Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy

This chapter examines the speech acts that denote and surround death in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and considers the part they play in enacting and indicating death timings on the English Renaissance stage. A character’s death can be heralded by his or her dying words, gestures, or sounds; by the observations of another character; or (in the text) by a stage direction. But those pronounced dead—like Othello’s wife Desdemona—may come back to life, if only temporarily, and variant textual states in plays such as Hamlet and King Lear create different moments and kinds of dying. This chapter argues that textual cues do not always indicate a clear point at which someone can be pronounced (theatrically) dead, and moreover that Shakespeare exploits the legal, medical, and moral ambiguities surrounding the performed transition from life to death, imaginatively exploring the state between being and not being.