Richardson's Charnel House: Pamela, Lovelace and 'The Skull of King Philip'

Abstract

CRITICS tend to overlook the fact that before Hamlet famously held it aloft and spoke to it, he could not identify Yorick’s skull. While the skull’s status as a memento mori becomes all the more potent and personal for Hamlet once the attribution to Yorick is made, such vivid and affecting recollections offer little assistance when confronted with bare, unidentified bone. In the graveyard, the First Clown, perhaps through his professional associations, constitutes the crucial link in a chain of causal reference that connects the skull with Yorick’s name and reputation. Over the next 150 years an anecdote about the skull of King Philip II of Macedonia begins to embody this neglected aspect of the Yorick scene, becoming the paradigmatic example of how skeletal remains constitute a final, levelling anonymity. The inability to distinguish king from commoner draws its potency here not only from its message of mors omnia aequat, but also from its reminder that, forensic radiography aside, humans begin to look largely the same as they are denuded of flesh.