Carrying on from my previous piece on misapplying Shakespeare in general (and quoting Polonius in particular), I want to look at probably the most famous Shakespearean (mis)quotation. I had to get around to this one sooner or later. Yes, I’m doing The Bit With The Skull.
Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him [well]!
This misapplication involves mangling Hamlet’s line very slightly. In the original it runs “Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio” and the alteration obviously has the advantage of decontextualising the line. Missing off the address to Horatio extracts it more effectively from the play and makes it that little bit more available for application in other situations. That doesn’t mean that it has to be applied in the sense that Hamlet meant it, of course. The times I can remember people saying “Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well!”[1] they were saying it ironically, often with one arm thrown out and the other hand smacked against the forehead.
Much after this fashion
Their gesture was meant to call attention to the gap between a situation and the supposedly overblown emotion being used to respond to it, but that gesture therefore assumed a particular meaning in the original. It positioned Shakespeare as grand and dramatic, even melodramatic, in contrast to the nuances and complexities of real (or modern) life. Tragic gestures are impossible in the present, it seems to say, and Shakespeare is unsuitably tragic. Too extrovert, too unsubtle.
Of course this is not what we would probably understand as the meaning of the line in context. Hamlet has just been considering the anonymous bones being dug up, reflecting that one skull might be that of a lawyer – “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of battery?” Another could have been “a great buyer of lands, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his pate full of fine dirt?” After a discussion of the speed bodies rot at, the gravedigger shows him one which has been in the ground twenty-three years, prompting Hamlet to ask whose it is, since the man obviously knows.
The information that it belonged to the King’s jester evinces his “Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him Horatio”, and provides fodder for the same kind of demands: “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.” The “point” of the line being quoted is surely not the devastating emotional impact of seeing part of a dead friend’s body, but the fact that Hamlet, musing elaborately on the anonymity of death is confronted with actually knowing one of the skulls. It might jar us into realizing that the undifferentiated vistas of mortality which the Prince finds so absorbing are made up of individuals. A fact which breaks up, for a moment, his use of them in his personal memento mori.
But not for long. Once he has got over the surprise of finding a person attached to his prop, Hamlet puts it through the same ironic interrogation that he applied to the genuinely anonymous bones, and orders it away to do a little Elsinore slut-shaming. It’s telling that even in death he treats Yorrick like a servant: instrumentalizes him first as a mirror for his personal mortality obsession, and then imagines using him to scare his girlfriend. Hamlet’s words aren’t an explosion of melodramatic personal grief[2], they’re the hinge in this scene’s display of invincible self-involvement. His inability to recognize Yorrick’s skull as the remains of a person, or to react appropriately to that fact, is the dominant implication of this line for me.
I stressed the way this misquotation seems to position Shakespeare, and not just Hamlet, as emotional and overblown, because the icon of the man holding the skull has become blurry over the years. Perhaps most famously embodied in the modern era by Lawrence Olivier
it was reiterated
in various versions
but also somehow became attached to Shakespeare.
in a number of odd ways
This was presumably due to the central position Hamlet enjoyed in the Shakespeare canon for so much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries – and even more to the actors (male and female) who performed famous Hamlets. But whatever the reason, there is a blurring in popular culture between Shakespeare and Hamlet which doesn’t occur with Lear, or Hal, or even Prospero. (Mis)quoting the skull line, with accompanying gesture, makes a broader statement about the meaning assumed to attach to Shakespeare. It’s an interesting example, because it doesn’t offer Shakespeare as a simple and unproblematic source of value.
The Yorrick line (and gesture) doesn’t necessarily involve dismissing Shakespeare, however. Though it is not being applied literally, it can be used as a way to ironize emotion whilst also expressing it: borrowing Shakespeare’s words can both articulate loss and place the speaker at a safe distance since they are clearly someone else’s words. And the very fact that a recognizable quotation from Shakespeare is being deployed hundreds of years later makes some implicit claim about the “timelessness” or relevance of his works. But this quotation seems to have a conflicted relationship with the value Shakespeare can transmit, and what people assume they’re doing when they quote him.
[1] Which include one time I said it myself about a classmate who had just been told to go to the headmaster’s office, and was promptly picked up on the misquotation by a passing drama teacher…
[2] The assumption behind a cartoon I’ve seen which has a policeman putting his hand on a weeping Hamlet’s shoulder as he holds a skull, and asking “Can you offer a personal identification, sir?”. The implied punchline is…well, you know.
quiteirregular 
Great post. I wonder if actually the line couldn’t be deliberately hysterical – and a little in the fashion of ‘one arm thrown out and the other hand smacked against the forehead…’. As you say, naming the skull can ‘jar us into realizing that the undifferentiated vistas of mortality which the Prince finds so absorbing are made up of individuals’, but isn’t this a direct inversion of the memento mori? The gravedigger throws out two skulls while singing his ballad, and his identification of Yorick seems a little arbitrary. Hamlet’s willingness to believe that the Gravedigger can actually identify bare bones is particularly strange in the light of his other reflections on death that bring people to non-people, to objects. When he replies to the Gravedigger’s identification with the line, ‘Let me see’ – as though he could actually visually confirm this…it could possibly be quite a funny moment, especially combined with the Gravedigger’s clowning…
Branagh definitely holds the skull best. Grasping between fingers is so much more inquisitive and emotionally removed than “beholding” the skull at the base of the cranium, as though to bear its weight.
Having just yesterday, in another context, re-read this 2009 Telegraph article, I am now musing on the consequences for interpretation (valid or otherwise) when you KNOW whose skull it is. Does it enrich or limit matters to know the skull was once Andre Tchaikowsky? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/6644720/David-Tennant-to-revive-partnership-with-real-skull-for-BBCs-Hamlet.html
What a good point! I’d forgotten that fact about Tennant’s co-star… It certainly makes questions of personal identity and what is subsumed to Hamlet’s generalisations more pressing, though I don’t know whether it would enrich or diminish the interpretative possibilities – thanks for bringing it up!
Oh I suspect it diminishes interpretative possibilities (despite the well-meant bequest). Was it Brecht who had to remind a director of one of his plays that it was NOT necessary to bring an ACTUAL pig on stage for (I think) a slaughter scene.
Also, as semi-alluded to above, is it possible that part of the reason Shakespeare gets painted with skulls is not just due to Hamlet, but because of the fashion of using skulls in memento mori artworks, which are sometimes lumped under that same umbrella of Classic Old Stuff? The Death exhibition at the Wellcome collection certainly featured lots of Classic Old Paintings with Skulls in Them, in Case You Forgot What Eventually Happens to All of Us. My, did people ever like painting (etching, drawing, etc) skulls! So basically, gif animators come along and go, “We think Shakespeare is a Serious Classical Guy, so let’s make him with some Serious Classical Guy stuff. Like a skull. Skulls are cool.” They’re just tapping into a long tradition (one might even say ancient urge, if one wanted to get pounced on by people who don’t believe in universals of human existence) of painting (etching, etc) things with skulls.
A lovely point, thanks Caitlin. Yes,I don’t know the extent to which Shakespeare may have been the occasion which happened to preserve the form of that kind of imagery, but it’s a really good demonstration of what kind of meanings people expect to associate with the Shakespearean name.
Do you know the origin of the misquoted line?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_I_Hardly_Knew_Ye