By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Although it isn’t openly stated, it is implied that Ophelia is Hamlet’s ‘girlfriend’: his betrothed, the woman he will marry. Like Hamlet, she is part of the royal court, and her father, Polonius, is a lord – so although she isn’t royalty like Hamlet, she would be a suitable match for him in Danish society.
Malvolio, Olivia’s steward in Twelfth Night, is self-important, pompous, and even a little puritanical (he is accused of being a ‘puritan’ by the other characters). But he is also alienated. Indeed, his alienation from the other characters – from Olivia’s affections and favours which he so craves, and from Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Fabian and their drunken and riotous antics – is his saving grace, and what prevents him from being an insufferable bore. We take delight in laughing at him when he dons yellow stockings and makes a fool of himself, believing his mistress wants him to dress in such a ridiculous fashion; but Shakespeare encourages to laugh as much at Malvolio’s human frailty and
Parolles, Bertram’s friend in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, has often eclipsed Bertram in productions of the play and become the male centre of it, much as Falstaff overshadows Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Indeed, Parolles as a character has been likened to Falstaff by numerous critics, most famously, Samuel Johnson. In Johnson’s time and in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t unusual to go and see productions of Parolles rather than All’s Well That Ends Well, with the all-mouth-and-no-trousers coward taking centre-stage and becoming the titular focus of the play. These days, you’re lucky to find any production of All’s Well That Ends Well being staged, but when it is, it’s usually under the play’s original title, rather than as Parolles.
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.
For Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human