It’s also traditional to say here that each generation creates its own Hamlet. That’s true; this book reflects thinking and sensibilities that might not have occurred to earlier generations. But that view is also wrong, because our generation isn’t just seeing Hamlet from a new perspective. We know more about Hamlet than our predecessors did. (Another, and I hope final, necessary traditionalism: "they are what we know.") We understand Elizabethan beliefs about ghosts and religion (various and contradictory). There’s been great work exploring Elizabethan views of medicine, botany, astronomy, rhetoric, and much else. We know more about how plays were staged, and how they were published. Anti-Stratfordian authorship contrarians notwithstanding, we know a heck of a lot more about Shakespeare and his time than scholars did fifty or a hundred years ago.

Beyond these kinds of facts, though, we also have interpretations and insights that have arisen over the centuries, some of which are irrefutably true, and which earlier generations didn’t have benefit of. One example: John Dover Wilson pointed out in 1935 that when Lucianus poisons Gonzago in the mousetrap play, Hamlet has just announced that Lucianus is nephew to the king. So the courtiers don’t see a representation of Claudius’ crime (they don’t even know about the murder); they see a nephew murdering his uncle the king, in a play put on by the current king’s nephew! That insight is just plain true, and imparts an accurate understanding of the play that wasn’t there before. (See Chapter Five for more on this mousetrap business.)

My aspirations are hardly so lofty. But I have some hope of adding to what we know, and perhaps speaking a word for my generation.

It wasn’t until I’d almost finished writing this book that I realized how long it had been growing in me. Going through my old college copy of the Riverside Shakespeare, I came on a note I penned almost twenty years ago–a comment on the gravedigger’s line that pegs Hamlet as a thirty-year-old. That line bothered me then, and it kept bothering me–to the point that I started digging through the centuries of commentary on the play, wondering if others had been similarly troubled. (They had.) For all those years, I’ve assaulted anyone I could get to listen with my thoughts on the subject.

Eventually all that reading, pondering, and brooding came to a head. I’d started to discover such interesting things, I finally said to my wife one Saturday morning, "I’m leaking," and started writing. This book began as an article on the simple subject of Hamlet’s age, and distended into the fixation you’re reading now.

Hamlet’s age seems like a trivial problem, but like so many things in this tapestry of a play, as you start to unravel the threads of the question, it reveals overlapping, interrelated layers and nuances of sense, meaning, and import. And as I dug even deeper, to my true surprise the question yielded new discoveries about the play–some just interesting, some perhaps significant–that have lain hidden within it for four hundred years.

If there’s one thing that’s truly remarkable about Hamlet (and great literature in general), it’s the play’s seemingly infinite complexity and coherence. Everywhere you look in the play there are reflections (and reflexions), echoes, allusions, and interrelated cross-correlations. It’s an endless interweave whose only equal for me is the complexity of the human mind. That’s why the simple problem that launched this project–the question of Hamlet’s age–turned into a whole book: if you start teasing at one thread, it eventually connects to every other. And those threads connect outside the play in myriad copulas. My pleasure comes from following those threads.

I have to admit that one thing I greatly enjoy is explaining some of the remarkably involved in-jokes that litter the play, and "puzzle the will." This punch-line approach sounds trivial, but (in addition to being fun) it’s actually an important touchstone for whether a given interpretation, criticism, or insight is valid–does it explain the jokes?

This book is written for everyday readers and Shakespeare enthusiasts, both professionals and amateurs. Scholars will, I hope, excuse my going over familiar ground that will not be familiar to the everyday reader. And everyday readers will, I hope, excuse my occasional obfuscatory nod to the scholars; sometimes I couldn’t resist.

If you were to put me in any critical "camp," you could probably best describe my approach as post-new-historicist neo-formalist (which I guess makes me a a New New New New critic). For those who understand that, kudos. For others, it’s probably best to state my prejudices here.

Prejudice #1. If I can’t make sense of something, the problem is most likely with me, not the play. I’m not saying Shakespeare was perfect; there are things in Hamlet that just don’t make sense. But the coherence of the play is so remarkable–and the more you look, the more coherent it becomes–I have to start from the assumption that anything that doesn’t make sense is my problem, not Will’s.

