Heeding poor Yorick

Snapped this guy in the Netherlands somewhere, on a trip to Holland some years ago. I'm quite sure he's on guard just outside a cathedral, and I'm guessing it's in the city of Dordtrecht--but I may be wrong. I didn't take the picture to identify the cathedral; I thought it wonderful because of what this guy says about life and death.

It may seem disarmingly out of place just outside the door of a church, but there's logic to him lounging there--it may be a woman. Why on earth sign up some wonderfully talented sculptor to festoon the archway with a dead man, a skeleton? 

There's a great moral admonition right here in marble, the same heavyweight moral of a thousand renditions of that famous moment in Hamlet, when the young prince visits the gravesite where Ophelia will be buried. Once there, he overhears a pair of goofy gravediggers philosophize on admissions to heaven and hell. One of them identifies a skull--the dead were buried with the dead long ago. Hamlet knows the bloke, or knew him alive, a court jester named Yorick.

What follows, I've always wanted to believe, is exactly what this skeleton was once meant (and still is, I suppose) to point out to worshippers, a very simple truth, that death is real, and life needs to be lived in the reality of its shadow. Here's Hamlet:

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, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. 

Here's the moment, in an old rendition:

Or here it is, amid the darkness of night, by Antoine Delacroix:

Or here, with a band of bunnies with banjos:

Go figure. 

Turning the image into farce is easier than taking the image--and Shakespeare's Act V version of it--seriously. What everything on this post thus far is meant to say is quite simply that what Hamlet takes to heart is that living without regard to life's own end is so frightfully easy to do that it's best to take some momento of death along with us always. A skull maybe.  Or, turning the whole thing around, what Yorick's skull means to Hamlet and to me is that living well means remembering that life is fleeting. Having learned it, he's ready for whatever may befall him shortly.

Let's just slip into the gallery for a while, just to admire how significantly universal these skulls are in the history of art and culture. Here's French Baroque artist George de la Tour's 1640 study, Magdaline with the Smoky Flame. See what she has in her lap. Alas, poor Yorick. 

Gorgeous and seductive, Mary Magdalene was, biblically speaking, one of Christ's most devoted followers, ever present, even to his death on the cross. Thought to have been a prostitute, this Mary was almost deified by the church and, given her repentance, she was thought to be a symbol of the Sacrament of Penance. That she holds that skull on her lap verifies her piety.

One more. St. Jerome, the Bible translator, is the subject here, a portrait by another Baroque artist, Caravaggio, just exquisite, isn't it? There, once again, is the skull, used as a bizarre paper weight, just a reminder. If St. Jerome himself seems somehow heedless in the devotion he has to his work, Caravaggio isn't--just look at that sweet light by which the artist himself tends St. Jerome's own Yorick.

Yorick is Shakespeare's take on the moral featured in every one of these and a thousand more art pieces: those who consider seriously the end of life will live with greater care and devotion. Don't forget, you're going to die. Ouch.

I've been reading The End of the Christian Life, a fascinating book by Todd Billings, a book whose moral heft is in these paintings and right there at the end of Hamlet's final act. The theme pressed in The End of the Christian Life is not at all new, but I can't help thinking--maybe especially today, just before a treacherous week--just how very forgettable Yorick is and how it is that we need to be reminded of what he's saying, which is exactly what Magdalene and St. Jerome knew themselves, only too well. 

I don't know that it will make the drama of this week any less tense, but heeding poor Yorick is never a bad idea.