SOURCE: “Last Words in Shakespeare's Plays: The Challenge to the Ars Moriendi Tradition,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Verlag Ferdinand Kamp Bochum, 1992, pp. 80-90.

[In the following essay, Guthke examines the death scenes of several principal Shakespearean characters, and maintains that Shakespeare repeatedly questions the traditional idea that a dying individual's last words reveal whether that person will be damned or saved. The critic argues that Shakespeare contests this belief by assigning these characters death speeches that focus on this world rather than the hereafter—or giving them no last words at all.]

Why does Hamlet decide against killing Claudius when the opportunity presents itself? The opportunity, Hamlet realizes on reflection, is no opportunity, since Claudius is praying; if he were to be stabbed in the back at this moment of “the purging of his soul” he would go straight “to heaven,” no matter how sinful his life (III.3.85; 78).¹ The real opportunity for revenge would be

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th'incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't—
Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes.

(III.3.89-95)

The condition of the soul at the moment of death appears to be all-important in determining its destination in the hereafter. In comparison, the nature of the life preceding it seems to fade into theological insignificance. Even sudden death, death while asleep, that is, in a state of (conceivably innocent) inability to commend one's soul to God or Christ, would point the way to hell; hence the litany's “A subitanea et improvisa morte libera nos, Domine.”

Hamlet's reflection about the right moment for dispatching Claudius reveals that he is well-versed in the teachings of the ars moriendi. Ever since the waning of the Middle Ages and down to Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and beyond, a veritable flood of books using this title, either in the language of the Church or in the vernacular, had admonished believers, be they Catholics or Protestants, that their last moments on earth were the most important ones in their lives: nothing short of confession of sins, repentance, affirmation of faith, prayer, forgiveness for all, and, ideally, the ritual “commendo spiritum meum in manus tuas,” addressed to Christ or the Lord, would guarantee the passage of the soul into eternal bliss; failure to live up to this expectation or, to be feared most of all, a sudden demise indicated God's disapproval, and about the consequences there was no uncertainty. In this sense, the moment of dissolution was the moment of truth. Last words, like those of the thief on the cross, thus had the power to wipe the slate clean (“Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it,” Macbeth, I.4.7-8)—or the power to end, by their non-conformity or by their absence, an exemplary life with a safe-conduct to the flames eternal.²

This scenario, presented here in all its dogmatic severity (which was not significantly softened until late in the 17th century), was re-enacted in Shakespeare's time almost every day in public executions of petty thieves, traitors, dissenters, and others. For the “dying speeches,” read by the “sufferers” under the gallows or in front of the executioner's block and printed as broadsides or small pamphlets routinely entitled “Last Words of …”, regularly followed the pattern set by the ars moriendi: the criminal confessed and commended his soul to his maker or, more rarely and specifically in the case of sectarian dissenters and Jesuits, he stood by his deeds and convictions. As such, last words were “der wichtigste Teil der Hinrichtung”³ and part and parcel of the ordinary living experience of Shakespeare's audience, nobles as well as groundlings. For them, last words were words of truth. Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri, as the maxim of common law has it. “I hope Christian Charity will not let you think, that by the last act of my Life, I would cast away my Soul, by sealing up my last Breath with a damnable Lye,” said John Fenwick in The Last Speeches of the Five Notorious Traitors and Jesuits … Who were Justly Executed at Tyburn, June 20, 1679⁴. And the reason why last words are truthful, his co-conspirator William Harcourt explains, is that “shortly after they are to be cited before the high Tribunal of Almighty God” (p. 2); hence “they bear great sway amongst the Living” (p. 1), last but not least in legal proceedings.

Shakespeare was well aware of the convention. We might recall, for example, Emilia's dying words in Othello: “So come my soul to bliss as I speak true” (V.2.257). In fact, Shakespeare has become a sort of authority on the matter. For, oddly enough, a few lines from the dying speech of Count Melun in King John have been cited, from the late eighteenth century down to the present, in legal commentaries on the evidentiary status of so-called “dying declarations,” which are recognized as exceptions to the exclusion of hearsay in English law and its derivatives in many parts of the world.⁵ The passage runs:

What in the world should make me now deceive,
Since I must lose the use of all deceit?
Why should I then be false, since it is true
That I must die here, and live hence by truth?

(V.4.26-29)

The word hence is sufficiently clear in context to be understood as a reference to Divine Judgment (and correspondingly legal authorities have, even quite recently, declined to honor the evidentiary quality of last words, as epitomized in the passage from King John, in cases involving natives who could not be presumed to believe in a supreme being empowered to punish them at the end of their days for untruthfulness committed at the moment of death).⁶ Similarly, Shakespeare's audience would have recognized the Christian theological context (and, in particular, the doctrine of the ars moriendi) even when they were not explicitly stated. This is the case in the most famous of all of Shakespeare's many references to the aura of hora mortis, which occurs in Richard II when John of Gaunt, dying, is told that the king refuses to listen to him:

O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony.
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
He that no more must say is listened more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before.

(II.1.5-11)

In the same scene, Gaunt alludes to a related convention of thought: “Methinks I am a prophet new inspired” (31). Here, too, the affinity to the ars moriendi and to the biblical analogues would have been foremost in the mind of Shakespeare's audience—Jacob turning prophet on his deathbed for instance, in Gen. 49—even though the notion that last words are prophetic is widespread in the folklore of cultures the world over.⁷

Shakespeare's familiarity with such traditions of thought is one thing. The more interesting question is how, connoisseur of death scenes that he was, he confronted the traditions in his plays through creative manipulation or transformation.⁸ The answer points to his attempt to offer a critical or at least thoughtful challenge to the generally accepted pattern of belief.

Even in the passages just cited, which are commonly quoted at face value, there is more than meets the eye. While presenting conventional religious beliefs, Shakespeare seems to undercut them by the context in which he puts them. Hamlet's meditation on the state of the soul in articulo mortis also refers to a third case, his father's, who was killed in his sleep, unprepared, “with all his crimes broad blown” (III.3.81)—unquestionably a candidate for hell, one would assume, given Hamlet's own understanding of the matter which in no way differs from the conventional view propounded by the ars moriendi.⁹ And yet Hamlet cannot help making a distinction between Claudius and his victim who, while not a saint, was not evil personified: “And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?” (82). All-too-human wishful thinking, attempting to modify the clear-cut dichotomy of holy and unholy dying? And as far as Claudius' destiny is concerned, isn't there at least a hint of presumptuousness in Hamlet's unquestioning assumption that it is he (and not the Lord) who is in a position to make the decision about his fellow man's eternal life and death, “sending” him to heaven or to hell? Isn't there a touch of irony in this arrogation of power, when in the same breath Hamlet is aware of the theological mystery of the power of last words? Isn't Shakespeare in fact questioning the schematic dogmatism of the ars moriendi tradition when he has Hamlet meditate in this manner?

The light of irony cast over the theological convention of thought is even starker in the case of John of Gaunt. His words, summarizing the more than earthly mystique of last words, are disavowed by the situation: the king, for whose benefit the wisdom of a lifetime is designed, refuses to listen; he dismisses the dying sage as a “lean-witted fool” (116), and Guant is carried off-stage. The near-supernatural, “prophetic” insight of the last moment remains unappreciated, powerless at the very moment when its power—again a widespread belief¹⁰—is extolled. And doesn't this suggestion of doubt about the conventional view turn our thoughts to the death of Percy Hotspur in 1 Henry IV? Not only does Hotspur, fatally wounded in his duel with Prince Harry, turn his thoughts to worldly glory (or his lack of it) rather than to the life to come and its glories. Even more ironic, he also articulates the topos of the prophetic power of the dying only to disavow it in the act:

                                        O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,
And food for—
                                                                                          He dies

(V.4.82-85)

“For worms,” Prince Harry finishes Percy's sentence: it is the living and not the dying who have the last word, and what a last word! It is the epitome of what, according to the ars moriendi tradition, man is not at the point of death, when the anima christiana leaves the body, free of “dust” at last, to join its maker. “Prophesy” indeed!

Such casual remarks on Shakespeare's undercutting of traditional views may, at this point, require a modicum of suspension of disbelief. Matters become more self-evident, given the ideological background sketched in so far, as we turn to the death scenes of some of the major plays. Here Shakespeare reveals himself as a master of the last word by evoking a multiplicity of associations in the minds of an audience trained in the precepts of the ubiquitous ars moriendi.¹¹

