This chapter explores the way that princes and leaders in Shakespeare’s plays often use a public moment of eulogy or commemoration to rehabilitate a quondam enemy, usually in the presence of that enemy’s body. At the end of Locrine, Guendolyn leads the other characters in burying the title character next to his father, Brutus, insisting that Locrine’s ignoble deeds near the end of his life should be forgotten in favor of his lineage and overall nobility of character. In the final moments of Hamlet, Fortinbras honors the Danish prince, whom he expected to fight, with a royal funeral even as he assumes the now vacant throne. Having crushed the conspirator’s forces and overpowered Brutus’s army at the end of Julius Caesar, Octavius praises the recently deceased Brutus as a “true Roman” who alone fought for the good of his state. I argue that such speeches which focus on dead bodies in these moments are unstable signifiers of the lives they lived, thus allowing the living to complete and revise the deceased’s narrative for their own purposes.

Tu fui, ego eris was a common motif of the early modern English memento mori tradition, expressing the inevitability of death for all. In Christopher Sutton’s ars moriendi treatise, Disce Mori, the English translation of the phrase adorned a prominent woodcut: “As thou art, I once was. As I am, thou shalt be.” This sentiment constituted a kind of paradox: usually accompanying an image of two bodies, one living and one dead. In this chapter, I explore the history of the tu fui motif in the English death arts. In particular, I concentrate on Sutton’s treatise, an underexamined but influential text of the seventeenth century, and then turn to a reading of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV. In Hal’s misrecognition of his father’s death, Shakespeare stages a live tu fui. In both cases, the form presents a paradox that is ultimately unsustainable; both Sutton’s text and Shakespeare’s play demonstrate the need to choose between the claims of identity and difference. Finally, this chapter explores the relationship between this particular death art and literary form, suggesting that the tu fui’s claims ultimately are sublimated by demands of narrative and dramatic form.

This chapter examines the funereal ritual of entombment—both metaphorical and literal—in Shakespeare’s Pericles and argues that the play’s multiple entombments and subsequent revivifications demonstrate the early modern stage’s unique relationship to the death arts. The tomb that frames both the play and this essay’s interpretation of entombment in Pericles belongs to the medieval poet Gower, who functions as the play’s choric figure. I explore how the play’s relationship with Gower provides a model for understanding the funereal rituals—especially images of literal and metaphorical entombment—in Pericles. Similar to Gower rising from the tomb to assist in the refashioning and retelling of the ancient tale, both Marina and Thaisa, whom Pericles believes are dead at various points in the play, emerge from their entombment in order to restore and reanimate the family unit at the play’s end. While the death arts in life only allow for meditation and memorialization, the death arts on the stage enact revivification, both of characters and of stories themselves.

[I]n Shakespeare’s Othello the forces of life and death are hypnotically, and often verbally juxtaposed, as when, for example, Othello strikingly recounts his marvelous foreign travels for the Venetian senate and the audience, thus establishing himself as both an exotic “Other” and the man whose words and deeds compellingly bespeak his humanness. Interrogating the “death art” of performative language, or what might be called “thana-rhetoric,” deployed as an affective mechanism simultaneously signaling a consciousness of mortality and invoking a form of transcendent humanity, my essay analyzes the play’s artful obsession with words as signifiers of not only love (and its fatal counterpart, hate)—but human life as it would, with downright violence, confront the specter of death.

In the memento mori tradition, the dead rise up to claim kinship with the living and remind them of their ends. Juxtaposing their bare bones to the trappings of worldly success, they insist that titles and goods cannot be taken into the grave, and distinct identities will be overwhelmed by the leveling experience of death. This chapter shows how Othello evokes this tradition repeatedly over the course of acts Four and Five, as the dead revive to speak back to those who survive them in ways that expose and disrupt social demarcations based on race, class, religion, and gender. Furthermore, the play suggests that a corollary of Death’s role as a leveler is that destabilizing encounters between self and other which initially seem to have little to do with mortality can function as memento mori. Desdemona and Emilia also take on the role of the speaking corpse. In performances of "The Willow Song" and their final words, both characters speak simultaneously for the living and the departed. Shifts in mode from speech to song, and reminders of the living presence of the actors highlight the constructed nature of theatrical death.

The sense of spiritual privation that pervades Hamlet stems in part from the loss not only of a father but also of a profitable relation to the past and to the faculty that connects us to the past: memory, which sometimes acquires a purgatorial dimension in the play. The graveyard scene represents an attempt to gain release from that particular purgatory by burying the past tense and the interrogative voice with which it is associated. This chapter explores the connections between memory, riddles, burial practices, and beliefs about the dead. Anthropological evidence reveals a link between burial practices and riddles, a link that is reflected in early modern controversies over prayers for the dead and beliefs about the souls of the dead lingering for a period of time after burial. Along the way, I show that Goodman Delver’s riddling language bears underground connections to the contested religious traditions that lie at the heart of the play.

