Alas, poor Yorick!

1. 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.”

Example Sentences

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him,” Hamlet mourns.

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Shakespeare: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a man of infinite jest.”

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Your butt may have suffered through a few “Hamlets” in its lifetime, but I’ll bet it’s never seen one as intimate and visceral as this, where some audience members visibly winced when Ophelia waved a fire-poker in front of Hamlet’s uncle’s face, or laughed anxiously when a gravedigger from the “alas, poor Yorick” scene dug in the real-life rain and tossed literature’s most famous skull through a doorway at Hamlet and Horatio.

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Later, in the celebrated gravedigging scene, “Alas, poor Yorick” juxtaposes high and low culture to articulate the mature Shakespeare’s existential vision of human frailty.

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It's a modern update on "Alas, Poor Yorick! I knew him."

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