30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (31 page)

Notes

¹
 Quoted in Richard Cavendish, “Five Oscars for Olivier's
Hamlet
,”
History Today
, 49 (1999);
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/five-oscars-oliviers-hamlet
(accessed 12 July 2012).

²
 Laurence Olivier,
On Acting
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), p. 186.

³
 Grigori Kozintsev (1967), quoted in Judith Buchanan,
Shakespeare on Film
(Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005), p. 4.

⁴
 See Neil Taylor, “The Films of
Hamlet
,” in Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (eds.),
Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 180–95.

⁵
 
http://uk.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1608515865/

⁶
 Samuel Crowl,
Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide
(New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), p. 109.

⁷
 Brian Cox (Titus in the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Deborah Warner, 1987), in Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (eds.),
Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 175.

In Act 5 of
Hamlet
the Prince encounters a gravedigger preparing a new grave. The grave has had previous occupants: as he digs, the gravedigger throws up skulls of the already-buried. This is not an unusual occurrence. The graves of commoners were unmarked (a practice unchanged until the early seventeenth century) and so the chances of reuse were high; and corpses were buried in sheets, not coffins, so if the grave was redug the sexton's spade would unearth bones rather than wood. Dislodged remains were removed to the charnel house—a bone house or ossuary within church grounds and therefore a consecrated space. (After death, a consecrated space was more important than personal space.)

Shakespeare's gravedigger identifies one of the skulls as that of the court jester, Yorick: “a mad rogue—'a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!” (5.1.174–5). Hamlet remembers him as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and recalls childhood play with the jester: “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times” (5.1.181–2). (The Victorian artist Philip Calderon depicts this piggy-back riding in his painting
The Young Lord Hamlet
(1868), and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film inserts flashbacks of Yorick [comedian Ken Dodd] entertaining the court.) Although Shakespeare does not provide a stage direction instructing Hamlet to pick up the skull, all modern editions insert one:
Takes the skull
. Since Hamlet addresses the skull for ten lines it is logical that he should do so with it in his hand—he tells the gravedigger “Let me see” (5.1.179), obviously an instruction to pass the skull to him. This has become one of the most iconic moments in Shakespeare, appearing in adverts for films and stage productions, in cartoons and parodies (usually about Yorick's dental records or pencil lead), and, most recently, in a Royal Mail stamp of 2011: a photograph of David Tennant's Hamlet holding Yorick's skull is superimposed over the first line of the Prince's “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the play's other defining moment.

Figure 5
This twenty-first-century play based on
Hamlet
explores death and memory. The skull (the “laughing boy” of the title) is central to the action, and even Ophelia gets to address it. Designed by Ian Pape. Skull image by iStockphoto.

Figure 6
David Tennant as Hamlet contemplates Yorick's skull in Greg Doran's production at the RSC Courtyard in 2008.

Malcolm Davies Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

The image was already iconic before Shakespeare staged it. Skulls were part of the memento mori (remembrance of death) tradition. This reminder of one's future death had a didactic purpose: don't act sinfully lest you be taken unawares, like old King Hamlet, “cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin,” with “all [his] imperfections on [his] head” (1.5.76, 79). In
2 Henry IV
the prostitute Doll Tearsheet asks her friend (presumably also her client) the slothful fat old knight Sir John Falstaff, “when wilt thou leave fighting o'days, and foining o'nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” Falstaff rebuffs this suggestion that he alter his lifestyle, saying “do not speak like a death's-head, do not bid me remember mine end” (2.4.233–7). “Death's head” is an alternative phrase for “skull” or memento mori. In Tourneur's
The Atheist's Tragedy
(published 1611) it occurs in no fewer than three stage directions:
To get into the charnel house he takes hold of a death's head
;
They lie down with either of them a death's head for a pillow
;
starts at the sight of a death's head
.

Portraits celebrating the sitter's success often contained memento mori skulls, reminders that the sitter's achievements were earthly and would one day be undermined by death. Hans Holbein the Younger's
The Ambassadors
(1553), now in the National Gallery, London, depicts two ambassadors at Henry VIII's court surrounded by the trappings of their cultured and civilized lives, as well as coded symbols of the political disquiet over Henry's divorce that had brought them to England: scientific instruments (globes, a sundial, a quadrant), a musical instrument (a lute), textiles (oriental carpets), and open books (symbols of knowledge, education, religion). When viewed obliquely a blur in the foreground rearranges itself as a skull. Similarly, portraits of young men or women often showed them holding or contemplating a skull, reminding them (and us) that, as Gertrude says, “all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–3).

