[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.
[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].
[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.
Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it against the evidence of the statements in v. i. which show him to be exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But they have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly inserted in order to fix Hamlet's age; and the fact that they differ decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does the fact that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years (iii. ii. 165), where again the number differs from that in Q1.