SOURCE: "'Horn Pypes and Funeralls': Suggestions of Hope in Shakespeare's Tragedies," in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 216-34.

In the following essay, Cox explores Shakespeare's blending of comedy and death, principally through the use of laughter and clowning, in his tragedies.

As death coverges with humor in Shakespeare's tragedies, our sense of the grotesque reaches its highest pitch. Death is now literal and ominous. It cannot be averted as in the comedies by a symbolic gesture of humility but must be confronted at its most hideous and awesome. As death becomes more terrifying, so its convergence with gaiety becomes increasingly discordant. Many critics, such as Susan Snyder in The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies, see in Shakespeare's mingling of "Kings and Clownes" intimations of...