Now Be Still: Dispatching Shakespeare’s Bodies

A series of coincidences became an inside joke, and now a friend of mine and I are very often tasked with removing bodies from the stage. In one production, I had no other role. I showed up just long enough to drag a body offstage.

The stage directions in the Folio edition are rarely Shakespeare's own. He tended to encode stage directions in the text itself (like "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room" when Hamlet kills Polonius). Which sometimes makes it tricky to figure out how he intended a body to get offstage. Today we can just turn off the lights and let the actor walk away, but that wasn't an option for him.

There are a million clever ways to do it, especially since we're not beholden to those non-canonical stage directions (or, for that matter, the canonical text, which is not copyrighted).