palgrave historical studies in the criminal corpse and its afterlife

INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON MORTALITY AND ITS TIMINGS

When is Death?

Edited by Shane McCorristine

# Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife

Series Editors Owen Davies School of Humanities University of Hertfordshire Hatfeld, UK

Elizabeth T. Hurren School of Historical Studies University of Leicester Leicester, UK

Sarah Tarlow History and Archaeology University of Leicester Leicester, UK

#### **Aim of the Series:**

This limited, fnite series is based on the substantive outputs from a major, multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating the meanings, treatment, and uses of the criminal corpse in Britain. It is a vehicle for methodological and substantive advances in approaches to the wider history of the body. Focussing on the period between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries as a crucial period in the formation and transformation of beliefs about the body, the series explores how the criminal body had a prominent presence in popular culture as well as science, civic life and medico-legal activity. It is historically signifcant as the site of overlapping and sometimes contradictory understandings between scientifc anatomy, criminal justice, popular medicine, and social geography.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14694 Shane McCorristine Editor

# Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings

When is Death?

*Editor* Shane McCorristine Independent Researcher Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife ISBN 978-1-137-58327-7 ISBN 978-1-137-58328-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58328-4

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication. The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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# Acknowledgements

This book emerged from the "Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse" project at the University of Leicester. Generously funded and made open access by the Wellcome Trust (Grant number: 095904/Z/11/Z), this project brought together a team of interdisciplinary scholars to explore themes relating to crime, punishment, execution, magic, and the notorious dead. I would like to thank: all the members of the team for their collegiality and curiosity over several years working together; our Principal Investigator, Sarah Tarlow, who co-organised the 2015 conference at Leicester, "When is Death?"' that led to this book; the contributors who shared their wonderful research with us in this book; and Emily, Carmel' and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan, who were patient and helpful throughout the process.

# Contents

# Editor and Contributors

### **About the Editor**

**Shane McCorristine** is an interdisciplinary historian with research interests in the history of Arctic exploration, the cultural geography of extinction, and the place of the supernatural in the modern world. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow on the "Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse" project at the University of Leicester. His most recent book is *William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

#### **Contributors**

**Rachel Bennett** University of Warwick, UK

**Douglas J. Davies** Durham University, UK

**Veronique Deblon** University of Leuven, Belgium

**Thomas W. Laqueur** University of California, Berkeley, USA

**Mary Ann Lund** University of Leicester, UK

**Brian Parsons** London, UK

#### **Jonathan Rée** London, UK

**Caroline Sharples** University of Roehampton, UK

**Kaat Wils** University of Leuven, Belgium

**Elizabeth Wicks** University of Leicester, UK

# List of Figures

# List of Tables

# Introduction

### *Shane McCorristine*

### When is Death?

*When is a person dead*? This is a diffcult and perhaps impossible question to answer—but it is fascinating to think about and explore. It is a question that has many different meanings and iterations depending on the context in which it is asked. Today, if we ask a physician to calculate when the death of someone has occurred or will occur, we will get approximate times based on particular biological indications drawn from their training and technologies. If we ask a bereaved family the same question we will probably get very different answers based around other, non-biological, indicators, customs, and timeframes.1 These might include the times when the person lost their identity, when the ritual of burial or cremation took place, or when legal or criminal proceedings decided on death certifcation, or the status of a present, but "brain dead" person. Asking the same question 200 years ago, of course, would have resulted in a different set of answers altogether.

Dwelling on the question of death timings, then, is like peeling back the layers of an onion—it soon starts to open up a range of further temporal issues and uncertainties about when life ends and death begins.

1

S. McCorristine (\*)

Independent Researcher, Cambridge, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2017

S. McCorristine (ed.), *Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings*, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58328-4\_1

When does a person die—really, fully, and absolutely? Is it when signs of life cannot be found in a body? Is it when a person, corpse, or life-force no longer has any agency in the world? Or is it when living people recognise a person as socially dead and outside the frame of everyday relationships? Death as an event is clearly something that comes with multiple temporalities for living and dying people.  How, then, do we begin to investigate the stages, sequences, and chronologies that fow through the time between the end of life and the start of death?

This book arises from a conference entitled "When is Death?" that was hosted by the University of Leicester in 2015. This gathering was part of the work of an experimental interdisciplinary team of researchers at Leicester who were funded by the Wellcome Trust to investigate the power of the criminal corpse in European culture and history.2 The criminal corpse was chosen as an object of focus because it was a force that harnessed legal, medical, and popular discourses about death and agency in the period 1500–1900. Individually, we researched topics such as the technology of the gibbet, criminal execution and dissection, folk-beliefs about the dead, and bioethics.3 Collectively, we came to realise that we all had concerns about the "when" of the deaths we were investigating. These included: living individuals who became socially dead; criminals who survived their own executions; and deaths whose timelines were stretched out for decades by the unending spectacles of post-mortem punishment. By looking at the journeys of particular bodies towards and beyond death we argued that the timing of death—something that at frst seemed so certain and absolute—was deeply uncertain and open to interpretation. This raised a set of issues and contexts that called for an exploration of the question from multiple perspectives—an interdisciplinary endeavour which led to the contributions in this book.

Scholars working in the feld of death studies regularly analyse and discuss the ideas of philosophers and thinkers as varied as Thomas Browne, Fustel de Coulanges, Martin Heidegger, Philippe Ariès, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Yet ideas and themes in popular culture provide us with other and equally fruitful routes into thinking about death timings. I suggest that *Weekend at Bernie's* (1989)—one of the more unusual movies of the 1980s—offers us a range of ways to think about the timing of death. The plot of the movie can be summed up as follows: during a baking hot New York summer Larry and Richard, two employees in an insurance corporation, uncover fraudulent accounting and go to their boss, Bernie Lomax, with the information. Realising that his crimes have been rumbled, Bernie hires a mobster to kill the two young men at a party he will host at his exclusive Long Island beach-house. However, instead the mobster has Bernie killed for having an affair with his wife. Excited about their weekend of partying at Bernie's house, Larry and Richard arrive to fnd Bernie dead in his chair. Thus begins a black comedic narrative in which Bernie's corpse retains its liveliness in many biological and social ways. Fearing that they will be suspected of Bernie's murder, Larry and Richard delay informing the police. As Bernie's house starts to fll up with partygoers they see that nobody realises that their quiet host, sitting on the couch in a pair of sunglasses, is actually dead. Rather, Bernie's friends greet and kiss him, massage him, haggle with him, and treat him as a living person. Larry and Richard therefore decide to "postpone" Bernie's death so that they might have a fun weekend. They respond to Bernie's social liveliness by acting as his guardian, explaining to the others that he is drunk. Without ever being noticed, they carry him, move his limbs about, and speak for him when the need arises.

It is quite remarkable how many social interactions the corpse has in the movie.  This prompts the immortal line: "This guy gets laid more dead than I do alive!". Even more remarkable is the fact that, despite the sweltering weather on Long Island, Bernie's body does not decompose nor show any signs of rigor mortis.

*Weekend at Bernie's* demonstrates how forms of life and liveliness can continue beyond biological death if the person is still a part of social life. In this fantasy of death denial, the "when" of Bernie's death is not recognised by his friends and is pushed into a distant temporal horizon by the two young men so that they can enjoy themselves in his company. In an even more macabre turn of events, Bernie's corpse is reanimated—really this time—through voodoo magic in the sequel, *Weekend at Bernie's II* (1993). In other words, corpses have power and social lives through their own actions/reactions and the actions/reactions or assumptions of living people.

### The Traditional Irish Wake

In its celebration of life and social interaction amid death, the plot of *Weekend at Bernie's* has much in common with the ritual of the traditional wake in Ireland. This funeral custom was a prominent feature of early modern and modern Catholic Irish culture and it still occurs today, albeit in a different form. In its earlier form, the wake was a special period of time marked out from the normal course of events by the watching over of the corpse before its burial, usually for two nights. Wakes in Ireland involved a ritual of sequences and timings that exposes some of the paradoxes surrounding death. On the one hand, the corpse became a time-telling object, displaying all the biological indications of death, but on the other hand the corpse continued to be regarded as socially alive and an active participant in the merriment of its send-off. We can therefore think of the wake as a ritual time during which the person and the corpse slowly transitioned to other states. The living marked these journeys by "resetting" the time of death through these customs.

We can trace out three temporal stages in the wake, each with their own crossing-cutting timelines: The frst stage came in the lead-up to the wake; before death has arrived, it already has a temporal horizon. There was a general desire for death to be "done well" and it was known for the poor to endure privations in order to scrape together the means for a "fne wake" and a "decent funeral".4 Old and sick people were seen as most likely to die in the short-term and this held out the tantalising possibility of a merry wake for the young people in the village. One commentator told the story of visiting a man who was ill with consumption, but expected to live, and found the kitchen full of men and women dressed in their Sunday best. Asking them why they were there, the man received the answer: "'We are waiting for the wake'. I inquired who was dead, 'No one; but the man within is all but dead and we are chatting a bit that we may help the widow to lift him when the breath goes out of his body'".5

Another nineteenth-century folklore collector reported:

So great was the amusement carried on at an Irish wake-house, that all the persons of both sexes were anxiously on the look-out for the deaths of certain old men and women in the parish. When some of the young men met a very old poor woman, the usual salutation was: 'How are you to-day, Biddy? you are living a long time. What time will you give us the pleasant night over you? We are expecting it now for the last seven years, and you are still as tough as ever, though you are near a hundred years old!'6

Irish folklore is full of examples of signs that a death was impending: when a crow lands on ones shoulder; when a frog enters a house; hearing a crying or knocking at the door. If the corpse at a wake was not stiff, people interpreted it as a sign that another person would die soon enough. Omens observed on the funeral walk also presaged a new cycle of death: when a gap developed in the cortege it was said that there would be another death in the village. This folklore echoed vernacular senses of time as being fragmented and contingent—futures could be known and, to some extent at least, predicted and controlled. When a death was sudden, untimely, or was that of a child, it is notable that wakes were more private and mournful than the traditional merry wake.

Through customs relating to clocks and watches, folklore also shows us that people literalised the idea that death was timed by stopping the household clock when a person died. This is a story collected on Rathlin Island:

[Informant] 1: The clocks always stopped [at the time of a death].

[Informant] 2: Well, I had never heard that story about clocks or anything else to do with clocks. And there was a man here died…he was very ill, and he died this night…And here, Francis had not long got that clock and it kept excellent time, only had it a few weeks.  And here the clock had stopped at that exact time. Well…I thought that was a bit funny, the clock should stop then you know. I was standing, the day of the funeral and he'd to go by that way you see, to go up to the chapel, the body was to go up there and Francis was away at it, and I was standing here…I was watching them going by up there, you know, following the funeral. Honest, I'll never forget it, and the clock all of a sudden, just as the body went by started 'tick tock tick tock', it started up again.  I says, 'Why should it start up again then?' You know, this was about two days later, the clock started. It was the weirdest thing.

Inf. 1: You see, it was always the custom, they always stopped the clock whenever someone died in the house, they used to stop it as soon as they died.

Inf. 2: So you wouldn't go into the house and ask them.

Inf. 1: Aye, that was the reason, that, when you went in, you just looked at the clock and then you knew what time they died at.7

Old people used to say that if the cock crowed at midnight it was a sign of impending death, or that strange sounds in the clock presaged death.8 It was also believed that the "dead man's tick", a sound in the wall like the ticking of a clock, indicated a death was imminent.9 The wake, then, was the ritual time after the clock—or the passing of normal time—was temporarily stopped.

