The young avenger enters alone. Neither shouting nor anything martial accompanies him. He is armed with a simple dagger that hardly threatens the King. The film reduces the political significance of Polonius’s death. The weakness and vulnerability of the Danish court in Act Four Scene Five is totally effaced. The omission of the “save yourself, my lord” (Hamlet, IV, v, 101) speech serves to strip Laertes’s entrance of its political importance. The words of Claudius and his stature do not betray any apprehension. Twenty-three lines are cut out from this scene. All those lines are pervaded with the political. They show the weakness of the Danish King who, being deserted, has no alternative but to resort to his tongue to save himself and his