Word: poloniuses
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...cruelty and circumstance--the usual interpretation--but as a strong and independent woman. Creating this Ophelia takes imaginative line-reading, a good deal of un-Shakespearean byplay that never made it into a script, and some outright cheating--for instance, an extra exchange of "Ophelia!" and "NO!" as Polonius tries to force his daughter to tell the King about Hamlet's visit to her chamber...
Cain's main technical difficulty seems to be a tendency, after inventing an effective device, to continue using it until it has beaten the audience insensible. In the first courtroom scene, Polonius, at a signal from the King, begins to thump his stick on the floor. At each impact the courtiers clap in unison; gradually, the chamberlain accelerates his pounding till the room rings with hearty applause. All well and good; but, having established the procedures. Cain has Polonius repeat the gesture six of seven times before the scene closes, and at least four more times...
...explication of the Salic Law (somewhat abridged), Paul Craig correctly avoids turning his Archbishop into a comic Polonius (one mistake in the Olivier film), but is too bland later doubling as Captain Gower. Pirie Macdonald '54 ably doubles as the conspiring Scroop and the Scottish officer Jamy. And Robert Stattel is a commendably solid Duke of Exeter...
...three weeks, then abandoned him on their wedding night. In her first eight years in England she had 29 postal addresses, not counting excursions to Europe. She compartmentalized her life, playing different roles to different people: the reckless bohemian, the exalted votary of art, the matey colonial. Paraphrasing Polonius in her journal, she wrote: "True to oneself Which self?" -Christopher Porterfield
...five lordly cronies--"that dismal sextet," Agate called them. The actors can do little but go through their plot-serving paces, though someone should have kept Theodore Sorel from going way out of vocal control in Alonso's "billows" speech. As old Gonzalo (a weak retread of Polonius in Hamlet), Daniel Benzali gets an unintended laugh from today's fuel-conscious audience when he outlines his ideal commonwealth as having "no use of...oil." And it is a nice touch, at the end of the play, for him to bow to Caliban with a kindly smile...