Death as “Fell Sergeant” in Hamlet

Towards the end of the play, Hamlet refers to death as a “fell (cruel) sergeant strict in his arrest” (5.2.341). In a longer note on this epithet, Harold Jenkins makes reference in his 1982 Arden edition to some contemporary books, memoirs, and treatises on Christian religion, Protestant controversies and moral instructions that portray allegorical figures of death as fell sergeant at arms: the anonymous medieval treatise The Dying Creature (1507), Philip Stubbes’ A Crystal Glass for Christian Women (1591), and R. Willis’ Mount Tabor or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner (1639). The first two are cited as the possible sources for the metaphor of death as a “fell sergeant” on which Shakespeare may have drawn for the image. In this connection, Jenkins also mentions a medieval morality play called The Cradle of Security, which R. Willis witnessed as a small boy around 1570 at the Bothall in Gloucester. This play shows three ladies—Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury/Lust—who induce a king to lie down on a cradle of security upon the stage.

The purpose of this short note is to point out that one notable omission in the list of possible influences on Shakespeare, overlooked in the editor’s longer note, is Stephen Bateman’s A Crystal Glass of Christian Reformation (1569), to which Philip Stubbes’ 1591 book was heavily indebted for its images of death as a fell sergeant at arms, among other things.

In preparing this note I have closely and meticulously collated available data and considerably drawn source material from…