To start with the bard's exercise in overkill, there is a wide variety of curtain lines in barely fifty lines in scene 2 of the final act of Hamlet. While Laertes comes close to dying a model death with his last minute change of heart, confession of “treachery” and offer of “forgiveness” in imitatio Christi style (260, 281), Gertrude breathes her last without anything remotely like what might at the time properly have been called a last word: “The drink, the drink—I am poisoned” (264). There is a sort of poetic or even theological justice in this improvident demise—Hofmannsthal's Electra comes to mind and her threat to take revenge for the murder of her father by preventing another criminal queen, Clythemnestra, from uttering her last word.¹² Equally hell-bound is Claudius, of course, who dies not only unrepentant and with his mind on this world rather than the next (“O yet defend me friends! I am but hurt,” 276), but literally without a word—Hamlet forces him to drink the poisoned potion. “Follow my mother. King Claudius dies” (279). Hamlet himself, dying more slowly of the poison, and knowingly, is afforded the well-rounded dying scene so irresistible to Elizabethan dramatists. Yet it is surprising to see what he makes of it. Considering his more than adequate knowledge of the requirements of the ars moriendi demonstrated in III.3, his concerns are astoundingly this-worldly. First of all, he is preoccupied with his image on earth, a very Danish and dynastic earth at that:

                                                                                          Horatio, I am dead,
Thou liv'st. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
.....If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.

(V.2.290-301)

If there is any religious overtone here at all, it comes close to parody and blasphemy—Christ's enjoinder to his disciples to “bear witness.” Subsequently, the motif of prophesy comes up, but stripped of any religious mystique or connotation; the context is pointedly secular, almost parodistically so: it is not the Lord who has Hamlet's “dying voice” as he should according to the ars moriendi, but the new overlord from Norway:

I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th'election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.

(306-308)

As he lies dying, the protagonist, very much the Prince of Denmark, looks forward to the kingdom to come, but it isn't the Kingdom come. Viewed against the background of the ars moriendi, the dying speech of the play's expert in the theory of the art of dying is less interesting for what it says than for what it doesn't say. “The rest is silence”—Hamlet's very last words confirm it: ultima verba are conspicuous by their absence. Remembering Hamlet's soliloquy in III.3, the audience is left wondering about the destination of the prince's soul.

Similar questions might be raised about the death of Lear. Kneeling by the side of Cordelia, he dies in a flush of ecstasy, apparently thinking that his daughter is showing signs of life:¹³ “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there. He dies” (V.3.286-287). The orthodox in Shakespeare's audience might at this point recall the didactic anecdote, told in some versions of the ars moriendi, about the moriturus who, having just commended his soul to his maker, catches sight of his mistress who happens to enter his room: all preparation is to no avail, as “this world” forces itself on his mind at the last moment. However, recalling this horror story, the orthodox might be forgetting that they are also playgoers, and this play, unlike Hamlet, does not specifically thematize the matter of the last moment and its words.

Be this as it may, we are on safer ground in Othello. For here the conceptual framework of holy and unholy dying is introduced expressis verbis, and it is “thrown in doubt” more challengingly than elsewhere in Shakespeare.¹⁴ Questioning Desdemona about “that handkerchief / Which I so loved and gave thee” that Iago has played into Cassio's hands in order to arouse Othello's jealousy, Othello cautions her: “Sweet soul, take heed, take heed of perjury. / Thou art on thy deathbed” (V.2.54-55). They both know what is at stake: if indeed she is about to die, failure to tell the truth will commit her soul to hell. In the event, Othello, believing her to tell a lie when she tells the truth about her innocence, “smothers” Desdemona, leaving her for dead. And now, to make his point, Shakespeare defies the logic of nature and of the theater: suffocated, having died a death which is indeed “guiltless” at this stage (132), Desdemona must nevertheless be permitted a last word to focus the problem Shakespeare all too obviously wants to thematize—a last word which changes everything, or does it? In reply to Emilia's solicitous “O, who hath done this deed?” Desdemona says: “Nobody, I myself. Farewell! / Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell! She dies” (133-134).

For one thing, the almost parodistic contrafacture of the canonical dying formula into a “commendation” to a “lord” who is not the Lord must have been obvious to all but the very young in the audience. Desdemona's commendo, unlike that of the Christian moriturus, articulates, for the last time, her love for her husband, as does her preceding self-accusation in extremis, her false confession of the one unforgivable (because unrepentable) sin, suicide. This highlights the other aspect of her dying: affirming her love of a man, rather than the Redeemer, as the highest value in her universe, she dies with a lie on her lips, irrevocably committing “suicide of the soul.” The point is not lost on Othello, who has just committed a mortal sin himself: “She's like a liar gone to burning hell. / 'Twas I that killed her” (138-139). To which Emilia responds: “O, the more angel she” (140). This poses the question unmistakably: the ars moriendi would summarily consign Desdemona to the flames, as Othello reminds us; and yet why at this juncture the pointed reference to the “angel” that Desdemona, the loving wife, has been throughout the play and more than ever in her last moment, when she pronounces her loving lie—and thereby practices the Christian virtue par excellence expected of the dying believer, forgiveness? Will this angel, who condemned herself to hell by the very perjury against which she had been warned, join the angels in the presence of the Lord? Shakespeare's challenge to the theological communis opinio could hardly be more provocative.

