A man stands in a graveyard. This is a man whom we have previously become accustomed to associating with ruminations on death and suicide. This is a man who when we first encountered him on the stage was dressed all in black (‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black…’, Hamlet, 1.2.77–8), a figure of melancholy and grief, someone deeply associated in our minds with notions of mortality. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (for the man is he) comes then already laden by the fifth and final act of this play with associations on the part of the audience with ideas of death, but these are undoubtedly heightened, brought to a kind of performative peak, by the fact that at this particular moment he holds a specific stage property: a skull.

The skull has been quite literally thrown up onto and into the stage space by the gravedigger's excavations of a new plot (which we will later realise is for the drowned Ophelia). It is one of several different skulls produced by the gravedigger's labour and all of them provoke the philosophical Danish prince to trenchant observations on the brevity of life and the levelling effects of death: