Word: polonius
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...actor is to play the Fishmonger Scene sprawling in a comfortable chair, his leg thrown casually over its arm, it will not be easy for him to give the impression that he has something on his mind. Mr. Benthall has cut Hamlet's line about the murdered Polonius: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room"--and this is a sure sign that he intended to give us not Shakespeare's Hamlet, goaded by a magnificent saeve indignatio, but the charming exquisite foisted on us by certain critics...
...program is divided into three parts: youth, manhood, and old age. Thus Romeo's speeches, Polonius's advice, and some of the cautionary sonnets go in part one, and the final section includes the deaths of Romeo, Lear and Clarence, among others...
When he first comes on stage, he is disappointing; without makeup and costumes, he looks like Arthur Murray. But he gives each fragment a life of its own--which is one reason they seem so wrong together. As he changes from Hamlet to Polonius, from Hotspur to Richard II to Lear, his voice and his very face change with the part...
Hamlet kills three men (Claudius, Polonius and Laertes) with his own hand. After stabbing Polonius in his mother's presence, Hamlet says briskly: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room," and cracks a joke about the corpse starting to stink in a month or so. Far from feeling queasy in matters of life and death, Hamlet shows repeatedly that he is coldly vindictive and diabolically foresighted. He not only sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England with a sealed letter containing their own death warrants, but urges England's king to bump them off without warning...
Closing at week's end, the play mingled one or two thrills with an appalling number of frills, one or two philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it. A good cast of actors, including Claude Rains, Christopher Plummer and Wendell Corey, were unhappily squandered on a pudding of a script-part scientific jargon, part Mermaid Tavern verse, part Madison Avenue prose-that sounded like cosmic advertising copy...