Late in his great study, Kantorowicz summarizes a good 
deal of his theme in a way that indicates how the legal fictions 
clustering about the separation of the King’s two bodies led to 
such characteristic fantasies as the danses macabres . These, 
indeed, made up a kind of animated cartoon world which 
dominated even Shakespearean imagery, and continued to 
flourish in the eighteenth century, as Gray’s Elegy  testifies. It 
was the English in the fourteenth century who developed the 
effigy in funerary rites as a visible expression of the King’s two 
bodies. Kantorowicz writes (pp. 420­1):

          No matter how we may wish to explain the 
     introduction of the effigy in 1327, with the funeral of 
     Edward II there begins, to our knowledge, the custom of 
     placing on top of the coffin the “roiall representation” or 
     “personage”, a figure or image ad similitudinem regis ,