Content area
Full Text
As Vincent Cheng and other scholars have noted, James Joyce had a lifelong admiration for William Shakespeare, to whom Joyce compared himself through-out his life (Cheng 1). Indeed, this fascination led Joyce to incorporate into Finnegans Wake a thousand allusions to the person and works of his English rival as well as to the claimants of Shakespeare's crown.
I offer these prefatory remarks because Joyce left provocative evidence in Ulysses and Wake that, thoroughly examined, enables one to hear the echoes and see the shadows of the man who may be Joyce's Shakespeare.
The Testimony of Joyce's Ulysses
In Chapter 7 is a wonderful example of the wit that foreshadows the many Shakespearean allusions in Chapter 9.
Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr. O'Madden Burke. (U 137)
The original meaning of "damned clever" turns into an ingenious pun on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford - "de Ver" - through the rhetorical devise of metathesis, which transposes sounds or letters in a word or phrase.
Two chapters later, at the start of the Shakespeare chapter in Ulysses, Joyce dismisses Francis Bacon with dispatch. "Good Bacon: gone musty" (U 195). He then has a librarian spur on the conversation by declaring: "I hope Mr. Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of the public" (U 196). Joyce proceeds to do this by listing the Shakespeare authorship speculations of George Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris (U 196), Walt Whitman (U 201) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (U 205). He then writes:
Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr. Best said gently. Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. (U 206)
Joyce has his characters continue questioning the traditional authorship of the Shakespeare plays.
When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet . . . (U 208)
Joyce later has a character talk briefly about the theory that the Earl of Rutland had written the works of Shakespeare (U 214). Obviously exasperated with all the talk about Shakespeare's identity, someone exclaims:
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. (U 214)
Despite this ironic appeal to God or a nobleman, Joyce still hadn't closed the discussion on who wrote Shakespeare, for he issues a final comment on the matter...