TEXT:
ACT TWO: SCENE I. A room in POLONIUS' house.
Enter POLONIUS and REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Give him this money and these notes, Reynaldo.
REYNALDO
I will, my lord.
POLONIUS
You shall do marvellous wisely, good Reynaldo,
Before you visit him, to make inquire
Of his behavior.
REYNALDO
My lord, I did intend it.
POLONIUS
Marry, well said; very well said. Look you, sir,
Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris;
And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,
What company, at what expense; and finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it:
Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him;
As thus, 'I know his father and his friends,
And in part him: ' do you mark this, Reynaldo?
REYNALDO
Ay, very well, my lord.
POLONIUS
'And in part him; but' you may say 'not well:
But, if't be he I mean, he's very wild;
Addicted, so and so:' and there put on him
What forgeries you please.
NOTES:
Entrances and Exits
There's an extraordinary study by Professor Mariko Ichikawa on the subject of 'Shakespearean Entrances'. While of course academia can sometimes feel like an ever-contracting nightmare of diligent students writing more and more about less and less, I have to say that this specific, particular, focused study - one of many brilliant books by Prof. Ichikawa - has really been making me think of late. Check it out!
Danskers
Here's a really obscure reference. So obscure, in fact, that I couldn't in good faith write it into the text of the episode... Shakespeare has Polonius refer to the Danish ex-pats in Paris as 'Danskers' - presumably a little flourish trying to make Polonius sound like the Danish politician he is. In modern Danish, this is absolutely the correct word. BUT in fact, our dear Bard is somewhat mistaken. While he was writing, Dansker meant something coming from Gdansk (or Danzig) - a city in what is now Poland. In Shakespeare's time it was a Danish settlement, and that is where its name comes from. You'll be delighted to know that there's an entire book dedicated to Shakespeare and Scandinavia, which goes into splendid detail about the literary correlations between Denmark and Gdansk in the English imagination.