Magic Mirrors, Moors, and Marriage: A Lost English Play Surviving in German

Abstract

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English plays were performed on the Continent and translated into German by travelling English players. These included plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Markham, and Massinger. Many of these German redactions have been lost entirely and some exist in unique manuscript versions, but others were printed and even reprinted. Occasionally, a play written for the English commercial theaters survives, remarkably, only in German, thanks to this phenomenon. “The King of England’s Son and the King of Scotland’s Daughter” is one such paradoxically absent-present lost play, and it bears the marks of being deeply immersed in the theatrical activity of London in the 1590s, including the marks of Shakespearean influence. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the play’s plot and attempt to situate the play in its theatrical moment in late-1590s London.