Olivier doesn't fret about such quibbles. In his 1990 film with Mel Gibson, for example, Franco Zeffirelli gives the line to Marcellus (Christien Anholt), who as a common soldier might not know about royal boozing customs. To avoid raising such minor questions in a play full of more important ones, directors sometimes give Horatio's line to a different character. Is he Danish? Why doesn't he know about the custom when he knows so much else about the Danish court, like the history of its trouble with Norway and what the old king looked like? When Hamlet explains to Horatio that these accompany the King's drinking, Horatio asks, "Is it a custom?" which raises questions about his character. Before the Ghost appears, they hear kettledrums, trumpets, and cannon fire. In that scene, Horatio and the soldier Marcellus have brought Hamlet to the castle parapet to see the Ghost. Another title appears, a version of Hamlet's "mole of nature" speech from act one, scene four. He shows us the castle tower for a moment before letting the fog close over it. In his Hamlet, he uses the perspective to introduce his vision of the play he considered Shakespeare's best. In his Henry V, he uses the aerial perspective patriotically, to show his wartime audience a high point of English civilization at a moment when it was being threatened. Flying over his country made Olivier think of Shakespeare and feel patriotic. A minor detail of this story, the plane Olivier was flying, is challenged in Terry Coleman's biography (145), but there's no reason to doubt the gist. In On Acting, he writes that seeing England from the air made him think of John of Gaunt's patriotic "sceptered isle" speech from Richard II (2.1.31-68 Olivier 268). Olivier's fondness for aerial perspectives may have come from his experiences as a pilot in the Royal Naval Reserve.
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