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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if there were any female tanners? And I wonder at what point jobs like that became gendered. Like, I think at one point – it was just that working people did whatever there was to do to make a living. Women farmed and sold things and probably tanned hides but it would seem by Shakespeare’s time, craftspeople were seen as male. There are no lady mechanicals, for example.
But when and how did that switch get made?

This is a very macabre way to ask this question.
It would be less so, perhaps, to say, “How long until a man is naught but bones?”
Or nowadays we’d say, “How long is the decomposition process?”
But Hamlet has rotting on the brain (“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”) and, perhaps, given how recently he’s seen his father’s ghost, he might also be wondering what his dad will look like the next time he sees him.

Ground is such a great flexible word. First, it is one of those words that just SOUNDS right for what it is. It is earthy and round and gritty. Second, it is so rich in possible meanings. Earth and cause, reason and probabilities are all connected to Earth, probably – that is metaphorical things on which something stands are also grounds. And as a verb, it turns something to earth.
Also it is very pleasurable to say.

It’s such classic comedy structure.
“It was so strange.”
“How strange was it?”
“It was so strange. There was a punchline at the end of it.”

It was so hot.
How hot was it?
It was so hot, pets who went out became roasted hot dogs with relish.
Ba dum bum.

We’re always looking for these kinds of answers when it comes to mental health. Why did it happen? How? What caused it? We look for a clear cause and effect. But it is rare that such a thing exists, I think. The clown’s answer to this question is actually the most accurate. A person goes mad because he goes mad. Sometimes there may be mitigating factors – but mostly it comes along like the weather, without much warning and sometimes destructively.