The Ear, Who?

Roderigo:

Most reverend signor, do you know my voice?

Brabantio:

Not I. What are you?

Roderigo:

My name is Roderigo.

Brabantio:

The worser welcome: / I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors …

—Shakespeare, Othello, act 1, scene 1

… about his feet / A voice clung sobbing till he questioned it, / "What art thou?" and the voice about his feet / Sent up an answer, sobbing, "I am thy fool …"

—Tennyson, Idylls of the King

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. 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 as the ghost of someone or other. Hamlet, you recall, begins with Barnardo's question thrown out in the night—"Who's there?"—as he approaches his fellow watchman.¹ 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. And when "it comes again / In the same figure like the King that's dead," Horatio's address will have the same form as Tennyson's King Arthur to the sobbing voice that clung about his feet: "What art thou that usurps't this time of night … ?" Like Arthur, Horatio addresses the figure—not a detached voice this time but a silent apparition—in the familiar form and yet refuses, to him, to thee, to it, the personal interrogative pronoun, calling out not "Who's there?" but "What art thou?" "Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak. [Exit Ghost]." In the wake of this silent retreating vision, Horatio counsels, "Let us impart what we have seen tonight," and, upon their return the next night with Hamlet, when the ghost's identity and story will unfold from his own mouth, so to speak, the watchers on the rampart question each other in all manner of ordinary what's (act 1, scene 4): "What hour now?" (l.3), "What does this mean, my lord?" (l.8), "What may this mean …" (l.32), "Why, what should be the fear?" (l.45), "And for my soul, what can it do to that… ?" (l.47), "To what issue will this come?" (l.66).

But, in the next scene, the beginning of Hamlet's exchange with the Ghost interjects a suspended and ambiguous "What?" between the lines of the apparition's appeal:

Hamlet:

Alas, poor ghost!

Ghost:

Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing

To what I shall unfold.

Hamlet:

Speak, I am bound to hear.

Ghost:

So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear.

Hamlet:

What? (1.5.5–8)

What is it possible to hear in this monosyllabic question or interjection "What?" Perhaps impatience to learn what he is bound to hear in a moment, to hear it without delay, in the anticipation that the Ghost has instilled. Or incredulity: Hamlet can't believe his own ears; has he indeed just heard the ominous word "revenge"? Or even deafness, incomprehension before the sounds the Ghost has made, as if to say "Come again? What did you say?" Finally, perhaps, one may also hear a protest against the precipitation with which his strange interlocutor has bound him through his ear, through his sense of hearing, and thus through his passive reception of the other's words, to a program of bloody revenge even before he has been told what for. For, at the point of this interjection, the Ghost has not yet answered Horatio's question "What art thou?" with the claim "I am thy father's spirit," which is...