Can you explain to me what this quote means: “So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused.”? Can you translate it into everyday English?
2 Answers
"The whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused," refers to how Claudius lies to the people of Denmark about how King Hamlet died. Basically, King Hamlet's death is falsely exploited to the people of Denmark.
It's essentially "so the story about my death is a lie that has tricked all of Denmark."
Explanation:
With Shakespeare, you can usually figure it out if you rearrange the words and then replace any weird-sounding words or phrases with close equivalents/synonyms.
You can rephrase it as "so a forged process of my death rankly abuses the whole ear of Denmark," which might go a step towards helping you decode it, and then you could further simplify the vocabulary by looking up any weird words online or in a dictionary and get something like "so a fake story about my death is doing everyone in Denmark a disservice".
Also, plenty of people have helpfully "translated" Shakespeare. There are a lot of different versions, but one helpful and accessible one is No Fear Shakespeare on sparknotes.com.
