See – here’s what’s funny. Every note I’ve ever read about this line has defined bunghole as part of a beer barrel – and the dust of Alexander as part of the bung, which is the stopper or a cork. And that is the received wisdom.
However, I cannot help hearing bung-hole in a more scatological sense. I thought I was making it up – but, it is, in fact, common slang. Beavis and Butthead make extensive use of it.

And there is evidence that bunghole was used scatologically as early as 1653. Which explains why scholars may be hesitant to make that connection here…if no one else was using bung-hole scatologically in the early 1600s – than could that be what Shakespeare is doing here with our most beloved intellectual, philosopher prince? No way. Hamlet, the scholar, would never mean something as base as bung-hole in the poop sense.

But…He is LITERALLY talking about base-ness here. He is talking about someone who has reached the highest heights being reduced to the lowest lows. Sure – yes – it could be the stopper made of clay. But I’m not sure that’s QUITE as base as being ingested and becoming the bung stopping up the colon of someone. Hamlet has already taken us on a journey of a king through the guts of a beggar…it is actually more logical and in line with the earlier images of the play to reference the body than a random piece of beermaking gear.

And yet – of course – he takes us through this with the beer barrel explicitly in the next line. So, yes, of course, he also means the bung-hole of the beer barrel but…it is not impossible that that is an attempt to soften the scatology of the previous line.

My friend’s husband is a pretty elegant guy. He wears tailored clothes and knows a lot about design. He is a champion of aesthetics in a lot of ways. When he became a parent, one of the things he marveled about was how primitive the experience was – how it all came back to the very base experience of the body. Eating, sleeping and shitting, essentially. I think he was particularly astounded by the shit.

And as death gets closer to us, we return to that same primitivity. We become eating, sleeping, shitting machines. We begin base, we end base – and in the middle, we are, of course, just as base as we are at the ends, we’re just better at hiding it, better at focusing on other things in addition to the things that are base. And once our lives are done, our bodies become literally part of the base of the world. We become dirt. We become dust. We are the basest of all.

This is such a genius way to express disgust. It’s not a word that exists. It is not a word like “ewww” – which we recognize as disgust. It’s got an exhalation built into the word. It’s propulsive. That P sends it away and the ah dissipates it.

Shakespeare is genius for so many big things – big ideas, big metaphors, big images, big characters – but a sound like “pah!” is just as much genius as those bigger things.

Is it the skull that smells? Really? I feel like, if it’s a skull, most of the smelly stuff would have long ago decayed and disappeared, consumed by worms or maggots or any of the matter-devouring organisms that clean a corpse of flesh. Might it simply smell of dirt?
On the other hand, this skull has been dug up in a grave that included multiple skulls, many bones – there may be bodies buried there that are fresher in their decay.
Or perhaps there is a smell to old bones that I have no sense of due to most skeletons I have seen being cleared up for medical use or museum display.
It’s a perhaps morbid curiosity – but what exactly is Hamlet smelling? The smell of death? The smell of another’s death? Decay? Vegetable matter? Rotten tendons? What could still smell after 23 years in the earth?

Alexander’s skull probably did look like that. Which – now I’m wondering – do we have Alexander’s skull somewhere? In our preservationist world, we sometimes do have ways to get a hold of such things.
Where was Alexander buried? Was he buried? He died in Iran, I think – is there a museum in Iran with his remains? This is an answerable question, I’m sure. But I’m going to pretend there’s no internet and hang on to the wondering for a while.

How was it that Alexander’s reputation lasted so long? From his time to Shakespeare’s to ours?
And of course the answer is stories.
I wondered – because there isn’t an Odyssey or Iliad or Gilgamesh sort of epic – but there are many. He was the subject of many a romance and because he ranged round his corner of the globe quite widely – people told stories about him quite wildly and widely.
Myself, I always see Alexander as Sean Connery. This might be seen as peculiar if you haven’t seen Terry Gilliam’s film, Time Bandits, in which Sean Connery portrays a kind generous jolly sort of Alexander who is the only good father figure the child has known.

Horatio is one of those roles I have always imagined could be so easily played by a woman. I wasn’t sure why, really – but it occurs to me now that Horatio is playing a role in the play that is usually reserved for women in a story. He doesn’t have much identity of his own, he primarily serves Hamlet’s needs for companionship, for a sounding board, for support. This is what women do in so many stories – or at least the ones where they’re not saying. “No, you CAN’T go to war, that party, that mission, that adventure, it’s too dangerous!” But the ones that aren’t that…they’re like Horatio. Ah, I love to realize how much I have internalized the Patriarchy.

Suddenly, the idea of MAKING someone laugh feels quite aggressive – and in this case, cruel. Though, I do believe making someone laugh – or, rather, eliciting a laugh from someone, is one of the most pleasurable acts, on both sides of the equation. And a really good comedian probably could make someone laugh at their own mortality in this way.
But that’s not what Hamlet’s on about here. He’s more concerned with inflicting punishment on Ophelia, with confronting her with something upsetting and disturbing. It has a bit of the quality of The Joker in Batman, whose jokes are not funny – but are, in fact, thrust upon victims. The idea of MAKING someone laugh, at the moment, evokes a sense of tying them up and poking them until they surrender.
I wonder about language differences here. In Italian, fare ridere is also to make laugh. But it might carry more of the sense of crafting than compelling, I think.
I’d love to know how other languages construct making someone laugh.

It’s interesting how we seem to know that Hamlet is referring to Ophelia here and not, say, his mother. Is Ophelia still his lady in his mind? He broke up with her many scenes ago.
And the answer is, of course, forthcoming.
And, of course, to this favor she is already well on her way.
It’s pretty dark, there, Hamlet. Here you are trying to make a joke about your girlfriend’s mortality and it is not funny because she is already dead.
Also the prejudice against make-up is infuriating. And I am no great fan of the stuff. I like it for performance and that’s about it. But a woman who chooses to wear make-up probably has a much more heightened awareness of her own mortality than any man. In the attempt at “correcting” for “flaws” a woman who “paints” her face is in the most intimate contact with her own march toward the grave. She can mark, literally mark, each new line, each crack, each sign of age.

Until I looked up the etymology of chap, I thought this was pretty simple – just chaps, as in cheeks or jaw, as the face, fallen. Like – sad – like crestfallen. But funny because a skull has no chaps, no cheeks and the jaw won’t necessarily be attached.

But it turns out “chap” as a person was already in use in Shakespeare’s time – so he could also be a chap, fallen. Or the sense of cracking open, in fissures, as in chapped lips, a skull might also have a sense of separation – a cracking open between skull and jaw or wear and tear from getting dug up by a gravemaker every so often. Or maybe that’s all a reach and it’s just the jaw.