Yorick, Who?

                      

Have you seen the picture above before? Well before I actually read Hamlet for the first time I thought that picture corresponded to the “to be or not to be” scene, yet I was completely wrong!!!

The Yorick’s skull appears in another scene, the :

ACT V SCENE I

A churchyard.

In this scene two clowns, Hamlet and Horatio are exhuming a corpse. The scene opens with two clowns in a graveyard talking about a dead man, and then one of them starts digging to find something. Later Hamlet and Horatio enter and stare next to the clown digging. Hamlet throws some skulls and say things about them before taking Yorick’s skull in his hands. Finally they takes that skulls giving a soliloquy again, about dead:

First Clown	Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade, that
	he will keep out water a great while; and your water
	is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.
	Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth
	three and twenty years.
HAMLET	Whose was it?	162
First Clown	A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?
HAMLET	Nay, I know not.
First Clown	A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a
	flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull,
	sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.
HAMLET	This?
First Clown	E'en that.	170
HAMLET	Let me see.
	Takes the skull.
	Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
	of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
	borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
	abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at
	it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
	not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
	gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
	that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
	now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen.
	Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
	her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
	come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell
	me one thing.
HORATIO	What's that, my lord?
HAMLET	Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i'
	the earth?
HORATIO	E'en so.
HAMLET	And smelt so? pah!
	Puts down the skull.

And what is all this about? What is the significance of this point in the play?

Unavoidable and vile effects of death:

Though the entire play, Hamlet has been contemplating death, but here he does it face to face with the representation of it in that skull! It is said that the skull symbolizes Hamlet’s own journey of life, foreseeing what is going to happen in the end of the play; while Hamlet holds the skulls, he remembers his childhood, the happy days in which he enjoys with his fathers the performance of that beloved king’s jester, then he is in a cemetery, contemplating death directly, maybe he is talking to himself….

Another important thing to consider: -why is this skull present? Is that during that time (even nowadays http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7749962.stm) the skull used on stage was an actual skull!! So, the audiences could also be reflection on death, on the owner of that skull, the same as Hamlet (the actor) was doing. Theatre present in reality; to me was kind of the same as the clowns telling the audience at the end that the “carnival” was over… They were in the play, but at the same time the audience is also in a reality…

http://www.johnheimbuch.com/thoughts/?p=8
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7749962.stm