Shakespeare Buffs May Just Be Wrong

On my other blog http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/05/and-ive-just-changed-name-of-book-to-in.html I mention the problems of avoiding retread titles for books (or anything else, I suppose), given that there are only a certain number of ways to pithily sum up your oeuvre, and a similarly finite collection of widely-recognised allusions and associations to be drawn upon.

Shakespeare and the Bible usually come up trumps, but my 'Biblical' title, via the Order of the Burial of the Dead, from my copy printed on waxed paper in prudent anticipation of outdoor use in the UK, was already taken, and Shakespeare only uses the word undertaker once, apparently (see "Shakespeare Oddly Reticent").

It's in Othello, when Iago volunteers to kill Cassio by saying "Let me be his undertaker".  

Notes to the text usually explain that was in the sense of undertaking to do a job, and that undertakers in the modern usage of the word didn't appear until the late 17th century. But in that case, wouldn't Iago say something like "Let that be my undertaking"?

In fact, undertakers as we understand the word began to appear around the time Othello was published in 1603. 

They diversified from making coffins to providing funerals for people who had money but no coat of arms. 'Wealthy' had been synonymous with 'aristocratic' until the dissolution of the monasteries and the expansion of trade with the new world created a new merchant class of commoners with money.

They showed they'd arrived by splashing out on big houses, flash clothes, jewellery, and everything else that money could buy, but they couldn't have posh funerals, because they were done by the College of Arms (as in coat of arms). You had to have heraldry for the heralds at the College of Arms to organise your funeral. 

Fortunately, the dissolution of the monasteries also meant that monks were no longer available to deal with royal and aristocratic bodies for heraldic funerals, so the heralds got the people who made the coffins to extend their brief. Instead of just delivering a coffin, they prepared the body, put it in the coffin, and looked after it until the burial.

And unlike the heralds, they didn't care whether you had a coat of arms. They would undertake to provide a funeral for anybody that could pay for it, and did.

So I think it's possible Shakespeare was using the word in its modern sense, and that perhaps it only crops up once because it was so new.