SOURCE: “‘Horn-pypes and Funeralls’: Suggestions of Hope in Shakespeare's Tragedies,” in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 216-34.

In the following excerpt, Cox discusses how Shakespeare's tragedies often combine death and the comical to foster our acceptance of the protagonists' unavoidable fate and our anticipation of the freedom and social reordering made possible by their deaths.

As death converges with humor in Shakespeare's tragedies, our sense of the grotesque reaches its highest pitch. Death is now literal and ominous. It cannot be averted as in the comedies by a symbolic gesture of humility but must be confronted at its most hideous and awesome. As death becomes more terrifying, so its convergence with gaiety becomes increasingly discordant. Many critics, such as Susan Snyder in The Comic...