What is "yorick"

Yorick is the deceased court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Yorick may also refer to:

• Yorick (programming language)
• Yorick, a purple skull Muppet from Sam and Friends that often tried to eat Kermit the Frog
• In the series The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica by James A. Owen, an army of bird-like creatures dressed as jesters are referred to as either un-men or Yoricks. They play a minor role in the fourth book The Shadow Dragons.
• Yorick, the Gravedigger, a playable champion character in the action real-time strategy video game League of Legends
• Yorick, a warlock and court jester character in the Quest for Glory adventure games
• Deathstalker Yorick, an NPC(non-playable-character) within the online MMO World of Warcraft he is found in Silverpine forest.

Yorick is an interpreted programming language designed for numerics, graph plotting, and steering large scientific simulation codes. It is quite fast due to array syntax, and extensible via C or Fortran routines. It was created in 1996 by David H. Munro of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Yorick is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is the dead court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of the play. The sight of Yorick's skull evokes a monologue from Prince Hamlet on mortality:

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 on a roar? (Hamlet, V.i)

The opening words are very commonly misquoted as "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well."

It has often been suggested that Shakespeare intended his audience to connect Yorick with the Elizabethan comedian Richard Tarlton, a star performer of the pre-Shakespearian stage, who had been dead for around the same time as Yorick in the play.