Sooner or later, everyone who thinks about Shakespeare’s Hamlet has to come to a view on how old its eponymous prince is supposed to be. Hamlet is described on several occasions as “young”; he is roughly the same age as Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern; he seems to be a little younger than Horatio and Laertes; he is a student at Wittenberg; he thinks and speaks like one in the midst of a humanistic education. And yet his exchange with the Gravedigger at the beginning of Act Five appears, anomalously but unambiguously, to indicate that he is thirty years old.
In what follows, I argue that the age given in the graveyard scene does not stand up to scrutiny: it emerges from a textual crux and relies on an authority – the Gravedigger – whose arithmetical skills are very much open to question. More broadly, I want to suggest that the exchange between Hamlet and the Gravedigger is intended to mock the urge to quantificatory certainty; that Shakespeare does not tell us how old Hamlet is in calendar years; and that Hamlet does not, somehow or other, age a decade or more in the time between leaving the stage in Act Four and returning to it in Act Five.
After satisfying himself that the Ghost is not purely a figment of Marcellus and Barnardo’s imaginations, Horatio decrees that they should impart what they “have seen tonight / Unto young Hamlet” (I quote from Harold Jenkins’s Arden 2 edition of the play). “Young” here differentiates the son from his father: Hamlet the Younger. But it is also the adjective with which Shakespeare introduces his disaffected prince, and suggests something about his youthful quality of being. Versions of it are reasserted throughout the play. Claudius counsels Hamlet that his enduring display of grief for his father is “unmanly”, a term whose persuasive force depends on Hamlet aspiring to, rather than already having attained, the condition of manliness; Laertes thinks of Hamlet as “A violet in the youth of primy nature”; the Ghost tells Hamlet that if he were to describe the afterlife in detail, the effect would be to “freeze thy young blood”, and addresses him as a “noble youth”; Claudius turns to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because they are “of so young days brought up with him, / And with so neighbour’d to his youth and haviour”; the fencing match between Hamlet and “young Laertes” is framed with some care as a contest of “youth”. There are many more examples (several of which relate to the comparability of Hamlet and his “delicate and tender” rival, “young Fortinbras”), but the point is incontestable: that Hamlet is “young” should be taken to connote more than his status as the son of a father with the same name.
Hamlet’s status as a student further avows his youthfulness. As Lawrence Stone’s statistical labours make plain, early modern Englishmen went to university far earlier than their twenty-first-century successors. For example, 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. Moreover, 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 brief, 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.
Now to the encounter between Hamlet and the Gravedigger. Hamlet asks the Gravedigger when he began his career, 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.
From which we deduce that although the Gravedigger thinks that “every fool” knows when Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and when 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.
At first glance, 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 is a teenager.
The textual crux first. As many readers of the TLS will be aware, there are two authoritative versions of Hamlet: the 1604–05 Second Quarto (Q2) and the 1623 First Folio. The 1603 First Quarto (Q1) is an intriguing problem in its own right – is it a work reconstructed from the memories of those who acted in it or from the notes of those in its earliest audience? Shakespeare’s first stab at a play on the theme of Hamlet, perhaps even the infamous Ur-Hamlet itself? – but is only occasionally useful in comprehending the textual challenges of Q2 and the Folio.
Of these texts, only Q2 supports the reading of the Gravedigger’s career given above. On the question of how long the Gravedigger had been at his work in Denmark, the Folio has him say “I have been sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares”. The reading is grammatically obscure, but offers a very different picture of Hamlet’s age. The Gravedigger has been “heere” (qua Denmark and/or his graveyard – he is being wilfully 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”. On being pressed, the Gravedigger discloses that “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester”. 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 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 that the Player King and Queen have been married. Even “unedited” texts of Hamlet based on the Folio have emended it.
If one sticks with the mortal remains of Yorick, things quickly become more complicated. Putting to one side the question of why the Gravedigger has unearthed his skull (has it been dug up accidentally or on purpose? Where is the rest of him? And how, with human remains apparently littered around him, can he be sure that the skull in question belonged to Yorick?), a twenty-three-year-old corpse should on the Gravedigger’s own account long ago have become a skeleton. It has been in the ground for fourteen or fifteen years more than the eight or nine he specifies for complete decomposition. And yet, Yorick’s skull has the rankly sweet odour of human decay. “My gorge rises at it” might just about be understood as an expression of metaphysical nausea at handling the skull beneath the skin of a loved one, but the gross physicality of the matter is soon beyond doubt:
HAMLET: Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
HORATIO: What’s that, my lord?
