3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Blackstone (apud Malone,1780, p. 360) :“By this scene it appears that Hamlet was then thirty years ago, and knew Yorick well, who had been dead twenty-two years. And yet in the beginning of the play he is spoken of as a very young man, one that designed to go back to school, i.e. to the university of Wittenberg. The poet in the fifth act had forgot what he wrote in the first. --------E [Blackstone]”

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3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Caldecott (ed. 1819) : “In these matters our author was too careless; and this was a sort of episode, in which he would venture to take the largest license.”

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3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Verplanck (ed. 1844): “Judge Blackstone remarks on this as a slip of memory in the poet. It appears, from what the Gravedigger subsequently says, that Hamlet must have been at this period thirty years old; and yet, in the early part of the paly, we are told of his intention to return to school at Wittenberg. In the first quarto, Yorick’s skull is said to have laid in the ground twelve years, instead of three-and-twenty, as at present.

“The editor of the Illustrated edition [knight?] acutely remarks that ‘It is probably that, in the reconstruction of the play, Shakespeare perceived that the general depth of Hamlet’s philosophy indicated a mind too mature for the possession of a very young man.”

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Hudson (ed. 1856) : “By this scene it appears that Hamlet was then thirty years ago, and knew Yorick well, who had been dead twenty-three years. And yet in the beginning of the play he is spoken of as a very young man, one that designed to go back to school, i.e. to the university of Wittenberg. The poet in the fifth act had forgot what he wrote in the first.”

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3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Tschischwitz (ed. 1869): “Blackstone macht die Bermerkung, es sei eine Vergesslichkeit des Dichters, dass er den 30 Jahre (s. 176) alten Hamlet am Anfange des Stücks wieder auf Universität wolle gehen lassen. Natürlich beruht diese Aeusserung auf einer ganz falschen. Vorstellung von den deutschen Hochschulen und ihren Einrichtungen. Alex. v. Humboldt hörte bekanntlich bis in sein hohes Alter hinauf noch Collegia bei seinem Freunde Bockh.” [Blackstone made the observation that it may be negligence by the poet that he desired to allow the thirty-year old Hamlet to go to university. Naturally this utterance depends on the entirely false representation of German high school and its arrangements. Alex V. Humboldt, it is well known, attended college [[lectures]] by his friend Bockh until his old age.]

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Clark & Wright (ed. 1872): “Blackstone calls attention to the discrepancy between the statement here with regard to Hamlet’s age, by which he must have been thirty years old, and that in the early part of the play whre he is described as a very young man, a student at the University [1.2.113 (295)].”

3339 is] Corson (1874, p. 32): <p. 32>“‘was’ suits better what follows: ‘Ham. Ay, marry, why was he sent into England? Clo. Why, because he was mad;’ </p. 32>

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne]Marshall (1875, p. 95): <p. 95> “The remaining point of importance in this scene is the allusion to Hamlet’s age, from which it appears, according to the grave-digger, that he was born on the very day his father defeated Fortinras [3338-39]; that also on that day this rustic wit ‘came to’ the trade of grave-maker [3334-35]; finally, that he had ‘been sexton, man and boy, thirty years’ [3351-52]. This would seem to put it beyond doubt that Hamlet was thirty years old. Besides this evidence we have the corroborative circumstances that Yorick’s skull had lain in the earth three-and-twenty years [3361-62]. As Hamlet tells Horatio that he knew Yorick, who had borne him ‘on his back a thousand times,’ and whose lips he had kissed ‘he knew not how oft’ [3374, 3376], in fact, that Yorick had been the constant companion of his early childhood, the age of Hamlet could not have been possibly much less than thirty years. I have thought it better to discuss in the Appendix† the question how much we ought to rely upon the figures in the passages referred to above.” </p. 95>

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Tschischwitz (apud Furness, ed. 1877): “Blackstone’s criticism is founded on a very erroneous idea of German Universities and their arrangements. It is well known that A.v.Humboldt, up to an advanced age, attended lectures (Collegia hörte) under his friend Boekh.”

3338 young Hamlet] White (ed. 1883): “Hamlet the son.”

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Wilson (ed. 1934): “. . . and yet this age does not at all tally with the impression of youth and inexperience which Ham. gives us at the opening of the play. The discrepancy, prob. due to revision, has occasioned much discussion, for which v. Introd. p. xlvii, and Furness, and cf. Østerberg, Prince Hamlet’s Age (Copenhagen, 1924) for an opinion differing from that just given.”