Hamlet is a young man holding a skull in a play about death. The play begins with Hamlet disabled by grief from his father's death. He continues to wear mourning clothes long after the official period of court mourning has ended. (The stage picture is striking: a figure, apart from the others, distinguished sartorially by his “inky cloak.”) In the first court scene, Act 1, scene 2, Claudius offers Hamlet conventional memento mori wisdom, reminding him that “your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his”; Nature's “common theme / Is death of fathers, and … still hath cried, / From the first corpse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so’” (1.2.89–90, 103–6). But Hamlet is too crippled by grief to accept that “this must be so,” that life has 100 percent mortality, that death is the inevitable conclusion. The contrast with Act 5, then, is remarkable, when, holding Yorick's skull, he recognizes the skull-object's function as a memento mori symbol. Addressing it, he says, “Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour [face] she must come. Make her laugh at that” (5.1.188–90). In other words: remind her that no matter how much make-up she applies, she cannot avoid the fact that one day she will die, and then cosmetics will be of no help.

The importance of this moment in the play has been noted by many critics (Marjorie Garber and Roland M. Frye, for instance) but the most astute observation comes from Elizabeth Maslen. Maslen points out that not only does Yorick serve the traditional fool's function in Shakespeare, that of a balancing act, realigning the hero's moral coordinates, but that in this play of grief and mourning the fool's function could only be served by a
dead
fool.
¹

Yorick's skull did not attract a great deal of attention as a prop in modern productions until 2008 when the Royal Shakespeare Company used a real skull in a production directed by Greg Doran. The pianist André Tchaikowsky, who died of cancer in his forties, bequeathed his skull to the RSC in 1982. Although the skull was used in a photo shoot with Roger Rees when he played Hamlet in 1984, and was used in rehearsals when Mark Rylance played Hamlet in 1989, it did not appear in public performances until Doran's production with David Tennant in the summer of 2008. The unusual prop received so much media attention in newspapers and on television news that it was considered a distraction for audiences; consequently it was removed from use when the production transferred to London. (At least, it was reported to have been removed; it was actually retained in both the Stratford and London runs.) Nonetheless, questions had been raised about the role of illusion in drama, with Claire van Kampen noting that using a real skull was as inappropriate as using real blood.
²

The Elizabethan theater did use real blood (not human blood but animal blood, supplied in bladders from the nearby slaughterhouses). Did it also use real skulls? Skulls are an infrequent stage prop. In Dekker and Middleton's
The Honest Whore
(1604) a servant sets out
a table, on which he places a skull, a picture, a book and a Taper
; in Webster's
White Devil
(1612) the ghost carries
a pot of lily-flowers with a skull in it
. Middleton's
Revenger's Tragedy
(1607) offers a perverse and extended variant when the hero, who has kept the skull of his beloved for nine years, now places it atop a dummy, dresses it/her up, and applies toxic lipstick to enact revenge on her priapic killer. When in 1598 Philip Henslowe took an inventory of props for the Admiral's Men, his list did not include any skulls. This is not surprising: all the examples of skulls in stage directions are concentrated in the first decade of the seventeenth century, suggesting that this was a temporary vogue.

In 1602 or thereabouts Henry Chettle wrote
The Tragedy of Hoffman
. In scene 1 Hoffman reveals that he previously rescued his father's body from the gibbet where he was unfairly hanged. He displays this skeleton, which he has concealed for years, to the audience. By the end of the scene he has managed to kill the prince whose father was responsible for the hanging (thereby achieving in just one scene the revenge that takes Hamlet five acts). Hoffman strips the new corpse to the bone, a “fair anatomy” and “image of bare death” (1.3.10, 16) (“presumably with some considerable effort,” observes Richard Sugg wryly
³
).

The play now has two skeletons. Producing a skeleton onstage (let alone two) is an order of magnitude different from staging a skull. One would dearly like to know if
Hoffman
predates
Hamlet
or was written as a response to it. There are many points of contact between the two revenge tragedies, and critics have often noted the ways in which
Hoffman
seems to compete with and outdo
Hamlet
. One of the intertextual moments relates to props: Elisabeth Dutton, who directed the play in 2010, said, “Hamlet may have a skull but Hoffman has the whole skeleton.”
⁴
Henslowe, who managed the company that staged this play, entered no payment for skeletons in his accounts, but his Diary stops at the end of 1602, just on the cusp of the date when
Hoffman
would have been staged, so his silence is inconclusive.

Given that life was cheap in Elizabethan London, that deaths from plague epidemics occurred suddenly and in vast quantity, that burials were hurried and in mass graves, and that graves were reused, a real skull would have been a familiar object, an object capable of reuse or misuse. After all, the skulls in portraits come from somewhere—perhaps the same place as skulls in plays. Procuring a real skull (as for Yorick) seems far less challenging than procuring a real skeleton. But since skeletons, not just skulls, were removed to the charnel house, perhaps it was as easy to steal one as the other? The records of the Company of Barbers and Surgeons often refer to the production of fake skeletons; if the prop can be made for anatomical study, surely it can also be made for stage use.

Shakespeare's plays are not heavily prop-dependent. There are good practical reasons for this. Plays that require props (in
Comedy of Errors
a bag of ducats, a rope's end, and a gold chain are crucial) require impeccable backstage coordination. Without the handkerchief for
Othello
there is no tragedy and no play. (The 1960s playwright Joe Orton said that his earlier work as an assistant stage manager helped him as a writer because it taught him not to write in too much business with telephones.)