Shakespeare's Violent Heads

Perhaps the most memorable of Shakespeare’s heads is not a head at all, but rather a skull: Hamlet’s Yorick. At the beginning of Act V, Hamlet famously holds up the skull, inviting it into conversation. But while the skull is named, giving it an identity, it remains firmly an object, a topic for Hamlet to reminisce on. He exclaims: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that. – Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. (5.1.190–202) While Hamlet directs a few questions toward the skull – including a few digs at the skull’s current state (“Quite chapfallen?”) – the emphasis is on his conversation with Horatio. The questions are framed by direct address (“I knew him, Horatio” and “Prithee, Horatio”). By the end, Hamlet turns back to his living companion, the skull tossed aside after a comment on its smell (“And smelt so? Pah!”), more or less forgotten (5.1.207). Yorick’s skull, always an “it,” lacks features that would make it identifiable to either a character or an audience member. In fact, Hamlet himself only knows it is Yorick’s skull because he is told so by the Gravedigger. Ultimately, the skull is only a memento mori that adopts whatever visage another wishes to impose on it. 1