The best clue to the length of the interval between Scenes iii. and iv. of the fourth act is, however, given by the flowers that were in bloom at each of the two periods.
In the last scene there are named pansies, columbines, daisies, crowflowers, nettles and long-purples; flowers which in England (and it is the English rather than the Danish flora that is referred to by Shakespeare) are all in bloom during the month of April. The time of Polonius's death is fixed with beautiful precision by the words of Ophelia:
I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.
It is in March that the English violets bloom and pass away.
The early violets of the United States, the “Johnny Jump-ups” of the children, have a curious synchronism in their flowering, which distinguishes them from other plants, and which seems to have passed unnoticed. Go at the right time, and you may find the grass beneath the trees and in moist or shady spots fairly blue with unnumbered myriads of these blossoms. Go two days later, and you may look in vain for a single specimen. They wither, literally, in a day. This little phrase of Shakespeare's shows the same peculiarity to be true of the English violets; and yet Shakespeare is the only writer who has observed it. Many another poet would have made it the basis of a dozen similes, and would have spun out verse after verse with varying references to it, yet Shakespeare in his wealth makes but this unnoticed and incidental allusion to the fact, and refers to it no more forever.
The flowers that are mentioned, therefore, show that the tragedy ends in April, and that it was some time during the month of March that Polonius was slain. The action commenced some two months, or a little more, before that time, or during the first half of the month of January, a time when
The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.
About two months before this, or early in November, the treacherous Claudius stole upon his sleeping brother,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of his ear did pour