Pyramus: 'Now die, die, die, die, die.' [Dies]A Midsummer Night's DreamAt the 400th anniversary of his death, Shakespeare could hardly be more alive, in theatre, in popular culture, in scholarship. And death in Shakespeare's plays likewise tends to affirm or transform life: in the memory of characters or in their speeches, in the living body of the actor, in the refusal of his characters to go quietly, in the ubiquity of ghosts, elegies and resurrections, and in the fact that theatre can go to places that everyday life cannot. The ingenious ways of dying in Shakespeare, from suicide to murder, and from workaday dagger to baroque pie recipe, are all documented in this book. They show how the playwright choreographs death as a moment of discovery as much as destruction. Underpinning this is the idea that a character may die, but the actor does not. Death on stage is literally impossible - a fact parodied by Bottom's performance as Pyramus in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead of the blank finality of death, we get a unique entrance into the stages of dying, as experienced by all of Shakespeare's greatest tragic figures.

This book, illustrated with contemporary drawings and images from stage history, establishes the cultural, religious and social contexts for thinking about early modern death. But it also shows how death on stage disrupts and refashions contemporary attitudes and practices, showing how Shakespeare's funerals, epitaphs and scenes of mourning are often undercut by their staged inauthenticity or interrupted by intrusions of the vulgarly living. This book celebrates the paradox: life in death in Shakespeare.