Famous Last Words: the Rhetoric of Death and Dying in Shakespeare

This essay examines a number of speeches in Shakespeare’s plays that are occasioned by the death of a character within them or by the imminent prospect of such a death. These include statements made by the dying persons themselves, eulogies delivered after their deaths, and various other forms of commentary elicited by their demise. Particular attention is paid to speeches pronounced by individuals seeking at the moment of death to shape how posterity will view them, and to those that constitute more or less deliberate appropriations of the deceased’s memory by parties pursuing personal or ideological agendas of their own. The varied and sometimes clashing intentions motivating such speeches are frequently reflected in the differing ways in which the individual is viewed in retrospect, contributing thereby to the multiplication of perspectives which is a hallmark of Shakespearean drama. KEYWORDS: Shakespeare; eulogy; epitaph; self-fashioning; appropriation