Yorick is a person in Shakespeare's play Hamlet — but a person who is already dead before the play starts. He had been the king's jester, the man whose job was to make the court laugh, and he used to carry the boy Hamlet on his back. Near the end of the play Hamlet is standing in a graveyard when a gravedigger throws up an old skull, and it turns out to be Yorick's. Hamlet holds it and says, 'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest.' It is one of the most famous moments on any stage: a man looking a skull in the face and thinking about how a laughing, living person becomes this. You will meet Yorick outside the play too. The picture of a man in black holding a skull is used everywhere — in cartoons, adverts, film posters — as shorthand for 'thinking about death' or simply 'Shakespeare'. And people quote the line when something once loved is now gone. If you use the name, use it as a name: capital Y, no 'the'.

約里克（莎士比亞《哈姆雷特》中已故的宮廷弄臣，哈姆雷特手持其骷髏感嘆生死的名場面）