Alas, Poor Yorick

Alas, poor Jango Fett.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that."

— Hamlet, Hamlet

One part squick, one part Tear Jerker, Alas, Poor Yorick takes place when a character picks up the severed head of a loved one and cradles it close to them. Depending on how gross you want to get, blood is optional, and sometimes just a skull or helmet is sufficient to get the point across.

This trope is very often used to conjure up pity for the holder and perhaps suggest that they're more than a little off their rocker. Expect angst to follow. In animated adaptations of manga in particular, this part is often left out, presumably because it's too graphic for broadcast.

Distinct from A Love to Dismember in that the person does not actually have a long term relationship with the part.

Sub-Trope of Shout Out: To Shakespeare, and tends to be confused with the slightly more known "to be or not to be". If the character starts talking to the skull, it can be a Surrogate Soliloquy.

Contrast Decapitation Presentation. Not to be confused with Alas, Poor Villain or Alas, Poor Scrappy, although they could overlap.

The line is often misquoted as "I knew him well" rather than "I knew him, Horatio." (Although it does sum up the rest of the monologue nicely).

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• X/1999:
  • Used often, especially in the original manga. First we have the young Fuuma picking up his mother Saya's head and licking the blood (which turns out to be Foreshadowing of his eventual Face–Heel Turn) and then his little sister Kotori, who's gone slightly nuts after being super broken, carrying around Tokiko's head, and then Kamui holding Kotori's head after she is very graphically killed and dismembered afterwards. In the anime adaptation, all three of these instances were removed, presumably because it was too graphic for TV. The movie ended with Kamui holding Fuuma's head, and during a vision he winds up holding Kotori's after she gets torn apart.
  • To a "lesser" degree, we have Kamui caressing the bloodied face of Daisuke Saiki's severed head after Fuuma murders him. Also removed from the TV series.
  • CLAMP probably got the idea from either Jonathan Joestar holding Dio Brando's detached head in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Phantom Blood (though that's not quite an example of this trope because Dio isn't actually dead at the time), or Devilman, where Akira holds Miki's head, since the situation is much closer to that in X: boy holding his beloved's head and all. That was one of the defining moments of the Devilman saga, by the way. CLAMP even did fanart of Satan holding Akira's head at one point, and they did doujinshi for both series before making it big on their own.
• In Angel Sanctuary, Rosiel cradling Kaitan's head.
• Clare carries Teresa's head with her in Claymore after the latter is killed by Priscilla. To top it off, Clare asks to have Teresa's flesh put inside of her so she can avenge Teresa by hunting down her killer. This part was cut from the anime.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • Though it occurs off-screen, Aoshi apparently takes the heads of the Oniwabanshu away to bury them after they are killed protecting him. This part was cut from the anime, where their bodies are kept intact.
  • And though he didn't get to hold it, poor Sanosuke witnessed the sight of his adopted father Sagara Souzou's severed head being put on display by his killers. This naturally traumatized him.
• One of the defining panels of the lead-in to the final act of Devilman is a sobbing Akira cradling Miki's severed head, after she along with her whole family are killed by a mob after Ryo reveals the existence of demons to the world.
• Doraemon: Nobita's New Dinosaur has the Time Police agent, Jill, whose office has a velociraptor skull as a paperweight which he occasionally picks up to converse with.
• Seras in Hellsing picks up Alucard's head after the first fight with Anderson. Luckily, he got better.
• In Air Gear, Sora sat holding Kilik's severed head in his lap while he waited for The Hero to come fight him. Needless to say, he was the one who cut it off.
• In Afro Samurai, after seeing his father beheaded in a duel for the headband, Afro carries his severed head around, until it's destroyed in a fight with some thugs (which takes a while to happen).
