PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Harkup’s entertaining Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, stabbings and broken hearts uses Shakespeare as the lens to understand the physiology of death in pre-modern times. She is relentlessly, and sometimes illuminatingly, literal ... Death by Shakespeare is pleasingly visceral ... Harkup’s untroubled method toggles between real bodies and their fictional presence on stage. Some of the Shakespearean material is a little uncertain ... Death in Shakespeare is often encountered as gruesomely bodily and darkly comic, rather than as meaningful or sublime: more Hammer than hamartia. Harkup’s enjoyable and informative survey presents this somatic Shakespeare for the Horrible Histories generation.
