48 pages • 1 hour read
William ShakespeareHamlet
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Yorick’s Skull
Yorick’s skull is perhaps the most famous symbol in Hamlet. The skull represents the certainty of death, the inevitable fate to which king and jester alike will come. Yorick, in death, is indistinguishable from Alexander the Great: As Hamlet observes, death makes everyone much the same. Yorick’s skull has a notably nasty physicality: Hamlet remarks that it smells terrible (5.1.176). Hamlet’s doubts and fears about the afterlife meet, in Yorick’s skull, one unequivocal truth—and it isn’t pleasant.
Actors and the Theater
Actors and the theater are a frequent image in Hamlet. They appear, of course, in the play-within-a-play, but they also play an important role in the final moments of the play, when Horatio asks that the bodies of Hamlet and his family be placed on a stage where everyone can see them. Hamlet also fears that everyone around him is an actor. The gap between people’s inner truth and outer performance is a source of constant anxiety to him. Symbolically, the play’s actors represent that unbridgeable gap between inner and outer. The frequent presence of actors also recalls us to the circumstances of the play itself. The symbolic stage reminds us that we’re watching the action on a quite literal stage, which itself symbolizes the world.
Plants and Flowers
The natural world is often meticulously catalogued in Hamlet. Both Ophelia and Gertrude offer up long lists of flowers, and Polonius compares Hamlet’s fragile love not simply to a generic blossom, but to a spring violet. Flowers stand in for many emotional states: Ophelia, in her recitation of flower symbolism, puns on “rue” (both a plant name and a word for regret) and “pansies” for “thought” (which is to say, pensées, in French). Flowers are also a place where sex and death meet, as Gertrude obliquely points out when she describes “long purples,” which shepherds call by a rude name, but maidens call “dead men’s fingers.”
In linking sex, death, and emotion, the flowers and plants of Hamlet are, in some ways, a counterpart to Yorick’s skull. Though they are associated with death—they adorn both Ophelia’s songs and her corpse—they also offer consolation. As Claudius and Gertrude point out (however self-servingly) at the beginning of the play, death is natural and inevitable (Gertrude says, “Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.274-275). The tragedy of the deaths of Ophelia, Laertes, and Hamlet may be that they are cut down before the prime of their lives, flowers that die before they can fully bloom.
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