e fact
that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years (III.
ii. 165), where again the number differs from that in Q1.

If V. i. did not contain those decisive statements, I believe my
impression as to Hamlet's age would be uncertain. His being several
times called 'young' would not influence me much (nor at all when he is
called 'young' simply to distinguish him from his father, _as he is in
the very passage which shows him to be thirty_). But I think we
naturally take him to be about as old as Laertes, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, and take them to be less than thirty. Further, the
language used by Laertes and Polonius to Ophelia in I. iii. would
certainly, by itself, lead one to imagine Hamlet as a good deal less
than thirty; and the impression it makes is not, to me, altogether
effaced by the fact that Henry V. at his accession is said to be in 'the
very May-morn of his youth,'--an expression which corresponds closely
with those used by Laertes to Ophelia. In some passages, again, there is
an air of boyish petulance. On the other side, however, we should have
to set (1) the maturity of Hamlet's thought; (2) his manner, on the
whole, to other men and to his mother, which, I think, is far from
suggesting the idea of a mere youth; (3) such a passage as his words to
Horatio at III. ii. 59 ff., which imply that both he and Horatio have
seen a good deal of life (this passage has in Q1 nothing corresponding
to the most significant lines). I have shown in Note B that it is very
unsafe to argue to Hamlet's youth from the words about his going back to
Wittenberg.

On the whole I agree with Prof. Dowden that, apart from the statements
in V. i., one would naturally take Hamlet to be a man of about five and
twenty.

It has been suggested that in the old play Hamlet was a mere lad; that
Shakespeare, when he began to work on it,[255] had not determined to
make Hamlet older; that, as he went on, he did so determine; and that
this is the reason why the earlier part of the play makes (if it does
so) a different impression from the later. I see nothing very improbable
in this idea, but I must point out that it is a mistake to appeal in
support of it to the passage in V. i. as found in Q1; for that passage
does not in the least show that the author (if correctly reported)
imagined Hamlet as a lad. I set out the statements in Q2 and Q1.

Q2 says:

(1) The grave-digger came to his business on the day when old