The second stage in the wake commenced after the moment of death was noted. However, this moment was dangerous and not easy to time. In Connemara, County Galway, when a man was dying of consumption it was customary to tie some unsalted butter in a piece of cloth and hang it up in the rafters. Just as the sick person gave his last breath, the consumption left the body and looked to enter another. If there was a relative present it would enter them, but if not it would go up into the butter, which was then taken down and buried. The relatives, meanwhile, stayed outside the house "til he's dead—and wel dead".10

When a person died in Ireland, news spread quickly. Work in the felds ceased and preparations were made to care for the corpse and stock the house (or barn) for the wake with funeral provisions (pipes, tobacco, alcohol, etc.). In the meantime, the corpse was laid out and prepared by female mourners. The body was frst allowed some undisturbed time so that the soul could communicate with God before the women washed the corpse, wrapped it in a sheet, habit, or suit, and then placed it on its back on a table, door, or bed. In many cases a crucifx was placed on the breast and rosary beads were entwined in the fngers. It was important that no tear was shed on the body during this stage (which took two to three hours) because it had not "settled" yet. Ritualised crying, or "keening" [Irish: *caoineadh*] would only begin after the women's preparations were done and they withdrew from the body. This stage of preparation and caring for the body also served to mark and pass over a time of physiological changes. The settling of the corpse was coincident with the periods of rigor mortis and algor mortis, during which muscles contract, the joints are immobilised, the body cools, and the skin loses its elasticity. In this context, caring for the corpse by positioning it peacefully, closing the eyes, and tying the jaw, also performed the crucial task of ascertaining that the person really was biologically dead.

The third stage of the wake was a time to ritually mark the bonds that bound the living and the dead. Like death rituals in other cultural contexts, the motivations for attending a wake in Ireland were varied: people gathered around the corpse in order to celebrate life and remember the dead; to guard the corpse from evil; to ensure that death had really occurred; and to placate the soul of the dead.11 Wakes traditionally took place over two nights before burial on the third day, and the corpse was never to be left alone. This wake-time was passed, then, in a slow manner with candles always burning, or as often as the householder could afford. Wake-time was not simply passed in an unconscious manner rather, people stayed awake through structured time. Time was periodically marked out by rituals and rhythms that reminded mourners about the presence of the corpse and the well-being of the dead. With seats arranged around the walls, encircling the body, the *bean chaointe* [keener] led periodic laments; spontaneous or planned rosaries were said; and the priest visited to lead prayers for the dead. This scene was described by an English traveller in the seventeenth century:

[The mourners] spend most of the night in obscene stories, and bawdy songs, until the hour comes for the exercise of their devotions; then the priest calls on them to fall to their prayers for the soul of the dead, which they perform by the repetition of Aves and Paters on their beads and close the whole with a *de profundis* and then immediately to the story or song again, till another hour of prayer comes; thus is the whole night spent 'till day.12

These moments had the power to effect reconciliation between the dead person and his or her surviving friends and family and achieve their incorporation with the inhabitants of the afterlife.13 There was, then, another temporal horizon gestured at in the prayers for the dead' for the amount of time that the soul of the deceased spent in purgatory concerned those who attended wakes. In 1813, a Purgatorian Society was founded in Dublin and, for the price of a penny a week, every subscribing member was entitled to have post-mortem masses said for them and their family to relieve the burden of time spent in purgatory. Members of the society also recited the Offce of the Dead Latin at wakes.14 The time being passed by the dead in the afterlife after burial was also marked by the recurring recital of prayers by the living as well as the custom of the "month's mind" requiem mass.

In contrast to these devotional means of timing and relating to death, unruly and boisterous customs were kept to constantly re-socialise the dead person as the body was passing further and further into death and decomposition. These customs—increasingly targeted by ecclesiastical authorities in the nineteenth century as uncivilised and superstitious—included feasting, alcohol consumption, wake games, and other licentious behaviours. Together, these customs symbolised the hospitality that the dead person, as host, was providing for the guests and the reciprocal celebration and sustenance that the living provided for the dead. The dual role of the corpse at the wake goes some way towards explaining why visiting observers and critics could be shocked by the swift transitions between "holy sorrow" and "orgies of unholy joy" at Irish wakes.15 They were an enactment of community, with the merriment and mourning of each wake a prelude to another—an endless cycle of death and rebirth, of hosting and being hosted. As Maria Edgeworth put it in her *Castle Rackrent* (1800):

Deal on, deal on, my merry men all, Deal on your cakes and your wine, For whatever is dealt at her funeral to-day Shall be dealth to-morrow at mine.16

Tobacco was a central feature of the merry wake, both as a stimulant with symbolic properties and as a means of passing wake-time. The plate of tobacco was therefore placed on a table over the corpse, or on the corpse itself, or underneath the table, and was offered on arrival to all guests by a young server as the "dealing" or gift of the dead. Tobacco was taken as snuff or smoked in a new clay pipe, and even if one was not a smoker, it was customary to have a few puffs in memory of the deceased and whisper *Beannacht Dé ar anamnacha na marbh* [Lord have mercy on the dead]. Tobacco was also provided at the graveyard and in the west of Ireland it was known for celebrants to leave their pipes on the grave as a token.17 According to folklore collected in the twentieth century, the origin for the use of tobacco at wakes came from the time of Christ when the watchers over his tomb found it hard to stay awake. Suddenly a plant appeared and beside it was a pipe. One of the watchers plucked the leaves of the plant, put it in the pipe, and smoked it, and since then they are given at wakes.18

While the ritual use of tobacco and whiskey, or poitín, were still common features of wakes into the twentieth century, the practise of wake games declined swiftly in the period after the Great Famine (1845–1852) due to a fracturing of communities, steady decline in the use of the Irish language, and clerical criticisms of popular mortuary practices. These games were often aggressive and played by the young men who had the energy to stay awake all night. They included potato or turf-throwing in the dark, slapping games, wrestling matches, and other rough pranks. There were also many different kinds of mock trials against an unlucky booby, and cycles of "mobbing"—back and forth battles of wits among men that could lead to fghts. The dead person symbolically participated in some of these games, as in "Lifting the Corpse", in which a stout man would lie prone on the foor with straight legs and four men tried to raise him off the foor with only one thumb each. The corpse was also a direct participant in rough play by being pushed around, or being made to hold a hand of cards or smoke a pipe. It was also a well-known trick to stitch a distracted mourners' coat-tails to the corpse's winding sheet.19 The folkloric record is also rich with darkly humorous examples of the dead person "reviving" at the wake: this was typically achieved by the prankster tying a rope around the corpse before rigor mortis set in (especially if the deceased had a hunchback or bow legs) and then cutting it at an opportune moment to make the body sit up and frighten everyone present.20

To judge from edicts and directives issued by Catholic bishops stretching back to the seventeenth century, the Church was especially concerned about erotic and transgressive games such as "Building the Ship" and "Building the Fort". In the latter game, young men ran at each other with "spears" before one fell down as if mortally wounded:

then all the hooded women came in again and keened over him, a male voice at intervals reciting his deeds, while the pipers played martial tunes. But on its being suggested that perhaps he was not dead at all, an herb doctor was sent for to look at him; and an aged man with a fowing white beard was led in, carrying a huge bundle of herbs. With these he performed sundry strange incantations, until fnally the dead man sat up and was carried off the feld by his comrades, with shouts of triumph.21

Clearly these games were linked to courtship rituals between young men and women, and indeed it was frequently said that more love matches were made at wakes than at weddings. This background motivation was brought to the foreground in the practice of mock marriages by mock priests at wakes. In an account of one of these marriages the priest, dressed "in robes of straw carrying rosary beads made of potatoes, surmounted by a frog for a cross" joined together two young people with the words: "'may the full blessing of the beggars descend upon you; may ye have plenty of ragged children'".22

The time spent with the dead was clearly considered necessary for a decent send-off for the deceased and for the community to engage in social interaction surrounding death and burial. However, on occasion, the length of time that wakes took before burial was a cause of concern for the authorities. This was chiefy due to the fact that the timeline of decomposition was not coincident with the social timeline that the body was still a part of. In 1871, for instance, an Irish labourer named Tehan died in Southwark, London, and was waked for some fve days.  The body was laid on the bed, and surrounded by eighteen candles. For three nights prayers had been said over it, and it had been 'sat by' with great ceremony. The face of the deceased was uncovered, and the body strewn with fowers.

The body "presented a shocking appearance" and was in an advanced state of decomposition. The coroner wanted to abolish the "disgraceful" practice and remove the body to a dead-house, but it was reported that the family resisted this move.23

It is a testament to the symbolic importance of merry wakes in Ireland that they continued to be held despite offcial directives from the Church. This suggests that the ritual activity of wake-time had a functional purpose for both the family affected and the wider community.24 In gathering people together to mark out the deceased person's transition to a new state, the traditional Irish wake made death timely through rituals and customs. These customs began to fade in the second half of the nineteenth century as mortuary practices became "faster". Wakes were shortened to one night; games and keening were no longer held; and mourners were given less time to work out the paradox of death. As priests ensured that the corpse spent the second night in the Church (the "removal"), the funeral on the third day became the primary rite of passage. The care shown to the dead was reset into another, less socially interactive, timeframe: this is the situation that persists in Ireland today.

### Chapters in This Book

Thomas Laqueur writes: "Death in culture takes time because it takes time for the rent in the social fabric to be rewoven and for the dead to do their work in creating, recreating, representing, or disrupting the social order of which they had been a part".25 In their different ways, the contributors to this book address Laqueur's argument, suggesting that the time of death (if indeed there is one single point in time when life can be said to be extinct) is social, as much as it is biological.

In Chap. 2, "Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy", Mary Ann Lund looks at how speech acts indicate death timings on the English Renaissance stage. In his tragedies, William Shakespeare used the power of language to stage self-referential games of being dead and playing being dead. A scene in *Othello* provides a good example of this: When Othello frst smothers Desdemona, he does not succeed in killing her: "Not dead? Not yet quite dead?". Othello continues smothering her until he states, "She's dead". However, even then, Desdemona's death is not certain at all. Death in Shakespeare, Lund argues, is a participatory process that is dependent on staging, performance, and language.

Moving from drama to political history, in Chap. 3, "'A Candidate for Immortality': Martyrdom, Memory, and the Marquis of Montrose", Rachel Bennett looks at the death and afterlife of James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose. Executed as a traitor in Edinburgh in 1650, Montrose was a key fgure in the military and religious conficts which ripped Britain apart in the mid-seventeenth century. However, as Bennett shows, far from being the fnal stage on Montrose's journey, his execution, or legal death, came some time after his excommunication and social death. This was followed by an exhumation and honourable reburial in 1661, while his scattered body parts were "re-membered" by royalists for centuries afterwards. The "when" of Montrose's death, Bennett suggests, was a matter of political debate and confict.

Although for many of us in Europe and North America, the dead body is a distant and infrequent presence, spectacles like Gunther von Hagens's *Bodyworlds* exhibitions stage face-to-face encounters with conserved corpses for millions of ticket-holders. As Veronique Deblon and Kaat Wils show in Chap. 4, "Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth-Century Belgium", these types of encounters, and the mixed emotions they provoke, have a long history. Deblon and Wils explore how new conserving procedures were developed in the nineteenth century in response to a growing disgust at the decaying corpse and a growing desire to create a corpse that looked as if it was sleeping. In Belgium, anatomists responded to this increasingly sentimentalised relationship with the dead by making anatomical preparations in a highly aesthetic manner. Although treated, injected, and embalmed, these prepared bodies and body parts seemed to convey the consoling message that death could be peaceful.

In contrast to this representation, many people were haunted by the disturbing message that some of the dead were perhaps not so "dead" after all. In Chap. 5, "Premature Burial and the Undertakers", Brian Parsons focuses his attention on how the fear of premature burial changed the way dead bodies were cared for and disposed of in nineteenth-century Britain. Far from being an irrational modern iteration of a primeval fear, concerns about premature burial arose due to a defciency in the law which meant that physicians did not have to check for signs of life before certifying death. Because of this, people developed a range of strategies to ensure that they, or their loved ones, were truly dead. These included: delaying burial; safety coffns; paying for a cremation instead of a burial; or hiring an undertaker to embalm the corpse. In his survey of this landscape of disposal, Parsons concludes that by testing for death, undertakers gained "a new status as quasi-medical practitioners and helped shed the Dickensian image of disreputability inherited from their nineteenth-century forebears".

