Harkup leaves no stone unturned in her immensely thorough and compelling distillation of the Bard's work ... Through an intricate dissection of Shakespearean plays, Harkup breaks down and analyzes methods of death, destruction and peril, and delves into how Elizabethan actors might have been bloodied up for battles of war using lye or slow coagulating sheep's blood ... Harkup's expertise leans toward the scientific. Her riveting storytelling, however, is refreshingly accessible. Her narrative will attract and intrigue readers who appreciate the macabre, eager for the enriching wisdom offered by two masters in their fields.
...intriguing ... The research is concrete, and the writing is infused with sly humor. Harkup serves a delectable stew of history, science, and wit that is sure to sate the appetite of any Anglophile.
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.
For fans of the Bard, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings, and Broken Hearts is the book they didn’t know they always wanted to read ... For those who have found Will’s way with language difficult to digest, this is the book that may change all that, focused as it is on the action ... She ends with a thoughtful look at the way Shakespeare touched on sensitive topics, like depression and suicide in Hamlet—a reminder that the Bard’s words stay with us because he was always ahead of his time.
Harkup takes a deep dive into how the world’s most famous playwright was influenced by both the knowledge of his time and his own personal experiences when it came time to kill off his characters ... Harkup does a tremendous job of presenting a wide array of research in a way that is both informative and entertaining. Her background in chemistry and science is obvious, but this is just as much historical and literary non-fiction, too, rich was intriguing asides, brief tangents, and footnotes that expand beyond the narrow focus of Shakespeare to take in the full scope of his time period and the works of his contemporaries and influences ... Death by Shakespeare is also a rather timely book for our current climate; many pages are devoted to the disruptive, deadly power of the plagues that, yes, plagued Shakespeare’s entire life, and reading this in the middle of your own quarantine can be quite unsettling ... a valuable addition to the scholastic pile. It’s accessible without being too simplified or pat, and the scientific, biological approach to the plays is a refreshing one ... Light enough to be a quick read for fun but hefty enough to educate.
Noting that 'spectacular deaths, noble deaths, tragic deaths and even mundane deaths' alike appear in William Shakespeare’s plays, chemist Harkup....analyzes all the gory details in her outstanding study ... Fans of the Bard are sure to devour this, but even those with only a passing familiarity with Shakespeare’s oeuvre will find Harkup’s survey tough to resist.
Besides investigating the plays, Harkup gives historical background about Elizabethan perils, such as executions, plague, syphilis, death in childbirth, tuberculosis, and infected wounds. She speculates about what Shakespeare knew about causes of death; like other contemporary playwrights, he did know that audiences loved violence ... A brisk, informative, and startling look at Shakespeare.
