SOURCE: “An Art of Dying,” in The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies, University Press of Kentucky, 1978, pp. 29-71.

In the essay below, Foreman diagrams the variety of ways in which Shakespeare's tragic protagonists meet their ends. Looking closely at the deaths of the central characters in both the minor and major tragedies, he considers the depth of the characters' understanding of themselves and the world, their sense of identity, their will to be in control of their fates, and the creativity of their confrontations with death.

I will be a bridegroom in my death. 

Death, that first and most obvious characteristic of a Shakespearean tragedy, so often becomes for the tragic figures a thing to be desired. At least from Richard II on, a death wish is either acted on or deeply and extensively felt by nearly all of them. Actually there seems...