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10 Off the Edge End Games and Elegy Like Shakespeare’s Claudio, Hamlet fears death may be a sleep disturbed by nightmares worse than he can possibly imagine. Since Victorian Anglicans and Dissenters do not believe in purgatory, and since few believe in hell, they seldom share Shakespeare’s fear that death may bring in its wake Claudio’s infinity of torments. On the contrary, Tennyson’s Lucretius, Arnold’s Empedocles, and Browning’s Cleon are all more afraid that when they’ve spun their “last thread,” they “shall perish on the shore” (Donne, “A Hymne to God the Father,” lines 13–14). Many Victorians feared that death would simply annihilate them. Their “sin of fear” was a terror of going off the edge, of confronting the void, of facing mere nothingness as such. This is the “furnace-fear” raging in Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” the horror of experiencing “no sight, no sound,/No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with,/The anaesthetic from which none come round” (lines 27–30). Shakespeare’s most appalling imagination of death—one of the most graphic in literature—appears in Claudio’s speech in Measure for Measure. We possess the speech by memory almost as soon as we hear it. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be—worse than worst— Of those that lawless and incertain thought off the edge 165 Imagine howling, —’tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. (3.1.118–32) A run of internal rhymes in the haunting opening line sets up eddies of lament and a swirl of surmises: “Ay, but to die,” “and go, we know.” When “kneaded” like rotting dough into a “clod,” the body’s “sensible warm motion” confronts only “cold obstruction.” Even if its “delighted spirit” manages to survive, it will be subjected to one of two tortures: it will be either “bathed” in “fiery floods” or numbed slowly, then frozen into ice. In their Dantesque power to appall, Claudio’s horrific portrayal of life after death makes anything Hamlet or Milton has to say on the subject sound tame and restrained by comparison. To be tossed and blown on the winds is not to be liberated like a bird, but to be imprisoned. It is to suffer the “restless violence” that hurricane victims know. Instead of taking a spacious view of the world suspended below it like a pendant, such as a space traveler might enjoy, the dead soul that is hurtled through space will be the victim of a “viewless” wind blowing blindly through a void. Sir Thomas Browne says he is “not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; ’tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children, stand afraid and start at us. The Birds and Beasts of the field that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance, begin to prey upon us. This very conceit hath in a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of waters; wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied” (Browne, 1967, 48). Graphic to the limits of endurance, Claudio goes even further than Browne. He asks us to imagine the worst howling of the insane, the worst lawless and uncertain thoughts of the mentally deranged. And then he wants us to imagine, if possible, something more horrifying. “Worse than worst” is all Claudio can say. Compared with a train of posthumous horrors, made to accelerate till it runs off the track, the worst trials in this life are a refuge and repose. No worst, there is none. Surprisingly, despite the horror of becoming a morsel for worms, the beautiful sound of the line “The weariest and most loathed worldly life” momentarily soothes the soul and eases its pain like a narcotic. But just as its beguiling euphony starts to belie the terror of what Claudio is saying, he is jolted...

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