Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

INSTEAD OF ASKING WHY HAMLET DELAYS, let's ask: Why does Shakespeare write Hamlet that way?  Besides the execution of two wives of Henry VIII, and of many Catholics accused of treason, including Shakespeare’s relative Edward Arden in 1583 [1], what figurative ghosts may have made a cautious Shakespeare write a cautious Hamlet?  1. In February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in England for conspiring against Queen Elizabeth I, her cousin. She was found guilty and beheaded. 2. In 1594, Ferdinando Stanley, patron of the Lord Strange's Men (in which Shakespeare and many of his fellow players were active) and possible heir to Elizabeth’s throne, was poisoned after faithfully reporting a plot against Elizabeth I that may have been intended to entrap him [2].  3. In February, 1601, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, attempted a rebellion against the English government, a year and a half before Shakespeare's Hamlet first appeared in the stationer's registry (July 1602), an...

People argue about Hamlet’s age. The ghost calls him “thou noble youth” (1.5); Ophelia describes his “blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy” (3.1). Hamlet was a university student: Rhodri Lewis notes, “the median age of matriculation at Oxford for the years 1600-02 was 17.1. Among the aristocracy and gentry it was substantially lower, at 15.9 years” [1]. But given the gravedigger’s remarks in two later editions [2] regarding Hamlet’s birth and Yorick’s death, people assume Hamlet was 30 and ignore references to his youth. Yet why would he still be at university at 30, and want to go back? [3] Rhodri Lewis makes an argument for the gravedigger feigning a competence with numbers that he doesn’t possess [4].   Perhaps too many assume that Shakespeare was writing under the same rules as modern writers regarding faithfulness to details. The gravedigger’s estimate of 30 years may also have pointed to at least [edit] four famous Elizabethan men who died in their 30s, and perhaps also a rel...