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PAGE 409 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 mind1
'MY TABLES -- MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.' This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems even absurd. And it has been suggested that it, with much that immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little change, from the old play. It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with anything that did not satisfy his own imagination. But it is not surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his imagination at such a point. Let us look at the whole speech. The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words, 'Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me'; and he breaks out:
1I 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):
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