By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Polonius is a fool and a windbag. But he’s also a schemer and an important member of the royal court of Elsinore. In these two sentences, we have the key to the character of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet with his feigned madness (and his very real mental and emotional affliction, occasioned by his father’s death – which he later finds out was murder – and his mother’s remarriage to his uncle, Claudius), Polonius is playing a part, at least in part.
We cannot be entirely sure how much of his long-windedness is affectation to conceal his more cunning plotting behind the scenes.