Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 February 1885 — Death in Shakspeare. [ARTICLE]

Death in Shakspeare.

There are in Shakspeare’s plays about ninety deaths, taking place either on the stage or behind the scenes, of important personages. It might be increased by soldiers and attendants who are killed by the way. Cold steel (the dagger or the sword) accounts for about two-thirds of the whole; twelve persons die from old age or natural decay, in some cases hastened by the trying circumstances of their lives; seven are beheaded; five die by poison, including the elder Hamlet, whose symptoms are so minutely described by his ghost; two of suffocation, unless, indeed, Desdemona makes a third; two by strangling, one from a fall, one is drowned, three die by snake-bite, and one, Horner the armorer, is thumped to death with a sand-bag.

One of the Sweet Things You Read OH “Madam,” said a husband to his young wife, in a little altercation which will spring up in the best regulated families, “when a man and his wife have quarreled and each considers the other at fault, which of the two ought to advance toward a reconciliation?” “The better natured and the wiser of the two,” said the wife, putting up her mouth for a kiss, which was given with an unction. She was the conqueror.— New York Ledger.