NOTE: What follows is the text of a conference paper that I wrote during my days as Professor of English at Arkansas State University. I submitted it for publication at a few very good scholarly journals and got a few very nice rejection letters. I still like the thesis and suspect that perhaps the East Coast grandees who ran the journals did not think an English professor from Jonesboro, Arkansas, carried enough gravitas to sustain a thesis that called for a bit of rethinking about the text of Hamlet and the correct understanding of the play. I offer it here to general readers for their enjoyment. JDH
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Jeffrey D. Hoeper
Arkansas State University
January 15, 1997
How Old Was Hamlet?
For more than a century scholars and critics have been troubled by the discrepancy between Hamlet's presumed age, thirty, and his actions: particularly, his adolescent love for Ophelia, his truancy from Wittenberg, his preoccupation with his mother's remarriage, his situation as a chided child too immature to govern his father's kingdom, and so on. Although it seems clear to such readers that Hamlet should be much younger than thirty, it has always seemed equally clear from the evidence in Act 5, Scene 1, that Hamlet must be thirty. When closely examined, however, the text of the play not only fails to prove Hamlet was thirty, but conceivably even suggests he was as young as sixteen.
As normally presented, the information on Hamlet's age has five components: (1) The First Clown came to his trade as grave maker "Of all the days i' the year . . . that day that our last king Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras" (5.1.154 56). (2) Fortinbras's defeat occurred on "the very day that young Hamlet was born" (5.1.159 60). (3) The gravemaker claims to "have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years" (5.1.176 77). (4) A skull, apparently Yorick's, "Has lain in the earth three and twenty years" (5.1.190 91). (5) Hamlet knew Yorick. From all this, the scholars conclude that Hamlet must be thirty. Indeed, most editors seem to assume that the lines in question are intended by Shakespeare to define Hamlet's age, yet the last act of a play is the last place where one expects to find such expository information. What dramatic function do the lines have?
Hamlet has just returned from abroad. He has discovered bitterly the folly of the youthful idealism with which he had earlier attempted to distinguish good from evil and thereby to set the times aright. He has learned that old men meddle, that wives and lovers are oft untrue, and that good friends will turn to spies and betrayers for the sake of advancement. He himself has become the rash and casual murderer of three men. Where once his religious convictions produced in him an agony of indecision as he stood with sword in hand behind the praying Claudius, now he recollects with amusement the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, saying, "Why, man, they did make love to this employment; / They are not near my conscience" (5.2.57 80). He believes "readiness is all" (5.2.233 34) and says "praised be rashness" (5.2.7), and he observes the gravediggers's handiwork with a morbid jocularity.
That jocularity first leads him to speak with the clown, who responds just as playfully, taking advantage of every ambiguity in Hamlet's questions:
Hamlet. . . . Whose grave's this, sirrah?
First Clown. Mine sir. . . .
Hamlet. I think it be thine, indeed; for thou liest in't.
. . . . . . .
First Clown. 'Tis a quick lie, sir; 'twill away again, from me to you.
Hamlet. What man dost thou dig it for?
First Clown. For no man, sir.
Hamlet. What woman then?
First Clown. For none, neither.
Hamlet. Who is to be buried in 't?
First Clown. One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead.
Hamlet. How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. (5.1.127 49)
The function of these lines is to develop dramatic irony. The audience knows that the grave is being dug for Ophelia and that Hamlet's crude and immature joking must give way to grief when he learns the horrid truth.
Hamlet thinks, however, that no grief can touch him now. In his affected cynicism, he continues to press the clown, idly asking how long he has been a grave maker. The clown's answer that he came to it "of all the days i' the year . . . that day our last king Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras" (5.1.155 57) is yet another example of equivocation. This is equivalent to saying, "I came to my trade on the anniversary of King Hamlet's victory over Fortinbras." By implication it identifies the month and the day, but not the year. Since Hamlet must certainly have known the month, day, and year of that battle, the only way to explain his next question "How long is that since?" (5.1.158) is to assume that he perceived the ambiguity in the clown's response and that he is once again trying to find out how many years the clown has been a gravedigger. Hamlet did not, however, phrase his question precisely enough, and the clown playfully takes "How long is that since?" to mean not, "How long is it since that day when you became a gravemaker?" but rather, "How long is it since that day when King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras?" He tells Hamlet what "every fool can tell" (5.1.159 60) and what Hamlet certainly knows that the defeat of Fortinbras took place on the very day Prince Hamlet was born. This plainly does not answer the question about how long the clown has been in his trade, and it demonstrates no necessary relationship between the clown's years in his trade and Hamlet's age. However, the clown's passing reference to young Hamlet's madness and exile leads Hamlet to drop his idle questioning about the clown's tenure in his trade in order to pry into the common gossip about the cause of Hamlet's misfortunes. He wants to find out whether the masses suspect that his "madness" is the result of his suspicions about foul play in the death of his father.
