Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

It’s quite a list: Hanged. Prison fever. Stabbed. Stabbed. Poisoned. Beheaded. Beheaded. “Malady of France.” Cannonball. Burnt. Bitten. Eaten. Mauled. Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things, but he really wrote a lot about death. Chemist and science communicator Dr. Kathryn Harkup’s new book is Death By Shakespeare. In it, she takes her readers through a fulsome exploration of death in the plays and provides plenty of grizzly explanations of just what causes it all. We talk to her about a some of those deaths, dying in Shakespeare’s world, and why gruesome deaths feature so prominently in stories from Shakespeare to CSI. Harkup is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Kathryn Harkup is a chemist, author, and science communicator. Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (published in the US by Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) is the third in her series of books joining popular fiction and science, which also includes A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie and Making the Monster: The Scienc