'Where Be His Quiddits Now'

Hamlet is the least sympathetic character in the major plays, the prototype of every entitled, scolding, overeducated prig with a Twitter account. I root for Polonius, though in Act V, Scene 1, Hamlet almost redeems himself. It begins with two clowns digging Ophelia’s grave and arguing the finer points of Christian burial for a suicide. Their mock-erudition leads to the posing of a riddle: 

First Clown: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?”

 

Second Clown: “The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.”

 

A suitable introduction for the death-haunted arrival of Hamlet and Horatio. The First Clown uncovers the first of many skulls and throws it from the grave. The scene is made for broad, grim, Beckett-like humor. Hamlet speculates on the identity of the previous occupant of the skull:

 

“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'er-reaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?”

 

Another skull is unearthed, giving Hamlet the chance to again display his witty eloquence:

 

“There's another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box; and must th’ inheritor himself have no more, ha?”

 

I love these comic riffs; in this case, playing on legalese. I realized I wasn’t sure about quiddits, though I assumed it was related to the old Scholastic notion of quiddity – whatness. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines quiddit as “a subtilty; an equivocation. A low word.” Johnson also gives us the related word, quillet: “subtilty; nicety; fraudulent distinction.” The popular sense that lawyers are sophists playing with words has a long history. Robert Browning uses quiddit and rather tackily rhymes it in the twentieth stanza of “Old Pictures In Florence”:

 

“Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory

For daring so much, before they well did it.

The first of the new, in our race’s story,

Beats the last of the old; ’tis no idle quiddit.”

 

Soon comes the scene everyone’s waiting for. Hamlet gazes at the skull of Yorick, the king’s jester when the prince was a boy. I always liked that Olivier turns his head when speaking to Horatio. He smiles. That little touch always gets me. Other actors never take their eyes off Yorick's skull, but Hamlet loses me again when he and Laertes engage in a grief competition.