One day when I was little, some time in the late 1970s, I suppose, I was sitting with my nan and grandad in their front room. My auntie was there, too. My brother and I were watching the television; Grandad was reading the paper. At one point he abruptly dropped his newspaper and asked: “Is Hamlet about a small English village?” My auntie told him no, it was about a Danish prince. “Oh,” he said, before raising his newspaper again. Bar the chuntering of the television, silence fell. And that was that.
For some reason this exchange has stayed with me for more than 40 years. I think it was his tone of voice, which suggested the question had been vaguely niggling away at him for most of the 20th century. I feel a bit sorry for him; if only he’d had the internet at his disposal and the confidence to use it, he would have had his answer. There is no need to idly wonder about things like that any more, and there’s certainly no need to ask it out loud and risk looking a bit of a chump. Not that he ever looked a chump in my eyes; he was my hero.
Even though the answer to every question is at my fingertips, I consistently disappoint myself by wondering about things for ages without bothering to spend 15 seconds getting an answer. For example, I have been idly wondering what the difference is between shallots and onions for a good 30 years. This period covers the dying decades of the pre-digital age, the invention of the internet and its present ubiquity. I’m not proud to confess that, until I Googled it yesterday morning, I still wasn’t sure. To be honest, the answer, when it came, wasn’t really worth the wait: “Shallots have a delicate and sweet flavor [sic] with a hint of sharpness, while onions bring a more intense heat”. Oh right, thought so.
On my grandad’s behalf I googled his literary question. I acknowledge this endeavour might be a sign I’m now rather scraping the barrel in my search for lockdown activities. I typed in: “Is Hamlet about a small English village?” It turns out to be one of those questions that is offered to you in full before you finish typing it. I love that. It reminds me of that thing teachers say about not being afraid to put your hand up because sure as anything there will be someone else in the class – or, in this case, planet Earth – who won’t know either.
It’s disappointing then, that this search didn’t yield an instant answer. Instead, buried in a solicitor’s account of a planning dispute, was the definition of a hamlet as “a small settlement, generally one smaller than a village, and strictly (in Britain) one without a church”. Didn’t know that. Not entirely uninteresting, I suppose.
I refined my question, putting the word Shakespeare before Hamlet. Up popped this: “The noun hamlet referred to a small village in Elizabethan times. But that sense of the word probably had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s naming of the title character in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Probably? Of course it bloody didn’t! But where did the name come from? Either, it turns out, from Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, or from the Danish mythological figure Amleth, recorded by the strikingly named Saxo Grammaticus, who surely would have been turning out some fine Scandi TV dramas if he was with us today.
I feel sorrier still for my grandad. Not only could he have had a fairly quick answer to his long-harboured question, he might also have whiled away many a contented hour poking around in interesting rabbit holes like this. All he had to peruse, poor chap, was the Birmingham Evening Mail. A fine title to be sure, but still. I’ve resolved to keep a list of all such nagging questions of mine. Then, on my 75th birthday, I’ll settle down in a nice armchair and spend the rest of my days googling all the answers.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer
