If anybody ever corners me and asks for a Shakespeare trivia question, I will say, “Who is Corambis?”
The answer is that this is the name Polonius is called by in the Bad Quarto of Hamlet.
The origin of the name Corambis has been the subject of scholarly speculation. Some have noted that William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Queen Elizabeth I’s chief counselor, had the Latin motto Cor unum, via una (“One heart, one way”), and that Corambis can be interpreted as Latin for “double-hearted” (cor meaning “heart” and bis or ambis meaning “twice” or “double”), implying deceitfulness or two-facedness, which satirically points to Burghley’s motto. This suggests it might originally have been a satirical reference to Burghley, and that the name Polonius was substituted in later versions, possibly to avoid offense or censorship.
However, not all scholars agree; some argue that the name change could reflect an early version of the play, or that Corambis and Montano might have been derived from other sources, such as Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, where a character named Corambus appears.