Hamlet lets out inadvertently that he was fat,
but he will not say so openly. His mother says to Hamlet:
"You are fat and scant of breath."
Many people, especially actors, have been so determined to see Hamlet as
slight and student-like, that they have tried to criticize this phrase,
and one of them, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, even in our day, went so far as to
degrade the text to "faint and scant of breath." But the fatness is
there, and comes to view again in another phrase of Hamlet:
"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."
No thin man ever spoke of his flesh in that way. Shakespeare was
probably small, too. We know that he used to play Adam in "As You Like
it," and in the play Orlando has to take Adam up and carry him off the
stage, a thing no actor would attempt if the Adam had been a big man.
Shakespeare was probably of middle height, or below it, and podgy. I
always picture him to myself as very like Swinburne. Yet even in Hamlet
he would make himself out to be a devil of a fellow: "valiant Hamlet," a
swordsman of the finest, a superb duellist, who can touch Laertes again
and again, though lacking practice.
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