Ulysses Part 60

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?

Richard, a wh.o.r.eson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a wh.o.r.eson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king uns.h.i.+elded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and spatchc.o.c.ked on to a Celtic legend older than history?

--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.

--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because 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. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.

It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, twice in _As you like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure for Measure_--and in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.

Judge Eglinton summed up.

--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all.

--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.

All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Oth.e.l.lo_ he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

--Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

--And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _pere?)_ is right. After G.o.d Shakespeare has created most.

--Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet _(pere?)_ and Hamlet _fils._ A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad n.i.g.g.e.rs go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: _If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend._ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call _dio boia_, hangman G.o.d, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

_--Eureka!_ Buck Mulligan cried. _Eureka!_

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's desk.

--May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

--Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._

--You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?

--No, Stephen said promptly.

--Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

John Eclecticon doubly smiled.

--Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery in _Hamlet_ but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? _Egomen._ Who to unbelieve? Other chap.

--You are the only contributor to _Dana_ who asks for pieces of silver.

Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants s.p.a.ce for an article on economics.

Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.

--For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.

Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then gravely said, honeying malice:

--I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the _Summa contra Gentiles_ in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay wh.o.r.e.

He broke away.

--Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.

Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts and offals.

Stephen rose.

Life is many days. This will end.

--We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. _Notre ami_ Moore says Malachi Mulligan must be there.

Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.

--Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk straight?

Laughing, he...

Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.

Lubber...

Stephen followed a lubber...

One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.

Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thought.

What have I learned? Of them? Of me?

Walk like Haines now.