SHAKSPER 1999: Re: Hamlet's Age

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 03/02/99 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.045  Tuesday 2 March 1999.

[1]     From:   David J. Schalkwyk <djschalkwyk@facstaff.wisc.edu>
        Date:   Monday, 01 Mar 1999 10:19:27 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

[2]     From:   Andy White <LHJERPE@concentric.net>
        Date:   Monday, 1 Mar 1999 16:05:35 -0500
        Subj:   Hamlet's Age

[3]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Monday, 01 Mar 1999 10:44:50 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

[4]     From:   Larry Weiss <pgw@idt.net>
        Date:   Monday, 01 Mar 1999 23:52:41 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

[5]     From:   Hardy Cook <hardy.cook@bowiestate.edu>
        Date:   Tuesday, 02 Mar 1999 08:59:20 -0500
        Subj:   Hamlet's Age


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           David J. Schalkwyk <djschalkwyk@facstaff.wisc.edu>
Date:           Monday, 01 Mar 1999 10:19:27 -0600
Subject: 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

Funny, I was about to pose the question myself after reading the play
again.  What struck me was the systematic insistence on not merely
Hamlet's youth in the first part of the play, but on his extreme youth.
So I began to wonder whether Hamlet and Ophelia might not be of a
similar age to Romeo and Juliet.  How would that change our view of the
play?  A Hamlet in his thirties would be similar to the poet of the
sonnets, "beated and chapped with tanned antiquity", hardly the "youth"
of the first half of the play.

The "Yorick" evidence is undeniable, but it is not clear what it means.
People have already suggested answers which variously take into account
a different treatment of time, or merely symbolising the passing of a
generation.  There is no doubt that Hamlet is a different kind of
character in the final stages of the play.  Is that necessarily
attributable to aging?  Perhaps there is not one Hamlet who matures
dramatically from one act to another, but two Hamlets?  (I seem to
recall Francis Barker suggesting this in strictly non-psychological
terms in _The Tremulous Private Body_.)  Perhaps, too, Hamlet has become
such a "big" part that it is now unthinkable to give it to an actor of
sixteen?

David Schalkwyk

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Andy White <LHJERPE@concentric.net>
Date:           Monday, 1 Mar 1999 16:05:35 -0500
Subject:        Hamlet's Age

That Hamlet is 30 in the gravedigger's scene is pretty much a given.
That the time of the play is compressed, but limited to a span of a few
months is also not too hard to find out:

Hamlet's "but two months dead; nay not so much", the night he meets the
ghost;

Ophelia's "twice two months" during the Play scene would indicate that
Hamlet has been in his 'antic disposition' for upwards of two months-so
at the time of the play-within-the-play, we are still only four months
from the death of King Hamlet.

As for Hamlet's return from the English expedition: this would have
happened fairly soon after his departure, since he's been intercepted by
pirates who proceed to bring him back to Elsinore.  The only question
mark would be: how long would it take Laertes to come back to Elsinore
from Paris?  I don't think it would take that long ...

Which is as much as to say that while Hamlet visibly matures from the
beginning of the play to the end, the maturity does not come simply
through the passage of time; it comes from within, from his final
reconciliation with the task he has to perform.  Killing an uncle so
that the bastard roasts in Hell, and possibly incurring the same fate
yourself, is no easy task; I'd cut Hamlet some slack on that score and
give him awhile to get used to it.

Andy White
Arlington, VA

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Monday, 01 Mar 1999 10:44:50 -0800
Subject: 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

Jack Hettinger writes:

>About Hamlet's age, I would recommend Alistair Fowler's article "The
>Case Against Hamlet" in the Dec. 22, 1995 TLS. He argues that
>Shakespeare uses a "compressed narrative" in which Hamlet ages about ten
>years from the time he is sent away to England to his return. Fowler
>says that Shakespeare advances Hamlet in age and therefore psychic and
>social outlook.

Does anyone else find it slightly suspicious that an older man is trying
to associate wisdom and age?

In some plays, like Romeo and Juliet, the young are assumed to be, if
not quite innocent, at least less depraved than their seniors. The same
could be said of the first few acts of Hamlet.  Could Hamlet's discovery
of a moral imperative therefore actually mean that he gets younger while
he's off with the pirates?  The imagery of nakedness in his letter to
Claudius might imply birth, if we want it to.  Access to "a cherub"
might imply innocence.

Cheers,
Seán.

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Larry Weiss <pgw@idt.net>
Date:           Monday, 01 Mar 1999 23:52:41 -0500
Subject: 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0330 Re: Hamlet's Age

Catherine Loomis wrote:

>The simplest answer is that Shakespeare did this so Richard Burbage
>(born c. 1567) could play Hamlet.  In Belleforest and Saxo Grammaticus,
>the Hamlet character is young.

And Cora Lee Wolfe makes the same point.  In fact, the two speeches
fixing Hamlet's age at 30 were added in the Q2 version (possibly a
playing revision), and the Folio has Yorick dead only twelve years,
making Hamlet about 19 or 20.  I have long conjectured that this was a
deliberate change made at the behest of Burbage (who I thought was
closer to 40, not 33, at the time of the probable first performance), to
try to put a stop to the ribbing he was taking at The Mermaid and
Yaughn's.

Gertrude's line in V.ii.287 ("He is fat and scant of breath") may have a
similar genesis.  Burbage is said to have weighed about 17 stone (c.240
lbs).  This line, however, appears in both Q2 and F1.

Larry Weiss

[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Hardy Cook <hardy.cook@bowiestate.edu>
Date:           Tuesday, 02 Mar 1999 08:59:20 -0500
Subject:        Hamlet's Age

Hamlet is a character in a play. In the last act of that play, the
character is identified as being thirty years old. The character in the
beginning appears considerably younger. My assumption has always been
that the character metaphorically ages between leaving for England and
returning to Denmark and that the aging involves an acceptance of death
- a movement from

<Queen.> Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
<Ham.> Ay, madam, it is common. (1.2.68-74)

and

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep --
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep --
To sleep, perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. (3.1.55-87)

to

                                  There is special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come -- the readiness is all.
Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to
leave betimes, let be. (5.2.219-224).

We should not forget that this play is a fiction:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all the visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, an' his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit?  And all for nothing,
For Hecuba! (2.2.551-558).

We might as well ask "When did Cassio take Bianca for his mistress?"

Of course, there is always the possibility that the character was meant
to be a perpetual graduate student - Been there; Done that!


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