14.10.15
 What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? – a beast, no more.
Sure, he {He?} that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason,
To fust in us unused… (4.4, Folio only)
 ‘We in Englande deuide [divide] our people
commonlye into foure sortes, as [1] Gentlemen, [2]
Citizens or Burgesses, [3] Yeomen: and [4] Artificerers
or labourers’ (William Harrison, Description of
England, preface to Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577),
Shakespeare’s favourite source text.)
 ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I…’ (2.2.527)
 Nb: The scale can sometimes be ascended –
Shakespeare, the son of a glover, would rise to
(purchase) the rank of Gentleman
 Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet
It is our trick – nature her custom holds
Let shame say what it will. [Weeps] When these are gone
The woman will be out…
(Laertes, 4.7.183ff.)
The skull beneath the skin
and the undiscovered country…
 “Now all knowledge makes its way into us through the
senses... Knowledge begins through them and is resolved
through them […] After all, we would know no more than
a stone, if we did not know that there is sound, smell,
light, taste...weight, softness, hardness, color..."
 Yet: “there is no existence that is constant, either of our
being or of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and
all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly.
Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing
by another, both the judging and the judged being in
continual change and motion.”
 (Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 1575-80)
 HAMLET: ‘Seems’, madam? Nay, it is: I know not ‘seems’.
 ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
 Nor customary suits of solemn black,
 Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
 No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
 Nor the dejected ’haviour of the visage,
 Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
 That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
 For they are actions that a man might play,
 But I have that within which passeth show;
 These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2)
MEDVEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?
 MASHA: I’m in mourning for my life. (Chekhov, opening lines of The Seagull)
 I wear black on the outside,
 Because black is how I feel on the inside. (Morrissey, ‘Unlovable’)

RICHARD
BURBAGE,
the first
Hamlet
 Hamlet: My lord, you played once i’th’university, you





