History Main / AlasPoorYorick

!!'''As a DeathTrope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.'''

* In Alex Cox's ''Revengers Tragedy'', the main character picks up the skull of his murdered lover and talks about her demise. He then uses it as a puppet and repeatedly screeches, "Revenge!" to show that underneath the snarkiness, he's quite AxCrazy.

* In the fourth season of ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'', Henchman 21 talks to Henchman 24's (possibly haunted) skull and keeps it in his room. The Monarch even lampshades this, and tells 21 to "knock all this 'Alas poor Yorick' crap off."

* In ''VideoGame/LamplightCity'', one of the cases Miles Fordham investigates involves a high society woman, a Madam Desiree Lathan, having been murdered by being burned to death. One of the few intacts pieces left of her body is her skull, and examining it causes Miles' rather snarky partner, Bill, to do a riff on the trope namer.

->''"[[TropeNamer 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 rims 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? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that."''

Subtrope of [[ShoutOut/ToShakespeare Shout Out: To Shakespeare]], and tends to be confused with the slightly more known "to be or not to be". If the character starts ''talking'' to the skull, it can be a SurrogateSoliloquy.

* In the remake of ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil'', Lisa Trevor picks up and cradles her mother's skull [[spoiler:before committing suicide by jumping into a pit]].

** In ''Web of Spider-Man'' Annual #1, Spidey holds the head of a robot he just defeated, purportedly because he's impressed with the advanced technology and design.

* When Thomas More had been condemned for treason and beheaded, his daughter Margaret climbed up onto the "Traitors' Gate" of London Bridge, where the heads were displayed, retrieved it (reportedly by bribing the man whose job it was to toss it in the river), and kept it in her room as a holy relic for the rest of her life, and it was eventually buried with her husband after her own death.

* In 2022 during the UsefulNotes/{{Russia}}n invasion of UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}}, Russian nationalist and [[PrivateMilitaryContractors mercenary]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Mangushev Igor Mangushev]] was infamously filmed putting on a show with a skull, {{dehumaniz|ation}}ing Ukrainians and calling for genocide on them. The skull allegedly was that of a dead Ukrainian defender of Azovstal in Mariupol, and he pondered making it a [[SkullCups goblet]]. Mangushev was killed by a bullet to the back of the head at close range later in February 2023.

* When Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded, his wife Elizabeth Throckmorton was said to have carried his embalmed head around with her for the rest of her life. When she died her son inherited it, and it was buried with him at his death.

* ''ComicBook/{{Daredevil}}'': [[RetiredMonster The Owl]] does this to a statue wearing Daredevil's mask in ''ComicBook/DaredevilEndOfDays'', and let's say it's not as heartfelt as otherwise expected of this trope.