The Artist's Theory of Everything — Ulysses

Stephen is at the National Library arguing his theory of Hamlet. The audience is the cream of Dublin's literary intelligentsia: the librarian Lyster, the poet and mystic AE, John Eglinton, and others. Stephen's argument is that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as disguised autobiography: that Shakespeare was not Hamlet but the ghost of Hamlet's father, betrayed by his wife Anne Hathaway and his brother Richard, working out his own humiliation in the play.

It is a brilliant theory delivered with full awareness that Stephen does not entirely believe it. He argues it anyway, because the argument is good, because the performance is the point, because thinking aloud before an audience is the closest he gets to belonging somewhere. At one point he admits internally that he has proved by algebra something he does not believe. He does not stop.

The chapter's deeper subject is artistic creation and fatherhood: what does an artist father? Stephen argues that the bond between father and son is not biological but spiritual: a consubstantiality of mind. Shakespeare's real children are his plays, not his genetic heirs. This theory is also self-referential: Stephen is arguing for the kind of fatherhood he might one day receive from a figure like Bloom, whom he has not yet properly met.

Bloom passes briefly through the library while Stephen holds court: they nearly meet but do not. The near-miss is geometrically precise. Their eventual meeting is being prepared by the novel's architecture.

The chapter ends with Stephen and Mulligan leaving together, Mulligan mocking the performance Stephen has just given. As they go out, Bloom enters. Stephen and Bloom pass each other without acknowledgment for the last time before Nighttown.