• Berserk: After witnessing the beheading of Vargas on the Count's orders, Guts goes to the graveyard and says something to his severed head:
  Guts: The look in your eyes, filled with vengeance. I won't fail... like you.
• The ending of School Days features a smiling Kotonoha floating away in a boat with Makoto's head, portrayed in the creepiest possible way.
• Appears in Battle Angel Alita. The guy was still alive (being a Cyborg) had always been nervous and never wanted to fight, just to get home to his family and sobs and begs for forgiveness as he goes.
• In Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, when Uso's mother Mueller gets decapitated in a collision between two battleships, he brings the head (in its helmet) back for burial.
• Suzu Kitamura of Peacemaker Kurogane carries around the lacquered skull of his mentor after said mentor dies in the raid on the Ikedaya.
• Occurs near the end of the fourth volume of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, where Akanemaru is the one whose skull is cradled.
• In Requiem of the Rose King which is based off of Richard III and Henry IV Richard kisses his father's severed head on the lips.
• A variant in Pluto. With Epsilon's head bitten off, Wassily uses the robot's detached hands to perform this trope.
• In Ottori Sousa, Yua Kotegawa's first manga series, done by the 1st Tome's 3rd Psycho of the Week, after being punched by Detective Akiba and stumbling on boxes containing his victims' heads. 20 years before, the murderer's mother eloped from house and got murdered by a psychopath, who sent her severed head in a box to her home : the boy, who was 8 then, was the first person to open the box and discover the head. As a result, he turned mad and developed a Mother Complex : when he became a young man, he started replicating his trauma by murdering women and putting their heads in boxes to send to their homes, in hopes to find his mother in those women.
• Happens in the Inuyasha manga, when two little kids hug the severed heads of their parents.
• PandoraHearts: Retrace LXXVIII, a flashback to the aftermath of the Tragedy of Sablier shows Jack, the sole survivor, holding Oswald/Glen's head close to his chest despite the fact that he was the one to kill him. It speaks volumes about the state of his mind at that time.
• In the manga Corpse Party Musume, the main character's little sister and the resident Wholesome Crossdresser (an athletic boy who happened to look, dress and act like a girl) are left in an abandoned nurse's office while the others try to escape. Then, one of the evil spirits (in the form of a tentacle-monster-esque thing) attacks. The crossdresser, trying to save the little sister, deliberately goads the monster into attacking her to give her time to escape. The scene then thankfully cuts away from the implied anal tentacle rape to the main character and Love Interest returning to find his little sister suffering from shock, cradling the severed head and crying.
• Brook in One Piece has a particularly saddening version of this trope. After losing their captain to a plague, he and his crew are attacked on the high seas, with poisoned weapons. They get stranded in the Florian Triangle and all die, but Brook's Devil Fruit power revives him alone. He finishes his revival one year after decomposition has done its work to the sight of his whole crew reduced to skeletons, and begins dissembling them for storage in only a few coffins on board the ship, hoping to one day enact a mass burial. Brook detaches a skull from someone's body and takes a moment to remember who they were while still alive. And presumably does this for the several dozen other fallen comrades strewn on his ship's deck. Unfortunately, the thing is, Brook Came Back Wrong and is also a skeleton.
• In Yona of the Dawn, Shin-ah is possessed by the ghost of one of his predecessors as the Blue Dragon Warrior, and learns about how this ancient dragon was trapped in the underground burial chamber of the Blue Dragon with a group of bandits and died alone, fighting them off. Once the ghost releases him, as Shin-ah is about to leave the catacombs, he lifts a skull off the ground and rests their foreheads together, wishing for him to rest well. He lays the skull back down on the ground, right next to the mask the ghost was wearing when he died.

Comic Books

• Played with in Y: The Last Man, when the protagonists spend the night in a Parisian crypt full of bones and Yorick just has to pick up one of the skulls. Also is Hypocritical Humor (or possibly a Lampshade Hanging on Yorick's part) since earlier when one of the Daughters of the Amazon was about to kill him, she quoted the line and he mocked her for being unoriginal. Additionally, the cover of an earlier issue displays Yorick's pet monkey, Ampersand, dressed in Shakespearean attire while holding a skull — a clear allusion to Hamlet.
• For a while Deadpool wound up carrying around the zombified head of himself from another dimension, though being Deadpool it could talk and make wisecracks.
• Superman:
  • In Justice #12, Superman does this with Brainiac's head. Subverted because he isn't sorry at all, and he crushes the metal head angrily.
  • In the cover of Supergirl (2005) # 47, Alura In-Ze does this with supervillain Reactron's helmet.
  • In Many Happy Returns, Xenon does this with the skull of a Supergirl he has just killed.
  • The Hunt for Reactron: After her father's death, Kara holds the metallic skull of one of the Brainiac drones which raided her city, before slamming it into the floor and heading out. Her friend Thara picks the skull and keeps staring at it as flashing back to the early days of their friendship with Kara.
• Spider-Man:
  • The cover of The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #346. Venom, holding up a skull covered with shreds of fabric in a familiar pattern.
    Venom: Alas, poor Spider-Man - I killed him well!
  • In Web of Spider-Man Annual #1, Spidey holds the head of a robot he just defeated, purportedly because he's impressed with the advanced technology and design.
• Daredevil: In Daredevil: End of Days, The Owl, after using his connections to get Daredevil's mask and keep it as a trophy, does this to a statue wearing Daredevil's mask, and let's say it's not as heartfelt as otherwise expected of this trope.
  The Owl: Alas, Horatio! I knew him well! He was a fellow of infinite jest! Where is your mocking now? Your laughter at death? Your condescending attitude? Your $#%&ing billy club?
• Subverted in Transmetropolitan when Spider gets ahold of his ex-wife's cryogenically frozen head. They hated each other, and she had her head frozen under specific instructions that it was not to be thawed until Spider was dead. Remembering that, Spider throws it off a bridge into the City reservoir.
• Firefly in the Marvel G.I. Joe series does his own version of this while holding a skull he claims belomgs to Dr Mindbender.
• Starscream does this to Megatron in a story in The Transformers (Marvel) 1986 UK Annual.
• 2000 AD:
  • Judge Dredd: Judge Fire is shown to have been in love with a female Dark Judge who destroyed herself to spite him. He kept her skull, staring at it for years to relive the event over and over again.
  • Shakara: Some Buggerian mercenaries find Shakara's skull after his apparent destruction by the Hierarchy. They hold it up and taunt him, but of course he's Not Quite Dead.
• The Wicked + The Divine: Laura's "Shakespeare in the Dark" scene from #3 is a direct reference to the trope namer. She picks up the fake Morrigan head, makes a Shakespeare-esque speech, which convinces Baph and Morri to stop fighting.
• Batgirl: Year One: Parodied in the second issue's cover when Batgirl holds Killer Moth's shattered helmet.
• In the Calvin and Hobbes Print Bonus comic "A Nauseous Nocturne," Calvin imagines being killed in his bed by a monster he read about in a horror comic and his dad coming into his room the next morning and picking up his skull.

Fan Works

• The original is parodied in William Shakespeare's Star Wars (by Ian Doescher) with Luke contemplating the stormtrooper helmet he wore as a disguise.
  Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,
  Yet have I ta'en both uniform and life from thee...
• Mocked by Vegeta in Hero House, as he cradles Piccolo's head.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him... in America!"
• Three of the Boneheads use their own skulls to quote Shakespeare on a stage. Though they quote "to be or not to be" rather than "alas, poor Yorick".
• When the skull that heralds the start of the Skypia arc lands on the Going Merry's deck in This Bites!, Jeremiah Cross and his partner Soundbite can't help themselves to use the skull for reenacting the Yorick bit to the rest of his crew's annoyance.

Films — Animation

• The film Antz has this, because the character whose head was severed was an ant, and while still alive (thanks to nifty biology) he's dying as Z holds him.
• In Quest for Camelot, after the skeleton falls on them, the two headed dragon cradles a dragon skull and the skinny head says, "Alas, poor Yorik! I knew him well!" and the other head says "Oh no! Not Uncle Yorik!".
• Referenced in the lyrics to "Jack's Lament" in The Nightmare Before Christmas - "And since I am dead/I can take off my head/to recite Shakespearean quotations..."

Films — Live-Action

• Star Wars:
  • Boba Fett picks up his (sort of) father Jango's helmet in Star Wars Episode II after he's decapitated. It seems that it wasn't his actual head, since you can see a shadowed ball falling one way, and the helmet rolling the other.
  • Chewbacca holds up C-3P0's head in The Empire Strikes Back looking like he's ready to go into a soliloquy. A deliberate Shout-Out to Shakespeare, according to director Irvin Kirshner.
  • In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren keeps the helmet of Darth Vader, his idol and grandfather, with him on his Star Destroyer.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man, Obadiah Stane (as Iron Monger) does this with Iron Man's separated helmet. Then he crushes it.
  • In Iron Man 3, after Tony Stark's mansion is destroyed and he appears to have died, his girlfriend Pepper Potts finds a damaged Iron Man helmet in the rubble. She presses her forehead against the helmet's faceplate, mourning for Tony. Pepper's character poster had her cradling an Iron Man helmet looking down.
• Both the Japanese version and The Remake of The Ring feature this, as the protagonist discovers Sadako/Samara's remains at the bottom of the well. Reiko cradles Sadako's skull (still matted with her trademark long hair) to her bosom. Rachel finds Samara's body in perfect condition... but as she cradles it, the 8 year-old girl's body rots away to its real state.
• The 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives qualifies, though in that case the head belonged to a robot.
• In Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy, the main character picks up the skull of his murdered lover and talks about her demise. He then uses it as a puppet and repeatedly screeches, "Revenge!" to show that underneath the snarkiness, he's quite Ax-Crazy.
• In Doomsday, Sol the cannibal leader does this after he finds the decapitated body of Viper. He reattaches her head and straps her corpse into the passenger seat of his car for his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Done for a laugh in Hot Shots! when Topper says that he is just like his father and even has his father's eyes... in a small case.
• The live-action Devilman movie (like the source material) has the main character carry around his girlfriend's severed head for most of the climax.
• In Mystery Men the bowler keeps her father's skull in her bowling ball, and his ghost talks to her.
• The infamous Highlander II: The Quickening has the scene being played out for an audience using Ramirez's skull. He comes back to life during the performance, much to the annoyance of the actor playing Hamlet.
• Played for laughs in Galaxy Quest when Sarris reveals what happened to his former lieutenant (who failed to raise the ship's shields in time).
• Subverted in Apocalypse Now. At one point, the severed head of one of Willard's men lands in his lap while he's tied to a cage, causing him to panic and throw it away. His reaction was most likely at least partially due to shock, as he had not been aware of the man's death prior to that moment, combined with his current mental state.
• In Another Country, Rupert Everett's character contemplates the empty bed of a character that committed suicide a few scenes earlier, then sighs "Poor Martineau!". In the first few minutes of the movie his character also uses the Band of Brothers quote from Henry V, so the Shakespearean allusion seems very much deliberate.
• In Avatar: The Way of Water, a Recombinant Avatar clone of the late Miles Quaritch comes across the site of the original Quaritch's death from the first film. The clone then briefly holds the original Quaritch's skull... and then crushes it.
• Happens in Sin City, when Cardinal Roark cradles Kevin's head.
• Three Headed Monster has a living, humanoid ginseng-man as a prominent character, right before he gets hunted and killed, with his head being all that remains which the main character cradles.
• This happens in Transformers: The Last Knight, when Megatron comes across the severed head of Starscream — his long-deceased second-in command who was killed in Dark of the Moon — in the scene where the Decepticons attack the junkyard. Before he battles Hound, Megatron picks it up and takes a moment to talk to it. While he does condescend Starscream, he also wistfully calls him his friend; suggesting that Megatron may have had some affection for his former right-hand man after all.
  Megatron: The end is near, my old treacherous friend. What a shame you'll be unable to see it.

Literature

• In Dragon Bones, Ward, Ciarra and Oreg stroke the skull of the titular dragon skeleton. Not as squicky as other examples, as the dragon has been dead for so long that only bones are left. Oreg is the only one who knew the dragon well, the others are just sad that such a majestic, beautiful creature was killed. (Dragons are sentient in that setting).
• At the end of Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King, Peachy Carnehain reveals that he has been carrying the severed head(now little more than a skull) of his friend Daniel Dravot since his death.
• Speaking of Kipling, in The Ballad of Boh Da Thone "Crook" O'Neil holds and talks to the Boh's head, much to the shock of his "innocent bride".
• In Stephen King's The Drawing of the Three, the second book in The Dark Tower series, Eddie cradles the head of his brother, Henry, after the gunfight at Balazar's bar.
• Played with for Black Comedy in Jonathan Coe's coming of age novel The Rotter's Club. Ben Trotter tells a friend about an incident a few years ago where his sister and her fiancé were caught in an IRA bombing, killing the fiancé and leaving her permanently traumatized.
  Ben: ...She doesn't remember feeling any pain. It went completely dark and there must have been screaming everywhere and it would have been a while before she could see anything at all. After that, all she remembers... is looking down... and seeing Malcolm.
  Emily: Where was he?
  Ben: She was holding his head in her hands.
  Emily: [thinking] Well, that's a romantic image. Two lovers. He's lying in her lap. She's cradling him as he dies...
  Ben: Not him... not the whole of him. She was holding his head. Just his head. ...A bomb... can do terrible things to a human body... You've no idea...
• Inverted in a mystery novel where the M.E. of a college town develops a mild fondness for a skull after its owner is long dead, because pranksters are always stealing it from the drama department (where it's a "Yorick" prop!) and leaving it where people will mistake it for a murder victim.
• The front cover of the fourth Skulduggery Pleasant book, Dark Days, has Valkyrie Cain holding the titular character's skull.
  • Happens again in Dying of the Light, but this time it's Darquesse with Skulduggery's skull in the final battle, after killing him. Turns out it was an illusion, so didn't actually happen.
• The title of Infinite Jest alludes to this speech, although the exact reason why will probably elude first-time readers: the "Entertainment" that everyone's searching for throughout the book is buried with its creator, James Incandenza, hidden inside his skull.
• In one of the stories of Evolution from Stephen Baxter, a prehistoric woman digs out the skull of her dead child and cradles it, later she starts using it as a totem to intimidate and control the other members of her tribe.
• In James Michener's Hawaii, Kelolo takes the skull of his beloved late wife, cleans it of all the flesh, and keeps it. He talks to her in the evenings.
  On the fourth day Kelolo opened the grave whose burning heat had baked away Malama's flesh, and with a sharp knife he severed her head from her gigantic skeleton. Carefully scraping the skull to remove all desiccated fragments, he wrapped it in maile leaves, then in tapa and finally in a closely woven pandanus mat. For so long as he lived, this would be his perpetual treasure, and as he grew older, in the evenings he would unwrap his beloved's head and talk with her. He would recall that before the Christians came she had loved tobacco. He would light his pipe and when the smoke was good, he would blow it into her mouth, knowing that she would appreciate his thoughtfulness.

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder features this in the first episode when Edmund kills Richard III not knowing who he is and picks up his head, only to realize who he just beheaded.
• Game of Thrones: Dany, Jorah and especially Irri expressed their grief over Rakharo's severed head.
• Played with in Slings & Arrows: narcissistic theatrical director Oliver bequeathes his own skull to his theatre company, with instructions that it be used onstage in all future productions of Hamlet. When not in use, Geoffrey keeps it on his desk as an After Eight dispenser. This example also fulfills the "slightly crazy" criteria: Geoffrey has a history of fairly serious mental illness, and is currently being haunted by Oliver's ghost. This doesn't stop the whole thing from being incredibly funny. Then Oliver's ghost has to remind Geoffrey to get the skull to the theatre — just in time to be used in the performance.
• Eko cradles his brother Yemi's decomposed remains in the Lost episode "The 23rd Psalm."
• While no severed heads are involved, Alton Brown does make a Shout-Out to this in the Good Eats episode on cobbler. The premise is that Alton is being given an invitation to enter a sophisticated culinary institute to fill an opening created by the untimely death of a member named Mr. Yorick.
  Alton: Alas... poor Yorick.
  Member: You knew him?
  Alton: Not that well.
• Norma in Passions treats her father's skull as a Companion Cube and talks to it frequently. As you might expect, she's pretty messed up.
• Sarah Lund, an actual Dane, does this in the second season of Forbrydelsen with a child's skull.
• In the Tales from the Crypt episode "Top Billing", Jon Lovitz kills his rival for what he thinks is the role of Hamlet in an off production of the play. It turns out he was "up" for the part of Yorick instead. It turns out that the "playhouse" is actually an insane asylum where the patients were putting on the play. The lead didn't like to kiss a plastic skull, and someone kept stealing the one that they had. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for Lovitz's character.

Music

• "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew me well/but I been killing my brain cell by cell"; line from Foetus song "Throne of Agony", taken from the album Nail.
• Parodied by David Bowie: When he performed "Cracked Actor" on tour in 1974, he was dressed as a hybrid of Hollywood star and Hamlet, being "filmed" as he sang to a prop skull. It was bad enough that the song's bawdy to begin with, but the segment climaxed with him French-kissing the skull. (This act was later revived for the 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour, with the twist that his stagehands suddenly strip him of all the relevant props/costume pieces when he starts kissing the skull, leaving him a bit bemused.)
• The taking of heads as trophies is referenced in Horslips' Daereg Dhu about the great Celtic hero Cu Chullain. See Mythology, below.

Music Videos

• In Styx's concert video, Caught in ihe Act, Dennis De Young does this during "Mr. Roboto" with the Roboto mask he was wearing earlier.

Myths & Religion

• The Irish legend cycle reinforces the historical truth that the head was regarded as sacred in Celtic society. A victorious warrior would collect the heads of those he killed as trophies, to be displayed in a prominent place in the hall; the legends recount several examples of great chiefs and warriors who would talk to the heads of vanquished foes, reliving old battles, treating them almost as living allies, asking their advice in times of trial.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street: Patrick Stewart holds the letter B in this style when he makes a soliloquy to it.

Roleplay

• Done in Survival of the Fittest version three, where Alice takes the severed head of Guy Rapide and starts talking to it as if Guy were still alive. She then stuffs the head in her daypack.

Theatre

• Trope name comes from Prince Hamlet's lament upon encountering the alleged skull of Yorick, the court jester during his childhood.
• Done in The Revenger's Tragedy, which is a parody of Hamlet. Vindici carries around the skull of his wife, who was poisoned by the villain. He later tricks the villain into kissing the skull, which still carries traces of poison. It's a strange play.
• In Henry VI Part 2, Queen Margaret carries the head of her dead lover Suffolk (recently killed by pirates) around ("Here may his head lie on my throbbing breast, / But where's the body that I should embrace?") King Henry is understandably none too thrilled about it.
• Salome by Oscar Wilde, with a helping of necrophilia, too. ("I have kissed thee on thy mouth, Jokanaan...") In the opera version, Richard Strauss' music makes it even creepier.
• In Bill Cain's Equivocation, right after Gunpowder conspirator Thomas Wintour is executed, his severed head delivers a Wham Line, causing the man who sent him to his death to drop the cranium. Shag catches it and cradles it, looking horrified and speechless as the lights black out and Intermission begins.
• In George Whetstone's play, Promos and Cassandra (on which, in part, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is based), Cassandra (the analogue of Shakespeare's Isabella) cradles and kisses the severed head that she thinks is that of her brother, Andrugio (Claudio). Yucketh.

Theme Parks

• In the Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time show at Universal Studios, the titular (good) Terminator picks up the skull of a Mook type terminator soon after accidentally traveling back to the Bad Future with John.
  John: Friend of yours?
  Terminator: He was my college roommate.

Toys

• Variations of this often pop up in BIONICLE, but are typically done with the deceased's Mask of Power rather than the actual head.

Video Games

• In Planescape: Torment, Morte, the floating skull, says this if Dak'kon, the most somber and unfunny character in the game, dies. An inversion considering who is saying it.
• In the original Soul Blade/Edge game, Siegfried's backstory as a bandit has him proudly holding the head of the knight he just beheaded... and finding out it was his own father's. He promptly snaps and goes looking for 'the real killer'.
• In Resident Evil (Remake), Lisa Trevor picks up and cradles her mother's skull before committing suicide by jumping into a pit.
• Legacy of Kain: "Alas poor Nupraptor, I knew him well...well, not really."
• Halo:
  • One multiplayer gametype has you playing Oddball... with somebody's skull. In Halo 3, there's even an achievement called "Alas, Poor Yorick", which you get by using the skull as a weapon to kill three people.
  • Many of the games also have hidden skulls that unlock achievements and do different things, from making the game more difficult, to just making it more amusing (like the Grunt Birthday Skull).
• Castlevania features a headless skeleton called the Yorick who kicks his head around like a soccer ball. Gets mad and runs around Benny Hill style if you destroy his skull.
• In Eternal Darkness, a random sanity effect has the player character's head falling off their body; it can then be picked up, where it starts reciting Shakespeare.
• The Curse of Monkey Island:
  • Parodied with this exchange:
    Slappy Cromwell: Alas, poor Yorick.
    Murray: Murray.
    Slappy Cromwell: Sorry. Alas, poor Murray. He's a disgusting corpse which ain't got no body.
    Murray: And I mean to eat you all! MUHUHAHAHAHAHA!
  • Later, Slappy is seen juggling three skulls.
    Slappy Cromwell: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him... and his two pals!
    Murray: Wheeeee!
• Rusty Pete does this with Captain Slag's head in the Ratchet & Clank. It starts getting a little weird Pete not only starts talking to the head, but makes the head talk back.
• In an unused version of Team Fortress 2 promotional video for the Medic, the Heavy ends up holding an enemy Spy's head Yorick-style when said Spy is decapitated while attempting to attack him and the Medic.
• In L.A. Noire, Cole Phelps quotes the first sentence verbatim to a Shrunken Head (a movie prop, used as evidence) in an attempt to be funny. It is not well-received.
• Marathon Infinity has a level called "Poor Yorick". This is more of a Shout Out: To Shakespeare (of which there are many in the trilogy) than a straight example of this trope, however, as it is otherwise unreferenced. However, the net play mode "Kill the Man with the Ball" could be considered a straight example of this trope: the "ball" is a human skull and is cradled in exactly the manner common to most depictions of the scene from Hamlet.
• Parodied in the bizarre "Agnus Redux" cutscene from Devil May Cry 4, where Agnus is doing a monologue to a human skull for no apparent reason other than trying to theatrically one-up Dante in the opera house. Agnus then dramatically crushes the skull with his hand and blows away its dust.
• Samus recovering Adam's helmet from Metroid: Other M. At least until it's violently interrupted by the ship's self-destruct sequence.
• Played for Laughs in Sonic Lost World. Orbot quotes it almost verbatim in the aftermath of the Deadly Six revolt, all while holding Cubot's severed head. Cubot, being a robot, responds accordingly.
• Happens in the fourth chapter of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair when Owari holds Nidai's head in her arms. The Squick factor is lessened by the fact that it's a robot head, however.
• In Undertale, Papyrus says "ALAS, POOR PAPYRUS!" if you kill him on a neutral run, with his head falling into his hand before his body turns to dust.
• Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has the protagonist Senua carrying the severed head of her dead lover, Dillion, to Helheim in an effort to save his soul. Allegedly.
• Happens in the first chapter of Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, when Naomi manages to save Seiko from her original death by hanging, only for Seiko to run away in terror and fall down the stairs, where some razor sharp piano wire was strung up beforehand. The chapter ends with Naomi clutching Seiko's severed head and wailing in despair.
• In Your Turn to Die, when Sue Miley attempts to take away the corpse of Mishima, Nao (who had accidentally decapitated the corpse), freaks out and shoves the head into a box and runs off in a fit of insanity. You later have to talk her into calming down, but when Sara and Keiji check the box afterwards, the head is gone, and even Nao doesn't know what happened to it.
• The Joker's profile in Batman: Arkham City has him holding a skull to which he added his trademark make-up.
• In Lamplight City, one of the cases Miles Fordham investigates involves a high society woman, a Madam Desiree Lathan, having been murdered by being burned to death. One of the few intact pieces left of her body is her skull, and examining it causes Miles' rather snarky partner, Bill, to do a riff on the trope namer.
  Bill: Alas, poor Desiree. A woman of infinite riches, of tastes most fancy. Where is all your money now? ...Come to think of it, that question might be worth answering.

Webcomics

• In Murry Purry Fresh and Furry, Melvin gives an... abbreviated soliloquy to a skull during a Hamlet parody.
• Slightly parodied in this anti-HEROES strip. The disembodied skull being that of a lich, it can talk (and snark) back.
• Parodied in The Order of the Stick, where Belkar carries around the sentient skull of a defeated, undead enemy, listing all sort of practical uses for the thing, and even calling it a third-rate Yorick knockoff.
• Referenced in Schlock Mercenary. A talking robot head says, "Alas, poor me."
• Implied to have happened in some way in Homestuck, between Tavros just after his death and Gamzee.

Web Videos

• The Nostalgia Critic does this, complete with paraphrased soliloquy, to the DVD of the Tom & Jerry cartoons during his review of the Tom & Jerry Movie. He then ends the moving performance with a quiet "...shitfuckers."
• Red vs. Blue has a variant once Caboose enters with a skull (from the Halo mode Oddball, see Video Games above) which he claims to be his friend's, and asks for help. Doc replies "Uh, I don't know what I can really do to help him, my first aid procedures aren't very effective after decomposition."

Western Animation

• In one of the 1950's Felix the Cat cartoons, "Felix Out West", the Professor tries to blow up a pinnacle Felix is trapped on with a bomb, failing to realize until after the fact that Felix escaped using the Magic Bag as a helicopter. After the rubble settles, Professor quips "Alas poor Felix, I knew him well."
• In Animaniacs, one short features the brothers re-enacting the famous scene (complete with Mr. Skullhead), with Dot providing a modern-day English interpretation.
• In Metalocalypse, Nathan Explosion contemplates going into comedy while holding up the skull of Buddy Hackett, purchased at an auction.
• In the fourth season of The Venture Bros., Henchman 21 talks to Henchman 24's (possibly haunted) skull and keeps it in his room. The Monarch even lampshades this, and tells 21 to "knock all this 'Alas poor Yorick' crap off."
• In Beast Wars, Dinobot performs a similar scene while holding Tarantulas' legs, when the Predacons were all assumed to be destroyed, complete with "This is the leg [sic] that stalked so many victims". Of course, Dinobot being Dinobot, this is nowhere near the only Hamlet based turn of phrase.
• In the Rugrats episode, "When Wishes Come True", Tommy and the babies believe Angelica had turned into a statue after making a wish for something bad to happen to her after she topples Tommy's block structure. They spend the episode trying to revert Angelica to her normal self and hiding the statue from the adults when they accidentally shatter it. Tommy holds the statue's severed head and laments.
• In episode 37 of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Scooby (the seal from Moby Dick & The Mighty Mightor) retrieves the busted diving helmet of Angel Dynamite (a.k.a. Cassidy Williams), leaving the gang to sadly fear the worst had happened to her.
• Played for laughs: "The Four Tasks Of Danger Mouse" has Count Duckula trying to strike a bargain with DM in getting his own TV show in exchange for two of his tail feathers. He attempts Shakespeare:
  Duckula: (hamming it up) Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him...well, Horatio was that not brilliant? (to the side) I said "was that not brilliant?" Applause, you idiots!! (canned applause from off camera)
• In Archer Woodhouse picks up a grapefruit and states "Alas, Poor Reggie" in the episode 'The Double Douce'
• In the Steven Universe episode "Steven Floats", Steven has an Imagine Spot about not being able to get to the donut shop in time for the first donut of the day. Somehow, it ends with him dying. Sadie then does this with his skull (which still has his hair).
  Steven: And then, they'll feed my donut to a dog. And then I'll die.
  Imagine-Spot Sadie: Alas, poor Steven! I knew him well.
• In the Duckman episode "Hamlet 2: This Time it's Personal", the entire episode is a parody of Hamlet. The Yorick in this case is a school clown named Yelnick Honk, with the clown's skull having been exhumed and laminated by Ajax as an art project.
• In the Bump in the Night episode "Farewell, 2 Arms", Squishington finds Molly Coddle's head and picks it up to say "Alas, poor Molly. I knew her well."
• The Cuphead Show!: As a preview for punishment, The Devil turns Miss Chalice to dust and bone and takes her noggin, dryly saying “Alas Poor Chalice, I knew her well,” before apathetically dropping her head back on her remains and restoring her body and soul.
• Seven Little Monsters featured a reference in the episodes "April Fools" and "A Pony Tale", which both had Three's persona of the day being a William Shakespear pastiche named William Three and featured a scene of him holding Seven's head in a similar way to Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

Real Life

• Truth in Television (mostly): Comedian Del Close bequeathed his skull to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for precisely this purpose. The skull currently residing at the Goodman, though, isn't his: nobody was willing to prepare it. Other aspiring posthumous Yoricks include Juan Potomachi, Andre Tchaikowsky, and Jonathan Hartman. (Tchaikowsky's skull finally made it to the stage in the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet (starring David Tennant).)
• Older Than Print:
  • When St. Catherine of Siena saw a Princely Young Man named Niccolo di Toldi being taken to execution for verbally opposing the current Sienese rulers, she went to keep him company to the end, even kneeling next to him and baring her own neck as he did likewise and was executed. When he had been beheaded, she received and embraced his severed head.
  • Ironically, when St. Catherine herself died, her own remains were divided and her head, now inserted in a bronze bust, was carried in a procession through Sienna (with her mother Luppa among the pilgrims and followers behind it). Then it was stolen several times, until it was finally located in the local Basilica of St. Domenico.
• When Thomas More had been condemned for treason and beheaded, his daughter Margaret climbed up onto the "Traitors' Gate" of London Bridge, where the heads were displayed, retrieved it (reportedly by bribing the man whose job it was to toss it in the river), and kept it in her room as a holy relic for the rest of her life, and it was eventually buried with her husband after her own death.
• When Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded, his wife Elizabeth Throckmorton was said to have carried his embalmed head around with her for the rest of her life. When she died her son inherited it, and it was buried with him after his death.
• When Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert were exhumed, so they could be moved to be buried together at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, Anton Bruckner was there and reverently held both of their skulls in his hands.
• In 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian nationalist and mercenary Igor Mangushev was infamously filmed putting on a show with a skull, dehumanizing Ukrainians, negating the existence of their nation and calling for genocide on them. The skull allegedly was that of a dead Ukrainian defender of Azovstal in Mariupol, and he pondered making it a goblet. Mangushev was killed by a bullet to the back of the head at close range later in February 2023.

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