Hamlet.
How then do _they_ come to be at Wittenberg? I had thought that this
question might be answered in the following way. If 'the city' is
Wittenberg, Shakespeare would regard it as a place like London, and we
might suppose that Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were living
there, though they had ceased to be students. But this can hardly be
true of Horatio, who, when he (to spare Hamlet's feelings) talks of
being 'a truant,' must mean a truant from his University. The only
solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare
used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young
students at Wittenberg, and that when he determined to make them older
men (or to make Hamlet, at any rate, older), he did not take trouble
enough to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left
some inconsistencies. But in any case the difficulty in the view which I
suggest seems to me not nearly so great as those which the usual view
has to meet.[254]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 251: These three words are evidently addressed to Bernardo.]

[Footnote 252: Cf. Antonio in his melancholy (_Merchant of Venice_, I.
i. 6),

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.]

[Footnote 253: In _Der Bestrafte Brudermord_ it _is_ Wittenberg. Hamlet
says to the actors: 'Were you not, a few years ago, at the University of
Wittenberg? I think I saw you act there': Furness's _Variorum_, ii. 129.
But it is very doubtful whether this play is anything but an adaptation
and enlargement of _Hamlet_ as it existed in the stage represented by
Q1.]

[Footnote 254: It is perhaps worth while to note that in _Der Bestrafte
Brudermord_ Hamlet is said to have been 'in Germany' at the time of his
father's murder.]

NOTE C.

HAMLET'S AGE.

The chief arguments on this question may be found in Furness's _Variorum
Hamlet_, vol. i., pp. 391 ff. I will merely explain my position briefly.

Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet
was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it
against the evidence of the statements in V. i. which show him to be
exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But they
have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly
inserted in order to fix Hamlet's age; and the fact that they differ
decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does th