My twelve-year-old son is learning about Shakespeare in English class. What can I say, he’s not your average kid, and he doesn’t have your average English teacher Anyway, we were discussing the Bard and started talking about the Tragedies tending to end up, as good tragedies will, with multiple bodies on the stage. We were wondering which one has the highest pile when the final curtain goes down?
For instance, take Hamlet. Laertes falls first, then Gertrude, then Claudius, and last of all Hamlet himself (who was the first to get the poison, but never mind). This gives Hamlet a score of four. Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, only has the title characters dead on stage, for a patheticly low body count of two.
So, Shakespeare buffs, can you help a kid and his mom out? Which Shakespeare plays have particularly bloody endings? Any to beat out Hamlet? I confess I’ve barely dipped my toes in the Histories and have read fewer than half of the Tragedies…
For some reason Wikipedia won’t allow me to view the page so I am going from memory here. I recal hearing that MacBeth was Shakespear’s bloodiest play in terms of bodycount, but if you are asking specifically about the body pile in the last scene then I am not sure if it beats Hamlet as I can’t recal the final scene.
Well, R&J is an odd case, because until the death of Romeo it could well have a happy ending. Most of the people in Verona would seem to be pretty happy to let the feud end, and having the marriage of R&J there as a done deal (but with the two still alive) might have easily ended it.
On the other hand, in Hamlet you have the King, Queen and the heir to the throne all dead in the last scene, when Fortinbras walks in, so it’s not just the death of four characters, but the conquest of Denmark by Norway as well: pretty serious stuff.
In some of the historical plays, you have the deaths of hundreds (even if they aren’t all on stage), e.g., at the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V, with the death of the English boys accompanying the army, and of the cream of the French nobility.
Well, there’s always “Titus Andronicus”, which features some 14 murders, plus dismemberments, live burial, rape, and cannibalism. The grand finale has either four or six deaths, depending on when you start counting, since you may or may not choose to count the deaths of Lavinia’s sons as part of the finale.
I’m not real sure why I’m spoilerboxing the finale of a 400+ year old play, but there ya go.
If we’re counting all deaths of characters we actually meet, not soldiers on the battlefield and not limited to the final scene, R+J comes out much better.
Romeo and Juliet: Tybalt, Paris, Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet.
Hamlet: Hamlet Sr., Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Gerturde, Claudius and Hamlet Jr.
Macbeth: Lady Macduff, Banquo, Lady Macbeth, Duncan and Macbeth
King Lear: Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Cordelia and Lear (although sometimes not the last two or three.)
But Titus, which I always think of as the bloodiest and most disturbing, actually ties with Hamlet on actual deaths, unless I’m forgetting some (which, according to Max Torque, I am. Who are the other 7, Max? I admit to not knowing Titus well at all):
Titus Andronicus: Aaron, Lavinia, Tamora, Chiron and Demetrius and Titus Andronicus and…
Excellent. It’s the kids who are turned on to the coolness of the classics at an early age that ensure that all of the morons will continue to be tortured with them for generations to come. I had a teacher in fifth grade who adored Shakespeare, and made it contagious.
But the English ambassadors also arrive to announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. So, although technically they are not onstage at the time, their deaths do come as a revelation, and may therefore be considered part of the finale body count. Unlike Tybalt, who is technically onstage at the end of *Romeo and Juliet * (as a corpse in the tomb), but was killed onstage earlier in the show, and would not be included in the finale body count. YMMV.
Well, going by a summary I found on the web: the play begins with Titus laying to rest a son who died in battle. It is then declared that Alarbus, eldest son of Tamora, shall be sacrificed, which happens offstage. Shortly after Saturninus is named emperor, Titus stabs and kills one of his own sons, Mutius. Later, Bassianus (brother of Saturninus) is killed just before Lavinia is raped and has her tongue cut out and hands cut off. Two more of Titus’s sons, Quintus and Martius, are (wrongly) put to death for the murder of Bassianus. Much later, Aaron kills a nurse because she knows that Aaron fathered a child by the unfaithful Tamora, and calls for the midwife that he may kill her as well. And finally, Titus captures and kills Chiron and Demetrius, bakes them into meat pies, and feeds to Tamora the flesh of her own sons. Grand finale: Titus kills Lavinia, Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, Lucius kills Saturninus. And then, epilogue: Aaron is buried alive, and Tamora’s body is thrown to the dogs rather than receiving an honorable burial.
By my reckoning, without counting the deaths of Titus’s first son (the one just brought home for burial) and the midwife, that makes 13. Including those two makes a total of 15.
Three. Romeo kills Paris before he offs himself. Another poster is correct that Romeo’s mother dies of grief after his banishment, but if I understand the OP correctly, we’re only talking about people who die onstage in the last scenes of plays.
It’s basically a comedy until Tybalt dies. But you’re right that hope is alive until that time.
I was a little surprised to see only one death in the last scene of Julius Caesar. There are two other suicides in the last act, but they’re in a different scene.
I think you missed some in Hamlet. Polonius is stabbed in the arras, that’s gotta hurt, and Rosencrantz and Guilderstern have death warrents issued against them, although their deaths do occur off stage. Ophelia commits suicide by drowning. That brings the body count up to eight, which I think matches “Pulp Fiction”, although there’s no anal rape in “Hamlet”.
Maybe I’m the only one who thinks he didn’t understand the first post. flodnak, are you talking about the final body count for the whole play, or just the number of deaths in the last scene?
If we’re going by *bodies *onstage, not deaths, R+J’s final scene actually ties Hamlet’s. Paris, Romeo, and Juliet, plus they’re in the tomb with Tybalt’s body.
In some productions, Tamora’s son by Aaron is put to death as well. But it’s a directorial choice, since the baby’s death isn’t mentioned directly in the text.
It that’s the case, Richard III has a pretty impressive body count: Prince Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the two Princes, Lady Anne, Buckingham, and Richard III. That’s at least 12 right there (I could be leaving somebody out).
Sorry, didn’t mean to abandon this thread… been a busy week with stuff happening at work and the kids going back to school :smack: Anyway, I specifically wanted to know about the body count in just the final scene. The kid’s twelve, nothing about Shakespeare is going to get his attention like a pile of dead bodies on stage when the final curtain falls…
When my Shakespeare class produced Richard III we had about fifty students for a play with about forty speaking roles. Most of the extras became soldiers in the two armies, and we ended up with something like eight dead soldiers scattered across the stage in addition to Richard and Brackenridge. (Brackenridge has no lines in that final scene, but somebody does mention that he’s dead at the very end.)
Anyway, we were discussing the Bard and started talking about the Tragedies tending to end up, as good tragedies will, with multiple bodies on the stage. We were wondering which one has the highest pile when the final curtain goes down?