I’m so curious to know how this line transformed into “I knew him well” in the popular imagination while retaining “Alas, poor Yorick.”
It’s like people easily recall the more arch language and paraphrase the mundane.
I knew him is not so different from I knew him well. There is, in fact a logic to “I knew him well.”
And it’s true, too, in this case. Hamlet did know Yorick well. But…still – it doesn’t quite explain how a line can so utterly transform. And when.
Is it that, out of context, “I knew him well” seems more logical, more complete? Or that Horatio gets excised, too – that the popular imagination features Hamlet, alone with the skull, dramatically saying, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him…” and without Horatio there, we just need another word and “well” makes so much sense there.
Author: erainbowd
Alas, poor Yorick!
I’ve just worked this out. It’s like he’s looking at this skull in the gravedigger’s hands and he just sees a skull – but then when he looks (or touches) it, he can suddenly see the skull as the structure below the face of his childhood companion. When he sees it, it touches him and so he feels compassion and pity for his long gone friend/father-figure/loved one. He holds the double-ness of the dead object in his hands and the memory of the live person it was once a part of.
Let me see.
In almost every production I’ve ever seen, Hamlet reaches for the skull and takes it, as if it were an apple or a book. Certainly, most editions feature a stage direction that suggests he should take the skull. And if you want to get the iconic image of this play, you are going to have to put that skull in Hamlet’s hands.
But he doesn’t say, “Give it to me.”
He says “Let me see.”
And he might not so eagerly seize hold of the skull of someone he once knew. What if he just looked at it in the gravedigger’s hands at first?
What if there were an evolution of comfort with it? The culmination of which led to the “smelling so” bit.
I do think I may have seen a production or two which the gravedigger tosses the skull to Hamlet giving him no time to decide to take it.
And the dumb joke maker in me wants the clown to say, “Look with your eyes not with your hands!”
E’en that.
I wonder how far outside a court a jester was known.
Like, did he get gigs outside the castle?
Tonight:
one night only:
Yorick, the king’s jester delivers his comedy stylings at The Porpentine.
Rhenish half price.
Or was he confined to the court?
What I’m wondering is – was there some sense of celebrity around the king’s jester?
Is this moment a bit like showing off an object once possessed by Elizabeth Taylor?
This?
I don’t know how I’d react if I were suddenly confronted with the skull of someone I once cared for. Like – if I were just chatting with my friend, joking about who those bones in the graveyard might belong to and then someone held up a skull and said, “This skull belonged to Kate – your old pre-school teacher and first theatre mentor.”
First – I’d be upset to know she was dead but also – the instant shift from the abstract to the deeply personal would be quite dramatic. I feel like it would be suddenly sobering and also instantly captivating. I’d search in my memory for what she actually was like and then try to reconcile my memory with the skull before me.
This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester.
This is the only use of the word “jester” in this play – and in the other plays, it is almost always used in a derogatory way about someone being spoken of. I wonder about how jesters were perceived when this play was current. Did Elizabeth have a jester? Or a fool? And if she did – was he called such?
Now, a jester tends to evoke a rather specific image – one in motley with bells on his floppy hat. But what about then? What did Shakespeare’s audience imagine when they learned of Yorick, the king’s jester?
‘a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.
Is he more upset that he’s had wine poured on his head or that a whole flagon has been wasted? We know that he enjoys his booze…it could be either or both.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
It’s a little late for pestilence to get that guy. He’s dead. There’s not much damage a pestilence could do at this point.
Do mad rogues typically get cursed with pestilences? Pestilenci?
And how did he die?
Is it possible that this line isn’t, in fact, a curse or an exclamation, but an explanation for his cause of death?
Did Yorick somehow fall victim to a pestilence? Is it possible he was one of the first that fell victim to the plague that caused the pocky corpses? And was it, possibly, said that he was felled by it because he was a mad rogue?
Nay, I know not.
I think I know a fair amount of things and maybe most importantly, I have a sense of what I don’t know, as well. It is destabilizing to see that something you thought you knew is actually something you DON’T know – but that’s where the real wisdom lies, probably on that line that lies between what you know and what you don’t.
Whose do you think it was?
I love that the clown starts a guessing game with the Prince of Denmark about a skull. It is such a delightfully silly question. The odds of a layperson being able to identify a skull are really small. It’s a little like holding up any object, like a book, or a brush, or a shirt or a bowl and asking “Whose do you think it was?” You’re going to need some hints to guess that.
The Hamlet Project 