Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesnât even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamletâs age is both in-text and as meta-text.
To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamletâs age:
Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelorâs degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Masterâs degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelorâs degree at 20 and a masterâs degree at 23.
Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a âyouthâ by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use âyouthâ to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless âmenâ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)
King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)
Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard
In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamletâs birth, and that heâs be âsixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.â However, itâs unclear if âsixteeneâ means âsixteenâ or âsextonâ (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)
Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says âdozen yearsâ instead of âthree and twenty.â This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huhâŚ)
Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravediggerâs expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood
One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamletâs death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)
Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that Iâm fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.
However, it doesnât really matter what the ârightâ answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:
Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravediggerâs description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of âyouthâ
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravediggerâs description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience
The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and thatâs the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isnât otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny
Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, thatâs so interesting and cool.
*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Poloniusâ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeareâs play, and been very well reviewed. Hamletâs joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).
