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Alas, poor Yorick!

Words from the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Hamlet says this in a graveyard as he meditates upon the skull of Yorick, a court jester he had known and liked as a child. Hamlet goes on to say that though “my lady” may put on “paint [make-up] an inch thick, to this favour [condition] she must come.”

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The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.