From Elvis Presley to Lord Lucan, many of the famous or notorious dead circulate as undead in popular culture, returning repeatedly in rumours, purported sightings, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps no fgure illustrates this phenomenon more than Adolf Hitler, said to have committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in 1945 (but memorably imagined by *Monty Python's Flying Circus* as living out his days in a small guesthouse in Minehead, Somerset). In Chap. 6, "The Death of Nazism? Investigating Hitler's Remains and Survival Rumours in Post-War Germany", Caroline Sharples looks at the phenomenon of Hitler survival stories and traces their endurance to the failure of the Allies to conclusively identify his remains in 1945. As she persuasively argues, both the Allies and the Nazis before them cast doubt on the timing of Hitler's death in order to further their own interests. When put together with, on the one hand, obfuscation from the Soviet authorities who forensically examined the scene and, on the other, the denazifcation process (which "disappeared" Hitler's remains and all Nazi iconography), the reasons for believing his death had not occurred quickly becomes apparent.

In 2016, a survey revealed that 52% of people would like their Facebook page to be updated after they died. This could take the form of replies to those leaving sympathy messages on their page, or the regular reposting of photographs, videos, or other memories of the "dead" person.26 As our social lives and our social media lives are becoming increasingly interchangeable, online presence after death is taking on palpable and interactive forms. The loss of a loved one is now, perhaps more than ever, paradoxically wrapped up in their throbbing presence, whether through digital recordings, virtual reality, or automated post-mortem activities. Is death now impossible? In Chap. 7, "Death's Impossible Date", Douglas J. Davies explores some of the philosophical intricacies of the question "when is death?" Raising the themes of animacy, grief, burial, and the "mortality paradox", Davies echoes other contributors in this book by claiming that death has an impossible date because "the 'when' of death is not coeval with 'the time of not being'".

In Chap. 8, "The Legal Defnition of Death and the Right to Life", Elizabeth Wicks examines the legal implications of modern means of ascertaining death and life. Every day in hospitals and courts, medical and legal authorities are making profound and diffcult decisions about the biological status and destination of vulnerable bodies. In October 2016, for instance, a terminally ill 14-year-old girl won a legal fght to have her body cryogenically preserved after death because she "'wanted to live longer'" and have a chance "'to be cured and woken up'".27 Focusing on debates surrounding the issue of brain death in her contribution, Wicks raises the tension between our legally enforceable right to life and the state's lawful withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in the case of people in a persistent vegetative state. This withdrawal is, she concludes, "sometimes ethically appropriate, morally good, and respectful of the human being's rights". The right to life, then, "is always limited, both in terms of state obligations and its application to mortal beings".

An execution is a usually a strictly timed event: a sentence of death is passed, the defendant's days are "numbered", and the execution itself follows a sequence of rites and behaviours. The "when" of the condemned criminal's death, then, is known for certain. In Chap. 9, "The Last Moment", Jonathan Rée focuses on this disturbing kind of death timing. He suggests that people experience a particular thrill and empathy when they imagine the fnal minutes and seconds of a person's life. Surveying examples from literature, philosophy, and the history of crime, Rée fnds that the evolution of execution narratives has a lot to do with social attitudes about capital punishment and, in particular, an urge to think about our own last moments of life.

Finally, in Chap. 10, Thomas Laqueur's afterword focuses on the possibility of future breaths—determined by the apnea test in brain death situations—as a way to think about the end of life. Brain dead people may subsist for decades attached to ventilators and participate in the same biological milestones as everyone else (puberty, pregnancy, death). Despite the expanding chronologies of the "living dead" through science and technology, however, Laqueur argues that the "when" of death starts at the time when it is shown that a person will never breathe again without artifcial assistance. This particular death sentence, of course, does not discount the reality that becoming dead also takes time in other, non-biological ways of thinking.

In its movement from history and literature, to philosophy and ethics, the contributions in this book attest to a pervasive dynamic between fnality and continuance, between death as a concrete biological event and death as a social negotiation. The question we have addressed is inherently interdisciplinary. It will continue to fascinate scholarly and lay audiences alike, because death timings allow us to make sense of who we are as individuals and societies in the midst of time, shorn between long memories and imagined futures on the one hand, and a single irrevocable destiny on the other.

### Notes

and Richard Ward, "Rethinking the Bloody Code in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Capital Punishment at the Centre and on the Periphery", *Past and Present*, 228 (2015), pp. 159–205.

### Author Biography

**Shane McCorristine** is an interdisciplinary historian with research interests in the history of Arctic exploration' the cultural geography of extinction, and the place of the supernatural in the modern world. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow on the "Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse" project at the University of Leicester. His most recent book is *William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy

### *Mary Ann Lund*

In his novel *Being Dead* (1999), Jim Crace intertwines the life of a married couple, both zoologists, with an account of what happens after their deaths. We learn at the beginning of the novel that they have been murdered on a beach, and their bodies lie undiscovered for some time. Their physical decomposition is described in details that are simultaneously scientifc and loving. The unfurling of this story is prefaced by an epigraphic verse, "The Biologist's Valediction to his Wife" (purportedly by Sherwin Stephens, a pseudonym for Crace), which provides a quite different perspective on being dead. Where the novel is tender, the poem is comically stark. The speaker of the poem declares to his wife that there is no chance of eternal life: "You're dead. That's it. *Adieu*. Farewell". Death is an entirely one-way process of "Rot, Rot, Rot,/As you regress, from *Zoo*. to *Bot.*". The wife's being is eroded by putrefaction, and while he assures her that he will grieve for her, he also dismisses the value of so doing, since:

M.A. Lund (\*)

University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2017

S. McCorristine (ed.), *Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings*, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58328-4\_2

…Grieving's never Lengthened Life Or coaxed a single extra Breath Out of a Body touched by Death.1

No strength of feeling will move the addressee back from "*Bot*." to "*Zoo*.", even momentarily. The facts of biological death and decay are bare and brutal. Crace's verse is an anti-elegy that seems to express mourning while dispassionately describing the physical processes of death. Yet, alongside this rather shocking viewpoint, what is notable about this poem is the way the woman is addressed: she is both informed that "You're dead" and called "Departing wife". We imagine that the wife is about to die, but the biologist is imagining her as dead already as he gives her this helpful cold comfort. There is an odd paradox in this fippant bit of verse: even while he is envisaging her as no more than "manure", there is still a sense of being attached to her (and even the botanical classifcation gives her some life).

This chapter looks at the speech acts that denote and surround death, and more specifcally, the part they play in enacting and indicating death timings on the English Renaissance stage. According to the groundbreaking language theory propounded by J.L. Austin, speech does not only *say*, but also *does*: it performs something through the act of speaking (in his terminology, it has perlocutionary force).2 For example, when a member of the royal family says the words "I name this ship…" in the appropriate circumstances, the ship becomes named through the speaking of the words. To return to my earlier example, the phrase "You're dead" is not a merely descriptive act. It is also a performative utterance that is, moreover, heavily context-dependent. When the speaker of Crace's poem says, "You're dead", he is imagining his "departing" wife as already departed, and in a sense, is creating her as socially dead before she is biologically so. At the same time, his choice of words militates against his ruthlessly biological reading of death as simple physical decay and taxonomical change. By addressing her as dead, he allows the subject to persist, acknowledging that there is still a "you", not an "it" or even a "she". As we shall see, the tragic drama of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has a similar fascination both with the experience of dying, and with the paradox expressed in the notion of simultaneously being, and being dead.

### The Borderlands of Death: Renaissance Tragedy

The drama of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England is heavily occupied not only with deaths, but with the depiction and vocalisation of the stages around them. Most obviously, the afterlife speaks and walks on the stage in the supernatural manifestations of ghosts hungry for vengeance—a staple element of the revenge tragedy tradition. In the Shakespearean canon, *Richard III*, *Julius Caesar*, *Hamlet*, and *Macbeth* all feature revenants of some kind who communicate with the living, and even play a signifcant part in the plot (in the case of *Julius Caesar*, the title character himself returns from the dead to haunt his own play). Such memorable, and sometimes lurid, fgures are not the only dramatic refection on mortality to command attention. Thomas Kyd's (1558–1594) highly infuential revenge play *The Spanish Tragedy* (a story framed by the narrative of a ghost seeking revenge for his murder) exploits the full dramatic potential of deaths that are not what they seem. At the climax of the tragedy, a living avenger, Hieronymo, stages his own play and invites other characters to participate. What they do not realise is that the guilty parties will be killed for real, when they naturally assume that they are only acting. It only gradually becomes apparent to the audience that the play-within-a-play has become enacted in truth: the dead characters are not going to stand up again, and the blood from their wounds is not fake. Yet they will stand up, of course, and the blood is fake, because they are actors playing characters who play characters: the fake-real-fake-real feint Kyd uses is as much a self-referential game as is the custom of boy actors playing female characters, who in turn dress up as men.

Renaissance dramatists experimented with, and challenged, the audiences' expectations and assumptions about how death occurs on stage. If we witness a character being strangled and see her immobile body lying on the stage or concealed behind a curtain, we assume that she is dead and gone, even though we know, and perhaps can even see, that the actor playing her is still breathing. As we shall later see, Shakespeare uses various conventions to indicate death, in particular verbal cues. Yet conventions can also be overturned, to complicate our notions of death timings. In some cases, the audience is privy to the secret that a character is not dead despite seeming to be so, a knowledge kept from other characters on stage. For example, in *Romeo and Juliet* we witness Friar Laurence explaining to Juliet his plan to reunite her with her exiled lover Romeo: she should drink a potion to suppress her physical responses, so that "No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest"; each part of her body "Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death" (*Romeo and Juliet*, 3.5.98, 103).3 When the unknowing Romeo breaks open her tomb, we know that he has misread the signs given by her body, and when he poisons himself—"Thus with a kiss I die!" (5.3.120)—we are acutely aware of the horrendous nature of this tragedy; Juliet will soon rise up from her drugged sleep-as-death to fnd the still-warm corpse of her new husband Romeo, and she will herself commit suicide.

Juliet's second death by stabbing is genuine and observed as such (the watchman pronounces her "bleeding, warm, and newly dead,/ Who here hath lain this two days" (5.3. 174–175)), but not all women in Shakespeare's tragedies pass away so swiftly or evidently. A strange contrast to Juliet's case is that of Desdemona, smothered by her husband Othello in a jealous rage. In such a death, there are no immediately readable signs like Juliet's fresh blood, especially since, as Othello himself has observed earlier, Desdemona has "whiter skin […] than snow,/And smooth as monumental alabaster" (*Othello*, 5.2.4–5). Even when she is alive and in good health, Othello imagines her as a dead fgure like that on a stone tomb, perhaps to lessen his guilt for what he is about to do. Her physical self presents a dramatic contrast to Juliet, in whom, even when she is drugged and seemingly "dead" within a vault, Romeo notices that "Beauty's ensign yet/Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks" (*Romeo and Juliet*, 5.3. 94–95). When Othello frst smothers Desdemona, he does not fully succeed, and remarks as much—"Not dead? Not yet quite dead?" (*Othello*, 5.2.95)—continuing until he can pronounce frmly that "She's dead" (5.2.100). But shortly afterwards, we discover that we cannot trust his reading of the external signs of mortality, when we hear her voice from behind the bed-curtains: "O, falsely, falsely murdered!" (5.2.126). Although we may initially conclude that she is a ghost, we soon realize that she has indeed revived, just for long enough to proclaim her innocence, and also to exonerate, rather than accuse, her husband. Her maid, Emilia, asks her "who hath done this deed?"; Desdemona's fnal words are "Nobody, I myself" (5.2.132, 134).

*Othello* is not the only example in Renaissance drama where a suffocated woman temporarily revives. Shakespeare's Jacobean contemporary John Webster (1580–1634) takes the idea even further: when the eponymous heroine of his play *The Duchess of Malf* is strangled on the orders of her brother, she revives over a hundred lines after she has seemingly "died". The man who has carried out the murder, Bosola, realises that "She's warm, she breathes", "her eye opes", and he tells her that her husband is still alive, allowing her to die happily: "Mercy" is her fnal word.4 This revivifcation of women may, as Kaara Peterson convincingly argues, be connected to the early modern medical understanding of the female disorder *hysterica passio*, in which women "display the symptoms that mimic death", a representation refecting a wider cultural anxiety that "women's bodies cannot be trusted to refect their most fundamental status as living beings".5 Perhaps Renaissance audiences were more sceptical about whether a female character's death was defnitive unless clear signs were exhibited. Moreover, such a medical understanding allows, and even enables, the fantasy that grief can coax a single extra breath out of a body touched by death; a particular preoccupation of Shakespeare's late drama. In his play *Pericles*, a coffn washed up on the shore is opened to reveal a still-pink body of Thaisa, buried at sea, who is revived back into life by a skilful doctor, and at last reunited with her husband; in *The Winter's Tale*, there is another pink female form—the statue of the wronged late Queen Hermione—that miraculously steps off its plinth and reveals itself to be a breathing woman. The borderlands of death allow redemption as well as consolation.

### Becoming Dead in Shakespeare

Renaissance drama reminds us that the boundaries between life and death can be paper-thin, that observed signs may not be suffcient, and that characters and actors inhabit worlds of being and not-being. The most striking reminder of death as merely performance is the jig at the end of a play, a traditional coda to the action. There may be a pile of bodies, or a funeral procession, but in a Renaissance tragedy that is not "it. *Adieu*. Farewell". As the play's action ends, the actors re-enter to dance, an experience recounted by the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter, who visited London in 1599: "On the 21st of September, after dinner, at about two o'clock, I went with my party across the water; in the strawthatched house we saw the tragedy of the frst Emperor Julius Caesar, very pleasingly performed, with approximately ffteen characters; at the end of the play they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's and two in women's apparel".6 There is something of the *danse macabre* to this idea of reanimated corpses, but the revival of this tradition in the Globe Theatre in recent years demonstrates how dancing provides a sense of release for actors and audience, an emotional and aesthetic complement to the catharsis of watching tragedy.

The question "when is death?" fnds a particularly nuanced response in two of Shakespeare's plays: *Hamlet* and *King Lear*. Both tragedies are invested not only in death, but in the process of becoming dead, and do so through their male protagonists. I have suggested that the phrase "You're dead" seems paradoxical, and we hear an equivalent one on the Renaissance stage:

Hamlet, thou art slain.

No med'cine in the world can do thee good.

In thee there is not half an hour of life;

(*Hamlet*, 5.2.266–268)

The words are spoken by Laertes, who has killed Hamlet in revenge for the murder of his father, Polonius, and the death of his sister, Ophelia. Having challenged Hamlet to a duel, Laertes poisons the tip of his foil so that even a fesh wound will kill his rival; during a scuffe in the swordplay, the foils are accidentally switched, and both men are wounded and fatally poisoned. Laertes is able to say, "thou art slain" not only because he has administered the poison, but also because he too is on the verge of death: "Lo, here I lie,/Never to rise again" (5.2.271–272), he says. His own internal feeling of approaching death becomes projected onto Hamlet, while Hamlet can see his own death in Laertes. Laertes becomes a living emblem of the traditional tomb inscription, "*Eris quod sum*" ("what I am, you will be").

Hamlet's recognition of what Laertes has told him reveals itself in a phrase even more paradoxical than "thou art slain": "I am dead" (5.2.285, 290). Hamlet says the phrase twice within a single speech to his friend Horatio, just after they have witnessed Laertes dying. At frst, we might think that Hamlet is indulging in a touch of melodrama by repeatedly drawing attention to his own process of dying. Certainly, his death is among the most protracted in the Shakespearean canon: he dies 60 lines after he has been wounded, which is twice as long as it takes Laertes to die from the same poison. As is often the case on the Renaissance stage, theatrical demands and medical theory meld in the behaviour of characters' bodies.  According to the prevailing Galenic medical understanding of the body in this period, those people with a hot or dry (sanguine or choleric) temperament were believed to be more susceptible to the workings of poison, because the natural heat in their bodies made the poison work faster, and because they were believed to have wider arteries.7 As the preacher John Donne would later put it, "Poyson works apace upon cholerike complexions".8 The hot-headed Laertes dies before the melancholic Hamlet, whose cold humoral temperament preserves him longer, just as the dramatist allows him the prolonged time to give his "dying voice" (5.2.340), being acutely aware of his own theatricality in front of the "audience to this act" (5.2.320).

What does Hamlet mean when he says "I am dead"? Perhaps it is just another way to say, "I am dying"; "I'm as good as dead"; or "I'm done for". But this phrase is hardly colloquial. In a search across English writing of the same period, instances when someone says, "I am dead" (usually in drama) are typically preceded by "when", or "imagine", words that make clear that the speaker is predicting or imagining, not inhabiting death as Hamlet does.9 Hamlet's phrase appears to be unique on the English stage. I would argue that the mirroring of Laertes' phrase is more than simply a substitute for saying that he is dying. Hamlet, the student, is well versed in ontology, and has already revealed his refections on what it is like to be dead, "not to be":

…To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffed off this mortal coil Must give us pause. (3.1.66–70)

Hamlet has spent most of the play's action thinking about and preparing himself, frstly, to revenge the murder of his father by his uncle, King Claudius, and secondly to die. Within 10 lines he has fnally achieved both: he has at long last successfully taken on the role of avenger, killing Claudius (who, incidentally, takes a mere fve lines to die) with a combination of poisoned implements, and he has also become the revenged: he has taken on the status of being dead, while he is still conscious.

There are further dimensions to Hamlet's extraordinary speech act "I am dead". The editors of the Arden edition of *Hamlet* note of these lines that "If Hamlet is already 'dead' when he kills the King, this may be Shakespeare's solution to the moral dilemma of the blood-guilt of the successful revenger".10 I think this explanation fails to account for Hamlet's own deep investment in the theology and ethics of revenge; for Hamlet to absolve himself of guilt through this speech act seems a solution too neat and untroubled for him. Hamlet's expression of simultaneously being, and being dead, is perhaps better understood as an articulation of death being experienced in different timings, rather than as a single event. From a legal and medical (if not an ethical) perspective, he may see himself already as a dead man. When Hamlet hurts the king with his poisoned foil, there is a general cry of "Treason, treason!" (5.2.275). Hamlet has not been tried for treason, but he has fully taken on the responsibility for killing a king, and there is hence a legal sense in which Hamlet is already dead: those who are condemned for treason (not necessarily through trial) lose all their civil rights and capacities, and forfeit their estates and their ability to transmit property to descendents.11 Hamlet himself characterizes death as "this fell sergeant" who is "strict in his arrest" (5.2.288–289), exploiting the idea of himself as a prisoner. Furthermore, a medical symptom may overlay his legal and philosophical awareness. He tells Horatio that "the potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit" (5.2.305), an expression of the moment of death as it is being experienced. The words "I am dead" may be a manifestation of that, of the symptom *angor animi*: that is, "the sense of being in the act of dying, differing from the fear of death or the desire of death" encountered, for example, in angina patients.12 "Angor animi" might be translated as "anguish of the spirit", and in Shakespeare's time, the term referred to mental anguish and melancholy, of the kind to which Hamlet was well-accustomed. Here, I suspect, he is also experiencing that more modern sense of the term: feeling death rather than just contemplating it.

### Textual Deaths in *Hamlet*

If we re-pose the question "when is death?" in *Hamlet*, we should look further at the protagonist's fnal words. There is no ambiguity about his passing moment in the way that there is about Desdemona, or the

14

Duchess of Malf—no trick where an extra breath is coaxed out of him after he seems to have breathed his last. There is, however, an interesting textual variation that serves to highlight the ways in which death can be signalled, both on stage and in a reading of the printed text. Hamlet experiences death in three different ways, according to which version of the play is consulted. The frst time that *Hamlet* appeared in print, in 1603 (the First or so-called "bad" Quarto), was in a version signifcantly shorter and markedly different from later editions; possibly it was a reconstruction of Shakespeare's play from memory by an actor or audience member, a "bootleg" edition with some notably garbled passages.13 In this version, Hamlet's words are (to us) unfamiliar, but conventionally fnal:

What tongue should tell the story of our deaths, If not from thee?  *Ham*. *dies*.

Hamlet asks his friend Horatio not to commit suicide and accompany him in death, but instead to remain alive and bear testimony to what has happened. As the poison takes effect, the First Quarto Hamlet acts as a kind of witness to the physical symptoms of dying he is experiencing. The sinking heart and loss of senses are conventional medical indicators that death is near: one manual lists "diffcultie of breathynge, dimnesse of sight, dulness of sense" among the warning signs.15 His articulation of physical experiences and symptoms as a representation of an unobservable, interior state is also a dramatic convention, being characteristic of the Senecan mode to which Elizabethan tragic theatre was indebted.16 But it is a frmly Christianized Senecanism, as Hamlet's fnal words indicate in the form of a spiritual piety, "heaven receive my soul". The stage direction confrms the obvious: "*Ham*. *dies*". The First Quarto, then, gives a triple set of indications of the moment of death: in verbalized medical symptoms, in spiritual preparation, and in an instruction to the actors (and, by extension, to the reader of the printed text).

Yet, this version is mostly rejected by editors; in the Second Quarto of 1604, he dies quite differently, or indeed, not at all (textually, at least). He starts to give a message for the Norwegian prince Fortinbras (whom Hamlet would like to take over the rule of Denmark), but he stops halfway through his sentence: "So tell him, with th'occurrants more and lesse/Which have solicited, the rest is silence".17 The abrupt last phrase is unaccompanied by any stage direction, and it is his friend Horatio's words in response that make clear that he has died: "Now cracks a noble hart, good night sweete Prince,/And fights of Angels sing thee to thy rest". In the First Folio, the collection of plays published 7 years after Shakespeare's death, Hamlet's last lines are nearly identical, but the text gives him a death groan "O, o, o, o" and a stage direction: "*Dyes*".18

Although the versions are different, Hamlet's ending is unambiguous. There is no indication that he lingers on after his fnal line. Indeed, between the three editions we can observe a combination of methods by which death is indicated at a textual level in an English Renaissance play. The clearest is the stage direction: "*Dyes*". This, like all stage directions, is used sporadically in printed texts; it is altogether common to fnd no such stage direction, which means that the modern editor of a play usually puts one in (and sometimes has to make an educated guess about where it occurs). A death groan in a printed text ("O, o, o, o") must be a shorthand for the combination of unscripted sound and gesture with which tragic actors such as Richard Burbage performed their death throes. It is worth remembering that the sightlines of public playhouses, with a raised stage and standing spectators in the yard, make different demands of a performed death from those in modern theatres; although the traveller Thomas Platter praised the layout of English playhouses where "everyone can well see everything",19 an actor lying down on the stage would need to die vocally as well as visually, in order to communicate to those standing round the stage. A resounding fnal line is another clear way of doing this.  Brutus in *Julius Caesar* meets a self-determined death by stabbing—the "Roman way" of suicide—with a similarly self-determined couplet, and Othello does exactly the same (stabbing is generally a quick death in Shakespeare, and characters tend to die within two lines, with the exception of Antony in *Antony and Cleopatra*, who bungles his suicide and takes a horribly protracted hundred lines to die, split over two scenes). And the last indicator of death (although the least reliable) is a pronouncement by another character. This is often, though, where ambiguity can creep in.

