SOURCE: Gellert, Bridget. “The Iconography of Melancholy in the Graveyard Scene of Hamlet.” Studies in Philology 67, no. 1 (January 1970): 57-66.

In the following essay, Gellert maintains that the first half of Act V, scene i of Hamlet, while the prince meditates on Yorick's skull and jests with the gravediggers, serves as an emblematic representation of melancholy as both a disorder and a sign of imaginative thinking.

It is now increasingly recognized that several of Shakespeare's scenes have iconographic or symbolic significances in addition to, and sometimes more important than, their contributions to the development of action.¹ These scenes establish tableaux that function as condensations or epitomes of central themes of the plays in which they occur. This device, it has been noted, is fairly common in the history plays.² In Richard II, for example, the king's physical descent from the walls of Flint Castle is an elaborate visual rendering...