J - “Jester”

The most iconic and indelible image in Hamlet, and even all of Shakespeare, is the moment when the Prince holds Yorick’s skull and expounds upon mortality. Branagh’s skull is purposely designed by the props department to have a set of wonky front teeth resembling those of another Sir Ken: Ken Dodd, the eminent “last great music hall entertainer” famous in England from the 1950s for his stand-up comedy and songs. In flashback, we see Dodd fittingly cast as the late Yorick, the King’s Jester, as he jokes and plays with Hamlet as a child. 

Hamlet’s preceding contemplation of death via jester’s skull is historically familiar to Shakespeare’s audience; illustrations on church walls in the medieval era portrayed the “Antic Death” in multiple scenes of the danse macabre. Death as jester, a grotesque grinning figure who mocks the living, was a commonplace image due to the ubiquity of pestilence during plague years. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), the traveling actors are on their way to Elsinore, of all places, to perform a grim play for the saints’ feast using an oversized skull-shaped death mask. Branagh’s Hamlet, in one memorable shot, dons a similar mask when he puts on his own “antic disposition” for Polonius.

The skull props onstage or in film are assumed to be faux, but in 2008, the Royal Shakespeare Company kept secret for a time the fact that David Tenant, as Hamlet, actually held up a genuine article during this famous speech. It belonged to composer and concert pianist Andre Tchaikowsky, who bequeathed his body to science, with specific instruction to gift his skull to the RSC for use in theatrical performances. Tchaikowsky died in 1982, and the skull was “aired” on the roof of the theatre for two years. In 1989, Mark Rylance used it during rehearsals, and subsequent companies did the same, never actually debuting the skull for a live audience until it finally got its chance for 22 performances in 2008. By then, the skull was only a few years older than it should have been according to the play. 

Throughout the play, there are several (contradictory) nods to Prince Hamlet’s age, the most often referenced being that of the graveyard scene, where the gravedigger tells Hamlet that he has been the church sexton for thirty years, ever since the very day the Prince Hamlet was born—the same day the last Hamlet overcame old Fortinbras. He goes on to say that Yorick’s skull “hath lien you i’ th’ earth three and twenty years,” which tracks with Hamlet’s claim to Horatio that he knew Yorick in his life. This would seem fairly definitive proof of Hamlet’s exact age at the opening of the play, but convincing arguments can and have been made that he was much younger: his enrollment as a student at Wittenberg; multiple mentions of his “youth,” which typically implied teenage years to an Elizabethan audience; and the very fact that Shakespeare (being a poor math student) frequently exaggerates or diminishes numbers as a function of general sense or metaphor. Theatre tradition would concede that Branagh, 36 at the time of filming, is at the upper limit of a “believable” age for portraying Hamlet. 

However, many Shakespearean theatrical conventions are as often conserved as they are broken, leading to oftentimes provocative casting decisions. In 2021, Sir Ian McKellen, at 82, played Hamlet onstage—50 years since he last carried the same role. The “age-blind” and “gender-blind” casting for this London production was deliberate and controversial, but in the last century, bucking convention is as traditional for Shakespeare as is holding up that skull.

Sources:

Bequeathed skull stars in Hamlet (BBC News)

Hamlet: Sir Ian McKellen’s age-blind prince divides critics (BBC News)