The Introduction briefly surveys the individual importance of memory studies and death studies in the lives, literature, and visual imagination of Renaissance England and then makes a case for the benefit and utility of mapping out their specific areas of intersection. Although the cross-pollination between memory and mortality is not strictly reciprocal, the two thematic fields during the period overlap in a range of philosophical, educational, theological, and ceremonial domains so that studying one field requires scholars to investigate and understand the other.

The Introduction sets out the aims and objectives of the study. The death arts, the Introduction proposes, possess the vigour and energy that built up the early modern world and injected animation into everyday existence. The chosen phrase, the ‘death arts’, while encompassing a plurality and heterogeneity of disciplines, activities, and techniques dedicated to mortality, foregrounds their artifice, thereby permitting us to conceive of the distinctive features and constructedness of Renaissance artifacts, whether textual, cognitive, or visual. Divided into the three subsections, the Introduction first outlines the legacy of the death arts in early modern English culture. Next we describe how the death arts are represented, focusing specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race. The introduction closes with a helpful guide for how to use the anthology.

This chapter examines the long history of depictions of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, acknowledging that this composition has a longer history than that of the play itself. Considering versions of the ‘Yorick still’ in relation to medieval and early modern memento mori art, I argue firstly that photography was a significant determining factor in this image’s rise to prominence and ubiquity. Secondly, I suggest that the uncanny qualities of the photograph, as they are discussed for instance by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, allow photographs based on Hamlet to revive some of the spectral qualities of the memento mori. The chapter concludes with reflections on ‘playing dead’ in photographs of Hippolyte Bayard and Sarah Bernhardt.