Alas, poor Yorick

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

 

The imagery and themes of the Dance of Death are central to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. As Hamlet talks with the gravedigger, various skulls are unearthed and casually tossed aside. Hamlet comments that regardless of status, breeding, and worth in life, death reduces everyone to so many old bones, knocked about by a lowly gravedigger's shovel:

Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with them? Mine ache to think on't
(5.1.91)

The questions Hamlet asks become even more personal when he finds the skull of an old friend -- the jester, Yorick.

The influence of the Death Dance in this scene lies not only in Hamlet's musings on death as the ultimate equalizer but also in the simple and powerful image of a living human holding another human's skull (or lying on the ground face-to-face with it, as Mel Gibson does in Zeferelli's film version). Given the fact that Yorick's prior occupation was court Fool, the image of capering skeletons has special relevance to this scene. Like the hand-in-hand dances of the quick and the dead, Hamlet and Yorick represent the inevitable, egalitarian, and capricious nature of death.

In a similarly democratic fashion earlier in the play, Hamlet specifically remarks:

We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service -- two dishes but to one table.
(4.2.21-4)

[Lady Boru]

Thank you --this was interesting to think about!