Hamlet Murders Polonius Quotes

Othello, Ophelia and Timon have not committed suicide. Iago, Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes and the society respectively drive them mad and ultimately murder them by using ‘words’ only!

I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would he quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love.

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other’s, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic.

Their father, Polonius, was in a ‘have a go’ mood and joined in. He also made changes, and together they renamed it: The Tragedy of the Very Witty and Not Remotely Boring Polonius, Father of the Noble Laertes, Who Avenges His Fair Sister, Ophelia, Driven Mad by the Callous, Murderous and Outrageously Disrespectful Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” “What was it like?” “With Polonius? Very . . . wordy.

Shakespeare’s pen was dipped in courtly scandals and his audience titteringly aware of who it was being pulled apart onstage. Nobody was safe from his satirical barbs, not Elizabeth’s hunchbacked secretary of state Robert Cecil, whose deformities were likely parodied in Richard III; not the powerful Lord Burghley, ruthlessly mocked in Hamlet as the Alzheimered Polonius; and not even the queen herself, who once snappishly complained of having been roasted in Richard II.