Shakespearean deaths: swordfights, snakebites & poison

From poison and fatal snakebites to dying from a broken heart, more than 250 named characters die in William Shakespeare’s plays. Speaking with Ellie Cawthorne, Kathryn Harkup guides us through a grisly range of the Bard’s death scenes. She looks at the real history and science behind them, and how they would have been staged in Elizabethan England.

Kathryn Harkup is the author of Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (Bloomsbury, 2020)