Hamlet practices a death art in his soliloquies, one which takes full advantage of the Renaissance playhouse’s symbolic topography: he rhetorically places characters within different otherworldly locations, depending upon his judgments about them. This practice of sorting characters into a cosmographic scheme is indebted to two different kinds of premodern theater: “theatres of memory,” architectural schemes for the organization of knowledge modeled on the theatrum mundi, and “theatres of God’s judgments,” topographically organized tours of the afterlife from visionary literature. While both kinds of theater provide Hamlet with frameworks for thinking through his judgments, neither fulfills its promise as a taxonomic system for imposing order on the world. The story of Hamlet’s theater of judgments is therefore also the story of its eventual abandonment. My chapter tracks this process through close readings of three of Hamlet’s soliloquies in which he addresses the topography of the theater most directly.

The humanist practice of rhetoric was among the most studied arts in early modern England. Many schoolroom exercises were designed to teach these skills and invited students to describe scenes of traumatic loss, such as the fall of a city, or to write speeches for bereaved characters, such as Hecuba. This chapter traces the connection between early modern handbooks that taught the skill of vivid visual description and two scenes in early modern drama that are used as sites of mourning. In both Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy, characters offer vivid descriptions in the context of bereavement. I focus on a scene from each play that employs descriptive figures of speech, namely ekphrasis and enargeia, to track the characters’ attempts to manage their responses to death. In one scene, a ghost uses description to urge his son on to murderous revenge, but fails to succeed because his enargeic speech produces mourning instead. In the other, a bereaved father describes a painting of his son’s murder in which he imagines himself depicted grieving perpetually. Both of these scenes leverage the elegiac aspect of descriptive rhetoric to repurpose rhetorical descriptions as sites for mourning death within drama.

Although Ophelia’s death has been variously interrogated, especially in terms of its floral attributes, scholars have paid relatively scant attention to its liquid process. My chapter argues that Ophelia’s drowning performs a burial rite that counters her final interment in earth. Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s dying radicalizes the convention of the locus amoenus, defines death as dissolution, and privileges water as permitting a terra-aqueous embrace that returns a creature to its origins. Her description mystifies death even in its final image of mud. Whereas Hamlet insists in the next scene that we end as dust and inchoate scatter, Gertrude suggests that Ophelia’s body layers with history the mud in which it is embedded. With these details, Shakespeare figures an ecology of the female body whose interaction with elemental nature, even in death, is permeable and deliquescent.

In the early modern period, suicide was usually seen as inimical to the death arts, which is among the traditions that Hamlet calls into question. However, despite Hamlet’s radical thinking on the subject of suicide, the act of suicide is left—possibly—to Gertrude and Ophelia. Their deaths open up moral questions about suicide that are linked to the passive role expected of them as women in the world of the play. Hamlet rejects Agrippina’s active role in Roman politics as a model for Gertrude when he rejects Nero as a model for his own actions. Questions about the choice between active and contemplative life and about the efficacy of human action lie at the heart of the play; these questions are gendered and best illustrated in the life not of Hamlet but of his mother. Her potential pregnancy embodies the unknowable, painfully inaccessible inwardness that Hamlet finds in himself, and her final, unaccountable act of will—drinking the poisoned cup—proves more transformative than anything Hamlet does.

Hamlet registers both the survival of the medieval ars moriendi and their changed status in post-Reformation England. The ghost of Hamlet’s father evokes the Catholic good death that consists in the proper ritual forms of communion, confession, and extreme unction (1.5.77). The counter-image to this unprepared for and therefore bad death is staged with Claudius at prayer (3.3.85–86). Yet, what looks like a good death at first glance is not. What if in prayer one’s “thoughts remain below” (3.3.97)? These two moments in Hamlet raise the question of how to prepare properly for death. They evoke the Christian death arts as an important frame of reference for understanding the seemingly gratuitous deaths, which would have been understood by Shakespeare’s audience as a lesson about both morality and mortality. This frame is provided more specifically by the danse macabre, popularized as a pictorial and literary theme in late-medieval Europe, in which human figures “dance” with a figure of death, often without recognizing that their final moment has come and therefore they die a sudden death, unprepared, and unrepentant of their sins: a mors improvisa like the deaths of Hamlet Senior and Claudius.

Hamlet is a play noticeably possessed by narrative yearnings, but ones that are repeatedly undone by its conflicted attitudes towards ending. Death, because it offers the prospect of completion, can seem “a consummation / Devoutly to be wished”—desired because it promises an “end” to “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” (3.1.61–5). But death is also to be feared, both because of the “dread of something after death” (l. 79) and also because its ending might offer only annihilation. This chapter scrutinizes our fondness for biographical narrative: we like to imagine our lives as coherent stories that move in a prescribed fashion from birth though life towards a proper conclusion. But, as Frank Kermode observes of the Horatian ideal of epic storytelling, in medias res bears an uncomfortably suggestive relation to lived experience, since human beings themselves “rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; [but] they also die in mediis rebus.” This chapter addresses Hamlet’s desire for a good death in conformity with the consolatory death arts of Catholicism, but the play denies him this closure as he is schooled in the Protestantism of Wittenberg.