Iago and Othello condemn themselves to hell in less problematic terms. Iago, certain that he is about to be brought to justice, abides by his vow “From this time forth I never will speak word” (310), thereby also depriving himself of the last word that might change the destination of the soul even in his case, which the ars moriendi would see as an analogue to that of the thief on the cross. Othello stages his death in self-parody, depriving it of whatever dignity it might otherwise have had, not to mention prospect of redemption. He dictates his own epitaph, adding:

And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcisèd dog
And smote him thus. He stabs himself.

(361-365)

Desdemona's “suicide of the soul,” committed with a lie and culminating in her last word's reference to her beloved, amounts to a Liebestod of sorts. The lovers' suicides in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are more straightforward cases; yet they too are used by the dramatist to bring his challenge to the ars moriendi into focus, if a slightly different one. As the lovers die, each has the beloved foremost in mind; in the last words of each, the beloved's name takes the place of the Lord's. A kiss, verbal or real, seals their love at the moment of death, while the kiss of death in the book of the Lord is the kiss of Judas.

Even the last word of Paris, killed by his rival Romeo in a duel at Juliet's supposed grave, is literally “Juliet”: “O, I am slain! If thou be merciful, / Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet” (V.3.72-73). Subsequently, Romeo, thinking that Juliet is dead, “drinks the poison.” “Thus with a kiss I die. He kisses Juliet, falls, and dies” (120). Juliet, awakened from the sleep induced by the friar's potion, stabs herself on discovering Romeo's body, but not until after her part of the duet: “I will kiss thy lips … / Thy lips are warm” (164-167).

The same substitution of the love of man or woman for the love of the Redeemer is pointedly thematized in Shakespeare's last tragedy of lover-suicides. Again, the beloved's name, rather than God's, looms large in each one's last words. Not only that; it is Cleopatra's supposed last word, “Antony,” communicated to her lover to test his love, that sets the whole denouement in motion. “Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself. / Say that the last I spoke was ‘Antony’” (IV.14.7-8). And the messenger knows how to dramatize the weight traditionally attributed to last words:

                                                                                                    The last she spake,
Was ‘Antony! most noble Antony!’
Then in the midst a tearing groan did break
The name of Antony; it was divided
Between her heart and lips: she render'd life
Thy name so buried in her.

(IV.15.29-34)

As Antony kills himself in despair on hearing this, he “will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into't / As to a lover's bed” (IV.15.99-101). In the actual death scene that follows he does pose as the noble “Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (IV.16.59-60), but the dominant note of the long scene is the queen of Egypt, who is by his side:

I am dying, Egypt, dying. Only
I here importune death awhile until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.

(19-22)

Cleopatra follows suit, staging her own Liebestod. Near-parodistic contrafacture again sets the tone. When she says “I have / Immortal longings in me” (V.2.275-276) she does not have in mind what the Christian moriturus might put into the same words. “Husband, I come” (282) takes the place of “Jesus, I come,” familiar from funeral sermons reporting on last words of the pious. Secularisation continues with Cleopatra's anticipation of the afterlife, which is summed up in “that kiss / Which is my heaven to have” (297-298). And then “O Antony” instead of “O Jesus”:

O Antony!
                                                            She puts another aspic on
her arm
                                                                                          Nay, I will take thee too.
What should I stay—She dies.

(307-308)

One could go on citing examples, but it should be clear by now that the thrust of Shakespeare's challenge to the ars moriendi tradition implied in his death scenes is twofold. At issue is, first, mors improvisa, death, sudden or otherwise, in the state of unpreparedness as the contemporaneous craft of dying understood it: death sealed not with the required last word but with a this-worldly exit line, or none at all; and second, as a pointedly secularized variation of this lack of proper preparedness, a life whose last word affirms the love of man or woman, rather than the Lord.

Ariès, in his best-selling L'homme devant la mort, while not mentioning Shakespeare, tried to make the point that by the time of Shakespeare the ars moriendi-induced anguish was giving way to a more relaxed attitude, put in a nutshell by Montaigne's remark that he would like to die “while planting cabbages” (Essais, I,20; 1580). Others might silently have emended it to “while making love.” And the stage of Shakespeare's time is, of course, one of the venues where the gospel of earthly love and delights began to usurp the place of the Gospel, with Shakespeare himself acting as one of the protagonists. Still, Ariès' postulation of a historical divide has been criticized from the outset for failing to pay sufficient attention to “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,” in particular to the persistence of the frame of mind expressed by, and re-enforced by, the ars moriendi.¹⁵ This would be the frame of mind of the rank and file of believers, whether Catholic or Protestant—including Shakespeare's audience. And it is to this mind-set that Shakespeare, no matter now subtly and covertly, would be addressing the questions that his death-scenes suggest. Whatever the precise nature of the divide in intellectual history that Ariès and his many followers posit, the questions would have been topical. The ears they fell on were open, eagerly or reluctantly.

Notes

1. Quotations are from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).

2. On the significance of the last word in the ars moriendi see Karl S. Guthke, Letzte Worte: Variationen über ein Thema der Kulturgeschichte des Westens (München, 1990), pp. 161-165, and the works cited there, esp. those on developments in Britain, e.g. Mary C. O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York, 1942) and Nancy L. Beaty, The Craft of Dying (New Haven, 1970).

3. Thomas Finkenstaedt, “Galgenliteratur,” DtVjschr., 34 (1960), 355. See also Guthke, pp. 165-169.

4. (London, 1679), p. 5.

5. Harriet C. Frazier, “‘Like a Liar Gone to Burning Hell’: Shakespeare and Dying Declarations,” Comparative Drama, 19 (1985), 166-180, esp. 166-170.

6. M. S. Tosswill, “Religious Belief in Dying Declarations,” New Law Journal, 121 (11 June 1981), 617-618; P. Brazil, “A Matter of Theology,” Australian Law Journal, 34 (24 Nov. 1960), 195-199.

7. T. F. Thiselton Dyer, Folk Lore of Shakespeare (London, n.d. [c. 1883]), pp. 340-341; Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1950), p. 434.

8. A tour d'horizon of the many ways of dying is Marvin Spevack's “The Art of Dying in Shakespeare,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West, Jahrbuch 1989, 169-173. On the cult of the death scene in Elizabethan drama see, above all, Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Harry C. Bauer's “Shakespeare's Last Words,” Library Review, 24 (1974), 255-261, is an uncritical listing; other than that, he is impressed by Shakespeare's “realism.” Two recent books have no bearing on my subject: Walter C. Foreman, Jr., The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Lexington, Ken., 1978); Robert F. Willson, Jr., Shakespeare's Reflexive Endings (Dyfed, Wales, 1990).

9. A telling detail: When Luther died his enemies could think of no better way to discredit him than to float the rumor that he had been found dead in his bed.

10. To cite an unexpected source: Botho Strauβ, Paare, Passanten (München, 1981): “Die allmächtige Kraft dessen, was ein Mann zuletzt gesagt hat” (p. 55).

11. As a curiosity one might mention that Julius Caesar's last words, familiar to everyone in the form of “Et tu, Brute,” are in fact a coinage of Shakespeare's. See Brian O'Kill's Exit Lines (Harlow, 1986), p. 23.

12. Elektra in Dramen, II, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt, 1954), p. 41.

13. Frazier (p. 172), who points out the irony of the “futility of Edmund's deathbed truthfulness” in this scene, sees Lear dying “of the grief of knowing ‘She's dead as earth’.”

14. Frazier (pp. 172-176), fixated on the pragmatic and legalistic aspect of last words rather than the powerful ars moriendi tradition, misses the point in an otherwise perceptive reading when she concludes that Shakespeare wished “to subject to ironic contemplation … a superstitious [!] belief of his day” in posing the question of whether Desdemona should indeed go to hell. Beside the point is her general conclusion: “Shakespeare's intention is surely to qualify the Renaissance proverb [!] that the dying speak the truth through Desdemona's final words” (p. 176).

15. See esp. Mirrors of Mortality, ed. Joachim Whaley (London, 1981), pp. 8-10 (Whaley) and 117-121, 129 (John McManners); Werner Friedrich Kümmel, “Der sanfte und selige Tod,” Leichenpredigten als Quelle historischer Wissenschaften, ed. Rudolf Lenz, III (Marburg, 1984), pp. 199-226, esp. pp. 199-200. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York, 1982), pp. 297-315.