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.
Author: erainbowd
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.
A whoreson mad fellow’s it was.
The gravedigger seems none too fond of Yorick. I wonder if he runs across the skull often. Like – if he digs it up and buries it again, just to torment his old acquaintance. I mean, you don’t call just anyone a whoreson mad fellow. Whoreson isn’t really the nicest thing to say. It suggests a rather contentious relationship. Is that just because of the flagon of Rhenish on his head? That just sounds like a frat prank. Or a schoolboy in the cafeteria cutting up with his friends, though what a group of schoolboys would be doing with a container of wine, I’m not sure. But really – this just sounds like an obnoxious boys will be boys situation. But it clearly got under the gravedigger’s skin and he has never forgotten it – even 23 years after the man’s death. I wouldn’t put it past him to treat his bones particularly irreverently.
I wonder if it’s a situation of Yorick punching down, a bit – like in order to get a laugh, he dumped wine over this young clown’s head and everyone laughed but they laughed at the young clown, not with him and he felt humiliated and pushed down -his dignity defiled in the company of royals.
Maybe he’d hoped to leave gravedigging and make the career change to fooling and Yorick took that possibility from him with a flagon of wine to the head.
Whose was it?
It’s funny to think of one’s skull as something that belongs to them or once belonged to them. It feels much more as if it is the person or at least a part of who that person is or was. I think of my skull as such a key part of myself, it is almost impossible to imagine it as a possession. But it is an interesting thought experiment to consider my possession of it as temporary.
It might actually help me take my migraines less personally. If the skull is just mine temporarily, the migraines are just a mismatch between tenant and landlord. Or just a miscommunication between two different inhabitants of the same space.
This skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
If someone had been buried the year that I performed in Hamlet, in my first acting job, their skull would have lain in the earth the same amount of time as this skull, as Yorick’s skull. And I, myself, was not yet 23. If someone had been buried the year that I was born, they would have needed another year to lie in the earth to have lain in the earth as long as Yorick then.
I have now been an adult for longer than I was a youth. It is a curious feeling. And if I measure it all in Yorick’s earth-lying years – I have not yet reached two skulls, I’ll have to wait another two years for that.
But who will be buried this year and what will happen in the 23 years until a skull is unearthed?
Oh hells. It’s taken me so long to upload these things that I have now, in fact, reached two skulls. I am two Yorick skulls old. Time is such a jerk. It moves so fast.
Here’s a skull now.
Serious question: How does the gravedigger know this is Yorick’s skull? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a preternatural ability to look at a skull and picture the face that once rested on it. So – does this mean that he is digging up Yorick’s grave? He’s already unearthed several skulls. Are they all in the same grave? That doesn’t seem logical. Also – why are they digging up graves? Is there a shortage of cemetery space in Denmark?
Is this three graves next to each other so he can tell who is buried in which? And to know, too, how long Yorick’s skull has been there. Is he looking at a gravestone? Or does a fool not warrant a gravestone?
The Hamlet Project 