The conversation on the causes of Hamlet's madness develops through equivocation for several lines until Hamlet asks upon what "ground" (5.1.175) i.e., as a result of what circumstances-did Prince Hamlet lose his wits. This is his third attempt to extract a clear answer, and his third failure. The clown takes the word "ground" literally and, according to the First Folio, replies: "Why heere in Denmarke: I have bin sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares." This answer is altogether typical of the clown. If we imagine his actions and paraphrase his words, they would go something like this: "Why, Hamlet lost his wits here on Danish ground. (Stomping his foot.) I have spent sixteen years here in this very graveyard. As man and boy, I have been thirty years in Denmark." The clown is a hair splitter who tolerates no ambiguity. He wants to prove that he knows whereof he speaks and that he has been in Denmark long enough to say where Hamlet lost his wits. Moreover, he insists on clearing up any ambiguity about the meaning of "here" by telling how long he has been on the particular spot of ground, as well as how long he has lived in the country.
Unfortunately, most modern versions of Hamlet emend this speech in a way that makes the clown's response uncharacteristically uncomplicated. In the Second Quarto, which is generally thought to be the soundest text of the play, the word "sixeteene" is written as "Sexten" (Hamlet: Second Quarto 5.1.176), and "Sexten," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be a variant spelling either of sixteen or of sexton. Since both the Second Quarto and the First Folio agree in using a word that can mean sixteen, one wonders why standard editorial practices are defied and the emendation "sexton" is universally used. The answer, of course, is that it is easy to make sense of the statement, "I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years"; and the editors of the play have not yet realized that the clown is much more likely to make an equivocal statement than an explicit one. An interesting implication of accepting "sixteen" as the correct reading is that, if the clown really did become a gravemaker in the year when Hamlet was born (and he certainly hints at that possibility), then Hamlet must be only sixteen years old. Since there is much other evidence that Hamlet is youthful, this is less a possibility than a probability.
The only remaining bit of textual evidence that even begins to suggest Hamlet is older than sixteen is the problem of Yorick's skull. There are two ways of disposing of that grisly evidence.
First, there is the possibility that the skull displayed as having remained three and twenty years in the ground is not Yorick's skull. To demonstrate this, let us consider the scene theatrically with stage directions inserted in brackets. As the clown digs Ophelia's grave, he throws up skulls apace. Then, after a conversation with Hamlet about the length of time it takes for a corpse to decay, the following exchange takes place:
First Clown. . . . Here's a skull now [he holds up a skull]; this skull hath lain you i' the earth three and twenty years.
Hamlet. Whose was it?
First Clown. A Whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?
Hamlet. Nay, I know not.
First Clown. A pestilence on him for a mad rogue: a' poured a flagon of Renish on my head once. [The Clown bends to the grave again, arising with yet another skull.] This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick's skull, the king's jester. (5.1.189 99)
If the scene is performed in this way, the skull that has lain twenty three years in the ground is not Yorick's skull, and Yorick's skull may have lain in the ground a much shorter time-though certainly longer than the eight or nine years the clown tells us it takes a corpse to rot. And if all we know is that Yorick has been dead at least eight years, then Hamlet, who had ridden on Yorick's back "a thousand times" need only be older than eleven instead of older than twenty six. All hinges on whether "This same skull" means "this same skull that we have just been discussing" or "this same skull that I now hold in my hand." On the whole, the passage seems to support the traditional notion of a thirty year old Hamlet, for it is likely that the mad rogue who poured a flagon of Rhenish on the clown's head might well have been Yorick, the king's jester. But the second reading remains a possibility; nothing in Shakespeare's text prevents the actors from performing the scene with two skulls.
