In Hamlet (written approximately 1600–1601), Shakespeare includes several meditations on the body's fate after death and its reduction to food for worms. Most famously, in Act 4, Hamlet tells Claudius that a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar, while elsewhere he meditates on how the body, once dead, becomes the food of worms and the dust from which a bottle's cork might be made. These passages were informed by a culture saturated with plague mortality and the visible evidence of bodily decomposition.

Hamlet's worm meditations represent the culmination of a long tradition of English and European 'worm poetry' — the genre of writing meditating on the body's reduction to worm food — that stretches back through the medieval lyric tradition to the Latin poets. The parasitic worm as final inheritor of human greatness is one of Shakespeare's most characteristic and profound images, and it influenced writers from Andrew Marvell ('To His Coy Mistress': 'worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity') to Thomas Hardy and beyond.