death
death,as Gertrude reminds Hamlet, invoking the most persistent of consolatory topoi, is ‘common’. Since ‘all that lives must die, | Passing through nature to eternity’ (Hamlet 1.2.72–3), to be human is to be mortal. Death, from this perspective, seems unproblematically universal, a simple, irreducible fact of our nature, unyieldingly the same across all societies and throughout time. If by ‘death’, however, we mean more than the mere cessation of animal being, it proves (like most supposedly ‘natural’ human experiences) to be an artefact of culture, its meanings shaped by a whole variety of local, intensely mutable beliefs and practices. Thus the death endured by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and represented in their art, was different in important respects from our own—and different also from that suffered by their medieval forebears.
In early modern England, racked by endemic social violence and decimated by recurrent...
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