Editing Hamlet (section)

=== Polonius ===
'''Polonius''', the king’s advisor and father to Ophelia and Laertes, represents the archetype of the meddling, verbose allistic elder. He is loquacious, literal-minded in a pedestrian way, and deeply enmeshed in social convention. In an autistic reframing of ''Hamlet'', Polonius serves as a source of comic relief but also as a contrast to Hamlet’s mode of communication and thought. Polonius is a man of '''stock phrases and neurotypical platitudes''': his famous litany of advice to Laertes (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be… to thine own self be true”) sounds wise but is largely a string of clichés—perhaps the Elizabethan equivalent of conventional social “common sense.” He relies on these rote sayings and prided routines, which could indicate a kind of mental rigidity of his own (though of a different flavor than autistic rigidity—his is the rigidity of unquestioned tradition).

Cognitively, Polonius is not portrayed as insightful. He concocts a simplistic theory that Hamlet’s strange behavior is due to love madness for Ophelia, proudly presenting this hypothesis to the king and queen as though it’s the revelation of a grand puzzle (“Since brevity is the soul of wit… I will be brief: Your noble son is mad. / Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, / What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?”). Ironically, in trying to be brief he cannot help but digress and double back, which is an example of '''unintentional recursion in speech''': he loops around his point with florid language, causing even the Queen to urge him to the point. This verbosity and inability to self-edit contrast sharply with Hamlet’s more purposeful wordplay and incisive, if sometimes cryptic, speech. Polonius’s loquaciousness might be seen as ''social noise'' that Hamlet, with his detail-focused mind, sees through. Indeed, Hamlet often mocks Polonius to his face, answering the old man’s earnest but intrusive questions with absurd non sequiturs that nonetheless carry truth. For instance, when Polonius asks what Hamlet is reading, Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words.” This could be read as Hamlet highlighting Polonius’s failure to grasp deeper meaning—Polonius sees only the surface (ink on a page, or Hamlet’s surface antics) whereas Hamlet’s mind is on the significations beyond. In autistic terms, Hamlet finds Polonius’s conventional mindset '''shallow and irritating''', and he doesn’t bother to mask his contempt. Polonius, for his part, cannot decipher Hamlet’s irony; he takes things at face value (a trait usually associated with autism, but here it marks Polonius’s limited imagination).

Polonius is also an '''agent of the allistic social order''' that oppresses the play’s neurodivergent elements. He is constantly engaged in surveillance and interference: instructing his daughter to avoid Hamlet and even staging a scenario to spy on their interaction, sending a servant to spy on Laertes in Paris under the guise of concern, and ultimately hiding behind the arras (tapestry) to eavesdrop on Hamlet’s private conversation with his mother. These actions are driven by a neurotypical presumption that controlling information and managing appearances is paramount. Polonius believes he can diagnose and fix Hamlet’s “problem” by fitting it into a normative narrative (unrequited love) and thereby cure it (by banning Ophelia from seeing him). This gross underestimation of Hamlet’s complexity proves fatal for Polonius himself: his decision to spy on Hamlet is met with a swift, unmeditated response—Hamlet, hearing a rustle behind the curtain, stabs impulsively, likely assuming it’s the king. Polonius’s death is sometimes played as a dark accident, but in an autistic reading, it also symbolizes the clash between Hamlet’s demand for authenticity/ privacy and Polonius’s intrusive, scheming officiousness. The “intruding fool” (as Hamlet calls the slain Polonius) is a casualty of his own inability to leave Hamlet’s atypical behavior alone.

Interestingly, Polonius does share one trait often linked to autism: '''pedantry'''. He loves to ramble and detail even when inappropriate, as seen when he needlessly explains how actors are categorized by child, adult, etc., or when he pompously corrects himself in conversation (“I will use no art at all. That he’s mad, ’tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity; and pity ’tis ’tis true…”). However, in Polonius’s case this pedantry doesn’t stem from autistic obsessiveness about a topic; rather, it’s portrayed as buffoonish self-importance and lack of awareness that others are bored. This could be seen as a caricature of an '''elderly neurotypical narcissism''' rather than neurodivergence. Yet, it’s intriguing that Shakespeare gives Polonius many characteristics that superficially parallel autistic communication (verbosity, tangential speech, literal interpretation) but imbues them with a completely different significance. Where Hamlet’s verbal tangents signify intellectual depth and a search for meaning, Polonius’s signify triviality and lack of depth.

Polonius’s interactions with Hamlet highlight the fundamental communication gap between someone operating on neurotypical assumptions and someone operating on Hamlet’s idiosyncratic logic. Polonius hears Hamlet say odd things and immediately tries to fit them into a familiar box (“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”). He senses there’s pattern, but he cannot actually discern what Hamlet’s method is. In truth, Hamlet is often layering his speech with barbed meaning (for instance, insinuating that Polonius is a pimp using his daughter as bait), but Polonius is too socially conventional to catch the insult. This mismatch has a slight tragicomic tinge: Polonius could never have truly understood Hamlet, and Hamlet never had any patience for Polonius. Their brief relationship in the play ends abruptly with violence, symbolizing perhaps that between the autistic individual and the obtuse social enforcer, meaningful dialogue was never possible.