30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith Page B

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