SOURCE: “Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death,” in Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney, New York Literary Forum, 1980, pp. 121-26.

In the following essay, Garber argues that although no character introduced into a Shakespearean comedy ever dies, the knowledge that death molds and informs life is implicit in every one of them.

I don't want to become immortal through my work. I want to become immortal through not dying. 

Woody Allen

It may seem perverse to argue that Shakespearean comedy is really about death and dying, but that is nonetheless what I should like to propose. More precisely, Shakespearean comedy is about the initial avoidance or displacement of the idea of death, the cognition and recognition of one's own mortality—and then, crucially, the acceptance, even the affirmation, of that mortality. In a sense, therefore, what we are speaking of is a process of neutralization, in anthropological...