Scholars tend to dismiss explanations of the play that seem to explain the plot or the characters’ motivations too easily, arguing that Shakespeare wasn’t so much concerned with credible plots as effective drama. And they’re right; Shakespeare is completely untroubled by improbable plots. The wacky final scenes in Cymbeline and Measure for Measure don’t just strain credulity, they’re absurd. Examples are endless. Even the ghost wouldn’t have been "credible" to a good chunk of Shakespeare’s audience. But credibility isn’t the same as coherent narrative. And coherent narrative is dramatically effective. Shakespeare uses that, just as he uses every other technique that comes to hand. I would argue that he uses it especially well in Hamlet.

Way back in my undergraduate classes and before, I learned that you have to get at the sense of a poem–what does it say? Without that basic understanding, you can’t perceive its full beauty. That’s my main goal in this book: to get at what the play actually says–what it tells us about the events, characters, and relationships. From that platform, you can stretch to the higher ramparts of meaning, import, and implication.

Prejudice #3. Hamlet is not just a drama to be played, but literature to be read. At least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays had been published in the 1590s, prior to the debut of Hamlet as we know it–at least some of them with Shakespeare’s apparent approval. Publishers in Elizabethan times published books for one reason: because they could sell them at their shops in St. Paul’s churchyard. And people bought them to read–not as prompt books.

Shakespeare also published his then-bestselling works–the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece–in 1593/1594. These were written and published for reading, silently or aloud. And his sonnets–which were patently for reading–were circulating in manuscript among his friends throughout the late 1590s (they weren’t published until 1609). Shakespeare clearly knew when he wrote Hamlet that his works were not just performed, but were widely read. And they were read by his best customers–courtiers, inns-of-court men, and others who populated the higher-ticket galleries of the Globe Theater, and who were his audience when he played at court.

So the arguments you sometimes hear–that these complex interrelationships within the play can’t have any validity, because nobody watching a play could possibly catch them–are just foolish. Even the great Shakespeare scholar John Dover Wilson falls for this angle, but in a contradictory way. He agrees, right at the beginning of What Happens in Hamlet, that no audience member could catch all the complexity:

Wilson’s insight into Shakespeare’s audience is incredibly useful–there was a large contingent of brilliantly educated individuals who paid very close attention, even writing down favorite passages for later thought, discussion, and misquotation. Shakespeare was not just writing for a pack of witless groundlings, or just for dramatic effect, as people often claim, but also for attentive and highly capable listeners and readers.

But in Appendix F of Wilson’s book, where he takes occasion to savage Salvadore de Madariaga’s On Hamlet, he takes an opposite and ill-considered tack in his eagerness to embay his Spanish rival:

So in the course of this book you’ll find me quoting some lines and passages more than once. Hamlet being the cross-referential harvest ground that it is, a single line may serve no less than three dozen avowed purposes, with spurious interpretations additional. This book is an attempt to tease out some few of those interrelationships and multiple meanings.

Prejudice #4. It’s fruitless to talk about "the author’s intentions." There’s no shortage of places in the text where you have to wonder what Shakespeare meant, but in general it’s not a useful question. Consider, for instance, the repeating imagery and ideas in these three passages:

Did Shakespeare "intend" all these echoes, scattered throughout the play? On what level of consciousness did he intend them? Was he even consciously aware of them? Which ones? Whatever the answer, he created these echoes and thousands of others, and it’s those connections that make the fabric of the play so rich. It doesn’t serve any purpose to guess at whether, and on what level, he "intended" them.

Knights takes arms against this tendency in Shakespeare criticism, a tendency that emerged in the eighteenth century and flowered (or in Knights’ view grew like a weed) in the Romantic era: the tendency to concentrate on Shakespeare’s characters and their "character" as if they were real historical personages. Nowhere is it more evident than in Hamlet criticism–the question of Hamlet’s character has absorbed more ink than any other.

Knights’ position is much similar to mine: that Shakespeare’s plays are dramatic poems, and that you have to look at their full effect–poetic, literary, and dramatic–to understand and appreciate them. This effect emerges through character, action, plot, stage directions, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, allusion, and a host of other literary and dramatic constructs. But at bottom, all of these emerge from language, and it’s there that you must seek first to understand the play–in the depths of the text.