Suppose, however, that we could somehow know for certain that the scene was to be performed with only a single skull. Is it also certain that Shakespeare intended that skull to have lain "i' the earth three and twenty years"? How confident should we be in the accuracy of the words "three and twenty years"?
The Second Quarto, which some critics believe was set into type from Shakespeare's own fair copy of Hamlet, prints the numeral "23" where the First Folio has "three and twenty." At first glance, there seems no difference. Note, however, that a handwritten numeral in a manuscript could easily be misread. One can feel confident that what Shakespeare wrote looked very much like the number 23 to the compositor, but the manuscript he worked with was far from legible, judging from the abundant misspellings and misreadings throughout the Second Quarto (Wilson 1: 88 89). Apparently, Shakespeare wrote in a fluid "Secretary hand," in which each letter or numeral glides into the next (Kellner 18 20). In such a script a 2 can easily be confused with a 1. Here, for example, is the date 25 October 1598 in an Elizabethan script which Leon Kellner cites as an example of handwriting that may have been similar to Shakespeare's (184):
Conceivably, Shakespeare may have written "13" where the compositor printed "23." Such a plausible error in the Second Quarto was not likely to be corrected in the First Folio, since the latter was apparently typeset from an "interlined and marginally annotated" copy of the Second Quarto (Bowers 132; Wilson 1: 88 93).
The only other copy of the play that is capable of shedding any direct light on what Shakespeare actually wrote is the First Quarto. Whether the First Quarto is an early draft of the play, a reconstruction based on notes and memories of performances, or a chopped down version for traveling players is not crucial here. What is important is that the First Quarto says the skull has been in the ground "this dozen yeare" (5.1.190). If, as some would have it, the First Quarto is based on Shakespeare's foul papers as rewritten for traveling players, it seems clear that the illegible numerals looked more like a 12 than a 23 to the eventual compositor. If, however, the First Quarto is based on reconstruction of the play from memory or notes, its "dozen yeare" is even more convincing; an auditor is quite unlikely to mishear "twenty three" as a "dozen," but it is possible for one's memory to reduce "thirteen years" to "this dozen years."
To summarize, Act 5, Scene 1, certainly does not prove that Hamlet was thirty. When examined closely, most of the textual evidence that has been used to support that claim turns out to be very uncertain. Not only can the play as it stands be interpreted as wholly consistent with an adolescent Hamlet, but there is also some reason to question the textual accuracy of some of the language that has been used to suggest that Hamlet is thirty. If one replaces "sexton" with the more defensible reading "sixteen" and if one makes the plausible reduction of "23" to "13," then Act 5, Scene 1, very strongly supports the hypothesis of a youthful Hamlet. It demonstrates that Shakespeare's clown had worked sixteen years in the graveyard and suggests that Yorick's skull had been buried thirteen years and that Hamlet was about sixteen at the time of the play's action. These views are strongly supported by historical evidence and by analysis of internal evidence elsewhere in the play.
It appears that Hamlet was based on an earlier play of the same name and on the story of Hamlet in Belleforest's Histories Tragiques of 1582. In this version Hamlet is too young to assume his father's throne. Belleforest writes:
Geruth having (as I sayd before) so much forgotten herself, the prince Hamblet perceiving himself to bee in danger of his life, as being abandoned of his owne mother, and forsaken of all men, and assuring himselfe that Fengon would not detract the time to send him the same way his father Horvendile was gone, to beguile the tyrant in his subtilties (that esteemed him to bee of such a minde that if he once attained to mans estate he wold not long delay the time to revenge the death of his father) counterfeiting the mad man with such craft and subtill practises, that he made shewe as if hee had utterly lost his wittes: and under that vayle hee covered his pretense, and defended his life from the treasons and practises of the tyrant his uncle. (New Variorum 2: 94)
We also know that Richard Burbage was praised for having played Hamlet as a young man. Fletcher's elegy on the death of Burbage includes the following lines:
Hee's gone & with him what a world are dead,
Which he revived, to be revived soe,
No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe. (Campbell and Quinn 89)
This praise clearly refers to the range in age of the characters Burbage could portray, and in the Renaissance a man of thirty was no longer "young." John Draper says that old age began at thirty five (48). "Life," according to Draper, "was short in the early 17th century; Iago at twenty eight seems to be middle aged" (194). If, as many suspect, Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical, then the sonnets support Draper's argument. Writing at about age thirty, Shakespeare was already describing himself as an old man in
That time of life . . .
