Corambis is also the name of a character equivalent to Polonius in the Bad Quarto of Hamlet.
He has performed in and/or directed more than 100 stage plays including performances as Macbeth, Shylock, Polonius and Claudius, and has won best actor and best supporting actor for his theatre work.
The title of the novel is derived from a quote by Polonius in William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act 1, scene 3): "This above all: to thine own self be true,/ And it must follow, as the night the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Polonius |
After working in repertory at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and the Victoria Theatre, Stoke, David was a regular performer with the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1970 and 2003, most notably as Touchstone in As You Like It (1977), various rôles in the 1986 revival of Nicholas Nickleby and Polonius in Hamlet (2001).
In September 1891 he took the part of Polonius at the Theatre Royal, Manchester in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's first performance of Hamlet, later becoming a leading member of Tree's Crystal Palace company, joining Tree at Her Majesty's Theatre on 1 February 1902, to play the original Ctesippus in Stephen Phillips's Ulysses.
These were the features Philip Sidney deplored in his complaint against the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's Polonius offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men."