Hamlet defeated Fortinbras:

(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 imag