Polonius

POLONIUS E. K. BROADUS I T HE appearance, in Saxo Grammaticus,1 of the , prototype of Shakespear~'s ~olonius, was brief and unpleasant. Amleth s 'wIcked uncle, Feng, was advised by "a friend," who is described as "gifted more with assurance than judgment," of a method of catching Amleth unaware. Feng was to absent himself from 'the court. The" friend" was to conceal himself and listen while Amleth was Closeted with his mother. Thus it was hoped to discover whether Amleth "veiled some' deep purpose under a cunning feint" or was as witless and harmless as he seemed. The friend" repaired privily to the room where. Amleth was' shut up with his mother and lay down skulking in the straw." . Amleth, 'suspec~inghis presence, resorted to his usual imbecile ways, and crowed Ilke a noisy cock, beating his arms together to mimic the flapping of wings. Then he mounted the straw and began to swing his body and jump again and again, wishing to try if aught lurked there in hiding. Feeling a lump beneath his feet, he drove his sword into the spot, and impaled him who lay hid. Then he dragged·him from his concealment and slew him. Then, cutting his body into morsels, he seethed it in boiling water, and flung it through the mouth of an open sewer for the swine to eat, bestrewing the stinking mire with his hapless limbs. So in Saxo's story appears and disappears the malolSaxo 's story of Amleth in the Historia Danica, with Oliver Elton's translation (from which' I quote);'BeIleforest's version of the Hamlet story in the Hisloiru Tragi'lues, Paris, 1582; and the English paraphrase, The' Historic oj, Hamblet, London, 1608, are conveniently accessible in Sir Israel Gollancz's The Sources of HamIel (Shakespeare Classics), Oxford Press, 1926. 337 I THE UNIVERSITY OF, TORONTO QUARrERLY dorous friend of Feng. When he reappears as Poionius, the raw old stuff of Saxo is still visible beneath the Elizabethan sophistication. For Feng's friend, "gifted more with assurance than judgment," we have the "prating knave" at:ld "wretched rash intruding fool;" for the bed of rushes, the arras; for the stinking sewer3 that nook of the stair at Elsinore where" if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him;" for the naked filth of Saxo's swine, the bitter irony of "a certain convocation of politic worms." I t was, of course, Shakespeare's way, thus at once to preserve and to transform; but it would appear that even before Shakespeare turned his hand to the Hamlet legend, the friend ofFeng had ceased to be merely a peg to hang an episode on, and was on his way to becoming a human being. He was, to be sure, still only a peg'in Belleforest. The straw under which the spy hid himself has become a bed-covering stuffed with feathers. Amleth jumps upon this, stabs the spy through it, drags him out, dismembers and boils him, and throws him in the sewer as food for the hogs..:-.all as in Saxo. Nor does the English version of Belleforest, the Historic ojHamblet, add anything to the episode of the old counsellor) except the placing of him t( behind the arras" instead of under the bed-covering, and Hamblet's exclamation "A rat! A rad" when he hears a movement there. But inasmuch as the only 'extant text of the Historic' of Hamblet was printed in 1608, it is assumed that these two departures from Belleforest's narrative are borrowings from Shakespeare's play. . The old Hamlet play, known to have been on the boards at least as early as 1589) took advantage, we may suppose, of the dramatic possibilities of the friend of Feng. The legend supplied also a young woman whom 338 POLONIUS the designing king used in an effort to lure Hamlet into an amour. Why not, for the sake of dramatic economy, make her ,the daughter of the ill-fated old counsellor? But the death of the co'unselIor at Amleth's hand had been purely episodic, had had no consequences, in the legend. l Why not make the daughter go mad when...