r's marriage, says:

"The funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."

Again, in "Romeo and Juliet" (iv. 5), Capulet narrates how:

"All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral:
Our instruments, to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast."

Mr. Tylor,[744] in discussing the origin of funeral feasts, and in
tracing their origin back to the savage and barbaric times of the
institution of feast of departed souls, says we may find a lingering
survival of this old rite in the doles of bread and drink given to the
poor at funerals, and "soul-mass cakes," which peasant girls beg for at
farmhouses, with the traditional formula,

"Soul, soul, for a soul cake,
Pray you, mistress, a soul cake."[745]

[744] "Primitive Culture," vol. ii. p. 43.

[745] See "British Popular Customs," p. 404; Brand's "Pop.
Antiq.," 1849, vol. ii. pp. 237, 246; Douce's "Illustrations of
Shakespeare," 1839, p. 439.

In the North of England the funeral feast is called an "arval," and the
loaves that are sometimes distributed among the poor are termed "arval
bread."

Among other funeral customs mentioned by Shakespeare, may be mentioned
his allusion to the burial service. Originally, before the reign of
Edward VI., it was the practice for the priest to throw earth on the
body in the form of a cross, and then to sprinkle it with holy water.
Thus, in the "Winter's Tale" (iv. 4), the Shepherd says:

"Some hangman must put on my shroud, and lay me
Where no priest shovels in dust,"

implying, "I must be buried as a common malefactor, out of the pale of
consecrated ground, and without the usual rites of the dead"--a whimsical
anachronism, as Mr. Douce[746] points out, when it is considered that
the old Shepherd was a pagan, a worshipper of Jupiter and Apollo.

[746] See Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," 1839, p. 222.

In "Antony and Cleopatra" (i. 3), we find an allusion to the
lachrymatory vials filled with tears which the Romans were in the habit
of placing in the tomb of a departed friend. Cleopatra sorrowfully
exclaims:

"O most false love!
Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see,
In Fulvia's death, how mine receiv'd shall be."

This is another interesting instance of Shakespeare's knowledge of the
manner