Again, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet narrates how:
“All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral:
Our instruments, to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast.”
Mr. Tylor,[744] in discussing the origin of funeral feasts, and in tracing their origin back to the savage and barbaric times of the institution of feast of departed souls, says we may find a lingering survival of this old rite in the doles of bread and drink given to the poor at funerals, and “soul-mass cakes,” which peasant girls beg for at farmhouses, with the traditional formula,
“Soul, soul, for a soul cake,
Pray you, mistress, a soul cake.”[745]
In the North of England the funeral feast is called an “arval,” and the loaves that are sometimes distributed among the poor are termed “arval bread.”
Among other funeral customs mentioned by Shakespeare, may be mentioned his allusion to the burial service. Originally, before the reign of Edward VI., it was the practice for the priest to throw earth on the body in the form of a cross, and then to sprinkle it with holy water. Thus, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), the Shepherd says:
“Some hangman must put on my shroud, and lay me
Where no priest shovels in dust,”
implying, “I must be buried as a common malefactor, out of the pale of consecrated ground, and without the usual rites of the dead”—a whimsical anachronism, as Mr. Douce[746] points out, when it is considered that the old Shepherd was a pagan, a worshipper of Jupiter and Apollo.
In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 3), we find an allusion to the lachrymatory vials filled with tears which the Romans were in the habit of placing in the tomb of a departed friend. Cleopatra sorrowfully exclaims:
“O most false love!
Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see,
In Fulvia’s death, how mine receiv’d shall be.”