Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time by Albrecht Classen (Ed.)

Author:Albrecht Classen (Ed.)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thomas Willard (University of Arizona, Tucson)

Images of Mortality in Early English Drama

The iconic image of mortality in early English drama, and perhaps in all of world drama, appears in the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600). Returning to the stage after an absence of three scenes, Hamlet strikes up a conversation with the “clown” who is digging Ophelia’s grave. The gravedigger raises a skull that, he says, “has lain in the earth three and twenty years,” adding: “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” (5.1.174–81).1051 Hamlet begins a reverie on “poor Yorick” to which I shall return. For the moment I should note that the skull, as a synecdoche of the human skeleton, is the great memento mori of late medieval and early modern art, including the figures in popular emblem books. The skull “has no voice of its own,” as one scholar observes, “but manages to speak to us about our mortality through the emblem, figured as a resonant echo from beyond the grave.”1052

This chapter will focus on the representation of death in late medieval and early modern England, with the understanding that there were similar developments throughout Western Europe. It starts with the first plays for which texts survive and some of the oral tradition and ritual behind those plays. It shows how the tradition was continually reshaped over the two hundred years (approximately) separating the earliest surviving texts and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas they anticipate. From Christopher Marlowe’s reworking of medieval motifs in Doctor Faustus (1592), the essay will turn to several other plays by Shakespeare (1564–1616), including Hamlet with the iconic skull of Yorick and, finally, to revenge tragedies in the manner of Hamlet.

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