ABSTRACT
Tragedy, and especially Renaissance tragedy, presupposes anguished spirituality even or especially when it is irreligious. William Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is perhaps the most famous dramatisation of the ‘self-division’ consequent on the conflict between ‘passion and reason’, but there are many more from this period. And the fact that ‘spirit’ links semen and soul via the notion of vital energy is a reminder of how inclusive the early modern spiritual sensibility could be. The historical approach to death insists that it is not some essential thing, but a socio-historical construct. It tells us that to look for the transhistorical continuities in the human experience of death is fundamentally misguided. On the contrary, we must understand death as something that changes across time within any one culture and that fundamentally differs between cultures.
