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.

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.

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?

It’s funny that we use the same word for leather treatment as we do for darkening the pigment of skin. Is that accidental or on purpose? Do we say someone is tan because the color is tan (as I previously assumed) or because a piece of leather darkens when it is a tanned? It would appear so. And it connects, too, to the old saying of someone threatening to “tan your hide.” It is probably quite useful to remember that we are not so far from the animals whose skins we tan. It is probably useful, too, to think of tanning from the sun as close to that process of curing leathers. We need all the encouragement we can get to avoid skin cancer.

Do tanners still call themselves tanners? I’ve never met one – though I do feel I’ve seen some at, like, craft fairs or artisanal events. Mostly they just sell leather goods, they don’t seem to be tanning them necessarily – at least not right there. I get the sense that it is a pretty smelly process. But. I have met people with the last name of Tanner and it is remarkable to realize that generations ago, those folks were tanners. And according to the gravedigger, they decompose a little slower than the rest of us.

I can find no actual evidence of this but I have always interpreted pocky corses as corpses with the pox – that is, bodies that died with the plague or some other wasting disease that rots you before you get into the ground and probably even before you die. Or, like, leprosy, which might lose you whole portions of your body before you gave up the ghost. And all of that makes me wonder if the gravedigger is referencing a plague outbreak, and particularly, the one that closed London’s theatres for a bit. I imagine Shakespeare’s audience had recently seen more pocky corpses than they would have liked. So, too, they might particularly identify with a gravedigger who is irreverent with bodies. Probably the whole population had to get immune to dead bodies at a certain point – and a pocky corse might get you a laugh of recognition.