### Produce the Bodies: *King Lear*

I will fnally turn to *King Lear*, another of Shakespeare's tragedies where the promised end is textually, medically, legally hard to pinpoint. When the aged and mentally frail Lear enters the stage for the last time, it is to the shock of anyone who knows only the historical source of the play. In the English chronicle histories which Shakespeare drew on as a source, the ancient English king Leir is outlived by his youngest daughter Cordeil. But in Shakespeare's version, Lear comes in carrying her seemingly lifeless body: "Howl, howl, howl […] she's gone for ever" (*King Lear*, 5.3.255, 257). He declares authoritatively that "I know when one is dead, and when one lives,/She'd dead as earth", yet even so, he immediately demands the materials for testing life, a mirror and a feather, and claims that "This feather stirs, she lives" (5.3.263). In most productions, and indeed in many editions of the play, the possibility that Cordelia is still alive is rejected, and Lear's behaviour is taken as a poignant exhibition of grief and delusion.20 Yet the possibility is still hinted at, and once again the play-text supports this ambiguity. Even more than in *Hamlet*, there are signifcant variations between versions—in this case the First Quarto (1608) and the First Folio (1623)—but both have the same stage direction: "*Enter Lear with Cordelia in his armes*", not "with the body of Cordelia".21 This phrasing is particularly telling since, a little earlier, Lear's other daughters, one poisoned, the other stabbed, are carried on, and the stage direction specifes that "*The bodies of Gonerill and Regan are brought in*". The stage directions thus appear to distinguish between the representations of two who are obviously corpses, and one who may or may not be. Lear's pain is all the more prolonged if signs of Cordelia's life appear and recede, a reminder that biological death is by no means instantaneous. Shakespeare flls the stage with bodies—unusually, even those who have died offstage are brought in—so that, by the end, the royal father and the three daughters for whom he divided his kingdom are all seen lying together and carried out in the fnal ritual of tragedy; the First Folio even specifes the musical accompaniment: "*Exeunt with a dead march*".22

I have suggested that Cordelia's death timing is ambiguous where that of her sisters Goneril and Regan is not—they are identifed as "bodies"—but the latter case is worthy of further scrutiny. The last scene of *King Lear*, like the character Hamlet, shows a preoccupation with the liminal state of being both alive and dead, one which all of the Lear family occupy at some point. Early on in the scene, Goneril's husband Albany takes charge of the court, as the full wickedness of a plot involving the two sisters Goneril, Regan, and their lover Edmund is revealed. Albany directly charges Edmund, as well as his own wife Goneril: "I arrest thee/On capital treason, and in thine attaint/This gilded serpent" (5.3.83–85). Attaint or attainder signifes "the legal consequences of being condemned for treason, i.e., death and forfeiture of wealth and honour, as if the blood were […] irretrievably stained".23 Edmund, having been attainted for "heinous, manifest and many treasons" (5.3.93), is ordered to a trial by combat, which he loses, but Goneril quibbles with the legality of this. When Albany confronts her with the paper evidence of her infdelity, she responds that "the laws are mine, not thine./ Who can arraign me for't?" (5.3.156–157). Albany has married into her power and lands, and she is moreover a queen and, in her eyes, above the law.

The confict between Albany and Goneril thus becomes a struggle over different assertions of legal authority, and, by extension, over the control of life and death. By pronouncing an attainder on Edmund and Goneril, Albany is staking a claim for his power to pronounce them both legally dead, before they are biologically extinct. When Goneril later poisons her sister and stabs herself, Albany orders attendants to "Produce the bodies, be they alive or dead" (5.3.229). Albany's careful wording reasserts the authority that Goneril has disputed: the sisters take on the status of "bodies" through *habeas corpus*, and also as people attainted of high treason. The equivalent is "bring up the bodies", as used in the novel of the same name by Hilary Mantel (2012), a reference to an order to bring Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers to court; the same language was used in the trials for high treason of Henry, Duke of Suffolk in 1554 and Patrick O'Collun in 1594.24 Goneril and Regan are in all senses dead when they are brought in, and problems of jurisdiction have been sidestepped; for Albany, it is "This judgement of the heavens that makes us tremble" (5.3.230).

Ideas of medical and legal forms of death are thus raised through the demise of Lear's three daughters, but at last it is Lear's own death that shows us the full tragic force of the "when is death?" question. As Emily R. Wilson puts it, "[t]he exact moment of his passing is obscure: the other characters on stage seem puzzled about when Lear dies and wary of saying prematurely that 'He is gone indeed'. Lear has already experienced practical death so many times that the moment of his physical death seems unimportant". Lear is, in Wilson's words, an example of "tragic overliving".25 In the First Quarto, he gives a dying groan ("O, o, o, o") and gives an *envoi* to a world of pain in his last words, "Breake hart, I prethe breake"; there is no stage direction to mark the precise timing of his death.26 In the later First Folio, there is a clear stage direction "*He di[e]s*",27 but this revised text also erases the other formal signs of dying in Lear's own speech, and the line "Breake heart, I prythee breake" becomes an expression not of a dying moment, but of pain and grief spoken by another character who witnesses Lear's death. Lear, indeed, is looking at his dead daughter's lips, "Looke there, looke there", when the stage direction indicates that he dies—fading away, perhaps in hope that there is a sign of life.

Shakespeare's tragic drama is deeply invested in the question of how death timings occur, and in the issues of power that surround them: medically, legally, philosophically, and emotionally. Because they are performed, moments of passing become a participatory process in which the character (or actor-as-character), other characters on stage, and the audience play a role in enacting them. The words spoken by the witnesses to King Lear's death, "O let him pass" and "he is gone indeed" (5.3.312, 314), do not only recognise the stages of death, but also enjoin audience members or readers to let Lear pass—perhaps in a way akin to Prospero's epilogue to *The Tempest*, when he asks the audience to "release me from my bands/With the help of your good hands" (Epilogue, 9–10). For the process of becoming dead in a tragedy extends beyond the fnal lines, into the solemn music of the funeral march, the procession that carries the bodies off stage, and fnally the actors' re-entry, revived, for the jig and the audience's applause. The medical and legal dimensions of becoming dead, Hamlet's testimony of death as it is being experienced, and Lear's fading moments all connect us to that communal experience of seeing and feeling staged death—part of the Aristotelian understanding of cathartic tragic drama.28 The statement to which tragedy always gestures, in the paradoxically pleasurable way that drama does, is not "you're dead" or "I am dead", but "we are dead".

### Notes

.

### Author Biography

**Mary Ann Lund** is Lecturer in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of *Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'* (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and editor of volumes 12 and 13 of *The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne*.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# "A Candidate for Immortality": Martyrdom, Memory, and the Marquis of Montrose

### *Rachel Bennett*

A salient theme in this book is that death neither has an entirely static definition nor does its timing always have a discernible chronology. To quote Thomas Laqueur, natural death is something that happens in an instant but "becoming really dead…takes time".1 This chapter engages with the central question of "When is Death?" by looking at the death of one man in particular, James Graham, the 1st Marquis of Montrose (1612–1650). Montrose played a prominent role in the early part of the mid-seventeenth century religious and military conficts between the Covenanters in Scotland and the Stuart monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His place in the history of the struggle was complex because he initially supported the Covenanting cause before switching to support King Charles I. This chapter demonstrates that Montrose's death had multiple timings and that the use of his body highlights an

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
R. Bennett (\*)

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2017

S. McCorristine (ed.), *Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings*, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58328-4\_3

important interplay between issues of power and punishment, and martyrdom and memory.

First, this chapter provides a brief timeline of the events that made Montrose a key fgure in the struggle between Covenant and King, and which made his death noteworthy. Second, it investigates the multiple stages of what will be defned as his "legal death". Montrose led Royalist forces in battle against the Covenanters, and for this he was outlawed, excommunicated, and attained for the crime of treason in 1644. Thus, the process of his legal death began years before he was fnally captured and publically executed in Edinburgh in 1650. This section also shows how Montrose's capture began a social death, as he was paraded from northern Scotland to Edinburgh with his crimes advertised and his name degraded. Within the black catalogue of offences that carried a capital punishment in this period, the crime of treason was set apart in how it was punished. The punishment for treason extended beyond the extinction of life as the corpses of traitors were used to send out stark and richly symbolic messages. In Montrose's case, his head was spiked on top of Edinburgh's Old Tolbooth and his limbs were displayed in four of Scotland's main towns. However, as the third section of this chapter demonstrates, he was still not yet truly "dead".

After the wars of the three kingdoms, and the Interregnum of republican government, the three kingdoms were restored under Charles II in 1660. This led to a wave of Royalist sentiment, and the martyred Montrose was used to propagate the themes of loyalty and sacrifce. In 1661, the frst parliament of Charles II resolved to provide some "honourable reparation" for the barbarity committed upon him.2 Montrose's dismembered body, once used to mark out his criminality, was gathered together and given a full public funeral at the King's expense in order to mark a legal, spiritual and social rehabilitation. This, again, provokes questions over the timing of his death. The third section of the chapter charts the journeys of particular parts of Montrose's body, namely his heart and one of his arms. These body parts were not buried with the rest of his body in 1661 and they have legacies of their own. In 1925, a newspaper article discussing the potential sale of Montrose's arm argued that the desire to possess it came from "our interest in the past and a craving for the most convincing form of testimony."3 These body parts were transformed into relics and were passed down through the generations, attracting beliefs about Montrose and also about the power of the dead body.

### Montrose: Covenanter and Cavalier

In 1638, Scottish nobles and common people alike signed the National Covenant, the purpose of which was to provide a written document stating their commitment to the Reformed religion and the principle of a church that was not controlled by the crown, but whose followers remained loyal to their king. It was signed in the Kirkyard of Greyfriar's in Edinburgh by the great Scottish lords, including the Marquis of Montrose, a young and energetic military campaigner. King Charles I alienated his Scottish subjects by reforming the liturgy and discipline of the church, leading to fears of an eventual return to popery. To the King, the Church of Scotland was greatly inferior to the Anglican Church as it lacked proper liturgy and its bishops did not have a suitably exalted status.4 After the signing of the Treaty of Berwick in 1639, which ended the early hostilities known as the First Bishop's War, Montrose was sent to discuss the religion question with Charles I, and it was not long after this that he began to switch his allegiances. John Buchan argues that Montrose became aware that the governance of Scotland was increasingly in the hands of certain individuals, notably his great enemy the Marquis of Argyll, who he feared were committing the very breaches of the law for which they had previously condemned the King.5

In 1644, Montrose pledged allegiance to the King and, soon after, was appointed the Viceroy and Captain-General of Scotland. In the same year, he was attained and outlawed for treason as well as being excommunicated by the Covenant Committee of Estates, thus marking the beginning of his legal, but also his spiritual death, in the eyes of his enemies. Montrose's cavalier forces went on to achieve victories in various parts of northern Scotland, including a particularly bloody campaign in Aberdeen that blackened his reputation. In an account of the sufferings inficted upon the Church of Scotland, the early eighteenth-century ecclesiastical historian Reverend Robert Woodrow called Montrose and others who supported the King "malignants and anti-Covenanters".6 Even the anti-Covenanter Sir George Mackenzie referred to Montrose as a "vain-glorious butcher" for his actions in the Highlands.7

In contrast, Montrose fared better in later interpretations of the period. Robert Chambers, in his *History of the Rebellions in Scotland* (1828), argued that the conduct of the Covenant meant that Montrose—his hero—had to join the King to protect the rights of society from church oligarchy.8 Other accounts praised his "heroic moderation" and the lack of malice in his military campaigns.9 Although Montrose missed out on a heroic status in life, he enjoyed a vibrant afterlife in works of fction that portrayed him as a romantic hero. Catriona MacDonald shows how, in the post-1745 Jacobite Rebellion period, Montrose's legacy was refashioned, along with that of the Highland clans, to exemplify Scottish national virtues in works such as Sir Walter Scott's *A Legend of Montrose* (1819).10

Despite winning some signifcant victories, Montrose encountered a lack of support in the Scottish Lowlands and he fed to Norway in 1646. It was not until 1649, following the execution of Charles I, that Montrose was restored to the lieutenancy of Scotland by the King's son and heir Charles II. In the following year, Montrose landed in the Orkney Islands with a small force of Royalists, but he failed to gain signifcant clan support and was defeated by Covenant forces at the Battle of Carbisdale in April 1650. He spent a few days on the run in the Scottish Highlands before coming upon a previous ally named Neil McLeod. However, instead of offering him assistance, McLeod apprehended Montrose and handed him over to the Committee of Estates for a bounty. This perceived treachery fed into the Royalist cult of martyrdom in the wake of Montrose's death. When he was apprehended by McLeod, Montrose apparently requested that he be killed quickly where he stood, rather than be handed over to his enemies.11 However, McLeod refused this request and the Covenant made plans to use his death to make a political statement about their strength and to avenge Montrose's betrayal. The Committee of Estates wanted to bring Montrose to Edinburgh to be put to death before King Charles II arrived in Scotland and interceded to prevent the execution. Despite this urgency, they made the execution a three-day long public spectacle replete with all possible ignominy.

