Joycean Shakespeare/Shakespearean Joyce
by Sabadino Parker

Allusions to Shakespeare and Hamlet abound in James Joyce’s Ulysses, more so than those to Homer’s epic narrative which Joyce used as a model. The standard for magnificence, according to traditional English literary pedagogy, is the works of William Shakespeare, and the enigmatic figure of this Elizabethan playwright and the aura of his genius stimulates a filial relationship to writers following in his wake. Harold Bloom, scholar of literary influence, has written that Shakespeare’s genius, which Joyce hoped to eclipse, resides not in his plots, as those were lifted from older sources, but in his characters and their unique ability to “contemplate themselves objectively in images wrought by their own intelligences…to see themselves as dramatic characters” (Bloom 66), particularly Hamlet, who possesses “an authorial consciousness all his own” (68). At the center of the Western canon Bloom finds Shakespeare, the epitome of authorship; Hamlet, the epitome of textual creation; and Hamlet, the richest and most profound of literary heroes.

Shakespeare’s ghost and the shadow cast by his creations permeate all of Western literature, as well as our notions and models of the psyche. Bloom insightfully notes that “Freud is essentially prosified Shakespeare” (345) and goes so far as to claim that psychoanalysis is “in many ways a reductive parody of Shakespeare” (364). Freud makes Shakespeare’s influence upon the formation of his theories explicit. Shakespeare had made the unknown mind a subject of discourse three hundred years prior to The Interpretation of Dreams, and Freud believed his own model of the psyche possessed the key to unlock the mystery of Shakespeare’s plays. Similar to Joyce, Freud fixed on decoding and outmaneuvering Shakespeare, revealing an underlying anxiety that his own work would not measure up to the playwright’s ability. Bloom writes that on “some level, Freud understood that Shakespeare had invented psychoanalysis by inventing the psyche, insofar as Freud could recognize and describe it” (57). In effect, in Bloom’s reading, Shakespeare is the father of psychoanalysis, Freud is in the position of son, one seeking paternal authority in the arena of psychology as Joyce had in literature –– both were faced with the task of outdoing their towering predecessor.

Using psychoanalysis as a bridge of discourse, one can see the congruency of methods between Joyce’s creation of Stephen Dedalus and Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet. The hero of Ulysses, however, is Leopold Bloom, whose presence envelopes Stephen’s and who is cast in the role of the father in the narrative’s one-day odyssey. Joyce sets down Leopold Bloom in canonical history to combat Shakespeare’s achievement in Hamlet; Bloom is the son who must slaughter his father’s father (Joyce’s literary father, Shakespeare) to inherit the wealth of legacy which the filial nature of the Western canon generates for its crowned ruler. Shakespeare, father of textual demonstrations of the psyche’s complex nature, thus represents a source for the structuring of characters’ psyches, as well as a figure within that structure that permeates the written text and psyches of those influenced by him.

Hamlet is debatably Shakespeare’s greatest intellectual hero, “the archetype of the individual consciousness” (Bate 184). Avid readers of Hamlet, such as Freud, spent no small time attending to the melancholic prince, attempting to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (3:2:351). The mystery, according to Freud, lies in unconscious motivations stemming from an unresolved Oedipal complex, triggered by his father’s untimely death and his mother’s overhasty marriage to the late King Hamlet’s brother and murderer, Claudius, who takes the throne instead of Hamlet, just as he in unconscious fantasy took Hamlet’s place in enacting the repressed wish to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Hamlet is paralyzed by the ambivalent feelings he has to his parental figures: the father whom he idealizes but is now dead, the mother whom he loves but now finds repulsive, and the uncle with whom he identifies but disdains. The melancholy Hamlet displays results from his repressed hostility towards his father which found itself acted out in Claudius’s crimes of murder and adultery and now is transferred to self-loathing as he blames himself for the loss of the love-object and desires to torture those around him, such as the fair but frail Ophelia –– an act of revenge against the dead King Hamlet, a love-object no longer there, and Gertrude, a love-object usurped by a detestable uncle. Fortifying his ego through these mechanisms are signs of Hamlet’s regression and narcissism, an obsession with an ethereal ego-ideal at the expense of interest with the outside world: his denunciation of his mother’s sexuality, his lack of delight with humanity, and a continual, obsessive analysis of himself through reflective soliloquizing. Freud claimed that the primary narcissism of children causes parents’ absorption with their young, as they see a reflection of the totally enclosed and reality-free selves they once were. The representation of the child as object, one wholly enveloped within his or her own fantastic reality, draws the adult onlooker’s love, because it acts as a mirror to an aspect of consciousness generally repressed. This may also explain why so many audiences have felt the urge to decipher Hamlet’s mystery, while building up the one surrounding Shakespeare and the motivations for Hamlet’s creation. Hamlet, Shakespeare’s prodigal son, is the hero/child onstage reflecting the repressed narcissism of the audience and reader and acting as the vessel through which unconscious fantasies can play out.

