He suddenly appears at Elsinore, and goes to the churchyard, where a grave is being prepared for Ophelia, who was drowned in a garden stream in her mad ramblings.
Hamlet converses philosophically with the grave diggers about the bones, skulls and greatness of a politician, courtier, lady, lawyer, tanner; and when the skull of the old king's jester is thrown out of the grave after a sleep of twenty-three years, Hamlet, speaking to Horatio, says:
"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 rises 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 in a roar?
Not one now, to mock your own grinning!
Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber,
And tell her, let her paint an inch thick,
To this favor she must come;
Make her laugh at that!"
The funeral procession with the corpse of Ophelia now appears, Laertes, King, Queen, train, and priests attending.
The priests tell Laertes that were it not for "great command" his sister's body "should in ground unsanctified have lodged till the last trumpet," because of alleged suicide.
Laertes peremptorily says:
"Lay her in the earth
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling in perdition."
Laertes and Hamlet, both overpowered with frantic grief, leap into the new-made grave and struggle for precedence of affection, the former exclaiming:
"Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made
To o'ertop old Pelion or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus!"
Hamlet, replying to the King, Queen and Laertes, says: