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Maynard Mack was perhaps the earliest to recognize that the question with which Hamlet begins — "Who's there?" (1.1.1) — is emblematic of its world: the pervasive darkness, the uncertainty of identity, the jumpiness of the sentries, the confusion in their roles, all presage a mismatch between the order of existence and the order of knowledge.¹ These epistemological quandaries are borne in no small measure by the tension between seeing and hearing. Vision and audition are out of joint, unable mutually to confirm the knowledge each singly provides.² Rather than being unified in the act of perception and knowledge, the relationship among the senses has become disjunctive. Since sight is disabled, identity must be confirmed by voice: Barnardo's "Long live the king!" (1.1.3) functions as a shibboleth to allay Francisco's anxieties at not being able to see whether the person arriving upon the scene is the person he was awaiting.³ But trust in what one hears also remains elusive: "the sensible and true avouch / of … eyes' (1.1.60) still seems essential to overcome resistance to whatever enters through the ears. Only after the ghost has been seen does the story once dismissed as fantasy now seize body and mind ("How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale": 1.1.56), so that by the scene's end Horatio is increasingly willing to give credence to the power of the cock's crowing even though he has never witnessed it before: "So have I heard and do in part believe it" (1.1.170).

DOI: 10.1057/9780230299092_7

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