Characters in Hamlet He is the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes. (This character is called "Ostricke" in the Second Quarto.) Osric, as well as Polonius, attempts to engage with Hamlet in the elaborate, witty discourse, fully consistent with Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 work, "The Courtier". This work outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. The Players are a company of actors who arrive at Elsinore Castle. Friends of Hamlet, they had earlier performed in "the city" (presumably Copenhagen), but faced stiff competition from boy performers, so they
Failure to refer Any sentence in which we attach a predicate to the name "Genghis Khan" is true if the predicate obtained in the actual world. Any sentence in which the predicate does not obtain for Genghis Khan is false. The Wikipedia statement “"Genghis Khan founded the largest contiguous empire in world history"” is thus true, and the statement “"Genghis Khan was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London"” is false. As an example for a name that fails to refer to a real object, Russell used “"the present king of France"“ in a 1905 article. According to the Russellian