Act V, Scene 1
[Line 167]
GRAVEDIGGER Why, here in Denmark!
I have been sexton here, man and boy,
Thirty years.
HAMLET
How long will a man lie in the earth
Ere he rot?
GRAVEDIGGER
Faith, if he be not rotten
Before he die—as we have many pocky corpses
Nowadays that will scarce hold the layin in—
He will last you some eight year or nine year.
A tanner will last you nine year.
HAMLET
Why he more than another?
GRAVEDIGGER
Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade
That he will keep out water a great while;
And your water is a sore decayer of your
Whoreson dead body. Here’s a skull now
Hath lien you in the earth
Three-and-twenty years.
HAMLET
Whose was it?
GRAVEDIGGER
A whoreson mad fellow’s it was.
Whose do you think it was?
HAMLET Nay, I know not.
GRAVEDIGGER
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
He poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head
Once. This same skull, sir, was sir,
Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.
HAMLET This?
GRAVEDIGGER Even that.
HAMLET [taking the skull]
Let me see.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—
A fellow if infinite jest,
Of most excellent fancy.
He hath bore me on his back a thousand times
And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it!
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.
Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?
Your flashes of merriment that were wont to
Set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock
Your own grinning? Quite chapfallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her,
Let her paint an inch think, to this favor she must come.
Make her laugh at that.
—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
HORATIO What’s that, my lord?
HAMLET
Dost thou think Alexander looked on this fashion
In the earth?
HORATIO Even so.
HAMLET And smelt so? Pah!
[HAMLET puts the skull down.]
HORATIO Even so, my lord.
HAMLET
To what base uses we may return, Horatio!
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust
Of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?
HORATIO
‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
HAMLET
No faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither,
With modesty enough and likelihood to lead it, as thus:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth to dust;…
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