Word: poloniuses
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...will, thought, word and deed. Hamlet is also the first supremely self-conscious hero to tread the stage. This is where Richard Pasco's failure is most manifest. He portrays a computer's Hamlet, mechanically feeding himself punch cards marked Father's Ghost, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and responding mechanically to them. His co-players do not perceptibly help by acting like crumpled punch cards...
...suspect that the subtitles we are given (which quite properly reproduce Shakespeare rather than re-translating Pasternak) are in many cases non-literal. If they are literal, the staging of this film is preposterous beyond belief. As Polonius delivers his parting advice to Laertes, and as we read his banal, senile lines, what we see is a purposeful, vigorous man hustling his son to the door in no uncertain manner. When Hamlet first plays mad for Polonius, his final "Except my life," appears to be addressed to the old man's parting back. It just doesn...
...aged Countess of Rousillon, sends her young son off to the French court and reacts to his priggish follies with precisely the right air of elegantly detached concern. Anthony Dawson, as the old lord Lafeu, looks and moves as an old man should; in delivering what could be Polonius-like lines, he shuns both casualness and sententiousness. Peter Johnson, as young Count Bertram's follower Parolles, burlesques his role into an amusing Falstaff figure...
...cliches, like their Fourth of July counterparts, deserve a certain affection: they express a deep desire for ceremony and remembrance. Behind the tritest phrase, there is sometimes a desperate attempt to reach across the unbridgeable gap and tell the young what age and experience have taught. In that sense Polonius was the model commencement speaker ("To thine own self be true...
Often, today's gowned Polonius ends up speaking only to himself and to his own generation, confessing his own failures or omissions or hopes, and interpreting the world in his own image. Peter Schrag, an official of Amherst College, has catalogued some of the inevitable themes, including the Simple Uplift Speech, which stresses the need for renewed moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities, along with the Inverted Uplift Speech, which stresses the lack of moral vigor, basic virtue and profound verities. Then there is the Aching Anywhere Appeal ("Anywhere needs your help; the Anywhereians are starving; their country...