Shakespeare’s violent.
His writing, that is. People suffer, people die…even in the comedies.
In Death by Shakespeare, chemist Kathryn Harkup not only explains why William Shakespeare’s works, arguably the greatest in English literature, are so violent, but also explains how he kills people off, in a medical sense. In Death by Shakespeare, readers are taken on a behind-the-scenes journey into how and why people died in Shakespeare’s time and in Shakepeare’s works, the author’s title Death by Shakespeare a play on words.
Shakespeare writes death into his work, but it is because Shakespeare was surrounded by death.
Why was his work so violent?
Shakespeare’s writing was a product of its times, in some ways. London in Shakespeare’s day was rife with struggle and violence, a burgeoning city, overpopulated and dirty, in which executions of criminals was a spectator event. The same Londoners who witnessed public executions, often dabbing pieces of cloth into the condemned’s blood as a keepsake of the event, might very well visit Shakespeare’s playhouse. They were no strangers to public executions, to the plague (which, incidentally, closed down London theatres for years with only brief and occasional openings), to poisonings, and to impromptu sword fights in the middle of London streets, just to name a few ways in which a Londoner, and Shakespeare contemporary, could meet his or her end.
How to compete on the stage with violent deaths to engage Elizabethan audiences for whom violence was a matter of routine? More of it.
As Harkup points out in Death by Shakespeare, Shakespeare was quite adept at describing death as a process and at detailing the stages of particular processes (i.e., the manner in which he opts to off his characters). Harkup alludes both to notable Shakespearian characters known for their dramatic demises and to some of The Bard’s lesser known characters and their unfortunate ends and explains just how Shakespeare kills them.
She peels back the layers of Elizabethan plague and other diseases as manners of death, of poisoning and other types of murder and misadventure, of war, of suicide, of execution, and more. There are myriad ways to die, and Shakespeare touched on most.
Harkup’s knowledge of scientific processes illuminates an already engaging canon of work, helping modern audiences to add context, through science, to some of the greatest death scenes ever written.
The subject matter in Harkup’s Death by Shakespeare is grim (obviously), but fascinating, and fans of literature, particularly fans of Shakespeare, won’t be disappointed.
Availability: Book
Rating: **** Stars (I really liked it)
Reviewer: Katina, Area Librarian