surrealism

Hamlet: Alas Poor Yorick

Date: 1948

Medium: Ink on paper

Hamlet: Alas Poor Yorick

Dali loved the works of The Bard of Avon, also known as William Shakespeare. His wife Gala read him The Bard's works as he created his three extensive suites of original intaglios, Shakespeare I, Shakespeare II and the colorful Hamlet. Dali seems to have been as enthralled with Shakespeare as he was with alchemy, time and science, other subjects that inspired him to create imaginative prints.

Salvador Dali's 1946 drawing MacBeth is comparable in depth, horror and complexity to Shakespeare's drama of the same name. This drawing combines more than a score of shocking icons that lay bare the warped subconscious of a noble who murders her sovereign rather than protect him.

A more subtle yet equally striking drawing, Alas Poor Yorick, was inspired by the artist's love of Shakespeare's eternally popular 1599 play Hamlet. Both the dramatist and the artist created these works as their statements about life in opposition to death.

Both creators focus on a skull as the symbol of death. In Act V Scene 1 of the play the title character finds the skull of the late court jester Yorick in a cemetery. Hamlet marvels at how Yorick had been so full of life, cavorting around the Court and making fun of the courtiers. While a child Hamlet had loved Yorick as the jester had carried him around on his back.

That all remaining of Yorick now is a skull reminds the noble Prince that life is transient yet oh so precious. This realization is especially touching because before the act ends, Hamlet himself joins the jester in death.

Dali captures the same themes in Alas Poor Yorick. (The title comes from Hamlet's famous line Alas, poor Yorick&I knew him, which does not end with the word well as the popular mind has taken the liberty to add on the Bard's behalf.)

The central figure in the drawing is Hamlet studying a skull. The work's lines are elegant and vibrant in the Dalinean manner. The artist may well be telling us with such lively lines as these that we never feel more alive than when we are contemplating death. Feeling this way we throw our lot in with life as opposed to death. Hamlet was doing the same as he expressed his love of Yorick.

Just as Shakespeare's Hamlet must have caused Elizabethans to appreciate life more, Dali''s Alas Poor Yorick is statement of his love of life. After all one of Dali's most famous quotes reads, Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.