ABSTRACT
In early modern England, as Protestant doctrine transformed the relationship between the living and the dead, representations of death in both literature and the visual arts developed an increasingly secular cast; and the burgeoning of tragic drama in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England played a crucial part in this history. King Lear, with its evacuation of the heavens, and its emphasis upon the inconsolable finality of death, might very well seem to represent the ne plus ultra of the secularizing process, yet it receives less attention in the book than any of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. The reconciliation between father and daughter, by virtue of its simplicity and emotional constraint, is possibly perhaps the most moving scene anywhere in Shakespeare. For Webster and many of his contemporaries, the vandalized tombs of earlier generations stood as reminders of the folly of such bids for everlasting glory.
