Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard

When English actors brought Shakespeare to Paris in 1827, they hit the young Romantics like a thunderclap. Delacroix was in the audience, and Hamlet stayed with him for the rest of his life. In this 1839 version he paints the graveyard scene, where Hamlet and his friend Horatio stand as a gravedigger holds up a skull just pulled from the earth, the jester Yorick, dead these many years. Delacroix gives Hamlet no heroics. He is pale, slight, dressed in black, caught in the moment of realizing whose bones these are. He had already worked the play into a whole set of lithographs in the 1830s, but the graveyard was the scene he came back to most.