What It Is
The skull that the gravedigger takes out of the earth while digging the grave of Ophelia, in scene 1 of Act V. It is Yorick’s, the court jester of King Hamlet, the prince’s father, buried for twenty-three years; the gravedigger recognizes it because Yorick once poured a bottle of Rhine wine over his head. Hamlet, who knew Yorick as a boy, takes the skull in his hands and speaks to it before Horatio.
Where It Appears
In scene 1 of Act V, before learning whom the grave is for, Hamlet watches the gravedigger toss skulls out and imagines whose they were: a politician’s, a courtier’s, a lawyer’s. When he learns that one of them is Yorick’s, death stops being a subject and becomes the memory of someone who carried him on his back a thousand times.
Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.(V.1)
Soon after, still holding the skull, he takes Yorick’s reasoning to Alexander the Great.
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?(V.1)
What It Means
The skull is death seen up close, with a face and a name. During the play, Hamlet thought of death as an idea, in the “to be or not to be” soliloquy and before the body of Polonius; in the graveyard it comes in the form of a bone he kissed when alive. The skull of the jester and that of Alexander level laughter and glory: both end up in the same dust. By sending the skull to tell a lady that, however thick her paint, she will come to this same look, Hamlet extends the lesson to whoever dresses up to disguise the end.
The scene of the skulls comes right before Ophelia’s burial and the duel. Hamlet leaves it without fear of death, and it is this man, who has already held death in his hands, who will say in the next scene that being ready is all. The skull does not paralyze him: it takes from him the hurry to understand and leaves him given over to whatever comes.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Death, Action and inaction.
- Characters: Hamlet, Horatio.
- Neighboring symbols: The poison, death as a weapon, and Ophelia’s flowers, which return in the same graveyard.
- Hamlet, the play.