“Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house,
O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.”
More distinctly revengeful is Romeo’s ejaculation at the tomb:—
“Thou détestable maw, thou womb of Death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open!”
And who does not remember the famous passage in Measure for Measure?—
“Claudio.Death is a fearful thing.
Isabella. And shamed life is hateful.
Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment,
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of Death.”
Again in the grave-digging scene in Hamlet we see the same fascinated familiarity of the imagination with all that pertains to churchyards, coffins, and the corruption within them.
“Hamlet. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Horatio. What’s that, my lord?
Hamlet. Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
Horatio. E’en so.