'Self-slaughter' collocates with 'against' in its two Shakespearean occurrences:
131 Or that the
Everlasting had not fix'd
132
His canon 'gainst [self-]slaughter!
(Ham.1.2.131-132)
Against self-slaughter
77 There is a prohibition so divine
78
That cravens my weak hand.
(Cym.3.4.76-78)
This may be less obvious than it seems. The word 'self-slaughter' is not attested before Shakespeare, and the modern word 'suicide' is a mid-eighteenth century coinage not found in Johnson's dictionary. So it is by no means clear that 'self-slaughter' was an independent lexical item when Shakespeare used it in Hamlet . It is more likely that the semantic unit is 'against self-slaughter', which Shakespeare coined in Hamlet and reused in Cymbeline. More specifically, 'self-slaughter' is explicitly associated with the divine injunction against it.
18 September 1999