A couple of weeks ago I started teaching Hamlet in my Literary Expressions of the Human Journey class. As I do every time I teach this play, I think it would be great to have a skull as a prop when discussing Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. This speech, for those of you who haven’t read the play recently, deals with the themes of mortality that permeate nearly every line, and points to Hamlet’s morbid obsessions. He struggles to come to terms with the tension between looking at himself and all other humans as divine creatures (“What a piece of work is a man…”) who are yet animals (“A beast, no more”). “The paragon of animals,” perhaps, but animals nonetheless.
I think we have all had this Hamlet moment, when we are forcefully reminded of not just our mortality but our physicality, our materiality, and that can be shocking, especially if you are one to focus more often on the intellectual or spiritual side of your nature. In my last post I talked about my various cycling mishaps, and nothing reminds you so much of your own mortality as seeing your own blood oozing out on the pavement after an unplanned bicycle dismount (that’s the official bureaucratic way of saying bike crash—unplanned bicycle dismount).
I wanted to make this point dramatically in class with a skull that I could wave around as I talked about the Yorick speech. To this end, I went to the Halloween store in the Danbury Fair mall, thinking that Halloween is nothing without our innate fear of mortality, so I should be able to find a great skull.
I was wrong. There were a lot of costumes that were meant to be funny (Rasta man, anyone?) and some that were supposed to be mildly scary (a very weak-looking Mummy). In the front, the store stocked some haunted house props that probably looked a lot better in the dark of night than they did under bright fluorescents. There, in a basket, they had stacks of small plastic skulls about the size of a grapefruit. These substandard skulls had a little light inside so it could glow. I thought this would maybe work since I could make the point that the glowing light is sort of like the spark of spirit that some say animates the human frame, or the light of intellect, or even the “ghost in the machine,” as Gilbert Ryle puts it. I quickly saw that I was grasping at nothing as I tried to justify my three dollar purchase.
Despite my misgivings, I brought the skull to class on our first day of Hamlet discussion. My students were even less enthusiastic about the skull than I was. “That’s not very scary,” said one. “Pretty weak,” said another. I had to agree, and I thought about ditching the whole skull idea before we got to Act V.
The Pathetic Skull, Looking Pathetic on My Desk
The Scary Skull, Scaring a Student
However, Lena, one of my students, came to the rescue. She had gone to Walmart, where she found a pretty decent skull made out of some sort of foam that nevertheless looked fairly realistic, and the focus of the class finally left my pathetic glowing skull. As an added benefit, Lena confessed that the skull creeped her out, so I got to keep it, and it now resides on my office desk. I am keeping my old skull, though.
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