Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls: Hamlet and the Iconographic Traditions

TLDR: The scene of Hamlet discussing the skull of Yorick in the graveyard of Elsinore is one of the most famous scenes in the Shakespearean canon as mentioned in this paper, and it has been engraved on the popular mind as the most memorable single image of the melancholy Prince.

Abstract: T HE SCENE OF HAMLET CONTEMPLATING the skull of Yorick in the graveyard of Elsinore is one of the most famous in the Shakespearean canon. For actors and playgoers alike, it is a lasting favorite, and it has been engraved on the popular mind as the most memorable single image of the melancholy Prince. As far as we can now tell, Shakespeare's presentation of that scene was a striking innovation on the London stage when he introduced it in or about the year 1600.1 But Shakespeare was not creating de novo. There was a long and very popular tradition in which a young man was shown contemplating a skull, or commenting upon it, and scores of examples of this visual topos exist in various art forms. The greatest of these is Frans Hals's oil of A Young Man with a Skull [Figure I ]-which was once confidently identified as Hals's painting of Shakespeare's Hamlet. That identification has now given way to a recognition that-there was a broad and encompassing tradition which included both Shakespeare and Hals.2 That tradition was well known to the audiences for whom Shakespeare wrote. It was readily accessible in England as on the Continent through prints