Two gravediggers (the “clowns”) joke and sing as they dig Ophelia’s grave, tossing up skulls. Hamlet, back secretly from the voyage to England, watches with Horatio and wonders whose skulls these were — a politician’s, a courtier’s, a lawyer’s. The First Gravedigger hands him one that has lain in the earth twenty-three years: Yorick’s, the King’s jester.
Alas, 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… Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?
Hamlet then follows the thought to its end: Alexander the Great returned to dust; the dust became loam; the loam stopped a beer-barrel. “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
At that moment Ophelia’s funeral procession arrives — the abstraction of death meets a real death, and Hamlet leaps into her grave.
Use it for memento mori, for the vanity of fame and power, for grief with a joke inside it.
Lines to Remember
2 quotationsAlas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Context & when to use it
Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester who carried him on his back as a child.
Memento mori; mourning someone who brought joy; the vanity of wit and fame.
⚠ Often misquoted as “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Context & when to use it
Following the dust of great men to its humblest use.
Against pride, empire and power — every conqueror ends as dirt.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalMemento mori
Origin. A medieval Christian formula, rooted in the ancient practice (attested later) of a slave whispering “remember you are mortal” to a triumphant Roman general. It gave its name to a whole genre of art — skulls, hourglasses, Hamlet with Yorick.
For humility, urgency, the vanity of ambition.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsHamlet
Prince of Denmark — scholar, wit, mourner, avenger who cannot avenge — the most quoted and most interpreted character in literature.
To Be, or Not to Be
Hamlet’s soliloquy weighing life against death — the most famous speech in English, and a compressed treatise on suicide, fear and the paralysis of thought.
Anxiety
Not fear of something, but dread before freedom and nothingness — for Kierkegaard “the dizziness of freedom”, for Heidegger the mood that reveals the nothing.
Nirvāṇa
The Buddhist goal — the “blowing out” of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion, the end of suffering and of rebirth. The Buddha described it as unborn and unconditioned, and refused to say whether the awakened exist after death.
King Lear
The proud old king who divides his kingdom by a love test, banishes the daughter who loves him, and is stripped of everything until he learns, too late, what love and suffering are.
William Shakespeare
The playwright and poet of Stratford whose 37-odd plays and 154 sonnets gave English its richest store of quotation and gave philosophy Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth.