ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Yorick is the fictional former jester of king of Denmark, named in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The name reappears some years later in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. One of the characters in Sterne’s comic novel is Parson Yorick, a name later used as a pseudonym by Sterne.

Detailed explanation-2: -According to the plot of the play, Yorick was a jester at the king’s court. He was also well acquainted with the prince, Hamlet. They both played and enjoyed together in Hamlet’s childhood days. In the Hamlet skull scene, Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull and contemplates on the vanity of his own life.

Detailed explanation-3: -Yorick was the king’s jester: that is, the jester to King Hamlet, Prince Hamlet’s father, who is himself dead (murdered by Prince Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius). Yorick, being a jester, was ‘a fellow of infinite jest’ (a phrase David Foster Wallace co-opted for his famous novel, Infinite Jest), as we might expect.

Detailed explanation-4: -Who is Yorick? Yorick was the king’s jester, who Hamlet knew well as a child. Part of the quote is Hamlet saying that he remembers how funny Yorick was, and how he rode piggyback on Yorick’s back a thousand times.

Detailed explanation-5: -Yorick grew up in a small fishing village on the edge of the Blessed Isles. He could never find acceptance among his peers, and he eventually learned that he could see the spirits of the dead. While at first he was scared of these spirits, he eventually realized that they were just lost and did not want to hurt him.