Shakespeare Magazine 14

How Old is Hamlet?
youthfulness. Lawrence Stone’s statistical labours
give a clear picture of when it was that early modern
Englishmen went to university. For instance, the
median age of matriculation at Oxford for the
years 1600-02 was 17.1. Among the aristocracy
and gentry it was substantially lower, at 15.9 years.
Further, it was common for the well-educated
sons of socially elevated families to enter university
as young as eleven or twelve. A good example is
Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and
the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis
and Lucrece. Wriothesley went up to St. John’s
College, Cambridge in 1585 at the age of twelve;
he graduated before he turned sixteen in 1589, at
which point he had already been admitted to Gray’s
Inn. In a word, Hamlet’s desire to return to his
studies at Wittenberg tells us that he is a teenager.
To an audience of theatregoers or readers in late
Elizabethan or early Jacobean London, it would
have been starkly irregular for an aristocrat, let
alone a member of the royalty, to have remained at
university beyond the age of about twenty.
Hamlet’s ambitious but frequently confused and
incoherent mode of discourse sounds like that of
an early modern university student. But as Barbara
Everett has proposed, it might well be that he also
looks like a student, or at least that he did so to
Shakespeare’s earliest audiences: in addition to its
role in signifying mourning, black is the academic
colour.
We come now to the encounter between Hamlet
and the Gravedigger. Hamlet asks the Gravedigger
when he began digging graves, and the following
exchange ensues:
Gravedigger: Of all the days i’th’ year I cam to’t that
day that our Last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras.
Hamlet: How long is that since?
Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? Every fool can
tell that. It was that very day that young Hamlet
was born – he that is mad and sent into England.
(5.1.139-44)
From which we deduce that although the
Gravedigger thinks that “every fool” knows when
Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and Hamlet
was born, Hamlet himself is less sure. After several
lines in which the Gravedigger works hard to evade
the questions he has been asked by and about
“young Hamlet”, he steers the conversation back to
the ground beneath their feet:
Gravedigger: I have been sexton here, man and boy,
thirty years.
Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’th’ earth ere he
rot?
Gravedigger: Faith, if a be not rotten before a die
... a will last you some eight year or nine year.
(5.1.156-62).
On the face of it, this is open and shut. The
gravedigger has been at his trade (i.e., a sexton) for
thirty years. Hamlet is therefore thirty years old,
however out of keeping that might seem with the
rest of the play. There are, however, both textual and
interpretative grounds to doubt this reading, and to
stick with our inference that Hamlet the student is a
teenager.
The textual crux first. As many readers of
Shakespeare Magazine will be aware, there are
two authoritative versions of the play. One is the
1604/05 Second Quarto (Q2), the other is the
1623 First Folio. Only Q2 supports the reading of
the text given above. On the question of how long
the Gravedigger had been at his work in Denmark,
the Folio (TLN 3351-52) has him say “I have
been sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares”.
The reading is grammatically challenging, but
offers a very different picture of Hamlet’s age. The
Gravedigger has been “heere” (qua Denmark and/
or his graveyard – he is being willfully ambiguous)
for sixteen years, and has been “man and Boy thirty
yeares”. On this account, it is the Gravedigger who
is thirty years old, while Hamlet is only sixteen.
Q2 has traditionally been preferred, on account
both of its grammatical simplicity and of what the
Gravedigger reveals about a disarticulated skull that
has caught his attention: “Here’s a skull now hath
lien you i’th’ earth three and twenty years” (5.1.166-
68). On being pressed, the Gravedigger discloses
that “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the
King’s jester” (5.1.175-77). As Hamlet goes on to
recall the joyful times he had spent with Yorick as a
child and as Yorick died twenty-three years ago, the
textual logic runs smoothly: Hamlet must be thirty
years old, and the Folio reading a corruption of Q2,
which spells sexton “sexten”. The more so because
the thirty years of Hamlet’s life echo the thirty years
shakespeare magazine 9