Harkup leaves no stone unturned in her immensely thorough and compelling distillation of the Bard's work.

...intriguing.

Harkup’s entertaining Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, stabbings and broken hearts uses Shakespeare as the lens to understand the physiology of death in pre-modern times. She is relentlessly, and sometimes illuminatingly, literal.

For fans of the Bard, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings, and Broken Hearts is the book they didn’t know they always wanted to read.

Harkup takes a deep dive into how the world’s most famous playwright was influenced by both the knowledge of his time and his own personal experiences when it came time to kill off his characters.

Noting that 'spectacular deaths, noble deaths, tragic deaths and even mundane deaths' alike appear in William Shakespeare’s plays, chemist Harkup....analyzes all the gory details in her outstanding study.

Besides investigating the plays, Harkup gives historical background about Elizabethan perils, such as executions, plague, syphilis, death in childbirth, tuberculosis, and infected wounds. She speculates about what Shakespeare knew about causes of death; like other contemporary playwrights, he did know that audiences loved violence.