Death Will Have His Day

Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences reveled in shocking drama. While patrons liked a good comedy, they consistently packed the theatres to see the newest foray into treachery, debauchery, and murder. Scenes of bloodshed were staged with maximum realism. An account of the props required for George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1594), for example, lists three vials of blood and a sheep's lungs, heart, and liver. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy calls for an arbor with a dead body swinging from it (as described in Karl J. Holzknecht's, The Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Plays).

Some of Shakespeare's most violent plays were by far his most popular during his lifetime. Although modern audiences are often repulsed by its gore and brutality, Titus Andronicus was a huge success in Tudor England, coveted by several of the finest touring companies. And certainly it is no coincidence that Shakespeare's most profound psychological masterpieces have their share of sensational melodrama. Shakespeare often deviated from his sources to include more titillating details. Hamlet's father is poisoned with a potion so potent that it immediately causes bubbling scabs on his body; King Duncan is lured to Macbeth's castle to be slaughtered in his bed, and so on. Presented here are those characters who meet their ends violently -- those who feel "death's eternal cold" through murder, treason, suicide, and bloody combat.

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