Quote Analysis

Still addressing Yorick's skull, Hamlet imagines sending it to a vain woman's chamber to show her that no amount of makeup can prevent her from eventually looking like this skull.

The verb 'paint' literalizes cosmetics as a kind of concealment project, and 'an inch thick' makes the effort sound desperate, as if enough layers might somehow prevent decay. 'To this favour she must come' uses 'favour' (face, appearance) with dark irony—this skull's appearance is the final 'favour' (destination) everyone reaches. Hamlet's instruction to 'make her laugh at that' is cruel; he imagines the skull functioning as a memento mori that robs women of their vanity, using Yorick's remains as a tool to mock feminine artifice.

Support a thesis that Hamlet's graveyard misogyny reveals how he connects female sexuality with decay—he specifically imagines using the skull to humiliate a woman's cosmetic efforts, as if women's attempts to be attractive offend him by denying the death he's now fixated on.