Shuffled off this mortal coil

This is Shakespeare’s well-known and often quoted metaphor for death, which these days is generally used jocularly or whimsically. Not so for Hamlet, of course, in Hamlet Act III, Scene I, “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” part of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy ‘to be or not to be’ in which he questions existence and contemplates suicide. Shakespeare was using the word coil is its old and now archaic sense of a mess or fuss.