SHAKESPEARE UNDERSTOOD THE POWER of stories about death, and about the human need to tell and hear such stories. For stories about the death of others are ultimately stories about our own deaths. They are a way to confront our inevitable end beforehand and, for now at least, live to tell the tale. Perhaps such stories carry an apotropaic value, helping people to drive away the spectre of death in the same way that parishioners in late medieval Rogationtide ceremonies processed with hand bells, banners and the parish cross to drive away evil spirits. Both activities are based on the construction of a dramatic ritual or action around the thing we fear and in doing so, imagining that the ritual protects us from it. As John Aberth puts it, ‘By conversing with Death, man took some of the terror out of his coming and could better prepare for the final end.’

Shakespeare's word ‘antic’ is a peculiarly apt and disquieting description of Death (big ‘D’ or little), evoking as it does the fool at court, who lampoons and admonishes without regard to station; the madman, who acts irrationally, sometimes violently, without rhyme or reason; and death, which strikes one man while sparing his neighbour. In much of the art and literature we will discuss in this chapter, we will witness death as antic, as fool, as madman, for surely only a madman would fell a child with plague and leave unharmed the parents to mourn her loss. There is, of course, Death, death and the dead. The stories we will examine involve them all, and will deal not just with stories of death, but specifically with stories of the dead interacting with the living.

The belief that the dead may continue to live on as corpses is, like the search for eternal life, of such ancient pedigree that it cannot reliably be dated. Belief in revenants usually includes a belief that those revenants are malevolent. They are almost always presented as having lived an evil life and/or dying badly.