‘Alas, poor thing!’

At the outset, let me proffer my humble apologies to Shakespeare, Hamlet and poor Yorick’s skull, which was Hamlet’s object of profuse sympathy. Yorick was the court jester and, I daresay, was a barrelful of laughs as he and his master downed many a tankard of the blushful Hippocrene at the nearby King & Crown. …