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Updated: June 2, 2025
We shall find later on that Hamlet's gall also claims its rights; all the more so as he endeavours, by an unnatural and superstitious use of dogmatism, to suppress and to drive away the 'excitements of the reason and of the blood. We have heard from Polonius that the Prince, after his 'sadness, fell into a 'fast. And everything he says to his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about his frame of mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the intention declared in the first act 'Look you, I will go pray' so as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to be changed and bettered.
Hamlet, thinking it was the King who was hidden there, thrust with his sword at the hangings, and killed, not the King, but poor old Polonius. So now Hamlet had offended his uncle and his mother, and by bad hap killed his true love's father. "Oh! what a rash and bloody deed is this," cried the Queen. And Hamlet answered bitterly, "Almost as bad as to kill a king, and marry his brother."
It was true wisdom that led Polonius to close his blessing on Laertes with the advice, "This above all: To thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Character itself is deeply involved.
Shakspeare himself, it would appear, did but laugh at the petty endeavours of critics to find out divisions and subdivisions of species, and to hedge in what had been so separated with the most anxious care; thus the pedantic Polonius in Hamlet commends the players, for their knowledge of "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical- historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, scene-undividable, or poem unlimited."
When the Queen told Claudius what had passed, and how Polonius was dead, he said, "This shows plainly that Hamlet is mad, and since he has killed the Chancellor, it is for his own safety that we must carry out our plan, and send him away to England."
He has been blamed for grimace, but it should be remembered that many of his characters verged on caricatures. That he could play comic characters chastely was amply shown in his Polonius; and touch the finer feelings of our nature was exemplified in his Old Dornton, in Holcroft's catching play of the Road to Ruin.
Polonius had dropped an early hint to his daughter concerning Hamlet's intent.
The unfortunate death of Polonius gave the king a pretence for sending Hamlet out of the kingdom. He would willingly have put him to death, fearing him as dangerous; but he dreaded the people, who loved Hamlet, and the queen, who, with all her faults, doted upon the prince, her son.
"The one of them carried me so far as to Coventry, sir: where, finding a fair in progress as I passed through the town, and falling in with three bridesmaids who had missed their wedding-party in the crowd, I spent the other in treating them to the hobby-horses at one halfpenny a ride. To him I applied for a job. They cast me for 'Polonius' and some other odds and ends.
The sententious Polonius says in Hamlet: "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." Unlike Lyly, Sidney did not aim at precision, emphatic contrast, and balance. For its effectiveness, the Arcadia relies on poetic language and conceptions.
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