Thank you, that’s a great article!
Basically, the summary is:
In textual evidence, it’s the “bad quarto” that uses the word fat. As the article suggests, the bad quarto really is bad. While there’s no authoritative version of the plays, this one is basically the equivalent of someone filming with a videocam over someone’s shoulder from the back of a cinema while people throw popcorn and sound keeps cutting out. It’s difficult to draw any conclusions about the plays at all from anything in the bad quarto.
Hamlet as relatively slim is backed up by his age and the time he lived in; even wealthy young university students weren’t chubby back then. If he’d been intended as fat, it would have been mentioned more times than once, even in the bad quarto.
Plus, he’s referenced as being excellent at fencing, and having practiced for two months continuously before the match with Laertes. Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t be overweight, but it makes it even less likely.
Other wider textual evidence is that Shakespeare’s introspective characters, if they’re described physically at all, tend to be on the slim side.
The other - very good - point - is that we think of Hamlet as thin, or athletic, because he’s generally been portrayed that way. But the thing is, for a character in a play, or in a movie version of the play, how they’re usually portrayed is how they appear. If all the Hamlets we’ve ever seen are slim, then Hamlet is slim.
That doesn’t mean an overweight Hamlet isn’t a possibility in any production. You can do whatever you like with Shakespeare, really. That’s one of the reasons the plays have lasted so long.
I’d quite like to see an overweight Hamlet, actually. But it would be a break with tradition, and for Hamlet, that’s what his character is mostly, er, characterised by.
