Two gravediggers debate giving Ophelia a Christian burial which is traditionally denied to deaths by suicide. They agree that, while the coroner has declared Ophelia’s death an accident, he would not have done so if she hadn’t been a gentlewoman. 

They are singing and making jokes about their profession—a gravedigger is a better builder than a mason, they say, because what a gravedigger builds lasts until Doomsday—when Hamlet and Horatio arrive. Neither is yet aware of Ophelia’s death.

Hamlet is both amused and appalled by the gravediggers’ humor. When they start to unearth old skulls, Hamlet himself begins to make morbid jokes, speculating on the skulls’ past lives. He gets into a punning battle of wits with one of the gravediggers, who claims to have been working at his profession since the day that the late king overthrew Fortinbras—coincidentally, the same day that young Hamlet was born. The gravedigger, not knowing who is speaking to, says Hamlet was sent away to England because he was mad.

At last, the gravedigger unearths the skull of someone Hamlet knew: the jester Yorick. Hamlet addresses the skull, at first horrified to the point of sickness, then blackly joking that everyone, king and jester alike, will come to this same fate in the end.