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Wilson (ed. 1934, Introduction, xlvii): <p. xlvii>“The most famous of them [puzzles], for example, the puzzle of Hamlet’s age, which seems to be about eighteen at the opening of the play and is inferentially fixed at thirty by the words of the sexton in the last act, looks like a consequence of revision, but has obviously nothing to do with any difficulty in the original play and passes entirely unnoticed by spectators in the theatre, seeing that their Hamlet is an actor made up to represent a certain age, which they accept without question.1”

<n>1 “Cf. Bradley, op. cit. p. 73, ‘the moment Burbage entered it must have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty.’” </n></p. xlvii>

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Rylands (ed. 1947, Notes): “Since the Clown tells us that he has been a grave-maker man and boy for thirty years, and that Yorick who took Hamlet on his knee has been dead twenty-three years, and since the Player King and Player Queen are represented as having been married thirty years, it would seem to fix the Prince’s age and to fix it as older than we should expect, particularly as to an Elizabethan thiry was a more mature age than it is to us. We feel, in at any rate the early part of the play, that Hamlet is little more than twenty. Shakespeare may have revised the text to suit a particular actor and, as Bradley says, ‘the moment Burbage entereed it must have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty.’ The most convincing performances of the part, be it noted, are often given by schoolboys and undergraduates rather than by professional actors of middle age and long experience.”

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Spencer (ed. 1980): “There seems to be a curious symbolism in the gravedigger’s having entered upon his occupation at the same time as Hamlet entered into being, as if preparation for death began from the day of birth.”

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Jenkins (ed. 1982, Longer Notes, 351-4): <p. 351>“This apparent allusion to Hamlet’s age has been the cause of much perplexity. No arithmetic is necessary to determine that Hamlet must be thirty, as seems to be near enough confirmed by the ensuing reference to Yorick, who, after delighting Hamlet’s boyhood (([3373-6])), has been dead three and twenty years (([3362])). Whether the number of Hamlet’s years was of concern to Shakesepare, or should be to us, is perhaps another matter. It is not incompatible that the King and Queen in The Murder of Gonzaga, who image Hamlet’s parents, have been married thirty years (([2024-9])), and some have thought it significant that it is not ((but see LN [Longer Notes])). Yet a thirty-year-old Hamlet goes against the impression the play conveys of the hero’s youth. We first meet him as a ‘student’ from the university, to which he is anxious to return. We first hear of him as ‘young Hamlet’ ((1.1.175 [169])), which the present passage is still content to call him (([3338])); and although the epithet has the function of distinguishing him from his father, it also matches him against tohse other sons, ‘young Fortinbras’ (([112])) and ‘young Laertes’ (([2841])), who are specifically characterized as youthfully hot-headed and impetuous. Hamlet’s own youthfulness is crucial at [467-73, 590, 701], still explicit at [725, 2606]. The perfection </p. 551> <p. 552>of manhood which Ophelia sees in im is that of youth’s full bloom (([1815])).

“Attempts to deny a certain discrepancy are futile. by the grave-digger’s acount of the combat between their fathers, young Fortinbras as well as Hamlet must be thirty, Horatio, who had memory of the combat ((76-7])), considerably more. Either Shakespeare, as Blackstone supposed, here forgot what he wrote in the first act, or else he chose to ignore it.

“There are inevitably conjectures of revision, of which Q1, so long as it could be taken for an earlier version, was naturally thought to show evidence. It makes no reference to the sexton’s thirty years at his job ((nor, for that matter, to Hamlet’s birth)); it gives Yorick a mere ‘dozen’ years in the grave instead of twenty-three; and it represents in the Gonzago play a marriage of forty years not thirty. But the only conclusion to be drawn from these divergences, now that Q1 is recognized as a reported text, is that the reporter had a poor memory for numbers, as indeed other instances in this same scene confirm (([3330], three years, Q1 seven years; [3374], a thousand times, Q1 twenty times; [3376] I know not how oft, Q1 a hundred times; [3466], forty thousand brothers, Q1 twenty brothers)).

“Nevertheless it is still widely accepted that the sexton’s numbers in Q2 have ‘the appearance of being expressly inserted in order to fix Hamlet’s age’ ((Bradley, p. 407)); and conjecture has been busy to suggest why. We can dismiss at once the notion that Hamlet had to be made thirty to fit Burbage. It is not to be supposed that a highly accomplished actor still in his middle thirties when Q2 was being printed would have difficulty in sustaining a youthful role; and if he had, what would be obvious from the start could not afterwards be helped by a belated last-act statement. In fact an elegy on Burbage includes ‘young Hamlet’ among his celebrated parts. It is more usual to account for a thirty-year-old prince by the demand of the play itself rather than the actor. Yet is not a much more plausible theory, though one commonly put forward, that Shakespeare proclaimed Hamlet to be thirty in order to suit the character he found he had created. No doubt Hamlet strikes us in the last act as more mature than in the first. But how could it be otherwise when he has lived in the first. But how oculd it be otherwise when he has lived through the experiences the play has visited on him? The reflections these have evoked from him throughout four acts have given him a famed intellectual stature; but it is safe to say that it would never have occurred to us that he must on that account be older than we had hitherto supposed. To insist now that the seemingly </p. 552> <p.553> young hero is no less than thirty after all, far from remvoing an inconsistency, would be the surest way of drawing attention to one, as the fuss over Hamlet’s age has only too well shown. Nothing about his age would be more difficult to credit than such dramatic naïveté on Shakespeare’s part. It is clear, moreover, that Shakespeare still not only speaks but thinks of him as young—witness the fight soon to come at Ophelia’s grave, the boarding of the pirate ship, the ‘rashness’ of rifling the packet with the King’s commision (([3514-5])). The whole catastrophe turns upon rivalry in fencing, which was, as the play takes unusual pains to emphasize, an accomplishment of youth (([3078+7-3078+16])). The statements of the grave-digger must therefore have been introduced not because of but in spite of what they imply about Hamlet’s age.

