I’ll talk about Shakespeare with anyone willing to join me. The first time I tried Chat GPT, looking at the blank box on the screen with the intention of taking the thing for spin but not actually having anything in mind to task it with, I think I must have wanted to test whether it had any sense of irony. I threw some Shakespeare at it. “Should I ever a borrower or lender be?” And then it came back with a strong attempt to give me financial guidance for the 21st century. It didn’t reference Polonius passing on the advice to Hamlet. So my follow up was, “But isn’t Polonius an ass?” It came back with a strong “No” and more or less explained that his advice was wisdom that had been recognized for centuries. I moved on to other topics. 

After about three and half years, I figured things had progressed enough that it was time to try again. And now I have more choices. I’m settling into a new personal computer and trying out AI tools, so I fired up Chat GPT, Claude, and Gemini. As before each tried to provide a framework of financial guidance for our contemporary world, but this time each did start out by referencing Polonious’ line. Responses to the follow up question, “But isn’t Polonious an ass?” did a good job explaining how the audience should read Polonious, and they mostly used the same language. Claude, was my favorite with it’s gleeful exclamation mark, “Yes, absolutely!” Gemini used boldface and hanging quotes “Most scholars and audiences would agree: yes, Polonius is absolutely an ‘ass.’” Chat GPT brought out all the punctuation and used italics “Short answer: yeah…he kind of is—but in a very intentional way.” I enjoyed Gemini describing the speech as “a collection of sententious platitudes” which sounds pretty damning. I also enjoyed Claude describing the “endless string of maxims” and Polonius “firing them off like fortune cookies.” Each had a good basic understanding of dramatic irony, and Claude even made a try at breaking the fourth wall: “the joke may be on everyone who quotes ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ as genuine sage advice.”

Claude also put forward that Ian Holm had played Polonius when he was with the Royal Shakespeare company, but added “I’d also gently flag that I should have been more careful earlier — my claim about Ian Holm playing Polonius specifically was stated with more confidence than I can actually back up.” Some of the best arguments I’ve heard about how to interpret Shakespeare have been backed up with had nothing more than the inflection with which they were delivered, so I’m not going to hold Claude’s initial claim against it. I looked it up and now realize I need to watch the 1990 film where Mel Gibson played Hamlet and Ian Holm played Polonius. I bet Holm is fun. When he was with the RSC he did play two of the greatest asses in all of Shakespeare–Malvolio and Troilus. I’m sure I’ll get around to writing about both Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida sooner or later. And as the android in Alien, Holm was wonderfully ironic about being human.