An innovative study of the emergent Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. Quoting Death argues that the post-Reformation preoccupation with textual remembrance led to a remarkable proliferation of epitaphic gestures beyond the putative gravestone. A poetics of quotation uncovers the fascinating ways in which writers have recited (or re-sited) these texts within new contexts. This study modifies conventional genre studies by detailing the situatedness of quoted text-a compositional habit that became markedly prevalent with the continued expansion of printing and literacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The compact genre of the epitaph was incorporated in other discourses by major early modern writers: the dramatists Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Tourneur; Tudor and Stuarts monarchs and Oliver Cromwell; the historians Holinshed, Stow, Camden, and Weever; the rhetoricians Sidney and Puttenham; and the poets Skelton, More, Jonson, and Donne. By scrutinizing the sophisticated ways in which these authors deployed epitaphs, this book contributes a refined approach to the growing field of historical formalism, as it probes rhetorical elements of genre while remaining attuned to theoretical, historicist, and methodological concerns.