Epigraphs

The same question—“What are you?”, “What art thou?”—posed each time to a voice, speaking or sobbing, detached from a familiar face, and thus made strange, unknown, uncanny. As if the questioner had to doubt that it was indeed someone's voice, he asks of it “what” rather than “who.” Calling upon the voice to attach itself again to a name, an identity, the question might well be addressing a ghost, an “it” not yet declared to be the ghost of someone or other. Hamlet, you recall, begins with a question thrown out into the night—“Who's there?”—as Bernardo approaches his fellow watchman. And a few moments later Francisco takes up the call: “Stand! Who's there?” These sentinels have been put on edge by, as Barnardo puts it, “What we two nights have seen”; their question to “who,” “who's there?” is something like whistling in the dark, a sound made to reassure themselves that it is indeed who and not what on approach.