An in-depth look at the science behind the creative methods
Shakespeare used to kill off his characters.
In Death By Shakespeare, Kathryn Harkup, best-selling author of A is
for Arsenic and expert on the more gruesome side of science, turns her
expertise to William Shakespeare and the creative methods he used to
kill off his characters. Is death by snakebite really as serene as
Cleopatra made it seem? How did Juliet appear dead for 72 hours only to
be revived in perfect health? Can you really kill someone by pouring
poison in their ear? How long would it take before Lady Macbeth died
from lack of sleep? Harkup investigates what actual events may have
inspired Shakespeare, what the accepted scientific knowledge of the time
was, and how Elizabethan audiences would have responded to these death
scenes. Death by Shakespeare reveals this and more in a rollercoaster
of Elizabethan carnage, poison, swordplay and bloodshed, with an
occasional death by bear-mauling for good measure.
In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence
and public executions were a common occurrence, and the chances of
seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theater was a
fairly likely scenario. Death is one of the major themes that reoccurs
constantly throughout Shakespeare's canon, and he certainly didn't shy
away from portraying the bloody reality of death on the stage. He didn't
have to invent gruesome or novel ways to kill off his characters when
everyday experience provided plenty of inspiration.
Shakespeare's era was also a time of huge scientific advance. The human
body, its construction and how it was affected by disease came under
scrutiny, overturning more than a thousand years of received Greek
wisdom, and Shakespeare himself hinted at these new scientific
discoveries and medical advances in his writing, such as circulation of
the blood and treatments for syphilis.
Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters,
and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions--shock, sadness,
fear--that they did over 400 years ago when these plays were first
performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have
the science to back them up?
