Until relatively recently, Shakespeare’s contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed both among scholars and general audiences. The inquiries that drove Renaissance science, and the universe it disclosed, are deeply integrated into Shakespeare’s poetic worlds. In fact, Shakespeare explores the philosophical, psychological, and cultural impact of many more scientific fields besides human anatomy, reflecting poetically on theories about germs, atoms, matter, falling bodies, planetary motion, heliocentrism, alchemy, the humors, algebra, Arabic numerals, Pythagorean geometry, the number zero, and the infinite. Shakespeare takes up references to the morbid art, and to other new discoveries, to show that when scientific investigations yield new ideas about nature, what ensues is an altered relation to ourselves. In Twelfth Night, for example, Sir Toby speaks of opening up Sir Andrew to look at his liver, and Olivia refers to her beauty being “inventoried” by body part: “ item, two lips indifferent red item, two gray eyes with lids to them item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.” In Macbeth we hear an echo of the anatomist’s incision in the account of Macbeth’s killing of an enemy: “he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” Why this interest in anatomy? Anatomical research appears also in other Shakespeare plays. Around the same time, as Sujata Iyengar points out in her book Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011), London’s Company of Barber-Surgeons was granted four corpses of executed criminals per year for dissection - and Shakespeare seems to be interested in their work. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius, known as the father of modern anatomy, published De humani corporis fabrica ( On the Fabric of the Human Bod y). A half-century before Shakespeare penned Hamlet, anatomists made significant advances in their inquiry into the human body that would fundamentally alter how we understand ourselves. Hamlet’s curiosity about bodies is significant not only because it recalls some of the materialistic ideas he entertained earlier in the play - that man is nothing more than a “quintessence of dust,” or that the dead Polonius is simply a bag of guts - but also because it suggests that Shakespeare was engaging with the science of his time. By the time he meets the gravediggers, Hamlet’s questions about the afterlife, still unsolved, turn to the physical realm: He wants to know about the material nature of corpses. Considering suicide, he wonders “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.” He seems torn between Catholic and Protestant accounts of the afterlife: Soon after returning from the University of Wittenberg, a center of the Protestant Reformation, Hamlet encounters what appears to be a strikingly Catholic specter - the ghost of his father, claiming his earthly sins must be “burnt and purged away” in purgatory - but he vacillates on whether the ghost can be believed. The question of what comes after death has been on Hamlet’s mind throughout the play. Later, Hamlet turns from the unfeeling coarseness of the gravediggers to morbid curiosity about the bodies, asking, “How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?” Quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Whyĭoes he suffer this mad knave now to knock himĪbout the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell Skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his That skull had a tongue in it and could sing Instead, we get a deeply philosophical and darkly comic exchange on death, with the gravediggers singing as they toss around bones and Hamlet wondering about the lives of the skeletons before him: At this juncture, we expect Hamlet to clash with his rivals. It is an odd and puzzling scene, and a noticeable departure from the rising action of the play. In Act V of Hamlet, after Hamlet has killed Polonius, Ophelia has died, and Hamlet has returned to Denmark from his murderous trip to England, he happens upon two gravediggers.