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.