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Hamlet is famous for, among other things, being the first early modern play to bring the human skull on stage as a property.1 Yorick's skull is perhaps the most concrete token of remembrance in a play devoted to the vagaries of memory, and Hamlet's famous apostrophe has become a metonym for the entire work, if not for the Shakespearean canon itself (Holderness 1988, 8). This paper examines the after-life of Yorick's skull on the modern stage, arguing that the property calls attention to the tension between the transitory nature of the theatrical medium and the desire - expressed by both actors and audiences - to preserve the performance experience. In a surprising number of cases, the skull chosen to represent "Yorick" has a real human being behind it, a human being whose connection to the theater survives the death of the mortal body. The reverent treatment of such skulls resists the play's own warnings about the anonymity of death, but it also attempts to resist the impermanent quality of the theatrical medium itself.
The use of real skulls in productions of Hamlet has become such a common feature of the play's history that the creators of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Slings and Arrows were able to spoof the practice in the opening episodes of the show's first season. The series, which pokes fun at the Shakespeare industry (especially as practiced in Stratford, Ontario) focuses on the misadventures of a brilliant, but mentally unstable actor who finds himself suddenly called upon to take up the artistic directorship of Canada's leading Shakespeare company, for which he was once the lead performer. In assuming the role of prodigal son he must also fulfill the last request of his famous mentor, whose ghost demands that his skull appear in the company's production of Hamlet. The ghost's appearance confirms Marvin Carlson's assertion that "our theatrical memories are haunted by Hamlet," but the conflation of the figures of Hamlet's father and Yorick, together with the comic tone of the ghost's fatherly complaints, also make the skull a symbol of the actor's unwillingness to follow in his mentor's footsteps (Carlson 2001, 79). Thus, the protagonist's ambivalent attitude towards the skull mirrors the show's mixture of affection for and frustration with the...