# The Execution of Montrose

Montrose had been attained, convicted, and excommunicated by the Committee of Estates in 1644 and this still stood at the time of his capture in 1650. Therefore, in this sense, his legal death had already begun years before he was physically present to hear his death sentence. Following his capture, Montrose was brought from northern Scotland to Edinburgh. While this journey was intended to bring shame to his name, and mark the continuation of his social death to Covenanters, Montrose actually received a multitude of reactions during the procession. In some places he was given food, comfortable shelter, and fne clothes thought beftting to his status. However, at places where his forces had been victorious, a herald was placed above him that proclaimed, "here comes James Graham, a traitor to his country".12

On 19 May 1650, Montrose was met at the city gates and conveyed with all possible ignominy to the Old Tolbooth. He was placed in a cart bare-headed and tied to a specially made seat to ensure that he was in full view of the crowd.13 Although the distance between the gates and the Tolbooth was little more than half a mile, the procession took three hours as special stops were made along the way, including a lengthy pause outside the house from which the Marquis of Argyll and other Covenanting authorities viewed the spectacle. The city's ministers urged people to throw things at Montrose and abuse him during the procession to add further shame. However, some in the crowd were moved by his dignity and courage in the face of his ordeal, and various commentators spoke of a "tense air of sympathy and startled admiration" for him.14

The day after his arrival in Edinburgh, Montrose was taken before the Committee who repeated their charges of rebellion against the state and desertion of the National Covenant. He was not given a formal trial because he was already attained, and thus convicted, for his crimes. Montrose was sentenced to be hanged on 21 May at the Cross in Edinburgh on gallows that were 30 feet high. Throughout Europe during this period many noble traitors were executed by beheading, perceived as a more honourable end than hanging. However, this concession was not extended to Montrose because of the desire of the Covenanters to add even further infamy to his death. His private chaplain George Wishart wrote a biography of Montrose that favourably detailed his previous military campaigns, and this book was ordered to be placed around his neck as a reminder of his crimes. After the body was hung for three hours, it was ordered that it be cut down, beheaded and quartered. Montrose's head was to be fxed on top of the Tolbooth and his legs and arms distributed to Stirling, Glasgow, Perth, and Aberdeen. Various ministers visited him before the execution because it was stipulated that if he repented his crimes, the sentence of excommunication would be lifted. However, Montrose stated that, although he continued to hold to the Covenant he had taken, he could not support any actions against the authority of the King, to whom he pledged a greater allegiance and in whose authority he had acted. Furthermore, Montrose apparently stated that he thought it an honour to have his loyalty remembered in Scotland's fve most eminent towns.15 During the Restoration regime, such reports of Montrose's gallantry when faced with unjust death were used to further establish his position as one of the most celebrated Royalist martyrs of the period.

On the morning of his execution, Montrose ascended the scaffold wearing fne scarlet with white gloves and silk stockings that had been provided by friends. Traditionally, criminals about to suffer the last punishment of the law were given the opportunity to address the watching crowd in order to express public penitence for their offences and to reconcile themselves with their fate. However, fears that Montrose might be rescued meant the authorities limited his access to the public. He was only permitted to address those immediately around him, one of whom recorded what he said. In his investigation of the behaviour and last dying speeches of the Jacobite rebels, Daniel Szechi argues that, during his execution, Charles I had set a precedent in refusing to publicly accept the justice of his sentence.16 Instead of showing penitence during his last moments, Montrose reaffrmed his loyalty to God and the King, and expressed satisfaction that he was to follow in the footsteps of the martyred Charles I.17 Reporting upon Montrose's gallant deportment, a contemporary pamphlet commented that "it is absolutely believed that he hath gained a better repute by his death than ever he did in life".18

After hanging for three hours, Montrose's body was cut down and his head and limbs were cut off with an axe—a scene that was met with sounds of regret from the crowd.19 The Covenant then began to display their authority and justice by distributing the body parts. Montrose's head was spiked on top of the Old Tolbooth to mark out his treasonous criminality and to prolong his public humiliation beyond execution. One of his arms was put up at Justice Port in Aberdeen, and another was sent to Dundee. The legs were sent to Stirling and Glasgow.20 Often, the torsos of victims thus dismembered were given to relatives for burial; this was not the case with Montrose, however. Because he had been excommunicated, his torso was buried in unconsecrated ground under the gallows on the Borough Muir. At the time, this fnal insult by the Scottish Kirk was considered a greater torture than the punishments inficted upon his body in life.21

These post-mortem punishments were broadly consistent with other treatments meted out on the corpses of traitors during the period. The legal death sentence was designed to deny the condemned a decent burial and also to harness the power of the criminal corpse to make a political statement: this is what happens to traitors. In many cases, the dismembered body parts of the executed remained on display for years until they rotted away to nothing, or were eventually taken down without ceremony and lost to historical record. Montrose's body, however, became a vehicle to promote an entirely different political message in 1661.

### "An Honourable Reparation"

In his biography of Montrose, Wishart called him a "candidate for immortality", and provided one of the earliest examples in which Montrose's death was held up as iconic in the Royalist cause. When lamenting Montrose's treatment by the Covenant, Wishart stated that his death "was not bewailed as a private loss but rather as a public calamity".22 However, following the Restoration, Charles II's frst parliament resolved to bestow upon Montrose "an honourable reparation" for the barbarity committed against him and sought to offcially rehabilitate him as a martyr.23 While this would fnally give Montrose the decent death he had previously been denied, his funeral also served a broader political purpose. The Restoration gave rise to a wave of Royalist sentiment in which the themes of loyalty and sacrifce were carefully woven into the fabric of the regime.24 Because of its political currency, Montrose's story was told and retold by Scottish Royalists into the eighteenth century and beyond.25 In 1661, his courage in fghting for the King's cause and his defance in the face of death was rewarded by a lavish funeral, the like of which had not been seen in Scotland since the coronation of Charles I in Edinburgh in 1633.

Montrose's attainment for treason in 1644 was intended to attach shame to his family's name and contribute to his social death in the eyes of the Covenant. However, in 1661, this social death was undone. Those "nearest in blood" to Montrose, including members of the Graham and Napier families, became a focal part of the funeral proceedings with one contemporary pamphlet commenting that the event marked a restoration of the good name of the Graham family.26 On 7 January 1661, the funeral procession made its way through Edinburgh to the sound of drums, trumpets and the fring of cannons, to collect Montrose's torso from the Borough Muir. It was disinterred from under the gallows and carried under a velvet canopy to the Old Tolbooth where his head was taken down by members of his family, before the procession continued to Holyrood Abbey. He was placed in a coffn where he lay in state until the funeral was held in St Giles on 11 May, followed by a large banquet in his honour. During his invasion of Scotland, Oliver Cromwell had supposedly ordered Montrose's displayed limbs to be taken down. The arm sent to Aberdeen was interred in the vault of fellow Royalist George Huntly, 2nd Marquis of Gordon, who had been beheaded in 1649. In 1661, it was raised up and put in a velvet-covered box and carried by a procession of over 500 people through the city.27 The celebration in Aberdeen was an important milestone in Montrose's public rehabilitation, as during his campaigns in the 1640s, he had attacked and plundered the city.

The funeral was conducted at the King's expense and was directed by Sir Alexander Durham who, as the Lyon King of Arms, was responsible for overseeing state ceremonies in Scotland. Durham's accounts show that he distributed, at least, the enormous sum of £802 sterling for Montrose's funeral. This lavish expenditure was more than mere remorse on the part of the monarch for a fallen cavalier. If we examine the great number of nobles and gentry who were present for the whole spectacle, it becomes clear that it brought together Montrose's friends and foes.28 This demonstrates that the Restoration regime intended the spectacle to act as a vehicle to propagate the value of loyalty and to show its strength after a generation of civil wars. Following the funeral, Montrose's remains were buried in the cathedral of St Giles, in the vault of his grandfather, a previous Viceroy of Scotland.29 Although the funeral and burial were intended to provide Montrose with an honourable death, not all of his body found its fnal resting place in the vault in St Giles. The next section looks at the separate journeys of one of Montrose's arms and his heart in order to highlight the beliefs that were attached to them and to demonstrate the continued agency of his body.

# "A Most Convincing Form of Testimony"

There were various ways to think about, and be affected by, dead bodies in seventeenth-century Britain. These included: debates about when a person was medically dead; debates about the religious importance, or power of corpses; and beliefs about the potency of the dead and the healing properties of certain body parts.30 Popular ideas about dead bodies were frequently noted at public executions, where people showed a desire to possess mementos, such as the blood, hair, clothing, and personal possessions of the executed person. Indeed, at the execution of Charles I, the monarch gave friends pieces of his clothing as relics, while after his death, his silk shirt and gloves became coveted curios. As was customary, the silk stockings worn by Montrose for his execution were claimed by the executioner. He had taken care not to cut them when severing the limbs, and after the event, they were purchased by Montrose's niece Elizabeth Erskine, Lady Napier. In 1856, a descendent of Lady Napier mentioned that the family was still in possession of the stockings, along with other relics of Montrose.31 While this was an example of the repatriation of Montrose's possessions and memory by his family, Royalists were also concerned to "re-member" his body by tracing down his missing arm and heart.

It appears that the left arm sent to Aberdeen was the only one of the four distributed limbs to be collected in 1661. The right arm sent to Dundee to be nailed up above the principal town gate was subsequently carried to England by a Cromwellian offcer named Pickering.32 When one of Pickering's descendents left England for Spain in 1704, he placed the arm into Ralph Thoresby's antiquarian collection in Leeds. Upon Thoresby's death in 1725, the arm was purchased by Thomas Graham of Woodhall in Yorkshire.33 It remained in the Graham family for decades and one his descendents, John Graham, wrote about the arm in 1752, stating its journey thus far and attesting to its authenticity. By 1834, Mr. C. Reeves of Woodhall, perhaps a descendent of the Graham family of Yorkshire, was in possession of the arm, and he provided details about its current condition. It was a mummifed limb, he said, that had been cut off at the elbow and was in an excellent state of preservation.34 In 1891, the arm was purchased by Mr. J.W. Morkill, along with a written statement of authenticity, and in 1925—the same year Charles' silk waistcoat was donated to the Museum of London—Morkill attempted to sell it at Sotheby's auction house. At the time, one newspaper stated that the arm was more than a gruesome relic because it offered a very defnitive indication of the character of Montrose: "for understanding eyes it is an historical document, in addition to being a relic coveted by all who have fallen under the spell of a very gallant gentleman."35 However, Morkill's notice of sale caused a public outcry and he withdrew the arm from Sotheby's. It was not mentioned again until 1932 when it was left to Morkill's son, Mr. Alan Greenwood Morkill, in his will.36 After 1932, the arm disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite the uncertainty of its fnal destination, the journey of the arm across almost three centuries demonstrates that people considered it to be a powerful curio as it was a tactile memento of the great Montrose worth possessing, and because the stories about it generated a sense of authenticity.

Following the execution and dismemberment, Montrose's torso was buried at the Borough Muir with the gallows used to hang him. However, when his body was disinterred in 1661, it was discovered that the chest had been broken open and heart removed. This had been done on the orders of his niece, Lady Napier. The post-mortem journey of Montrose's heart can be traced through a letter written by Alexander Johnson, a descendant of Lady Napier, to his daughter in the early nineteenth century.

According to Johnson, Lady Napier had the heart embalmed and enclosed in a case made from Montrose's sword. It was then placed into a gold fligree box that had been gifted to the Napier family from a Doge in Venice, and then placed inside a silver urn. She sent the heart to the Netherlands, where Montrose's son was in exile. After this, the heart was apparently lost for some time until a friend of the ffth Lord Napier recognised the gold box in a collection of curiosities in the Netherlands and purchased it for him. The Napier's had him sign a certifcate attesting to its authenticity and the circumstances by which he had acquired it and Johnson wrote that it was then taken back to the Napier ancestral home at Merchiston. Johnson's grandfather often told the story of Montrose's heart to his mother and when he died he had left the heart to her. As a child, Johnson travelled to India with his mother and father, who was an offcer in the East India Company, but on the voyage their ship had been attacked and the gold box was damaged. In India, his mother had it repaired by a goldsmith and also had another silver urn made with an engraving, in the two most common languages of the southern peninsula of India, telling the story of Montrose. The Johnsons displayed the urn in their home in Madura and, because of his mother's care for it, the locals believed it to be a talisman with the power to protect the bearer in battle. Owing to this superstition, it was stolen and sold to a powerful chief. But this was not the end of the heart's journey.

In his letter, Johnson recalled how he was often sent to hunt with local chiefs in order to learn more about their culture, and on one trip he earned the praise of a particular chief for an act of bravery. In a remarkable twist of fate, this was the chief who had purchased Montrose's heart, without knowing it had been stolen, and he agreed to return it to the family. (Interestingly, some years later, the chief was executed for his part in a rebellion, but before this, he told his attendants the story of Montrose and asked them to preserve his heart in the same way.) Montrose's heart then returned to Europe with the family in 1792, but during their journey through France, they found out that the revolutionary government was confscating gold and silver. The Johnsons therefore entrusted the gold box into the safe keeping of an English woman in Boulogne named Knowles. When Knowles died soon after, the family were unable to trace the heart.37 But still, the trail did not go cold.

In 1931, Captain H. Stuart Wheatley-Crowe, the president of the Royal Stuart Society, led an investigation into the missing heart. Wheatley-Crowe had in his possession an embalmed heart that was believed to have been brought to England from France during the Revolution by the ancestors of the Perkins family who claimed it was the heart of Montrose. He had a medical examination carried out upon the heart that found it to be approximately 300 years old, but could fnd no other defnitive proof of its authenticity.38 In 1951, Wheatley-Crowe sent the heart to Canada to a person he believed had a claim to the relic, a Mrs. Maisie Armitage-Moore.39 Another turn of events came in 2012 when the largest ever collection of memorabilia marking the life of James Graham was exhibited in the Montrose Museum, a museum that opened in the town of Montrose in 1842, to mark the 400-year anniversary of his birth. The exhibition included paintings, documents, weapons, and a heart believed to be that of Montrose himself. The museum's curator acknowledged that there were two recorded accounts of different hearts believed to belong to Montrose and they had located one. However, it is unclear if this was the same heart that had been sent to Canada in 1951.40 Despite the lack of proof of its authenticity, the heart was placed alongside other artefacts defnitively related to Montrose, and this perhaps is a suitable fnal destination.

### Conclusion

While awaiting his execution in the condemned cell of the Old Tolbooth, Montrose remarked to the guard "even after I am dead I will be continually present…and become more formidable to them [the Committee of Estates] than while I was alive".41 Despite making this statement, Montrose could not have foreseen how both his body and his legacy would be utilised by both the Covenanting and the Royalist causes to propagate entirely different values. His three-day execution spectacle was replete with the hallmarks attached to the punishment for offences against the state, from the ignominious public procession to the multiple stages of the execution itself. Furthermore, the displaying of his corpse to indefnitely mark out his criminality was intended to prolong his legal death beyond the extinction of life. However, in conducting a public funeral, the Restoration regime changed Montrose's identity from that of an executed traitor to that of a murdered martyr and reconciled him religiously and legally.

We can draw parallels between the posthumous treatment of Montrose and other infuential corpses from the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration period. Following his execution for treason in 1681, the remains of Oliver Plunkett, the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, were exhumed in 1683 and went on a journey of spiritual rehabilitation across Europe before he was eventually canonised in 1975. In contrast, upon his death in 1658, Oliver Cromwell, the late Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, received an elaborate state funeral which was intended to serve as a reinforcement of the Protectoral regime. However, this did not to mark his fnal resting place or his fnal legal death. By order of the Restoration regime, he was posthumously convicted and executed as a regicide with his spiked head on top of Westminster Hall serving as a reminder of the reward for treason.42 The chronology of Cromwell's multiple deaths presents an almost reverse pattern to those of Montrose who suffered an ignominious execution in 1650, but received a lavish funeral in 1661 to mark his offcial death at the same time as his rehabilitation in the public memory.

Will Montrose ever die? This chapter has shown that, even after the honourable reparation afforded to Montrose in 1661, he was not, and perhaps is not yet, truly dead. Some of his body parts, once the dismembered remains of a traitor, were refashioned into coveted relics and instead of marking out his criminality, they attested to his gallantry and loyalty to the king. Spanning four centuries, the journeys of Montrose's arm and heart drew forth beliefs about body parts as signs of punishment, curious relics, icons of political memory, and curated exhibits. For the Covenant, Montrose's execution in 1650 marked the end of his life, but for Royalists it was the honourable funeral of 1661 that marked his legal death and repatriation into a political community. Montrose remains an iconic fgure in Scottish history; indeed, the First Marquis of Montrose Society was founded in 1995 to promote his name and memory. This contemporary relevance, alongside the mobility and multiple meanings attached to his body parts, make it unlikely that Montrose's post-mortem journeys are over yet.

### Notes

### Author Biography

**Rachel Bennett** was recently awarded her Ph.D. in history by the University of Leicester and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. Her research interests are focused upon crime and punishment in Britain between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, notably the history of capital punishment and the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth-Century Belgium

*Veronique Deblon and Kaat Wils*

The start of the nineteenth century coincided with the development of a new aesthetics of death. Funerary rites became more elaborate; cemeteries and tombstones were increasingly adorned, and corpses were embellished before their burial. At the centre of this beautifcation of death movement was a new individualised and "sentimentalised" relationship with the dead.1 Paying respect and tribute to the personhood of the deceased became an important aspect of mourning and funeral culture. At the same time, a more romanticised view of the afterlife was portrayed with an emphasis on the promise of reunion in life after death.2 In European funerary culture, the "death as sleep" metaphor became a popular representation of death as it allowed mourners to separate the idea of death from a fnal state of being and corresponded with the Christian narrative of resurrection. In this narrative, the transition from life to

University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Wils e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
V. Deblon (\*) · K. Wils

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2017

S. McCorristine (ed.), *Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings*, Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58328-4\_4

death allowed the soul to fall asleep, only to awaken for the fnal judgement.3 As Sarah Tarlow indicates, the comparison between sleep and death allowed for a "fgurative understanding" of death (as the deceased were granted an eternal rest in peace).4 The death as sleep narrative was accordingly part of the commemorative culture of Christian worship and it was materialised in tombstones and grave inscriptions.5

The grave as a peaceful place of sleep stands in sharp contrast with the reality and corporeality of death—of decomposition and putrefaction. The process of decay is inevitable in the body once organs stop functioning and bacteria and enzymes start decomposing bodily tissue. In the nineteenth century, new conserving procedures for the dead body were developed in response to a growing fear about the decaying corpses of the dead. New embalming techniques seemed to materialise the death as sleep metaphor: the preserved corpse appeared to be sleeping. These conservation methods were developed in the anatomical theatre, where corpses were preserved for scientifc research or educational purposes. Even though embalmed corpses destined for burial and anatomical preparations were displayed in a different context, they both represented the corpse lingering between life (or sleep) and death. Moreover, defning death as sleep offered anatomists a visual language to connect their practices to contemporary funeral culture. By looking at the use, display, and popularisation of conservation procedures for corpses, we will show how death was overcome by preserving the body and suggesting a state of sleep in both medical and funeral culture. The display of sleeping corpses further aligned medical practice to Catholic death rites and an emerging conspicuous funeral culture.

This chapter presents a case study on nineteenth-century Belgium, where anatomists explicitly connected their practices to a funeral culture by preserving and displaying dead bodies as if they were still alive and seemed to be merely sleeping. The death as sleep metaphor received a new application in these treatments of the corpse. In doing so, anatomists testifed to a sentimentalised relationship with individual corpses. At the same time, they helped shape nineteenth-century death culture by presenting their conserved corpses as if they were sleeping.

The practice of conserving corpses was not entirely new in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. This frst part of the chapter looks at an early modern method for conserving bodies used by the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731). Ruysch's work (re)gained renown in the nineteenth century when interest in the conservation and beautifcation of corpses was high. Inspired by Ruysch, the Belgian anatomist Adolphe Burggraeve (1806–1902) preserved corpses in such a way that they appeared to be alive and seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Focusing on the death as sleep metaphor, we examine how Burggraeve's "sleeping corpses" became familiar representations of death in an era in which embalming was popularised in Belgium. The fnal part of the chapter will look at how anatomical preparations impacted on death cultures and people's perceptions of what death looked like.

# Conserving the Dead Body: The Preparations of Frederik Ruysch

For medieval physicians and churchmen, the conserving and collecting of body parts was a routine practice that formed an important aspect of how medical knowledge was passed on and how Christianity was practised. The frst medical collections contained several osteological remains such as skeletons, while in churches different bones and skulls of saints were preserved. These collections of anatomical specimens and holy relics were designed to be displayed, and by the Renaissance period, they became increasingly adorned and made into commodities.6 However, in the seventeenth century, anatomists working on (lay) bodies developed techniques to conserve tissues by macerating and storing body parts in alcohol-flled jars. This meant that they could create new spectacles of death, beyond the dry skeletons that originally flled their cabinets.

Frederik Ruysch showed particular interest in the conservation of corpses, both as embalmed and anatomical preparations. Ruysch was particularly known for his skeletons of foetuses that were preserved and often mounted in a "landscape" of human body parts, such as injected arteries or kidney stones. The lifelike skeletons—that were placed in an upright position—held different vanitas symbols, such as feathers, pearls, and handkerchiefs. The inscriptions that accompanied the anatomical preparations reminded visitors of the frailty of life. For example, labels of the tableaux read: "Death spares no man, not even the defenceless infant", or "What is life? A transient smoke and a fragile bubble".7 The tableaux of foetal skeletons were intended to present spectators with a moral message on death as the inevitable fate of man and served as memento mori.

Ruysch also developed a conservation technique for the preservation of human tissue by injecting them with substances such as (coloured) wax or mercury and storing them in alcohol. Though Ruysch was not the frst to employ this method, he developed the skill to create specimens that mimicked the body's natural state.8 The uncanny character of the preparations came from their lifelike appearance: contemporary visitors to Ruysch's collection emphasised the "rosy complexions" of the bottled babies, which made it appear as if "they had never died".9 His injection technique not only restored the suppleness of the body in its living state, it also allowed him to map fne anatomical structures such as the capillaries.

Ruysch's lifelike specimens also formed a tribute to the infnite power of a divine Creator. His cabinet was recommended as a place where visitors stood "face to face with manifestations of the creation" and could observe the ingenious structure and functioning of the human body as it was designed by the Creator.10 In his study on the preparations of Ruysch, Van de Roemer emphasises that the attributes of the specimens, such as embroidered textile, strengthened the religious refections of visitors to the anatomical cabinet. The delicate lace that covered the anatomical preparations offered a visual association between the texture of textile (made by man) and the texture of the body (as created by a divine power).11 Moreover, the lifelike appearance of the preparations supported the emotional connection between dead body parts and their spectators.

