1. William Shakespeare, Tragedy of King Richard II, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 1.2.18–21. All quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are to act, scene, and line numbers and refer to The Norton Shakespeare, as cited above. Additional references will be provided parenthetically in the text.
2. In this respect, my argument builds on the work of Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Neill notes that “Renaissance tragic drama, at its core, is about the discovery of death” (1), imagined as a “brutal stripping away of the outward person” and a “nightmare of indistinction” (9).
3. See also Robert N. Watson, “Giving up the Ghost in a World of Decay: Hamlet, Revenge, and Denial,” Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 199–223.
4. Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30. My work here is deeply indebted to de Grazia’s book, particularly Chapter Two, “‘Old Mole’: The Modern Telos and the Return to Dust.”
5. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 310.