Time in the Play of Hamlet

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
The leperous distilment.
 

And it was in December, or

 
Within a month—
A little month!
 

after her first husband's death that Gertrude married his murderer.

Why was it that for thirty days the perturbed spirit of the former king allowed

 
The royal bed of Denmark (to) be
A couch for luxury and damned incest,
 

and made no sign?

The answer is given by Marcellus:

 
Ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say no spirit dare stir abroad.
 

It was, therefore, not until after the Christmas holidays were passed, that the ghost of Hamlet's father could bring his message from the grave.

Here it may be well to notice a variation between the first quarto and the following editions of Hamlet, the only one in which the time is changed. In the first form of the play that has come down to us, Gertrude's marriage did not occur until about two months after her first husband's death, and the drama opens immediately after her wedding. The winter's cold is but slightly referred to, and the season of the year seems not to have been as firmly fixed in Shakespeare's mind as it was by further thought and study.

There are two passages which seem to indicate warmer weather than is consistent either with the “bitter cold,” which is twice referred to, or with a January night. These are:

 
The morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill
 

and

 
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
 

These I can only account for by the theory that they formed part of the drama in an earlier state, before the time of the play had been fully developed, and that their beauty saved them in the later forms that we now have, notwithstanding their inconsistency with the “bitter cold” of a winter's night.

It cannot escape attention that the first days of November would be very late for the elder Hamlet to be able to continue his afternoon custom of sleeping within his orchard. Still, it is not impossible that pleasant autumn weather might continue until that season of the year.

It may be worthy of notice that the action in the original “Hystorie of Hamblet,” on which the drama is founded, covers a period of “many years,” and that in the German play, “Fratricide Punished,” which by some is thought to be an adaptation of an early form of the drama which has not otherwise reached us, there is not a single indication of any definite lapse of time or of the season of the year.