HAMLET AND YORICK
Wed. May 31st, 2023
In Act Five of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince Hamlet
comes across two gravediggers on the palace grounds, cheerfully digging a new
grave. It turns out the grave is for
Hamlet's girlfriend Ophelia, who has committed suicide. It seems that it is only during this scene
that Hamlet finds out that Ophelia is dead.
In Shakespeare's day, a person who killed themselves could
not be buried in a Christian graveyard, nor have a proper funeral. But since Ophelia was of a noble family, she
is afforded a semi-Christian burial, with a priest saying a curtailed mass; but
she is not, it seems, to be buried in a regular graveyard with a tombstone.
As they dig, the grave diggers keep unearthing skulls and
bones. Now that I've grown up, that
suggests to me that the palace servants did not receive a churchyard burial
even if they had not committed suicide.
If the palace servants were buried in unmarked graves on the palace
grounds, and Ophelia is to be buried in an unmarked grave even though in the
presence of a priest, then the grave
diggers are doubtless digging in an area of the palace grounds where they have
dug before, and they are unsurprised when they turn up the bones of earlier
burials. But one skull the first grave
digger recognizes as the skull of Yorick -- the court jester to the late King
of Denmark, the king that was Hamlet's father.
By this time Hamlet has joined the grave diggers' conversation. The first grave digger passes Yorick's skull
to Hamlet, and Hamlet proceeds to reminisce about Yorick the jester. "He has bore me on his back a thousand
times," Hamlet says, to indicate the rides Yorick gave him when Hamlet was
a little boy (as pictured by the Spanish-English painter Philip Calderon,
reproduced in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorick#/media/File:The_Young_Lord_Hamlet.jpg).
So when I woke up this morning, it struck me, perhaps an
element of this complex stagecraft -- a layer undreamt of by the few commentators
I was exposed to -- was that Shakespeare had seen to it that the plaster cast
of a skull to be waved in the air when the play of Hamlet was being acted,
might be crafted to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shakespeare's own skull -- still
residing inside Shakespeare's head when Hamlet was first acted -- but then what
a dome Shakespeare had! Look at the engraving
of Shakespeare published in the first folio of his plays -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portraits_of_Shakespeare#/media/File:Shakespeare_Droeshout_1623.jpg
-- Shakespeare was most literally an egghead, his cranium giving ample space
for a palatial, brainier-than-average brain.
The plaster skull, then, might have been a surplus joke riding the crest
of the wave of the grave diggers' wit, beating against the level sand of Prince
Hamlet's turgid and Poe-shaped morbidity, so that the audience was howling with
laughter while the thoughtful heads among them were stunned by Prince Hamlet's
phantasmagoric melancholy.
For the epitaph on his own tombstone Shakespeare had written
"Good friend , for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here . . .
and cursed be he that moves my bones."
Perhaps Shakespeare wrote the grave diggers' scene in "Hamlet"
from life, having witnessed and marvelled at the ability of a real and living
grave digger to identify a skull of his own earlier burying, the while
exchanging jokes with the second digger and treating the earlier bones
unearthed while digging a spot for a newly-dead body with a cavalier
disrespect. Perhaps a younger
Shakespeare had shuddered to witness such a scene, and resolved to do what he
could to forestall grave diggers after his own death from tossing around his own
bones in so jolly and unholy a manner.
Frank Newton