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold. (Sonnet 73)
Thus, we know that the Hamlet of Shakespeare's probable source was a minor, that Burbage portrayed Hamlet as a very young man, and that Shakespeare himself sprinkled the expression "young Hamlet" liberally throughout the play. We know that the Elizabethans would not have viewed a thirty year old as young and that sixteen was a typical age for an Elizabethan aristocrat to attend a university.
On top of all this, there is much internal evidence of Hamlet's youth. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet's father dies; yet Hamlet, who is loved by his people, is not crowned. Instead, his mother remains queen, and her second husband becomes both king and Hamlet's guardian. If Hamlet is thirty, this is odd; if sixteen, it is understandable. In Act 1, Scene 2, Hamlet is chastised like a schoolboy for his excessive grief; in Act 1, Scene 5, he jots down the ghost's words on a student's "tables"; and throughout the play no one treats Hamlet as a grown man. To Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, he is their prince and a fellow student. To Laertes and Polonius, he is a youthful prince whose adolescent love for Ophelia is apt to prove fickle. Even Hamlet thinks of himself as more fit for fencing lessons than for the outright warfare undertaken by Fortinbras. If Hamlet is thirty, all this is very odd; if sixteen, it is understandable. Throughout the play, Hamlet's affection for his mother and his revulsion at her remarriage are more intense than one would expect to find in a grown man. Furthermore, Hamlet's mother is still young enough to prompt passionate love and perhaps sexually inspired murder. If Hamlet is thirty and Gertrude is over forty five, this is odd; if they are but sixteen and thirty two, it is understandable. Finally, in hesitating to exact revenge, Hamlet is like a youth struggling to reconcile his tutoring about good and evil and heaven and hell with the bleak exigencies and muddled possibilities of action in the real world.
In the next film version of Hamlet we should hope that the lead will not be played by a grizzled Mel Gibson or a mustachioed and nearly silver haired Kenneth Branagh. Nor should we particularly applaud Laurence Oliver as he solemnly intones, "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." No, the lead role should be played by someone like John Boy Walton saying in an adolescent tenor, "This is the story of a boy forced tragically to become a man."
Jeffrey D. Hoeper
Arkansas State University
Notes
1 The question of Hamlet's age was rather fully debated in the late nineteenth century, but the argument for a youthful Hamlet always foundered on the textual evidence of act 5, scene 1. Horace Howard Furness provides extensive quotations on the issue in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1918) vol. 1, 391 95 and vol. 2, 346 47. See also Godfrey F. Bradby, The Problems of Hamlet (New York: Haskell House, 1965), 9 11; Salvador de Madriaga, On Hamlet, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1964) 113 15; V. Osterberg, Prince Hamlet's Age (Copenhagen, 1924); and A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904) 408. Bradby and Madariaga both agree with Bradley that Hamlet is thirty. Osterberg argues that Hamlet is closer to twenty, but does so on grounds that are persuasively rejected by Madriaga.
2 Except where otherwise noted, all references are to the New Cambridge Edition of The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, eds. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1942).
3 Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, a facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kokeritz (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954) 768.
4 See J. Dover Wilson, The Manuscript of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the Problem of Its Transmission: An Essay in Critical Bibliography, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963) 88 93. See also G. B. Harrison, "Introduction," William Shakespeare: The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, 1603 (1922; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966) xxix; and Albert B. Weiner, "Introduction," Hamlet: The First Quarto, 1603 (Great Neck, New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1962) 3.
5 An able summary of the competing theories is presented by Weiner, 1 60. See also Harrison, v xxxi; Hardin Craig, A New Look at Shakespeare's Quartos (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1961) 75 83; and Clifford Leech, "Studies in Hamlet, 1901 1955," Shakespeare Survey: 9, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956) 4 7.
6 The failure to designate Hamlet as king is nearly as odd in an elective monarchy as in a hereditary one. We know that Hamlet was loved by the people; if he had been of age, his father would certainly have nominated Hamlet as his successor, a choice that his people would surely have supported. The most logical explanation of the facts in the paly is that Hamlet was still too young to be chosen as king.
