Due To The Dead / Theatre

Examples of Due to the Dead in Theatre

Good

• Euripides's Alcestis: When Admetus's wife Alcestis dies, and his friend Hercules appears at his home, Admetus tries to hide that he is in mourning for his wife because they considered hospitality sacred. When Hercules learns of the death, he is really, really, really shocked to find that his host had hidden this from him and so his behavior has been really bad; he goes to wrestle with Death to reclaim her.
• Following the death of Roy Cohn in Angels In America, Belize calls upon Louis to recite the Jewish prayer for the dead at his bedside, in spite of the fact that both men find the deceased personally and politically despicable.
• Sophocles:
  • In Antigone: before the beginning of the play's action, Eteocles and Polyneices, two brothers leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, died fighting each other for the throne. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, has declared that Eteocles will be honored and Polyneices disgraced. The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites, and will lie unburied on the battlefield, prey for carrion animals like worms and vultures, the harshest punishment at the time. Antigone and Ismene are the sisters of the dead Polyneices. In the opening of the play, Antigone brings Ismene outside the palace gates late at night for a secret meeting: Antigone wants to bury Polyneices' body, in defiance of Creon's edict. Ismene refuses to help her, fearing the death penalty, but she is unable to dissuade Antigone from going to bury her brother herself. Tragedy ensues.
  • Despite being the man Ajax hates most and whom he attempted to torture and kill, Odysseus is determined to convince Agamemnon and Menelaus to allow him burial rites and not carry on their grudge in Ajax. Since the whole incident was proof of what happens when you make the gods angry, it's a rather wise decision on his part.
  • In Electra, obligations to the dead are omnipresent. Electra refuses to stop mourning her father until he is avenged. Clytemnestra sends grave offerings with Chrysothemis in hopes to appease Agamemnon's spirit. Electra stops her because a false offering would be an even worse slight to her father. Chrysothemis takes locks of their hair instead, only to find Orestes had already done the same, despite the news of his death. Electra immediately begins ritual mourning once she hears her beloved brother has died in a chariot race. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are not shown to get any "due" after Orestes murders them.
• Euripides' Suppliants is about the other five deceased Seven Against Thebes getting decent burial. This was also apparently the subject of Aeschylus' The Eleusinians and The Men of Argos, and a surviving fragment of The Eleusinians translates as follows:

"The matter pressed, rotting already was the corpse."

• William Shakespeare:
  • In Romeo and Juliet, Paris goes to visit Juliet's grave. When Romeo comes calling for Juliet, Paris believes that he is coming to do the evil version of this and challenges him to a duel. After losing the duel, Paris's final request is that Romeo lay him alongside Juliet, a request that Romeo honors.
  • In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio goes to mourn at Hero's apparent grave.
  • In Hamlet, the priest is annoyed that Ophelia is getting full funeral rites when she might have been a suicide. In the final scene, Fortinbras orders Hamlet be given a soldier's burial as a mark of honor, and possibly also to hold Hamlet out as having died in battle.
  • In Twelfth Night, Olivia is in deep mourning for her brother. The Duke is trying to convince her that a more suitable form would be to perpetuate his family line by marrying and having children. The Jester even calls her a fool for mourning her brother's soul being in Heaven, much to Olivia's shock.
  • Oswald in King Lear, after being mortally wounded by Edgar:
    Slave, thou hast slain me: villain, take my purse:
    If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body;
  • Julius Caesar, after Brutus dies, his enemies, Antony and Octavian agree on giving him a respectful burial.
    Octavius: According to his virtue let us use him
    With all respect and rites of burial.
    Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie,
    Most like a soldier, order'd honorably.
  • The ending of Antony and Cleopatra has Caesar order respectful treatment of the eponymous characters' corpses after their mutual suicide.
    • The historical Caesar Augustus wasn't always so considerate. In the aftermath of one battle, a prisoner who was being led off to execution asked for a decent burial. Augustus suggested that he take it up with the crows, since his corpse was going to be abandoned to them.

Evil

• The Greek play Agamemnon shows the importance of the fact that bodies of some Greek soldiers were left behind at Troy.
• William Shakespeare's Hamlet: Queen Gertrude's quick remarriage did not take a proper period of mourning:
  Horatio: My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
  Hamlet: I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student.
  I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
  Horatio: Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.
  • Played humorously in the opening number of Hamlet, Cha-cha-cha!: "Boo-hoo! I do!"
• The protagonist's late mother's body gets subjected to various indignities in Joe Orton's farce Loot. At one point the original script had the corpse falling out of a closet onto her son. The censor deemed this bit of business to be too shocking and insisted it be replaced with something else. Orton duly replaced the falling corpse with a speech where one of the other characters calls out the son for his shameless disrespect... not only has he stuffed his mother's in a closet, but she's standing on her head..
• Sweeney Todd's victims tend to end up as meat pies at Mrs. Lovett's pieshop.
• Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus avenges the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia by killing Queen Tamora's last two sons, and then, in a nod to the above fairy tales, bakes them into a giant meat pie which he then serves to Tamora before taking his final vengeance upon her.
  • Aaron boasts of his evil deeds, including this one.
  Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
  And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
  Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
  And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
  Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
  'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'