ABSTRACT
Michael Neill readings of several great canonical tragedies such as The Spanish Tragedy as well as Hamlet, Othello, Anthonyand Cleopatra, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi suggest how playwrights responded to the crisis of identity in their midst. This chapter focuses on four early modern images that trace a highly selective, but significant mini-history of the memento mori skull. It deals with two sixteenth-century exemplars—Hans Holbein's famous anamorphic skull of 1533 in The Ambassadors and Andreas Vesalius's standing skeleton in his De humani corporis fabrica of 1543—and go on to compare them to the locus classicus of such images, Hamlet gazing upon the skull of Yorick. The chapter draws on the beautiful skull in Isaac Fuller's portrait of William Petty, a skull that ironically has been taken out of time twice over by ceding to the "objective" authority of the book its power to represent mortality or even to represent itself.
