A Note on Hamlet’s Age: Reason to Doubt the ‘Teenage Hamlet’ Theory

Some readers of Hamlet have been convinced that the protagonist is in his late teens. Rhodri Lewis argues that Hamlet is a university student and that ‘it would have been starkly irregular for an aristocrat, let alone a member of the royalty, to have remained at university beyond the age of about twenty’.1 However, it is not clear that Hamlet is still a student. Furthermore, the play is set in legendary Denmark, not early modern England, and (as is well known) the late education of Danes was axiomatic in Shakespeare’s day.2 The clearest internal evidence in the play to cast doubt on the belief that Hamlet is a teenager appears in the gravediggers’ scene, in which the senior gravedigger (or ‘Clown’) says that he has been at his profession since Young Hamlet was born, namely for 30 years: Ham. Upon what ground? Clow. Why heere in Denmarke: I have been Sexten heere man and boy thirty yeeres (TLN 3351–2).3