which includes patricide, suicide, and fratricide. In
Poetics, Aristotle highlights the value of tragedy,
which compels an audience to feel a catharsis, or
cleansing of the soul, by witnessing tragic acts, typi-
cally deaths of highly regarded characters—deaths
those characters may not totally deserve. Even in
ancient literature, authors were utilizing death as a
theme to elicit an emotional response in the reader
or audience.
Later, in the Roman myths told in Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses, death is one of the underlying themes
present, in which characters face transformation,
which for them is often the same as death. In the
Roman poet Virgil’s The aeneid, Aeneas is to
establish the city of Rome, but this is only after
his home has been destroyed and his family killed.
Throughout the story, the reader witnesses constant
death in battle. In book 10, after Aeneas takes
the life of Lausus, his father, Mezentius, comes to
Aeneas to avenge his son’s death. Mezentius calls
out to Aeneas,
why do you ridicule me, threaten me with
death?
Killing is no crime....
Let me rest in the grave beside my son,
in the comradeship of death.
(Virgil, The Aeneid, book 10:1,067–1,077)
Here it seems that death would be a comfort to this
father whose son has been killed in combat. In this
perspective, a reader can understand how death is
seen in battle as valorous and can even be consoling.
Especially throughout literature of battle and war,
death is faced with bravery and moral courage.
In the Middle Ages, the theme of death often
underlies the literature as well. In a lot of the
romance literature, such as Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le
Morte D’Arthur, the idea of chivalry is a prominent
theme, and one aspect of chivalry was that a knight
was expected to fight valiantly to uphold his king’s
or his lady’s honor, even forfeit his life in battle if
need be. One of the major European events in the
Middle Ages, the bubonic plague, certainly had an
effect on literature, as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The
Decameron, in which 10 people flee the plague in
Florence, and each tells a different story over the
course of 10 days in order to keep his or her mind
off of the deaths of friends and loved ones left
behind. One of the biggest literary figures of the
Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, wrote the divine
coMedy, a story in which the poet is given a guided
tour of life after visiting the inferno, purgatory, and
heaven. This work seems reminiscent of Aristotle’s
catharsis idea in that the reader’s soul is cleansed by
seeing what Dante sees.
Geoffrey Chaucer uses death as a central
theme in several of his canterbury taLes. In “The
Pardoner’s Tale,” three men actually set out to find
and kill Death, who has taken the life of one of their
friends. The Wife of Bath, one of the most critically
examined female literary characters, tells a story of
a knight who faces execution unless he can find out
what women truly want. In these stories Chaucer
uses death as a theme to demonstrate several ideas:
Humans are afraid of death; they sometimes become
at once saddened and angry when loved ones die;
and finally, something demonstrated in nearly all
of these works is the idea that humans fear death
because they value life so dearly and they do not
know what comes after death.
Not knowing what comes after death is sig-
nificantly portrayed in Renaissance literature as well,
especially in the poetry of England, in which the
theme of carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) is
so common. From Robert Herrick’s iconic “To the
Virgins to Make Much of Time” to John Donne, the
idea of “seize the day” is not so much an inspiration
to enjoy life as it is a warning to enjoy life quickly
before it ends. On the other hand, in Christopher
Marlowe’s doctor Faustus, the title character
makes a deal, transferring his soul to the devil for
immortality because he does not want to die. Later
in the Renaissance, John Milton composed one of
the greatest epics in the English language, paradise
Lost, in which he sets out to “justify the ways of
God to men” (book 1, l. 26). In doing so, he must
explain death as much as life.
However, any discussion of Renaissance litera-
ture must highlight William Shakespeare, who
used the theme of death in many of his works. In
Sonnet 73, he uses the traditional symbolism of
seasons, in which spring represents birth and youth24 death