I’m sorry.  I cannot sit through Olivier’s Hamlet. There’s entirely too much flitting, and Ophelia, he’s just not that into you. We saw the play, perhaps Shakespeare’s longest, and I was ready to shake off his mortal coil about halfway into Act III. Tedious. Now Olivier’s Richard III—that’s delicious malevolence. I love that film.

Elizabeth and I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in London; I rented a little pair of opera glasses but we couldn’t focus them because we were laughing so hard. That’s good Shakespeare, that.

One of the best Hamlets ever was said to be John Gielgud, and Gielgud directed one of my favorite actors, Richard Burton, in the role in a 1964 film.

Both Gielgud and Burton were big drinkers and did not mind imbibing before or during a performance, like the way Babe Ruth ate hot dogs.  Burton once drank a fifth of vodka, gave a flawless performance in Camelot, then threw up.

Gielgud was in his cups a wee bit in a London play where his character was to commit suicide in the final act, which, now that I think about it, makes Hamlet’s failure to act after the mid-play “To be or not to be…” soliloquy even more painful. In Gielgud’s play, his final line was delivered to a butler: “A pint of port and a pistol, if you  please.”

Well, of course, it didn’t come out that way. Gielgud asked instead for “a pint of piss and a portal.”

The rest was Silence.