(1) Yorick's skull has been in the ground a dozen years:
(2) It has been in the ground ever since old Hamlet overcame Fortinbras:
(3) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.
From this nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet's age, except that he is more than twelve![256] Evidently the writer (if correctly reported) has no intention of telling us how old Hamlet is. That he did not imagine him as very young appears from his making him say that he has noted 'this seven year' (in Q2 'three years') that the toe of the peasant comes near the heel of the courtier. The fact that the Player-King in Q1 speaks of having been married forty years shows that here too the writer has not any reference to Hamlet's age in his mind.[257]
FOOTNOTES:
[255] Of course we do not know that he did work on it.
[256] I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H. Türck (Jahrbuch for 1900, p. 267 ff.)
[257] I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening of the Player-King's speech, as given in [Q2] and the Folio (it is quite different in [Q1]), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene's Alphonsus King of Arragon, Act iv., lines 33 ff. (Dyce's Greene and Peele, p. 239):
Thrice ten times Phœbus with his golden beams
Hath compassed the circle of the sky,
Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir'd,
And fill'd her barns with fruitful crops of corn,
Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.