Joyce also spent his fair share of effort contemplating Shakespeare and his plays. The day on which Ulysses is set –– 16 June 1904 –– is also the day on which he “began to work out his theory that Shakespeare was not prince Hamlet but Hamlet’s father, betrayed by his queen with his brother as Shakespeare was –– Joyce thought –– betrayed by Anne Hathaway with his brother” (Ellmann 155). This theory appears in Ulysses during the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, in which Stephen espouses it to a skeptical gathering at Dublin’s National Library. It is a theory comprising fantastic elements which are manifest as such because of Stephen’s unconscious thoughts which, like Prince Hamlet’s, are triggered by his parent’s death.

Joyce designed Stephen as a somewhat narcissistic youth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one with lofty ideals and ambitions, flying free from the all restriction and responsibility and migrating to France under the battle cry of Non Servium. Between the periods during which the two novels take place, Stephen returns to Ireland from medical school in France because his mother May is dying. Similar to Hamlet, the actions which stir the drama occur before the story is presented; Claudius murders Hamlet’s father and marries his mother, and Stephen refuses to bend in prayer at his mother’s deathbed, in a sense killing her as well. His melancholia over this resembles Hamlet’s to an overt degree, both black-clad and brooding youths, both in abhorrence of the remaining parent, and both caught up in words reflecting back upon themselves, self-reproachful and disenfranchised from the external world . Both also reveal unconscious associations latent in their thoughts during scenes when they try containing parental figures with authority: in Hamlet, during the play-within-the-play, and in Ulysses, during Stephen’s theorizing on Hamlet and Shakespeare, itself a performance casting Shakespeare in the lead role, a role onto which Stephen projects his unconscious fantasies.

The play-within-the-play, which Hamlet hopes will catch the conscience of the king, results in him exposing both his detestation of and identification with Claudius and Gertrude. In The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet identifies the figure who poisons Gonzago as “one Lucianus, nephew to the king” (3:2:235) who then seeks the love of the Gonzago’s wife, the queen. Aside from Claudius’s realization that Hamlet is either aware of his foul deed or plotting his murder, Hamlet unwittingly illustrates the unconscious associations he makes between Claudius, the assassin and adulterer, and himself –– the source of his inner conflict, an Oedipus complex unresolved, the wish Hamlet harbored to kill his father which Claudius fulfilled. This consubstantial connection of Hamlet, Gertrude, and Claudius spawns Hamlet’s self-reproaches (“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” [1:2:129]) and is evidence of the latent roots of his narcissistic melancholy.

Stephen Dedalus reveals similar conflicts and problematic identifications when he poses his paradoxical reading of Hamlet and the reasons Shakespeare produced certain motifs, such as the jealous rivalry between brothers, regularly in his works. His narcissism and deep guilt over his mother’s death is made apparent in the very first chapter, when he faces Buck Mulligan (who has already admitted that his aunt thinks Stephen killed his mother) with a comment made the day after her death, “O it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead” (8:19-20). It is not the comment’s offensive gesture towards his mother which Stephen finds irritating, but the offense to himself. Soon afterwards he faces her ghostly image in his mind’s eye: “Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul.” His reaction to which is, “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No mother, let me be and let me live” (10:25-6). His conscience, like Hamlet’s, haunts him, and returns to haunt him in the National Library scene.

In the library, Stephen proclaims the same theory that Joyce had conceived on the same day the novel occurs. Shakespeare is painted as a cuckold who transferred his animosity over Anne Hathaway’s supposed affairs onto the play’s “guilty queen” (189:8), as well as creating Hamlet out of a sense of loss over the death of his son Hamnet (with whom Stephen also identifies). Stephen points to Shakespeare’s having left Hathaway his second-best bed in his will (focusing upon the bed reveals the sexuality latent in the theory), and also, caustically, that “the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him” (212:3-6). He also focuses on the discrepancy between Shakespeare and Hathaway’s ages; she was eight years his senior, which connotes the sense of her as a lustful older woman, a mother figure: “Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood” (202:31). The Oedipal nature of Stephen’s reading and theories –– that the sexuality of Queen Gertrude, which stirs Hamlet’s repulsion, derives from the infidelity of Anne Hathaway, alluded to as a mother figure –– is a manifestation of his own guilt and identification with his mother. As soon as the three figures of Gertrude, Hathaway, and May Dedalus begin to combine in Stephen’s consciousness (a “mobled queen” laid out “in stark stiffness” in the “secondbest bed” sparks a “remorse of conscience” [206:15-27]), he unconsciously censers himself and shifts the emphasis of the argument to fatherhood, which he describes as a “necessary evil” (207:10), one based in fiction, contrasted with the biological determinacy that connects a mother to her child. Hamlet may also doubt his paternal legacy, suspecting that Claudius is his true biological father, since his mother may have practiced adultery prior to King Hamlet’s demise, which would accentuate his contradictory emotions toward King Hamlet and Claudius. Stephen represses any notion that his melancholy stems from Oedipal guilt; his mother, a sexual and mortal being, is degraded and decaying, while his biological father, Simon Dedalus, is rejected as a love-object because he elicits a similar disdain of baseness that Hamlet feels towards Claudius. Joyce constructs Stephen’s psychological conflicts as a parodic reflection of Hamlet’s own. The familial dynamics and the reactions of the narcissistic ego function similarly, although the manifest forms are inverted (Hamlet’s father versus Stephen’s mother). However, Stephen is not the hero of Ulysses, he is not the character Joyce sets to answer John Eglinton’s challenge at the beginning of “Scylla and Charybdis”: “Our young Irish bards…have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (185:7-9).

