(2) On that day young Hamlet was born: 

     (3) The grave-digger has, at the time of speaking, been sexton
     for thirty years: 

     (4) Yorick’s skull has been in the earth twenty-three years: 

     (5) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.

This is all explicit and connected, and yields the result that Hamlet is now thirty.

Q1 says: 

     (1) Yorick’s skull has been in the ground a dozen years: 

     (2) It has been in the ground ever since old Hamlet overcame
     Fortinbras: 

     (3) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.

From this nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet’s age, except that he is more than twelve![256] Evidently the writer (if correctly reported) has no intention of telling us how old Hamlet is.  That he did not imagine him as very young appears from his making him say that he has noted ‘this seven year’ (in Q2 ‘three years’) that the toe of the peasant comes near the heel of the courtier.  The fact that the Player-King in Q1 speaks of having been married forty years shows that here too the writer has not any reference to Hamlet’s age in his mind.[257]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 255:  Of course we do not know that he did work on it.]

[Footnote 256:  I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H. Tuerck (Jahrbuch for 1900, p. 267 ff.)]

[Footnote 257:  I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening of the Player-King’s speech, as given in Q2 and the Folio (it is quite different in Q1), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene’s Alphonsus King of Arragon, Act IV., lines 33 ff. (Dyce’s Greene and Peele, p. 239): 

     Thrice ten times Phoebus with his golden beams
     Hath compassed the circle of the sky,
     Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir’d,
     And fill’d her barns with fruitful crops of corn,
     Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.]

NOTE D.

‘MY TABLES—­MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.’

This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems even absurd.  And it has been suggested that it, with much that immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little change, from the old play.

It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with anything that did not satisfy his own imagination.  But it is not surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his imagination at such a point.

Let us look at the whole speech.  The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words, ‘Adieu, adieu!  Hamlet, remember me’; and he breaks out: