Is Lord Burghley, William Cecil (1520-1598), the historical prototype for Polonius in Hamlet, as George Russell French first hinted in 1861 and so many Shakespearean scholars have subsequently concluded?

The case is critical. If true, the claim that "Shakespeare" ridicules a powerful public figure with whom Edward de Vere was intimately associated helps to establish the relevance of the Oxfordian position as an interpretive paradigm which exposes the political underbelly of the play.

It would seem that the existence of such a satirical dimension in the play aimed at such an influential person with such close personal ties to the alleged author would certainly justify the author's concealment of his true identity. Certainly a Hamlet in which the chief minister of Elizabethan England is exposed to slanderous satire as a meddling "Jeptha" becomes a "brief and abstract chronicle of the times."

Mark Alexander examines the positive case in detail at his Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook. Weighing in-- sort of -- for the revisionist orthodox position that Cecil is not the inspiration and prototype for Polonius is Terry Ross.

The Ross argument proceeds something like this: Certain Oxfordians have bolstered the case for the identity of Polonius as Cecil by claiming that Cecil bore the contemporary nickname "Polus." According to Mr. Ross, this claim is not correct -- therefore the entire larger argument is discredited.

Regular readers of Mr. Ross will realize that this mode of reasoning is characteristic of his thought process: discover one tiny flaw in a larger argument, ignore all the corroborating evidence which substantiates the argument, aim a silver bullet at the one weak link, and triumphantly announce victory to the world.

Unfortunately, in his essay on the Polus question, Ross has falsified the history of scholarship on the essential question of whether the author of Hamlet intended to parody Lord Burghley.

One can search his article in vain for any concrete particulars on the reasons so many orthodox Shakespeareans who have supported this identification. For the record, the "real scholars" to whom Ross refers as supporting the identification of Polonius and Cecil include J.D. Wilson (1948 155;187), E.K. Chambers (1930 418), and Joel Hurstfeld (1958 257), among other orthodox scholars.

Ross also fails to acknowledged that the Polus argument has played an entirely ancillary role in the history of scholarship on the question:

The "Polus" argument merits only a footnote in Ogburn (1992 666 fn 1), is not mentioned at all in Looney (1920 469-474), in Sobran (1997 192-195), in Stritmatter (2001 41), or in Holmes (2001 83-85). In Whalen (1994 108-110) the topic merits less than one half of one sentence.

 

As the summary of Justice John Paul Stevens illustrates, the actual case for the identification of Polonius with Cecil rests on entirely different elements, which Mr. Ross omits to mention in his essay:

In Hamlet, the character Polonius is unquestionably a caricature of Burghley. His position as advisor to the King, his physical appearance, his crafty use of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to try to ascertain the cause of Hamlet's antic disposition, and his employment of Reynaldo to spy on his own son, Laertes, while away at school, are all characteristic of Burghley. (2)

Adds Stevens in a footnote to this paragraph, quoting A.L. Rowse:

"There is nothing original in pointing out that Polonius is clearly based on old Lord Burghley --merely in showing how close the resemblance is in detail. Lord Treasurer and the Queen's leading minister, he had been Southampton's gaurdian, whose grandaughter the young Earl would not marry and had been made to pay for it. All the Essex faction detested the politic old man, who was irremovable until his death in 1598; after that it was safe to portray him as Polonius. Hamlet describes Polonius to his face: 'old men have grey beards, their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum . . . together with most weak hams.' Those who are familiar with Burghley's letters in his last years well know that they are full of his querulous complaints about his health, the weakness of his limbs, his gout, his running eyes. One clue to Burghley's hold on power was his remarkable intelligence system. This is clearly rendered in Polonius' interview with Reynaldo, setting him to spy on his son's doings in Paris and report on them. Burghley's elder son, Thomas, had had an unsatisfactory record in France and been similarly reported on."(3)

We thank Terry Ross for clarifying that the claim that "Polus" was a nickname for Cecil depended on a questionable -- although hardly disproven -- interpretation.

Unfortunately for the sake of his larger project of shoring up the dying orthodox paradigm of Shakespearean authorship, the issue is practically irrelevant. Mr. Ross deserves bonus points for exceptional efforts in providing services to the Stratfordian state, but his silver bullet leaves the essential case unscratched -- as readers of Mark Alexander's essay will, we think, agree.

We invite everyone to carefully read these two essays: they are indicative of the methods of argument of both sides in the authorship debate.

 

NOTES

 

(1)The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality, (EPM Publications, 1992).

(2) "The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction," Pennsylvania Law Review, cxl (1992), 1372-86.

(3) A.L. Rowse, The Annotated Shakespeare (1988 1725-26).