say.
Polonius: That I did, my lord, and was accounted a
good actor.
Hamlet: And what did you enact?
Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed
i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me.
Hamlet: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a
calf there.
(3.2)
THE GLOBE IN HAMLET:
Hamlet: This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave
o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
(2.2.299-303)
 Hamlet: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat /
In this distracted globe.’ (1.5.100-2)
 Hamlet: O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated
fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the
groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb-shows and noise. (3.2.8-12)
 “The fictive worlds anatomized on the early modern stage
disclose a fundamental characteristic of skeptical
the renewed attention
to sense perception as a
problem…”
reasoning:
 Intro to Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, and
Cognition, eds Gallagher and Raman, 2010: p.10
Historicising the senses
 “The scandalous idea that
the senses have a
history is one of the touchstones of our own
historicity; if […] we still feel that the Greeks, or better
still, primitive peoples were very much like ourselves,
and in particular lived their bodies and their senses in
the same way, then we surely have not made much
progress in thinking historically.”
 (Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious 1981:
229)
HAMLET: Come, sir, to draw toward an end with
you. Good night, mother.
Exit lugging in Polonius.
[
]
CLAUDIUS: There’s matter in these sighs, these
profound heaves;
You must translate. ’Tis fit we understand them.
(3.4.218-220 - 4.1.1-2)
 i) THE GHOST – ‘Say, why is this? Wherefore? What
should we do?’ (1.4.38)
 ii) HAMLET before OPHELIA: Mad for thy love?
My lord, I do not know, but truly I do fear it.
What said he? (1.5.89)
 iii) OPHELIA’s madness: Her speech is nothing,
Yet
the unshaped use of it doth move
The
hearers to collection [inference]. They aim at it, And
botch the words up fit to their own thoughts (4.4.8-10)
 Scenes of Eavesdropping (Hamlet and Ophelia
listened to by Claudius and Polonius; Hamlet and
Gertrude listened to by Polonius) – sound but no
spectacle.
 EYES
 ‘THEORY’ AND ‘THEATRE’ ARE COGNATE
 Gr. a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation,
theory, also a sight, a spectacle, abstr. n. f. (: * )
spectator, looker on, f. stem - of to look on, view,
contemplate.
 L. theatrum, a. Gr. , a place for viewing, esp. a theatre,
f. to behold (cf. sight, view, a spectator).
 [I, 2] BARNARDO:
Sit we down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story
 [II, 2] HAMLET: What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
 [III, 4] HAMLET: Here is your husband, like a mildew'd ear
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? […]
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.
 [1.4] HAMLET: I would not hear your enemy say so,
Nor shall you do my ear that violence
To make it truster of your own report
Against yourself. I know you are no truant.
 [I, 5] GHOST: ’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abus'd.
 [IV.5] CLAUDIUS: Her brother is in secret come from France;
Feeds on his wonder, keeps, himself in clouds,
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
With pestilent speeches of his father's death,
‘Hear’ heard 31 times:
Hamlet: Follow him, friends. We'll hear a
play to-morrow. (2.2)
Polonius: he beseech'd me to entreat
your Majesties
To hear and see the matter. (3.1)
Hamlet: How now, my lord? Will the
King hear this piece of work? (3.2)
Hearing and seeing (and feeling and
remembering) a play
 “texts can be read; works must be heard and seen. It is
not only the performer’s body that distinguishes ‘work’
from ‘text’ but the listeners’ bodies. Every act of
speaking and listening is an existential moment that
affirms (1) the selfhood of the speaker, (2) the selfhood
of the listener, and (3) the culture that conjoins them”
(Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern
England, 1999, pp.21-22)
 ‘when a manne bothe heareth and seeth a thinge […]
he dothe remember it muche the better’ (Thomas
Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, 1557, 116-116v)
 ‘Sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many
lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears,
whiles the actor is the centre’
 ‘An excellent Actor’ in Sir Thomas Overbury [and others], His Wife. With Addition
of...divers more Characters (1616), sig. M2.
 The ‘second tooth’ theory
 Why is the ear more vulnerable than the eye?
(intramission and extramission)
 According to one school of thought, seeing was the
result of something leaving the eye and travelling
to thing seen then back to the eye, often the result
of beams of light sent out from the seer’s eye –
 He seemed to find his way without his eyes
(For out o’doors he went without their helps)
And to the last bended their light on me. (2.1.95-7)
cf John Donne, ‘The Ecstasy’:
 Our eye-beames twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string
 ‘The cause is for that the Sense of Hearing striketh the
Spirits more immediately, than the other Senses; And
more incorporeally than Smelling: For the Sight, Taste,
and Feeling, have their Organs, not of so immediate
Access to the Spirits as the Hearing hath’
 Sir Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum pub. 1626
 Sounds are more physically assaultive than sights; ‘the
power of sound resides in the fact that it is a matter of
motion, of waves of air physically striking the
members of hearing.’ (Bruce Smith, Acoustic, p.105)
 All other senses involve
choice: smell can be
avoided by breathing
through one’s mouth;
we have an even clearer
choice to taste or not to
taste, to touch or not to
touch, to see or not to
see…
 The open-plan prison
 The watcher watched…
 If you let the play speak for itself, it may not make a
sound. (Peter Brook)
 OFFCUTS

I haue heard, that guilty Creatures sitting at a Play,
Haue by the very cunning of the Scoene,
Bene strooke so to the soule, that presently
They haue proclaim'd their Malefactions.
For Murther, though it haue no tongue, will speake
With most myraculous Organ.
What can sooner print the modesty in the souls of the wanton than by discovering unto
them the monstrousness of their sin? If follows that we prove these exercises [plays] to
have been the discovers of many notorious murders, long concealed from the eyes of
the world. To omit all far-fetched instances, we will prove it by a domestic and homeborn truth, which within these few years happened. At Lynn in Norfolk, the then
Earl of Sussex’s players acting the old history of Friar Francis, and presenting a
woman who […] had secretly murdered her husband, whose ghost haunted her,
and at diverse times in her most solitary and private contemplations, in most
horrid and fearful shapes, appeared and stood before her. As this was acted, a
townswoman (till then of good estimation and report) finding her conscience
(at this presentment) extremely troubled, suddenly screeched and cried out
‘Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely
threatening and menacing me’ […] whereupon the murderess was
apprehended, before the Justices further examined, and by her voluntary
confession after condemned. That this is true, as well by the report of the actors as
the records of the town, there are many eye-witnesses of this accident yet living,
vocally to confirm it. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, 1612. (Reprinted in
Shakespeare’s Theatre: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard, pp.244-45)