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Updated: June 2, 2025
Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius: "He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage.
Mack was low and feverish about this assignation, and would have been more so but for the hope that her Polonius, behind the arras, would bring the woman of Endor to her knees.
If Hamlet and Polonius were living now, Polonius would have a much better chance of being a Cabinet Minister, though Hamlet would unquestionably be a much more intellectual character. What would become of Hamlet? Heaven knows! Dr. Arnold said, from his experience of a school, that the difference between one man and another was not mere ability, it was energy.
There they were received by a very venerable mask with a long and flowing white beard, and dressed in a gold 'broidered black velvet tunic, white hose, white gauntlets, and red buskins, and holding a long brazen wand. This was no other than "Father Abe," the oldest man on the manor, personating my "Lord Polonius," that prince of gentlemen ushers and gold sticks in waiting.
Nay, in the great world of fashion and of crime. I remember very little now about the order of the plays; very little of their names and drift. I only know we were swept triumphantly through the widest range ever imagined since the "pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral," of old Polonius.
The dread appearance of the Ghost takes possession of the mind and the imagination almost at the very commencement; then the play within the play, in which, as in a glass, we see reflected the crime, whose fruitlessly attempted punishment constitutes the subject-matter of the piece; the alarm with which it fills the King; Hamlet's pretended and Ophelia's real madness; her death and burial; the meeting of Hamlet and Laertes at her grave; their combat, and the grand determination; lastly, the appearance of the young hero Fortinbras, who, with warlike pomp, pays the last honours to an extinct family of kings; the interspersion of comic characteristic scenes with Polonius, the courtiers, and the grave-diggers, which have all of them their signification, all this fills the stage with an animated and varied movement.
Now in Montaigne's Essay already mentioned we read: 'When an urgent circumstance, or any violent or unexpected accident of State necessity, induces a Prince to break his word and faith, or otherwise forces him out of his ordinary duty, he is to ascribe that compulsion to a lash of God's rod. The passage in which Hamlet consoles himself in regard to the murder committed against Polonius is new:
This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably."
Hamlet's wit is sharpened by the garrulous obtuseness of Polonius; the sad world-wisdom of Paula Tanqueray is accentuated by the innocence of Ellean. Similarly, to return to the novel for examples, we need only instance the contrast in mind between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. The expedient of antithesis is also employed effectively in the balance of scene against scene.
Rogers was cast for the ghost in one act, Polonius in another, and the grave-digger in another. I remember how I roared when I read it. Fancy that fellow as Polonius!" "Can't you remember the town?" "Not a ghost of an idea. Some little village in the Midlands probably, where Hamlet would be appreciated.
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