“Shücking’s rhetorical question, ‘Why else are these precise pieces of information given, than in order to fix Hamlet’s age unmistakably?’ ((RES, XI, 132)) admits, to be sure, of an answer. But first one needs to observe that the numbers are not in fact precise and that they are not attached to Hamlet. ‘Thirty years’ is a round number, and a boast at that. And although ‘23’ looks specific enough in the figures of Q2, if the copy, like F, had ‘three and twenty’, it would give a very different impression. The shepherd who says ‘I would thee were no age between ten and three and twenty’ ((WT 3.3.159-60 (1501-02))) is not aiming at exactitude. ((Cf. [Tro. 1.2.226 (391-92); 1H6 1.1.113 (125)])). In what is probably the most satisfactory treatment of the problem ((Prince Hamlet’s Age, Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Hist.–fil. Meddelelser, VIII, no. 4)) Østerberg has shown that thirty years was a traditional formula for a stretch of time covering most of a man’s life. Instances include Marlowe’s Faustus, ‘I have been a student here these thirty years’ ((v.ii.42)); the Abbess in The Jew of Malta, ‘’Tis thirty winters long since some of us Did stray so far’ ((I.ii.303)); one of a group of fiddlers in Lyly’s Mother Bombie, ‘I have been a minstrel these thirty years’ ((v.iii.16)); one of a pair of watchmen in the old King Leir, ‘I have bin a watchman about this Beacon this xxx. yere’ ((l. 2442)). The last two are low comics who appear with like companions when their play moves towards its close, and they give hint of a dramatic tradition to which the Clown in Hamlet adhers. The sexton’s thirty years belong to his role, not to Hamlet’s. If Shakespeare had been concerned to impress his hero’s age upon us, it would have been easy enough, when the dialogue harks back to his birth, to let Hamlet himself disclose it. The time the grave-digger has been at work and Yorick’s skull </p. 553> <p. 554>in the earth relates to Hamlet only in so far as their roles impinge on his—as of course they significantly do, though in ways that a preoccupation with Hamlet’s exact age is liable not to notice. The twenty-three years that Yorick has been dead are the years that separate Hamlet from his boyhood; and that this loss of boyhood is what Shakespeare associates with them is confirmed in The Winter’s Talewhen Leontes, also recalling his boyhood, casts his mind back ‘twenty-three years’ ((I.ii.155)). The grave-digger’s numbers are less important for themselves than for the pattern of a life which they evoke. What mattes is that when Hamlet came into the world a man began to dig graves and has now been at it for a lifetime. For let no one rise up and assure us that to have been a grave-digger ‘man and boy, thirty years’ one need not be much more than forty. As Hamlet’s talk with the grave-digger thus links the grave-digger’s occupation with the term of Hamlet’s life, will it not seem to us that the hero has come face to face with his own destiny? The companion of his carefull childhood has already been a generation underground. Must not he himself, however ‘young’ or old, be ready for what will come? This scene leads on to the next ((cf. V.ii.216-18)) in ways apparently unsuspected by those who have been able to think of it as an interpolation ro an afterthought ((e.g. RES, XI, 129-38; Yale Rev., LIV, 59)).

“That it is not primarily Hamlet’s age that is in question is confirmed by the fact that the beginning of the grave-digger’s occupation is said to have coincided not merely with Hamlet’s birth but with King Hamlet’s victory over Fortinbras, described in the opening scene. It is this which, if we consider it oo curiously, makes Horatio, Hamlet’s ‘fellow-student’, much older than hamlet, which can hardly have been the dramatist’s design. What was, I take it, was to link the end with the beginning, so that the activity of the grave-diger, despite the lateness of his entry, is found to span the whole play and with it the whole career of Hamlet since he was born into a world of strife. Exactly how old the prince is may seem of less moment than this.” /p. 554>

3338 very day that young Hamlet was borne] Edwards (ed. 1985): “By making the clown say later (([3351-2])) that he has been sexton for thrity years, Shakespeare pointedly tells us that Hamlet is thirty. A similar late fixing of the hero’s age is in [Lr. 4.7.60 [2814]] ((‘fourscore and upward’)). Contrast the early mention of Juliet’s age (([Rom. 1.3.13 [363]] )): ‘she’s not fourteen’. Most people think of Hamlet as younger than thirty. It seems unnecessary to speculate, however, that Shakespeare here underlines Hamlet’s increasing maturity. But if he is thirty, he’s an elderly student, and Gertrude must be in her late forties, at least.”