This article explores the communicative, self-dramatizing, self-fashioning dimensions of suicide as they were recognized & exploited by English Renaissance playwrights, including Shakespeare. By exploring these dimensions, it will be shown how stage-suicide resembles but also differs from other deaths on stage; how suicide is linked to the “theatrum mundi” metaphor (both the act & the metaphor expressing a contempt for life &, paradoxically, a denial of death); & how the mimetic representation of suicide leads to metadramatic effects which have, perhaps surprisingly, their counterparts in actual suicide. (58 notes)