So I’m with Knights in disdaining the rambling discourses on Shakespeare’s noble characters that are scattered through the Romantic era and beyond. (Knights speaks of them as "pseudo-critical investigations that are only slightly parodied by the title of this essay.") Shakespeare’s characters are not real people, or our friends, but dramatic, literary, and poetic entities that illuminate our lives and thoughts through their words and actions.

But this returns us to the notion of coherence, and authorial intent. It’s patently clear to me that Shakespeare conceived a whole world of Hamlet, most of which he tells us about in the text of the play. There’s no other way he could have built the cohesive chronology described in Chapter Two, or coordinated the characters, motivations, and actions of this huge work so convincingly.

So ruling out discussion of anything that isn’t explicitly stated in the text is a disservice both to the text and to ourselves. The hints, echoes, suggestions, allusions, and connotations in the text are emphatically part of that text. They contribute mightily to the overall literary and dramatic effect that both Knights and I prize most highly.

There’s certainly more than one place in this book where I’ve skirted the imperfect boundary between what Shakespeare might and could not have intended. But I hope I’ve stayed on the reasonable side of certainty. I was more than tempted in more than one case, for instance, to cite the 1586 performances at Elsinore by Kemp, Bryan, and Pope, who by 1594 were members of Shakespeare’s company. It’s certainly possible that Will was part of their company by that time, and accompanied them as an apprentice on the trip. It’s even more likely that he received direct report from them. But there’s absolutely no evidence of either. So there’s one lure, at least, that I didn’t rise to.

This returns us, finally, to the simple but admittedly not so useful touchstone–what can we reasonably assume, and what’s on the far side of improbable? That probability arises, like all true knowledge, not just from the viability of individual facts and statements, but from the context of those statements–the other facts that surround and support them. Does the whole weave of conceit cohere, as Hamlet does, into a pattern that rings true both in its whole and in its individual parts?

This book is written in the inductive mode; I have a central thesis–that Hamlet is a teen, not an adult–but the conclusions that arise from that thesis emerge in the course of the argument. I reveal my discoveries in much the order that I came to them. So this book is as much a tale of my journey into the undiscovered country as it is a description of the country arrived at.

The journey I’ve taken, and that I continue to take, is centered on the framework of chronology that is both blatantly obvious and subtly hidden in Hamlet. As far as I can find, nobody has tackled the workmanlike task of sorting out that chronology in a systematic way. So after exploring the issue of Hamlet’s age in Chapter One, in Chapter Two I lay out the whole chronology of the play–who does what and when. Then in the remaining chapters I turn to the really interesting stuff: the implications of those words and actions. What do they tell us about the play, and ultimately about ourselves? In the appendices you’ll find more detailed inquiries into some curious areas that I couldn’t resist, but that would have clogged up the first five chapters.

Before leaving this preface I must give thanks. First, to all who came before me. I am not, of course, the first person to enter this labyrinth. This book could not be if it weren’t for thousands of critics and commentators who have discovered connections and explanations that had lain unrevealed to others. I am hopelessly indebted to all those critics, and have attempted to give credit where due. But to quote William Minto’s 1875 comment on "the mass of Shakespearian literature," "It would take the labor of a lifetime to make quite sure that a particular view had never been expressed before." That mass of literature has grown geometrically in the last century and a quarter. And in many areas, large and small, I could not give credit without digressing into history-of-ideas essays covering critical discussions that often spanned decades or centuries.

For all the ideas in this book that others have come upon before me, many thanks. I hope that those in the future will use my ideas with as much enthusiasm as I have received my predecessors’.

To the late Edmund K. Chambers, who humbly described himself as "one who only plays at scholarship in the rare intervals of a busy administrative life." (His words could have spoken for me as well, when I began this book.) Professor Chambers’ two-volume Medieval Stage, four-volume Elizabethan Stage, and two-volume William Shakespeare are the grounds upon which all Shakespeare critics stand–or should stand, at any rate. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

To xxx readers who provided comments. list tk.

To my parents, Ben and Betsy Roth. Thanks for teaching me to "read," even though my grade school told you not to teach me how to read.

And most of all to my family–Jesse, Dia, and Susie. Thank you for giving me time and space enough to make this work, and play this play.