Even though I know that to gambol means to play around, skip about, to frolic, as it were – I still thought gambols were a particular dance move, like a jig or a caper or that move that Sir Andrew Aguecheek can do as well as any man in Illyria. But one moment with a dictionary clarifies that gambols are just the noun version of gamboling.

All of which makes me quite curious about Yorick’s gambols. How did he gambol? Gracefully? Awkwardly? Like a child or a clumsy fool? Was Yorick a joyful clown or a cynical one? I suspect he must have and a playful spirit to have connected so potently with the young Hamlet. But that doesn’t tell us his comic stylings.

Gibe has a French origin that meant “to handle roughly” – and I suppose that a gibe is a verbal rough handling. An insult. A mock. A joke with a target.

Was Yorick the Don Rickles of the Danish court? His humor is partly physical – he carries small boys on his back and gambols – but also he’s an insult comic, it would seem. This tracks with the majority of fools in Shakespeare. Touchstone, Feste and the Fool in Lear are usually at their cleverest when delivering an insult. Comics now tend to be specialists – physical comedians are not usually insult comics, storytellers are different from joke tellers – but court jesters probably had to have all the tools in their toolbox. Their survival depended on their skill.

I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that a seven year old Hamlet kissed his grown man jester on the lips an untold amount of times. It’s different times, I know. But – these days we’re a little bit more careful with boundaries of this kind. A kiss on the lips feels quite intimate. And fine in a three year old, maybe, who is learning how to kiss and when to kiss and so on. But by seven? I don’t know. I love my friend’s children – some of whom are around this age – and I cannot imagine kissing them on the lips.

I wonder about this intimacy between these two – and about how physical intimacy played out between young people and adults in Shakespeare’s time – or just physical intimacy in general. In some cultures, kissing on the lips is much more common. Was that so in Renaissance England? How about hugs? Kisses on the cheeks? Pats on the back? I want to know the rules and the taboos. Lord knows the English now are not particularly touchy people…so how have those mores changed?

I tend to think of a gorge as a place – a stone valley, really. And so it is funny to imagine a place like that within a person. But in fact, the place, the natural formation, is named for the body. That is, gorge is from the French for the throat, and the sense of gorge as a passage, a narrow passage, is actually evoking the body, the narrow passage of the throat.
And, of course, the body is how any human being experiences and understands the world – so it makes so much sense that the natural world is named for us rather than the other way round.

What, exactly, is this “it” here?
The image of riding Yorick’s back?
Surely the memory itself isn’t terrible. It’s the combination of the two things – the sweetness of a playfellow and imagining that playfellow not as he was then but how he is now – as if one could ride around on the back of a skull.

Hamlet is also transformed from those childhood days. He is a man, not a child, and he has known great sorrow. He has lost his father, seen his father’s ghost and sent his two childhood friends to their deaths in England. Not to mention being rescued by pirates – and discovering that his uncle is a treacherous murderous damned villain.
True, Yorick no longer has flesh. But as he died not long after these childhood games of Hamlet. he likely died much as Hamlet remembers him. While Yorick might have a difficult time recognizing the boy he once bore on his back.

What if Yorick just went about his duties with the tiny Hamlet on his back?
If he just wandered around the castle, making his jokes, not paying the child any special care – just treating him as if he were a part of his own body.
I imagine it might make a kid feel very comfortable – the act of pretending invisibility, the joke of being the jester’s hunch or a backpack that occasionally got heavy or pulled his hair. I can imagine a royal child giggling quite overwhelmingly at being ignored or treated inconsequentially – or just as an invisible witness to all kinds of foolery.

I read David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus which gets its title from this line. And still I’m not entirely certain why he called it Infinite Jest (maybe I did figure it out while reading it but if so I already forgot). The only thought I had is that it does rather seem to be an unending joke. It circles round and round, like a mad merry-go-round – sometimes a story about a tennis school, sometimes a story about a 12 step program, sometimes a story about French-Canadian spies, sometimes just footnotes.

And several of the ideas stick with me, even as the book as a whole faded.

1) The Entertainment – a videotape that entertains people to death (also, perhaps, an example of the aforementioned Infinite Jest) and
2) The Corporate sponsorships of each year – this future in which we mark time with products instead of numbers. As in the Year of Depends Undergarments.

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.