Source: "Death Imagery in Antony and Cleopatra," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 14, No.4, Autumn, 1963, pp. 399-410.

[MacMullan describes the artistic and literary image of Death that was familiar to Renaissance audiences- a grim but erotic bridegroom coming to claim his mate MacMullan then explains that in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare "individualized" this conventional image so that it focused less on the figure if Death and more on the characters if Antony and Cleopatra as they experienced the act if "dying tragically" in their arms in a world filled with both love and violence.]

Certain conventional methods of evoking the subject of death, either verbally or pictorially, were common to the Elizabethans, among them that of the danse macabre. That this convention was present virtually everywhere in sixteenth-century England is clear from its widespread employment as a decorative motif in art and as a theme in poetry, sermon, and...