This FEELS like a classic middle school boy response, like, “What’s up?” “The Sky.”
But in fact, given the existential difficulty of the question, “in heaven” is a perfectly logical reply. Polonius is not, really, in his body anymore and in a culture that believes in heaven…he has clearly departed to go there. (One assumes. Although given all his manipulations and spying, it also MAY not be an accurate assumption.)

This suddenly makes me think of a sketch on W/Bob and David where a little kid has a near death experience and goes to heaven where he meets God. And when he’s on a talk show promoting his book about heaven, he lets slip that he saw Hitler in heaven and all kinds of other horrible people we would hope not to find there. His parents disavow him and it’s generally a big mess. But it does point out how complicated having some options about where one goes at death can be. Some believe in heaven but not hell. And who goes where if you do believe in hell can get quite complicated.
Where is Polonius?
Heaven?
Purgatory?
Hell?
He doesn’t get to confess his sins before he dies – so it’s a tricky one.

This is an interesting sequence of lines in that this beggar reference seems quite a bit different than the one a few lines earlier.
Previously, the king and the beggar were side by side, two dead people on a table. Now, the king is consumed by a beggar – (presumably via the fish that ate of the worm that ate of the King). They started off as equals and then by the end of this idea, one has consumed the other. So it’s not even that the king is no better than a beggar…it’s that the beggar wins.

Circle of life!

Insert gif of Lion King here.

Except.
One doesn’t REALLY fish with the worms that eat corpses, does one? I mean – aren’t worms more into vegetable matter? Or, like, dirt? Maggots, for sure, are into corpses. And surely there are many sorts of worms that eat dead bodies – but I’m thinking those aren’t the kind you want to put on a hook and stick in the water. I could be wrong, though. I’d need to do some major research on worms and decomposition and also fishing to be sure.

It is, though. Definitely. For everyone, more or less – either metaphorically or actually. We do, all end up dead. We don’t believe it. We think the things that happen to us will go on forever but…wait long enough and everything will change. The people we thought would always be here, they will all go, either before or after we do. We thought we’d always have Bowie and Prince and Alan Rickman. And because she had always been, it felt as though my grandmother would always be.
It is, even when you know better, hard to believe there will be an end.

Oh, Bienvenue Monsieur et Madame – we have some deliciously new specials on the menu today. We bring to you a royal dish – a plate of roasted king. This skin crisp, fresh, ready to fall off the bone. This one was nice and fat and juicy and will roast up beautifully.

We also have an especially lean cut of a beggar. It is well seasoned and, you’ll see, carries the flavor of many roads, many lands with him.

These are our top sellers and excellent companions to one another, due to the contrast. Look over the menu, see what you fancy. We’ll bring to your table any combination you like.

It would be something if maggots, realizing they were at the top of a food chain, began to take over.
What if they’ve already taken over?
We think we want to eat that ice cream sandwich because it tastes good but really our maggot overlords are sending secret mind control messages to our brains. “Eat the ice cream sandwich,” the message says. “Eat two!”

They try and adjust our diets to get a different flavor of human. There’s, like, a breed of maggots that really hates wheat, so they kicked off the whole “No Carbs” idea.

His crown is one of leaves. The smallest his followers can find. The worm Emperor sometimes wears a toga, like a Roman emperor – and sometimes a tight business suit, like a movie mogul.

His business is dieting. He makes an incredible amount of money in telling people what to eat and what not to. He himself will eat anything but he knows that’s no way to make a living. If he can sell people his “only compost” program or is “Eat Nothing but Protein” or “Only Orange Food for a Week.” He can get an unparalleled amount of people at his meetings for which he charges a hefty sum.

He presides – worm that he is – perched on a chair – crown on his head.

I don’t get a lot of the contemporary political jokes that Shakespeare included in the plays. I don’t know what I don’t know in this department.
In this case, though, it seems I’ve always know that this line is a reference to the Diet of Worms, named for the town that the convocation was held in.

What I didn’t know was what the convocation was for. I didn’t know that this line was a reference to the reformation. I didn’t know that the convocation was a collection of priests. I’d have to think a lot more deeply about it to work out that layer. Though, certainly, I can’t help but picture some worms dressed up in priest outfits eating a dead body.

For me, this line has always felt like a pop culture pun in a contemporary comedy – a little shout out to the issues of the day – a way to make an audience nod and say, “I see what you did there.”

I can’t help but picture Polonius laid out on a dining room table – naked and covered in sushi, like one of those weird specialized models that people eat sushi off of.
I can’t believe that that is a thing.
But I know that it is
And this line evokes that for me.
It starts with the sushi sitting on top of him and once the gleeful mob has eaten all the rolls it can manage, they break out the knives and forks and start carving into the dish – i.e. carving into the dead naked Polonius. Yum. (Yuck.)

Shakespeare uses both “supper” and “dinner” (I think of Caliban saying, “I must eat my dinner.”) For me, the words are interchangeable. But I know that there are distinctions depending on where you come from. One example I can think of is Dinner being like a big lunch and Supper, the lighter evening meal. But I imagine there are more distinctions. What I’d like to know is A) were there any distinctions between supper and dinner that Shakespeare might be making? Were they interchangeable for him? Or his contemporaries? and B) Was there any perception of these concepts in Denmark at the time?

Is it Suppertime?