Shakespeare's stage world is a deeply royal world, with royal characters featuring in all his plays. But how did Shakespeare depict his princes? Which of the traditions of the day, established for example in royal portraiture, in the speculum principis or the courtesy book literature, can we trace in Shakespeare's own depiction of royalty? And what influence did that quintessentially English legal fiction of the 'Two Bodies of the King', and the cluster of royal metaphors revolving around it, have on Shakespeare's princes? In tackling these questions, the study goes on to explore the very essence of kingship, which it finds caught up in the eternal and irresolvable tension between the ideal and the real and characterised by the delicate balance of diverging elements that lends Shakespeare's royal characters their lasting fascination.