The Influence Of The Ear In Hamlet

Hamlet, a great tragedy, is poisoned and doomed from the start. Love and death are afflicted within the kingdom, but no one knows the truth. What appears to be the truth is not, but why would someone of great nobility lie?. Ears can be the window to new and interesting facts, and no one knows how ears shape their lives and those around them. In Hamlet, ears are a recurring influence, but how it is used sets up Shakespeare’s writing. Shakespeare's emphasis on the ear can be deadly or harmful to someone's ego, even those with psychological diseases, but appearance versus reality and interpretation of the listener determine the outcome. Shakespeare is a tremendous writer who always uses the senses to capture his audience. In Hamlet, Shakespeare

“Part of the fascination with the ear and hearing stems from a clear connection between the ear and the tongue, emphasised by the fact that one can hear oneself speak in a way that one cannot see oneself seeing, cannot taste oneself tasting, and so on” (Robson 5). The ear is being used to see what someone else has claimed to have seen with their own two eyes, however this is not the only case. When a person sees something they explain what they saw through words and this can be translated into something else allowing people to hear what has happened through a person's tongue. In other words what a person sees and what another hears can be two completely different stories that will not add up when put together, which is not always the case. Some stories will line up perfectly and those who tell them are truthful. This proves that everything heard through the ear can not always be trusted as if it was seen through someone's own two eyes: seeing is believing. Shakespeare uses this for the basis of Hamlet. Some characters are only believing the information they are receiving through their ears, but characters who are actually around Hamlet know the truth. The main characters that believe Hamlet, are his true friends and those opposed are only thinking about what Hamlet’s enemy is saying. If this was not the case the play could have ended differently or there would not have been

This could also be the case in Shakespeare’s writing. Shakespeare could use this in order to make it seem like the ear is untrustworthy and what is heard is poison. When a person brings facts to another, the facts are up for question. The listener is the one who will tell themselves if they believe or disbelieve the information present at the time. “The performance of the ear at the low end of its dynamic range is limited by internal noise. All signal processing systems have some internal sources of noise due to random fluctuations in various parameters or components of the system. If a signal is too weak, the auditory system can't separate it from these random variations” (Jacobson). When the anatomy and physiology of the ear is brought up a reader can better understand how this could be an influential point in deciphering the play. This can be crucial to the understanding of information and how a person processes the information present at the time. When a person talks metaphorically one hundred miles per hour, the ear can pick out words that do and do not seem important. When this happens words that do not seem important are not comprehended leaving the result of not all information being gathered completely. When not all information is gathered, when that person relays it to someone else it can become mixed up even more and if that second hand