“His means of death, his obscure burial,—
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment, o’er his bones,
No noble rite, nor formal ostentation,—
Cry to be heard, as ’twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call’t in question.”
Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10), Iden says:
“Is’t Cade that I have slain, that monstrous traitor?
Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed,
And hang thee o’er my tomb when I am dead.”
The custom of bearing the dead body in its ordinary habiliments, and with the face uncovered—a practice referred to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 1)—appears to have been peculiar to Italy:
“Then, as the manner of our country is,
In thy best robes uncover’d on the bier,
Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault
Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie.”
In Coryat’s “Crudities” (1776, vol. ii. p. 27) the practice is thus described: “The burials are so strange, both in Venice and all other cities, towns, and parishes of Italy, that they differ not only from England, but from all other nations whatever in Christendom. For they carry the corse to church with the face, hands, and feet all naked, and wearing the same apparel that the person wore lately before he died, or that which he craved to be buried in; which apparel is interred together with the body.”[741] Singer[742] says that Shakespeare no doubt had seen this custom particularly described in the “Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet:”
“Another use there is, that, whosoever dies,
Borne to the church, with open face, upon the bier he lies,
In wonted weed attir’d, not wrapt in winding sheet.”
He alludes to it again in Ophelia’s song, in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):
“They bore him barefac’d on the bier.”
It was, in bygone times, customary to bury the Danish kings in their armor; hence the remark of Hamlet (i. 4), when addressing the Ghost: