Stage and Film Portrayals
In most productions of the 20th century, up to about 1980, Polonius was played as a somewhat senile, garrulous man of about seventy-five or so, eliciting a few laughs from the audience by the depiction. More recent productions have tended to play him as a slightly younger man, and to emphasise his shiftiness rather than pompous senility, harking back to the traditional manner in which Polonius was played before the 20th century. Until the 1900s there was a tradition that the actor who plays Polonius also plays the quick-witted gravedigger in Act V. This bit suggests that the actor who played Polonius was an actor used to playing clowns much like the Fool in King Lear: not a doddering old fool, but an alive and intelligent master of illusion and misdirection. Polonius adds a new dimension to the play and is a controlling and menacing character.
One key to the portrayal is a producer's decision to keep or remove the brief scene with his servant, Reynaldo, which comes after his scene of genial, fatherly advice to Laertes. He instructs Reynaldo to spy on his son, and even suggest that he has been gambling and consorting with prostitutes, in order to find out what he has really been up to. The inclusion of this scene portrays him in a much more sinister light; most productions, including Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 film version, choose to remove it. The respective productions starring Richard Burton and Kenneth Branagh both include it. Although Hume Cronyn plays Polonius mostly for laughs in the Burton production, Polonius is more sinister than comic in Branagh's version.
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