In A Short View of Tragedy, Thomas Rymer famously glosses a speech from Othello, ‘So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this call'd the Tragedy of the Handkerchief? What can be more absurd …?’ His complaint introduces a nonetheless serious critical claim about Shakespeare's play. This chapter will suggest that Hamlet could be accused of a similarly ‘absurd’ attention to ears. Subjected throughout to poisonings both figurative and literal, the ears of kings, queens, princes, ladies of the court and courtiers prove supremely vulnerable organs in this play, situated at the threshold between the body and its environment. Ears are stabbed with verbal ‘daggers’, filled with poison, ‘abused’ by rumour and ‘assail[ed]’ with stories (3.2.386, 1.5.38, 1.1.30). But Hamlet is ‘absurd’ in a different sense as well. Derived from the French term ‘surdus’, meaning ‘deaf, inaudible, insufferable to the ear’, the term ‘absurd’ invites consideration of theatrical speech and its reception, topics with which Hamlet seems to be almost obsessively occupied.

Much has been written about Hamlet 's interest in the risks that listening entailed, and more recently critics have begun to turn their attention to the physical, material quality of those risks. This work has importantly enhanced our understanding of Shakespeare's play, but by divorcing itself from the study of dramatic form, it has left unexplored what appears to me to be a crucial aspect of Hamlet 's attention to hearing – its intervention in a turn-of-the-century debate over how particular kinds of plays should sound and how they should be heard by their audiences. Key to this metadramatic contest is, on the one hand, an assumption of sound's materiality and, on the other, a set of contradictory models of auditory reception. Early modern anatomists describe sound as an object or force capable of working profound physiological effects on its listeners. Noise slips inside the ear, or ‘hole of hearing’, and progresses ever more deeply inside the self, passing from the outer ear to the auditory canal and, finally, into the ‘afterbrain’ and memory. At each stage, sound presses on the body and reforms the corporeal material with which it comes into contact.