Alas, poor Yorick!

Cultural  

1. Words from the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Hamlet says this in a graveyard as he meditates upon the skull of Yorick, a court jester he had known and liked as a child. Hamlet goes on to say that though “my lady” may put on “paint [make-up] an inch thick, to this favour [condition] she must come.”

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Example Sentences

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him,” Hamlet mourns.

From Seattle Times

Shakespeare: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a man of infinite jest.”

From Washington Post

Your butt may have suffered through a few “Hamlets” in its lifetime, but I’ll bet it’s never seen one as intimate and visceral as this, where some audience members visibly winced when Ophelia waved a fire-poker in front of Hamlet’s uncle’s face, or laughed anxiously when a gravedigger from the “alas, poor Yorick” scene dug in the real-life rain and tossed literature’s most famous skull through a doorway at Hamlet and Horatio.

From Seattle Times

Later, in the celebrated gravedigging scene, “Alas, poor Yorick” juxtaposes high and low culture to articulate the mature Shakespeare’s existential vision of human frailty.

From The Guardian

It's a modern update on "Alas, Poor Yorick! I knew him."

From The Verge