Musical director Claire van Kampen, who later married Rylance, recalled:Īs a company, we all felt most privileged to be able to work the gravedigger scene with a real skull. His skull was used during rehearsals for a 1989 RSC production of Hamlet starring Mark Rylance, but the company eventually decided to use a replica skull in the performance. Pianist André Tchaikowsky donated his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical productions, hoping that it would be used as the skull of Yorick.
He was portrayed by comedian Ken Dodd in a flashback during the gravedigging scene in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film Hamlet. While Yorick normally only appears as the skull, there have been scattered portrayals of him as a living man, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon's painting The Young Lord Hamlet (1868), which depicts him carrying the child Hamlet on his back, as if being ridden like a horse by the prince. The earliest known printed image of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull is a 1773 engraving by John Hall after a design by Edward Edwards in Bell's edition of Shakespeare's plays. Calderon, which shows Hamlet as a child, riding on the back of Yorick. The Young Lord Hamlet (1868) by Philip H. Īlternative suggestions include the ideas that it may be derived from the Viking name of the city of York ( Jórvík), or that it is a near-anagram of the Greek word 'Kyrios' and thus a reference to the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion. There has been no agreement about which name is most likely. The name "Rorik" has also been suggested, since it appears in Saxo Grammaticus, one of Shakespeare's source texts, as the name of the queen's father. The name Yorick has been interpreted as an attempt to render a Scandinavian forename: usually either "Eric" or "Jørg", a form of the name George. Hamlet meditating upon the skull of Yorick has become a lasting embodiment of this idea, and has been depicted by later artists as part of the vanitas tradition. It was also a familiar motif in emblem books and tombs. Memento mori are also expressed in images of playful children or young men, depicted looking at a skull as a sign of the transience of life.
It is suggested that Shakespeare may have intended his audience to connect Yorick with the Elizabethan comedian Richard Tarlton, a celebrated performer of the pre-Shakespearean stage, who had died a decade or so before Hamlet was first performed. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? ( Hamlet, V.i) Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.
The sight of Yorick's skull evokes a reminiscence by Prince Hamlet of the man, who apparently played a role during Hamlet's upbringing:Īlas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy he hath borne me on his back a thousand times and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. He is the dead court jester whose skull is exhumed by the First Gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of the play. Yorick is a character in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Yorick's skull in the 'gravedigger scene' (5.1), depicted by Eugène Delacroix.
0 kommentar(er)
