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Death in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays [quiz]

Mortality is not a theme that Shakespeare shies away from in his works, and in many cases death serves an integral part of a play’s plot. Occasionally his deaths are tragic, others are gruesome and violent, and others are just creative (we’re looking at you, Antigonus), but they play move the play along or resolve its final conflict. Shakespeare’s frequent incorporation of death in his plays is better understood given the context of his time period, where death was a constant, imminent reality. In his sonnets, his thoughts on death are more clearly revealed and are usually expressed in relation to remembrance and legacy. Brutal deaths and morbid thoughts aside, how much do you know about death and Shakespeare?

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Image: “Young Man with a Skull” by Frans Hals. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Recent Comments

  1. Good quiz! Except for when you confusingly introduce questions about the Stratford merchant. Yes, he is traditionally thought to have written the canon. But this is an example where tradition is simply mistaken.

    Feeble efforts to link the literary works to the life of the Stratford merchant help fuel the movements in literary criticism that seek to detach literature from the life of the author.

    But, when it comes to the life of Edward de Vere, again and again there are unavoidable connections with the works of Shake-speare. His father died when he was 12. His older half-sister then took him to court to have him declared a bastard, so she could inherit their father’s vast wealth. Queen Elizabeth assigned him to the guardianship of William Cecil, the very man de Vere probably suspected of having his father killed.

    At 17, de Vere killed a servant. Cecil intervened and had him exonerated, in language that is echoed in Hamlet. De Vere is said to have boasted he could have his rival Philip Sidney killed, and get away with it. Was de Vere involved in the death of another rival, Christopher Marlowe?

    When it comes to Shakespeare and death, some of us long for the death of the absurd certainty that the Stratford merchant wrote the works of Shakespeare.

  2. Mike Leadbetter

    Very compassionate of OUPblog to continue to indulge Richard M. Waugaman, M.D, so long after the arguments he continues to espouse have been flattened and consigned to the land-fill of sophistry and cant.

    Most people won’t have the slightest idea of what he’s on about, of course, but I don’t think that’s a serious problem these days.

    Or even much of a change.

  3. Philip Buchan

    Professor Waugaman expresses confusion about why questions about William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon are included in a quiz about William Shakespeare. Though he assures us that there are “unavoidable connections” with the works, he entirely fails to make them.

    Here’s a fascinating assertion: “Queen Elizabeth assigned him to the guardianship of William Cecil, the very man de Vere probably suspected of having his father killed.”

    Huh? There’s no evidence that John de Vere was killed. His actions in his final days were consistent with those of a man aware that his time was drawing near, including writing a will and disposing of lands — setting his affairs in order.

    Edward his son became the ward of the Queen because his father’s (and therefore his) lands were held from the Crown by Knight Service; Cecil had become Master of the Court of Wards a year previously, and therefore the responsibility to assign wards to noble houses was one of Cecil’s responsibilities (really, a lucrative opportunity since his rich young wards had to pay for their own upkeep, and the guardian was able to make advantageous marriage agreements on the wards’ behalf.)

    The coincidences that constitute the Oxfordian case provide no proof at all of authorship. Oxford as a rich entitled young man kills a social inferior and gets away with it? How many examples of that pattern playing out are there in those times and ever since? It’s a commonplace that every theatergoer of the time and ever since would recognize.

    For those interested in the real author of Shakespeare’s works — the man that the quiz asks questions about — go to the wonderful new website, ShakespeareDocumented.org. Oxford’s Bodleian Library has joined with other institutions that control the extensive documentary evidence of William Shakespeare’s life.

  4. Jay Hoster

    I’d like to thank Dr. Waugaman for giving me a good chuckle.The notion that de Vere had a hand in doing in Marlowe is particularly hilarious. I hadn’t heard that one before. The attempt to create a place in literary history for the Earl of Oxford, a versifier of middling talent and someone who had everything handed to him that Elizabethan society had to offer and who then botched his life, starting with the fact that he learned at age 17 that he could get away with murder and concluding with his obsession about obtaining the tin mining concession (talk about money grubbing!), is incomprehensible to me. If Hamlet were simply the life story of one remarkably self-indulgent member of the nobility, today it would be an odd curiosity piece and nothing more. The fact is that you could spend years probing the depths of the play, filling several bookcases in the process (including many titles from the Oxford University Press!), and you still would not have understood everything that is there. That’s a daunting reality; so the temptation is to believe that Hamlet can be fit into a tidy pre-existing structure, thereby convincing yourself that you have it all figured out. You don’t. Nobody does, and that’s why we keep studying Shakespeare.

  5. Michael

    Dr. Waugaman may have given us unintentional humour, but humour none the less and for that (if nothing else) he must be congratulated.

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