When I don’t want to hear something,
I feel it in my belly.
It feels more like getting kicked in the stomach repeatedly than like getting knifed in the ears.
I like the metaphor a lot. It would be fun to play the Queen and really viscerally feel like Hamlet’s words are daggers. It would, I think, actually help to play this scene. It’s not so much what he says, just the repeated image of daggers every time he speaks.
And probably it’s not what he’s saying but how he’s saying it.
If I were to play the Queen now, I could explore how she is different from me. She would feel in her ears what I would feel in my guts and on that we could hang our difference.
We could build out from there.