..., C. C. Clarke, J. H. Hackett, Victor Hugo, A. W. Verity, Edward Dowden, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. For analyses of various views see Richards, p. 741 ff. and Grebanier, 203 ff. Hamlet s Mad Soliloquy 61 including the heedless pursuit of the ghost on the battlements, the slaying of Polonius...

... he has put the body of Polonius he says it is at supper Not where he eats, but where a is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots (IV, iii, 18-24). The Elizabethan...

... and Desdemona, and Ophelia and Polonius, along with the title characters. And works like The Tempest, Measure for Measure, and The Winter s Tale are com­ edies precisely because revenge is set aside in favor of forgiveness, deliberate and magnanimous. Such external evidence is impressive, when totaled up...

... Polonius, the conniving old dotardj from the pathetically impressionable Ophelia; from Gertrude, whose fluttery psychoses are hardly perceptive; from the ever-expedient Claudius (against his better judgment); and from the old gravedigger. Horatio, intimately aware of Hamlet s intent toward an antic...

...; its canonical status was repealed only yesterday. But I think one can see as decisive the new Augustan Age that succeeded to the Renaissance. It was then that Polonius got the upper hand of Shakespeare. Polonius, who liked to give counsel, assured Laertes that if only he were true to himself, he could...

... at a distinct seam in the play: Hamlet has just given his advice to the players and sends them off to make ready The Murder of Gonzago. Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern make a brief, almost pointless, appearance, and Hamlet is left on stage with something of the air of a stranded actor. But instead...

... of grief. But in the opera it is suggested that Polonius had been an accomplice of Claudius in the murder, and Hamlet, who knew or suspected this, did not wish to ally himself with the family of the criminal. (He does, however, show up at Ophelia s funeral.) There is no suggestion of this situation...

..., for fathers tend to be reactionary (Brabantio and Cymbeline), mercenary (Egeus, Capulet, Baptista Minola, and Polonius), egotistical (Leonato, Shylock, and Lear), and jealous (virtually all the fathers in all the plays). Lear is the ultimate father in turmoil, as he manifests all of these negative...

... by scholarly understanding! Through pure inspiration, he sometimes seems to glimpse the truth, as when he realizes that Polonius is not quite the doddering fool he usually is played and that the friendship with Ho­ ratio is of but recent date. What a pity that he had no knowledge of the Ghost s background...

... understood and practiced the principle that Hamlet once explained to Polonius when he instructed him not to treat the visiting players after their desert but after his own honor and dignity. When, at sunset on the day of his first sally, Don Quixote rode up to the first inn which he mistook for a castle, he...

... the audience. And the endless complications resulting from a fix­ ation on vegeance described in the Rambler essay are hypocritically ignored by Hamlet, who, after the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia, blames his action on his madness in a conciliatory speech to Laertes beginning at V, ii, 218. I wish, adds...

... but unsteady in business; that in speech he may have been sententious and dogmatic, and that perhaps some memory of him may be preserved in the character of Polonius. Such speculations as these, fortunately infrequent, lead to unfirm standing ground. Later chapters of the volume do little to increase...

... of black people. Styron s awareness of the South as victim is nowhere made clearer than in the advice Milton Loftis remembers getting from his father, a man perhaps Polonius-like in the sententiousness of his advice, but a man deeply steeped in a southern culture he knows to be having seen Lincoln...

..., and oblivion of the republican party in the destruction of the old and the reconstruction of the new governments, South. The bill excepts what General Butler calls politicians from its favors but that makes its general title a sole­ cism. It is the play of Hamlet, not only with Hamlet, but Polonius, king...

..., as Wordsworth did. But what is high seriousness in Wordsworth is fancy or humor in Frost. Frost goes on at length in a Polonius-to-Laertes speech to his orchard, which he is leaving for the winter. Watch out for the rabbits and deer and grouse; they will eat you. And if the sun gets too hot before the proper...

... wilt not murder me? Help, ho! (19-20). In defense of her honor, Polonius steps, fatally, from behind the arras. Nonplussed by the presence of Polonius s corpse, Hamlet wants to proceed to Gertrude s inmost part, the singular trait of her nature: 882 Ned Lukacher Leave wringing of your hands. Peace...

... an administrative regulation working with inexorable fatality, and setting itself up for law of nature. It is occasionally hard to decide where important position leaves off and officialdom begins. Most of the time, however, the decision is not hard to make. We may have doubts about Polonius, but we don t have any...