During Elizabethan time, traditional beliefs often held that untimely death was a punishment for sin and therefore was a thing to be feared. Since the medical knowledge of the time could not explain the plagues that could wipe out whole villages, it was assumed that these mass fatalities were signs of God's displeasure. By Shakespeare's time, humanism and the revival of classical philosophy resulted in the growing influence of alternative ways of thinking about death, exploring the many intellectual possibilities (and controversies) raised by new ways of thinking about mortality. Hamlet in particular explores the idea of death as an "undiscovered country, as opposed to the clearly defined territory of medieval Christian doctrine.
Death songs and elegies: singing about death in Elizabethan England
Butler, Katherine. Early Music, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 269–80. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24750704.
Mourning and misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the final progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607
Mullaney, Steven. "Mourning and misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the final progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 2, 1994, pp. 139. ProQuest; eLibrary,