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
Character mask masks, substituting a non-literal translation. English translators of other writings by Marx & Engels, or of classical Marxist texts, quite often deleted "Charaktermaske" as well, and often substituted other words such as "mask", "role", "appearance", "puppet", "guise" and "persona". Marx's concept of character masks has therefore been little known in the English-speaking world, except through the translated writings of the Frankfurt School and other (mainly German or Austrian) Marxists using the term. Tom Bottomore's sociological dictionary of Marxist thought has no entry for the important concept of character masks. The "Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory" likewise does not refer to