Given this link between the display of bodies and musings on mortality and Creation in early modern collections, anatomical preparations could be seen to have similar functions to holy relics.12 Anatomical preparations offered mourners a "material and emotional link to the deceased" and "represent[ed] the living" in the same way that relics did.13 While relics had a power associated with their origin in the bodies of saints and narratives of martyrdom, why did Ruysch's preparations need to be beautiful in order to inspire people to refect on death? The artistic embellishing of preparations helped to deal with people's disgust at the corpse; the anatomical artistry consciously referenced the divine work of God, a juxtaposition that gave anatomists like Ruysch a spectacular power.14 Marieke Hendriksen further argues that the "elegancy" of anatomical preparations in the early modern period was a necessary means by which anatomical knowledge was transmitted. The senses of touch, sight, and smell might overpower those who approached the (unpreserved) corpse to learn, yet the beauty of the preparations demonstrated the beauty of the anatomical body. In turn, the perfection of dissected or injected body parts generated anatomical knowledge.15 Though the taste for elegance in seventeenth-century anatomical preparations soon waned, Ruysch's work was celebrated until well into the nineteenth century precisely because he was able to eliminate "the disgust inspired by the cadaver".16

### Death in Nineteenth-Century Belgium

In the early modern period, representations of the decaying body served as memento mori—a reminder of one's own mortality—but by the nineteenth century, the thought of bodily dissolution came to be seen as distressing. Nineteenth-century death culture aimed to conceal the "reality of death and decay".17 This was because, from the late eighteenth century onwards, there was a transformation in how people mourned. An individualised relationship with the dead emerged and burial became increasingly aestheticised as part of the wish to pay tribute and respect to the personhood of the deceased.18 This created a new sensitivity about the decay of the corpse, because it threatened to affect people's emotional relationship with the dead, and raised fears about the medical dangers of rotting bodies.

In nineteenth-century funeral rituals, more attention was paid to the bodily integrity of the deceased. Amid the cultural shift towards an individual relationship with the dead, anatomists and medical students at European universities developed new and more effcient ways to conserve the corpse for use in their studies. Their desire to halt decay did not exclude their desire to beautify the corpse; rather, these new conservation methods overlapped with the aesthetic methods that upper-class mourners were using in their funerary practices.19

In France, new embalming techniques were popularised and commercialised by medical men in the frst half of the nineteenth century. A similar shift occurred in America where new conservation techniques were marketed by funeral directors in the emerging funeral industry.20 In Belgium, funeral rites and ceremonies were exclusively in the hands of the Catholic Church in the frst half of the nineteenth century. Religion played a crucial part in the moments leading up to death and in the organisation of funerals. Confession, absolution, and prayer accompanied the fnal hours of a dying person.21 In Catholicism, the fnal sacraments allowed the soul to live on in the afterlife and supported the idea of heavenly immortality.

After death, the laying out of the corpse was part of a dignifed farewell. This particular task was usually performed by the sisters of a Catholic order and was often reserved for the highest echelons of society. For example, the bodies of bishops were washed, covered with odorous spices and laid out after death. Displaying the corpse was seen as a mark of respect and appreciation for the deceased. Care for the dead body was an expression of faith in resurrection and the immortality of the soul.22 Cherishing the corpse would provide that dead body with the opportunity to resuscitate and reunite with the soul in the afterlife. Physicians who wanted to promote their embalming techniques capitalised on this belief: conserving the corpse equalled care for the corpse and guaranteed its physical integrity.

In the homes of the destitute, the laying out of corpses was more of a necessity than an aspect of the funeral rite. Due to the lack of municipal morgues, pauper corpses often stayed in people's one-bedroom houses in attendance of a funeral.23 As the embalmment of corpses in nineteenth-century Belgium was exclusively reserved for royals, nobility, and the bourgeoisie, the preservation of pauper corpses in the domestic sphere was often problematic.24 Decaying pauper corpses were increasingly seen as a medical hazard. The time between the moment of death and the actual funeral was therefore strictly limited. Yet, the presence of the beloved deceased in the domestic sphere also contributed to the image of the "corpse at peace".25 In her study on the expression of grief among the working classes in nineteenth-century Britain, Julie-Marie Strange notes that the "relaxation of the facial muscles" and the similarities between "shroud and nightdress" led spectators to associate death and sleep.26

The post-mortem fate of paupers who died in the hospital was radically different from those who passed away at home. Patients' corpses were transferred to the anatomical theatre and dissected when the family was unable to cover the funeral costs. The putrefying corpses in the anatomical theatre evoked repugnance among the people in the neighborhood who often complained about bad odours. The practices of anatomists therefore enjoyed a bad reputation among a non-medical audience. Anatomists tried to disconnect the corpses from the realities of death by embalming and conserving their source material.

# Between Life and Death: The Preparations of Adolphe Burggraeve

While Ruysch's anatomical preparations had been excessively adorned with textile or attributes in the early modern period, by the end of the eighteenth century, a more realist, "representational" and modest style was developed for anatomical representations of the body.27 Elaborate displays of decorated body parts went out of fashion. As anatomy moved away from providing spectacles of death for lay audiences, anatomists developed more sober representations of the anatomical body.28 However, the desire to overcome the disgust and horror of the corpse remained an important aspect of the work of anatomical collectors into the nineteenth century.29 This removal of disgust chimed in with contemporary mourning cultures and provided a new context for the display of anatomical preparations.

In Belgium, the creation and institutionalisation of anatomical collections was an important aspect of the development of a national science after its independence in 1830. Anatomists at the new universities put great effort in the establishment of anatomical museums. At the University of Ghent, Adolphe Burggraeve and his aide Edouard Meulewaeter developed several conserving techniques to ensure the expansion of the institution's anatomical collection in the 1830s. Together they created mercury-injected specimens, injected bone preparations, and injected preparations of the mucous membrane next to larger wet specimens of diseased organs or foetuses. Their preparations were lauded for their natural appearance and delicacy, and were seen as the ultimate proof of Burggraeve's craftsmanship. Though elegance went out of style, the preparations housed in the anatomical museum at the University of Ghent show that anatomists were still concerned about creating the most lifelike preparations possible.

Burggraeve searched for years for a preservation method that could equal the results of Ruysch. Inspired by an encounter with some lifelike preparations in the Netherlands, Burggraeve devised a procedure that he felt matched that of Ruysch. With the assistance of his aide Meulewaeter, Burggraeve found a way to inject corpses with coloured gelatine, and then conserved the preparations in soured alcohol. They added over a 1000 specimens to the University's anatomical cabinet, but only a few preparations from the original collection have survived.  This preparation received considerable attention in the nineteenth-century medical press; its natural skin tone and the rosiness of the cheeks and lips were particularly lauded. The velutinous quality of the skin was said to give the preserved body the "transparence of life" and suggested the bodies were at peace.30 A preparation of a half-dissected girl displays a similar serenity, but paradoxically it also incorporates the violence of a dissection (Fig. 4.2). On the one hand, the girl on display is clearly dead; her head is cut in half to show the matter within. On the other hand, she appears to be sleeping peacefully. When, in 1837, Burggraeve presented some of his preparations to a medical audience, their lifelike appearance caused many to recall the work of Ruysch, an association Burggraeve was keen to highlight. Indeed, like Ruysch, Burggraeve adorned his preparations with textile decorations and kept his conservation method a secret.31

The purpose of the textile decorations was twofold: Firstly, it was meant to cover up mutilated body parts, as was its function in the seventeenth century.32 The autopsy scars on the body of the newborn infant, for example, were concealed by the christening dress. Secondly, the adherence of textile to body parts also had a symbolic function: the christening gown of the newborn infant emphasised the innocence of the child, but also confrmed the possibility that the child would live a peaceful afterlife.33 In the nineteenth century, it was customary to bury babies in their baptismal clothing as proof that they had been baptised and could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.34 By dressing the child in a white gown, Burggraeve aligned the preparation of the child with contemporary funeral practices.

As an anatomical preparation, the body of the newborn child hardly demonstrated anatomical structures or knowledge. However, it did visualise a new "death way" to visitors to the anatomical museum. The dress softened the harsh reality of death, made the corpse into an aesthetic object, and hid the scars inficted by the post-mortem examination.In Burggraeve's preparation of the girl, the reality of the dissection was not hidden. Rather, the traces of the dissection and the carving of the scalpel were clearly visible on the body. Her trunk appears to have been detached violently from her chest, and Burggraeve highlighted her anatomical structures by means of coloured gelatin injections. The textile attached to the preparation, however, served the symbolic purpose of drawing out an association with sleep. Draped as if it were a pillow, the

**Fig. 4.1** Anatomical preparation of a newborn child (Museum for the History of Medicine, Ghent. Collection: University Museum, Ghent)

fabric seems to suggest that the deceased is resting and has found peace, despite the disintegrated state of her body.

Burggraeve's preparations not only caught the attention of his fellow medical professionals, but the results of his injection method were also noticed in the Belgian newspaper press where audiences read about how

**Fig. 4.2** Anatomical preparation of a girl with hand (Department of Basic Medical Sciences, Anatomy and Embryology Research Group. Collection: University Museum, Ghent. Photographer: Benn Deceuninck)

one could hold onto the bodies of the deceased. Burggraeve's invention was contextualised by referring to the human fascination with the dead body and our wish to overcome the "destruction" of life. In one newspaper article the "idea of death" was said to be "too dreadful for man", which explained, for the journalist, why many different cultures embalmed and conserved the dead.35 The display of lifelike anatomical preparations to a lay audience, it is clear, allowed for a peaceful and consoling confrontation with death.

# Embalmment Mania: Jean-Nicholas Gannal's Conservation Method

Anatomists continually sought for better ways to conserve putrefying corpses. In the anatomical theatre, the same corpse that served as an object of scientifc enquiry one day could be the locus of fears about illness and disease from medical students the next day. A fear of rotting corpses also prevailed among the citizens of densely populated areas who saw the dead body as a breeding ground for diseases such as typhus and cholera.36 In this context, anatomists intervened in medical and popular fears about the dead by developing ways to conserve bodies, preserve their physical integrity and extend their "liveliness". In the 1820s and 1830s, the French chemist Jean-Nicholas Gannal (1791–1852) gained critical acclaim for his procedure to embalm cadavers. After working as an apothecary in the army of Napoléon Bonaparte, Gannal grew interested in the conservation of anatomical preparations and small animals, and later created a method for embalming human corpses from his operating base in Paris. He did this by making a small incision in the neck, rinsing the arteries, and then injecting the corpse with arsenic. At frst, only corpses destined for the anatomical theatre were treated this way, but later on he also developed a conservation method that became popular in the funeral industry.37

As news about Gannal's embalming procedure spread across Europe, hospitals and hygiene commissions became interested in applying his method for the conservation of corpses for dissection. The Medical Commission of the city of Brussels looked to Gannal's method as a possible solution to the health risks and insalubrity caused by the circulation of cadavers for anatomical courses.38 Anatomists claimed that the embalming of corpses could halt the exhalation of "mephitic miasmas" and the emanation of "poisonous gas", which caused typhoid fever.39 The teaching hospitals—where corpses were dissected—also reacted positively to Gannal's method. Embalming was considered an excellent solution to the problem of the high number of accidents and illnesses caused by *"le piqure anatomique",* or injuries caused by infection from dissection instruments.40 In 1841, four years after Gannal had patented his injection method, Cécilien Simonart, the prosector of the Brussels anatomy department, approved Gannal's method for the conservation of anatomical preparations and for embalming procedures.41

Following the popularity of Gannal's conservation procedure, many scientists took it upon themselves to create new embalming methods. Research on new embalming procedures rocketed in the 1840s, which caused the *Gazette médicale belge*—a publication that regularly reported on new conserving techniques—to ask its readers "when will this embalmment mania stop?"42

### The Application of Conserving Procedures

News on Gannal's embalming technique reached Belgium at the same time as Burggraeve displayed his preparations. Like Burggraeve's method, Gannal's injection technique received considerable attention in the newspaper press where it was also presented as a successor to Ruysch's procedure.43 Burggraeve's anatomical preparations and Gannal's embalmed corpses were described in similar terms by journalists, who lauded the freshness of their conserved bodies that had all the "appearances of life".44