HAMLET: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’ earth?
HORATIO: E’en so.
HAMLET: And smelt so? Pah!
HORATIO: E’en so, my lord.
This is a graveyard, not a charnel house in which the stink of a newly decomposing corpse might taint even the most desiccated bones. Yorick’s soft tissue has not yet fully putrefied. His body has been in the ground for nothing like as long as twenty-three years.
Before going any further, I want briefly to glance at Q1. By virtue of so straightforwardly making numerical and dramatic sense, it hints at something integral about the puzzles of Hamlet’s age and Yorick’s subterranean years in Q2 and the Folio. In Q1, the Gravedigger brandishes a skull: “Look you, here’s a skull hath been here this dozen year – let me see, ay, ever since our last King Hamlet slew Fortenbrasse in combat – young Hamlet’s father, he that’s mad”.
The Gravedigger subsequently reveals that the skull belonged to Yorick; Hamlet laments the dead clown and the transitoriness of life, then recoils from the skull’s smell. There is no mention of Hamlet’s age, and granting that “dozen” need only be the reflexively imprecise unit of measurement of one brought up in the duodecimal thinking of English tradition, there is no difficulty with Yorick’s skull still reeking of putrefaction. Whether Q1 is an authorial first draft or a creaky reconstruction by one or more non-Shakespearean others (I tend strongly to the latter view), its version of the graveyard scene is heavily simplified. This simplification enables us to see with much greater clarity that, in Q2 and the Folio, Hamlet’s encounter with the Gravedigger takes place with a show of numerical incoherence placed front and centre.
This incoherence has its root in Shakespeare’s awareness that the cultures of early modern England and Europe were not arithmetically advanced. As Keith Thomas demonstrated in his essay on “Numeracy in Early Modern England” (1987), facility in mental arithmetic (“reckoning”) was generally confined to merchants, sailors, soldiers, and those involved in other more or less artisanal trades. For the general populace, of high and low social status alike, the ability to compute more than the most elementary sums of addition and subtraction depended on the manipulation of physical counters on a board, and recording the results in Roman numerals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those skilled in “reckoning” were often viewed with suspicion. And yet at the same time, the impulses to exact measurement and quantification, and with them Arabic numerals, had already begun their transformation of Western intellectual life. Shakespeare has some fun with this conflicted state of affairs in The Winter’s Tale, where much is made of the discrepancy between the apparent precision of numeration and the vagueness with which numbers are, in reality, employed. An honest Clown enters, destined to be swindled – fleeced, even – by Autolycus. The Clown is attempting to work out the value of the wool he has shorn from his 1,500 sheep, but has to give up: “I cannot do’t without counters”. The highly numerate Autolycus has found his mark, and can hardly believe his luck.
The exchange between Hamlet and the Gravedigger is animated by exactly the same cultural dynamic. Both characters enjoy feeling like the cleverest person in any conversation, and both will say anything to ensure that they get to feel like this; in the skirmish of their wits, neither shows more than the most rudimentary notion of how to compute numbers in general, or of how to use numbers to compute time in particular.
At the beginning of the graveyard scene, Shakespeare quickly establishes that the Gravedigger, like Dogberry, is prone to detach verba from res for self-aggrandizing rhetorical effect. In describing the prospect of Ophelia having drowned herself in self-defence, he asserts to his less talkative partner that “It must be se offendendo”. He means the opposite (i.e., se defendendo), but the chance to accrue some Latinate cultural capital is too good to miss. A little later, he theorizes that if a man goes to the water, “but the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life”. For “argal”, he means to say ergo; he again seeks to repeat a Latin word that he has heard others use to impressive effect, but that he does not himself understand. This recalls the comic uses to which Shakespeare had put linguistic pretension in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but another striking feature of the case is that the compositor responsible for this section of Q2 failed to spot the dog Latin or its dramatic purpose. For example, when confronted by the nonsensical “se offendendo”, he guessed at “so offended”. He would have done well to remember the Erasmian rule of thumb that when faced with competing readings of a text, the harder or more implausible one is usually correct.
Keeping the shortcomings of the Q2 compositor in mind, let’s return to numbers. Once Hamlet and Horatio arrive in the graveyard, Hamlet begins to speculate about the various disreputable parts that the people whose skulls are before them might formerly have played. He and the Gravedigger then engage in some mutual chicanery about lying, lying down, and the business of digging graves. The Gravedigger considers answering direct questions to be dull or otherwise beneath him. Hamlet sees his answers as a sort of “equivocation”, and informs Horatio that “these three years I have took note of it, the age is grown so picked [i.e., pernickety, nit-picking] that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier that he galls his kibe”; the sophistry of the lower orders is snapping at the heels of the nobility. Notwithstanding the fact that Hamlet has spent most of the last year or two (or three) away from Elsinore as a student at Wittenberg, the most important aspect of this declaration is that his “three years” is meaningless as anything other than a placeholder for “of late” or “in recent history”. It operates on the same level as the “he walks for four hours together” (i.e., for long periods of time) that Polonius observes of Hamlet, or Hamlet’s own assertion that not even “Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats” (i.e., a vast accumulation of manpower and money) would be enough to “debate the question of this straw” between Fortinbras and “the Polack”. “Three years” nevertheless has the feel of considered observation, and leads Hamlet to ask the Gravedigger how long he has been about his business. The Gravedigger seems no keener to answer this question than those that preceded it, but his response is historically specific: since the day on which Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and the younger Hamlet was born.
Remarkably, Hamlet shows no sign of being able to quantify when these events took place. It is true that he has difficulties with the use of numbers to mark the passage of time throughout the play (“But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two” etc), but there is no suggestion of emotional turmoil at this point in the graveyard scene: Hamlet simply cannot say how long ago his father won the victory that secured his throne. Yet the Gravedigger asserts that “every fool” knows this event to have been synchronous with Hamlet’s birth, and it beggars belief to suppose that Hamlet has never heard of this synchroneity for himself. The conclusion? Hamlet does not know how old he is. He immediately changes the subject when the Gravedigger’s comments threaten to lay this reality bare. The Gravedigger may or may not suspect that his high-born interlocutor is, in fact, the “young Hamlet” of whom he is now being pushed to speak, but must sense that the drift of their conversation towards matters of state puts him in danger. He needs to tread carefully, and once he guesses that his questioner has a limited facility with numbers, sees a gratifying way out. His gambit succeeds: unable to fathom what the Gravedigger says about his age and the duration of his career, Hamlet counter-bluffs with a question about rates of bodily decay. From there, the Gravedigger – aided by the skull of Yorick – has no difficulty in redirecting their discussion to safer territory; in this case, to the conditions of mortality. The rub is that the Gravedigger is no better at the numerical computation of time than he is at Latin. His historical measurements of sixteen, thirty, and twenty-three years are empty signifiers – no more than words. They contradict each other, but he doesn’t care. He gets to put one over on someone of a far higher social and educational status than himself, and who has presumed to question his work.
So, the numbers in the graveyard scene as recorded in Q2 and the Folio designedly do not compute. They represent the inability of Hamlet and of the Gravedigger to reckon with historical numbers in their heads, and the desire of both characters to look as if they can. Both “sexten/sexton” (Q2) and “sixeteene” (Folio) lend themselves to the incongruity of what follows, but “sixeteene” is the better reading: in clashing so directly with the twenty-three years that Yorick is supposed to have been in the ground, it allows the exchange to make even less sense, thereby capturing more of the Gravedigger’s pretensions, and of Hamlet’s inability to expose them. “Folio “sixteene” as a corruption of the “sexten” witnessed by Q2 cannot be ruled out, but nor can the possibility that just as Q2 stumbles over “se offendendo”, so it sees that “sixteen” is contradicted by the reported death of Yorick, and emends it to “sexten”. On one level, a far from unreasonable procedure. Unfortunately, to convey the impression of nonsense is precisely Shakespeare’s point: both Hamlet and the Gravedigger only feign to know what they are talking about. Their attempts to speak the new language of numbers offer a comically macabre miniature of the pretence that drives life in Elsinore as a whole.
What does all of this tell us about Hamlet’s age? As his student status suggests, he is an adolescent. That is, an inhabitant of the intermediate category between boyhood and the assumption of adult masculinity; on the seven-stage model of human life familiar to Shakespeare, the period between one’s fourteenth and twenty-first birthdays. To venture anything more precise is guesswork or special pleading. In As You Like It, Jaques portrays adolescence as the age of “the lover, / Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow”, and his depiction fits Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia – both before and after she jilts him. But in most iterations, adolescence has a different aspect. It is an age of apprenticeship in the world, of preparation for the challenges ahead, and of fitting one’s understanding to one’s burgeoning physical and sexual potency; it is also marked by heat, impetuousness and impatience. Ecce homo.