My son, Porter, uses phrases like “My boy Shakespeare,” and his favorite play is Hamlet, so I have spent zero minutes worrying he might join a gang. Whenever he gets distressing news, such as notice he must clean up the carpet of clothes in his room, he makes his Porter face and says, “Alas, poor Yorick.” No one knows what he suffers, except me, so sometimes I invoke poor Yorick before he can.

In Hamlet, Yorick debuts in Act 5, the graveyard scene in which the gravedigger is digging Ophelia’s grave, unearthing various skulls in the process. It’s a wonderful, darkly comic scene in which Hamlet is barely phased by the macabre cache of bones before him, right up until he finds himself face to skull with Yorick, a man of “infinite jest” who had carried him piggyback as a child, and kissed him with lips long since decayed away. Hamlet is a grown man; it is not as though he didn’t know the stark realities of life and death. Yet in holding Yorick’s skull, sweet childhood memories and ugly truth clash in a terrible emotional crescendo that sets the stage for his reaction a short time later when he realizes the grave is being dug for his dear friend Ophelia, who may possibly have been a suicide. Today a suicide is deeply tragic, but in Elizabethan England it was a religious and criminal offense so serious that a proven suicide was not allowed burial in consecrated ground. The deceased could even be tried posthumously for murder, and, if convicted, have all their money and goods confiscated by the state, impoverishing the family.

Holding Yorick’s skull and confronted with Ophelia’s murky death, Hamlet must come to grips with realities he had always known without knowing, officially acknowledging the complex undercurrents of truth that had not previously figured in the neat equations of his days. For Hamlet the accumulation of painful truths from Acts 1-5 are so powerful that we have spent the last four hundred years arguing whether his madness was real or feigned.

We should have guessed what was coming from the start of the play. In Act 1 Hamlet says to Horatio, who will later be with him in the graveyard, “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet wasn’t crazy, he was right, the trouble came as he gradually discovered just how tremendously right he was.

I talked to a skull once, I think, but truthfully, I don’t remember if I was able to get the words past my lips. I was volunteering in an orphanage in China and went into the sick room to visit a dying toddler. I couldn’t take him out of his crib, so I just stood there looking at that small face, skin stretched taught. I could see the detail of his skull, and listened to his breath as it caught and shuddered, knowing each one could be his last. I knew the facts. Because of birth defects he’d been thrown away by his parents; in the orphanage he’d lived his life with just the edges of love; he was ill; there was nothing more the doctors could do; he was dying. We all die, it’s unavoidable. I stood at the side of the crib making the effort to look calm and pleasant, though inwardly shocked and silently raging, my heart crying out a great and guttural WHY?! Read More