The graveyard; Yorick

A churchyard. Two clowns — the gravediggers — are at work on a grave, debating points of canon law (whether a suicide can be buried in consecrated ground), trading jokes about which trade builds longer-lasting work. Hamlet and Horatio enter and stand watching at a distance. Hamlet, with characteristic gentleness toward common men, falls into conversation with the first gravedigger and asks how long a body lies in the ground before it rots. The gravedigger answers technically, then unearths a skull and tosses it to one side.

Hamlet asks whose it is. The gravedigger replies. The skull is Yorick's, the king's old jester, dead twenty-three years. Hamlet picks it up and the speech that has become Western literature's central image of mortality follows. "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." Now, where are his gibes? His flashes of merriment? Get to my lady's chamber, Hamlet says, and tell her that though she paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. He works through the same logic on Alexander the Great: the conqueror is now dust; the dust may be plugging a beer-barrel somewhere.

A funeral procession enters. Hamlet pulls Horatio aside to watch from a distance. The priest grumbles about the rites being curtailed for "doubtful" death (suicide). Laertes is there. Hamlet realizes whose body it is — Ophelia's. Laertes, in agony, leaps into the open grave and demands to be buried with her. Hamlet, who has held himself in until now, bursts forward: "What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis? This is I, Hamlet the Dane!" — and leaps in after him. The two grapple; courtiers pull them apart. Hamlet protests his love for Ophelia "more than forty thousand brothers" could match. Laertes is led away. Hamlet, shaken, leaves with Horatio. Claudius murmurs to Laertes: "patience — remember last night's plan."