Shakespearean Death Arts

William E. Engel is the Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. He has published eight books on literary history and applied emblematics, including two critical anthologies coauthored with Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams, The Death Arts in Renaissance England (2022) and The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016); and has coedited several collections of essays including Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (2022) and Memory and Forgetting in the Early Modern Era (2018). Grant Williams is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. With William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane, he has co-authored The Death Arts in Renaissance England (2022) and, with Donald Beecher, edited Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade (2021). He has also co-authored The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016) with Engel and Loughnane and co-edited three collections: Taking Exception to the Law (2015), Ars reminiscendi (2009), and Lethe’s Legacies (2004)

“The well-conceived collection concludes with an afterword by Rori Loughnane that reflects on the form and nature of material and rhetorical memento mori, on the work of memory and authors' works as their legacy. … The essays engage in suggestive and lucid ways with material practices, rhetorical figures, and historical tracts, sometimes forging new connections and almost always contributing to a deeper and broader understanding of the early modern death arts between Catholicism and the Reformation, medieval and modern constellations.” (Anne Enderwitz, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 34 (3), 2023)“Shakespeare represents the art of death and his work has lived and lived long after his last breath. The rest and unrest, words and silence this collection so aptly addresses.” (Jonathan Locke Hart, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 46 (1), 2023)

• Section I: Staging the Death Arts .- Chapter One: Shakespeare’s Ars Moriendi, Andrew D. McCarthy.- Chapter Two: Deciphering the Dead: Speaking for Corpses in Early Modern Drama, Brian Harries.- Chapter Three: ‘As thou art, I once was’—Death’s Unstable Binary, Eileen Sperry.- Chapter Four: Antony and Cleopatra and the Vicissitudes of Monumentalization, Grant Williams.- Chapter Five: Tombs, Ooze, and Ashes in Pericles, Dorothy Todd.- Chapter Six: Empathetic Reflections on Love, Life, and Death in Othello, Jessica Tooker.- Chapter Seven: Othello’s Speaking Corpses and the Performance of Memento Mori, Maggie Vinter:- Section II: Hamlet and the Death Arts.- Chapter Eight: Turnings in the Grave: Riddles, Death, and Burial in Hamlet, Jonathan Baldo.- Chapter Nine: The Theatre of Hamlet’s Judgements, Zackariah Long.- Chapter Ten: The Art of Losing: Descriptionin Early Modern Rhetoric, Amanda K. Ruud.- Chapter Eleven: ‘Native and indued / Unto that element’: Dissolution, Permeability, and the Death of Ophelia, Pamela Royston Macfie.- Chapter Twelve: Artful Death and Women’s Suicide: Gertrude and Ophelia, Lina Perkins Wilder.- Chapter Thirteen: Artless Deaths in Hamlet, Isabel Karremann.- Chapter Fourteen: ‘He made a good end’: Middleness, Ending, and Annihilation in Hamlet, Michael Neill.