SARAH: "When we have shuffled off this mortal coil" means when we have died. But the image is a striking one. We are shuffling off, or shedding, this mortal coil, the flesh that surrounds us — like a snake shedding its skin.

RALPH: This image brings us back to the opening lines of Hamlet's first soliloquy — "Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve into a dew" — the idea that our bodies can be shed and left behind as our souls move off to an afterlife.

RALPH: But this sense of shuffling off, meaning shedding like a skin, may in fact have come from Shakespeare himself, from these very lines.

SARAH: To shuffle also meant to walk slowly, scraping the ground — as we mean when we say we shuffle our feet.

RALPH: And it also means to throw things all together into a heap — as we mean when we say shuffling cards.

SARAH: The word coil also has different meanings. The modern word coil, something wound up in a circle, as in "a coil of rope," seems to have appeared in print only after Hamlet was written. Before Shakespeare's time, the word coil usually meant a noisy disturbance or a bustle.

RALPH: So the phrase "shuffled off this mortal coil" might have brought to mind for Shakespeare's audience an old person shuffling off, dragging their feet to the afterlife, leaving this noisy confusing world behind.

SARAH: Or they might have thought of all the noisy confusions of the world being thrown together in a heap and left there when we die as our souls move to the afterlife.

RALPH: Both of these possibilities imply that "mortal coil" isn't just our bodies that we leave behind, but everything we associate with the world of the living.