I've been teaching an undergraduate course on Shakespeare for several years and I typically use the Norton Shakespeare to present the plays. Next time around, I am definitely considering Kathryn Harkup's "Death by Shakespeare" as a second required text. It gives a very solid and entertaining introduction not only to the bard, but to Elizabethan theater ("a more crowded, noisier, undoubtedly smellier, and rather more risky experience than now"), the history of the time, law, and medicine. Following this, it charts out the deaths in Shakespeare's plays and what was known at the time about each topic (did you know, for instance, that a good candidate for the poison Juliet uses came from a puffer fish?). Topics include: public execution (with advice on how to escape the death penalty through benefit of clergy or benefit of the womb), burning, drawing and quartering, beheading, hanging, the gibbet, crushing, murder (looking at you, Richard III), suicide, and even death by emotion! Readers new to Shakespeare will be excited into reading the players while familiar readers will no doubt be returning to their favorites with newfound knowledge and understanding.

If you’ve read Shakespeare’s works, you would know how he’s well verses in killing off his characters, poison, stabs, suicides and what not! Death by Shakespeare by Kathryn Harkup serves as a reference guide to why Shakespeare killed the characters like he did. Not a fictional work, but a well researched work. Glad that I got to read this book. It definitely made me look Shakespeare’s work with a differebt pov!
Thank you NetGalley, Kathryn Harkup and Bloomsbury for reader’s copy of this book. The review is not influenced and is purely based on my opinion.

This is great, I love how it talks about the real-life situations that the Elizabethans went through, Often times when we read Shakespeare we use our lives to try and figure out what they were saying, and most times we get it wrong. This book is going to be one of the reference guides that the beginning Shakespeare scholars will want to use.

**I received an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

Kathryn Harkup brings us Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts. The book is an in depth look at history and medicine as relate to death during Shakespeare's time. Harkup then guides the reader further into how Shakespeare represented death in his works and how that was potentially affected by the world in which he lived.

Harkup clearly is well-researched and presented information in a way that was accessible regardless of level of background knowledge. My only real criticism was that I would have wished for the deaths to be organized by Shakespeare's works and by individual rather than by death type in a flowing narrative.

This was an interesting book and I was grateful to have early access.