school in Wittenberg.’  But it is not really inconsistent with that.  The idea may quite well be that Hamlet, feeling it impossible to continue at Court after his mother’s marriage and Claudius’ accession, thinks of the University where, years ago, he was so happy, and contemplates a return to it.  If this were Shakespeare’s meaning he might easily fail to notice that the expression ‘going back to school in Wittenberg’ would naturally suggest that Hamlet had only just left ‘school.’

I do not see how to account for these passages except on this hypothesis.  But it in its turn involves a certain difficulty.  Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be of about the same age as 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.