OCR Text |
Show YORRICK'S SKULL While Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson was making his farewell appear-. appear-. ance in New York City last winter, Mr. Edward Bok, editor of the Ladles Home Journal, witnessed a performance perform-ance of Hamlet. In the course of a letter written to Sir Johnston, thanking thank-ing him for "the refreshment that you fgave a tired man when he went to the . theater," Mr. Bok writes: "In the graveyard scene where you take up your Yorrick's skull a gentleman gentle-man sitting behind me audibly expressed ex-pressed his intense regret that a beautiful beau-tiful performance should be marred by the fact of a lapse in that particular particu-lar piece of property, he claiming that the skull you picked up as that of Yorrick's was not that of a man but of a woman, as shown by the formation forma-tion of the head. I have not the pleasure pleas-ure of knowing the man who made the remark, but he looked intelligent, and his years somewhere around sixty suggested a certain authority of knowledge. I questioned the accuracy accur-acy of the statement to Mrs. Bok, for I have always contended that few actors ac-tors on the stage were more careful about their properties than yourself." On receiving this letter Forbes-Robertson had the skull in question taken to the Anthropological department of the Natural History Museum in New York and found that Mr. Bok's neighbor neigh-bor was wrong. The skull, so the authorities au-thorities said, was not that of a woman, wo-man, but of a man, and was, curious enough, the skull of a very low type of person most likely a criminal and that he had evidently suffered from two serious wounda in the head. |