Ulysses’s focus is Leopold Bloom, a cuckold just as Joyce held Shakespeare to be, and a father figure as well. Joyce creates Bloom as analogous to Homer’s Odysseus, whom Joyce considered the greatest character in Western literature, in contrast with the prevalent opinion that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was richer. Joyce’s employ of Odysseus signals an attempt to outdo Shakespeare by devising a character in the mold of the ancient father-figure –– a father to Telemachus in The Odyssey and to Hamlet in literary history –– whose paternal power can contain the Hamlet-figure, Stephen, and by association, Prince Hamlet’s creator. Harold Bloom noted that Joyce also constructed Leopold Bloom as an embodiment of “citizen Shakespeare” (390), the observant, mundane artist wandering the streets of Elizabethan London just as Bloom wanders Edwardian Dublin. Joyce’s superimposition of paternal figures (including Shakespeare) onto Bloom exemplifies his desire for Bloom/Ulysses to exceed Hamlet/Hamlet while at the same time paying homage to the paternal figure whom he seeks to usurp: the poet from Stratford-upon-Avon. In “Circe,” the lengthy, surrealistic chapter presented in dramatic form, Stephen and Bloom finally meet and simultaneously gaze into a mirror. “The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall” (567:17-20). This apparition, with horns behind symbolizing the cuckold, arriving like the ghost of King Hamlet, who is a projection of Hamlet’s father/creator, Will Shakespeare, is a parodic reflection of Bloom and Stephen’s creator, James Joyce. His paralysis is the uncanny reflection of Stephen and Bloom’s shared ineffectualness. By transforming Shakespeare into a character, a father figure, and one representing by association Joyce himself, Joyce reveals both his idealization of the English playwright and his desire to contain him within a text which he wishes will prevail over Shakespeare’s canonically accepted greatest work. According to Harold Bloom, the figure of Shakespeare “beardless” is a sign of Joyce’s own latent sense of ineffectualness in regards to Shakespeare, as though he, like Hamlet, cannot escape from the position of the immature son. However, one can also read it as a slight toward Shakespeare, overcome by the interaction of Bloom and Stephen and castrated via the image of the clean-shaven face. It is, most likely, a combination of the two, a synthesis of contradictions which Joyce knowingly employed in order to actualize the ambiguousness of human relations: Stephen’s relation to Bloom and Joyce’s relation to Shakespeare.

Reverence for Shakespeare is obvious in Ulysses (containing allusions to 36 plays and eight sonnets), just as it is in Freud’s work. Jonathan Bate agrees with Harold Bloom’s opinion that Freud’s submission to the theory that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was “a way of taking revenge on William of Stratford for being the one person in the history of the world with a more powerful map of the human passions than his own” (Bate 97). Similar to Freud’s desire to undercut this figure of a forefather, Joyce’s wish to outdo Shakespeare may be the result of the Englishman’s regal position within Western literature coupled with his affiliation with the imperial nation that had conquered Ireland and forced its language (and literature) onto Irish culture. During the writing of Ulysses (1914-1921), the 1916 Easter Uprising occurred and the Sinn Fein had taken control of Ireland’s seats in the British Parliament, and the wish that an Irish bard would outshine England’s cultural hero, Shakespeare, was not absent from Joyce’s mind. Shakespeare’s function in Ulysses is one of a paternal figure in literary, psychological, and cultural senses, representing the source of the structure for articulation of psychological dynamics and unconscious fantasies as well as the restrictions of that structure which, like consciousness itself, is defined only by its limitations.

Shakespeare’s magnificence in character development, his ability to display personalities in a manner as contradictory and self-reflective as those in reality, is the source of his success and the reason audiences and readers have since found reflections of themselves enacted on the Shakespearean stage. Following in the Shakespearean tradition, Freud and Joyce allow no character, image, reference or signification escape the contradictory yet synthetic nature of human consciousness, playing with the borders of the unknown. The myriad effects the Shakespearean has had in its formation of and translation into texts which followed, presenting a self-contemplating model for character construction as well as representing the procreative paternal role within that model for having explored its dynamics and boundaries, results in Shakespeare’s boundless presence lurking behind nearly every work of the Western world.

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(c) S. Parker, 2000.