Recent popular accounts of how to face death have strikingly hinged on passages from early modern literature, whether invoking Montaigne’s essays or Shakespeare’s elegiac verse. As there is currently a struggle to face a climate crisis and declining faith in institutions, can a previous era’s confrontation with death provide resources for present-day quandaries? This chapter argues that it can, through a renewed attention to the formal homologies between ‘craft of dying’ handbooks and dramaturgical practice. These manuals, often framed in the theatricalized form of a series of dialogues, were performative in their very structure. They provide behaviour that is scripted, and then practised, and then enacted, with actors and audiences. Like the anatomy theatre and the rhetorical quaestiones tradition, the craft of dying ought to be considered one of the fundamental cultural practices that led to early modern drama's staging of death. At today's crucial juncture, returning to this theatrical craft of dying might help, in Tennyson’s words, to ‘teach [us] how to hope, / Or tell [us] how to die'.

When grave illness compelled rulers to plan for the likelihood of a child’s succession, their chief concern was not that their young son would be passed over as king. Instead, most dying rulers focused on making collaborative arrangements for protecting the kingdom and supporting the child in rule. This chapter examines some of the evidence for the preparations dying kings made as they gathered to their side men and women whose involvement would be crucial for the child’s continuing education and the realm’s administration. The first two sections draw attention to shifts over time in familial attendance at royal deathbeds and in the testamentary records of rulers’ intentions. The actions of kings and queens both before and at their deathbeds suggest hesitancy to impose a wardship model upon royal children, especially upon the new boy king, and this royal reluctance is examined in greater detail in the chapter’s third and final part. Even when it became apparent an infant or child would succeed, kings eschewed entrusting their sons and kingdoms to the care of individual magnates, preferring collaborative arrangements in which the queen often took a prominent role.