The quaker librarian soothed them with Wilhelm Meister, Goethe true in the larger analysis, and creaked away after an attendant. Irish bards, Eglinton said, had yet to make a figure the world would set beside Hamlet. Russell answered from his shadow that the questions were academic, schoolboy work. Art reveals formless spiritual essences. The supreme question is how deep a life the work springs from. Mr Best came in to say Haines had gone to Gill's for Hyde's lovesongs, and Russell warned that such songs were dangerous, born in a peasant's heart, not in the academy. Best offered Mallarmé instead, Hamlet walking and reading the book of himself. Stephen took the hour and made them see it. Mid June, the flag on the Bankside playhouse, Shakespeare come from Silver street, not stopping for the swan. A player enters in a dead courtier's mail. The player is Shakespeare, speaking the ghost to Burbage: Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit. He speaks to the son of his soul, and to Hamnet, the son of his body, dead in Stratford so that the name might live. You are the dispossessed son. I am the murdered father. Your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Hathaway. Russell would not have the prying. We have King Lear. As for living, servants can do that. Under the talk Stephen remembered the pound he still owed, lent when he was hungry. Molecules change. The man who borrowed it is another man. He is himself only by memory. A.E.I.O.U.
Eglinton asked if he meant to fly in the face of three centuries. She died, for literature, before she was born. She died, Stephen said, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into the world and out of it, took his first embraces, bore his children, and laid pennies on his eyes. The world says Shakespeare made a mistake and escaped it. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. Best feared they were forgetting Ann, as the poet forgot her. Stephen said he had been chosen. She was twentysix. She put the comether on a younger man, a Stratford wench tumbling him in a ryefield, and the boywomen of the plays are the women of a boy. Russell looked at his watch and rose. He was due at the Homestead. There was a meeting, and a sheaf of younger poets being gathered. Stephen asked him to give a letter to Mr Norman, and sat down again when the door had closed. Lyster, blushing, asked whether the view was that she had not been faithful. Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering. Eglinton warned him. Mulligan had promised paradoxes, but Shakespeare is Hamlet, and that belief would be hard to shake. Stephen set the mole on his own breast against him. The body is woven of new stuff again and again, and the mole remains, and through the ghost of the unquiet father the unliving son looks out. What, then, softens a man tried like another Ulysses? A girl placed in his arms. Marina. Pericles finds his daughter and says his dearest wife was like this maid. Eglinton called it the bypath. The highroads are dreary, but they lead to the town.
Stephen would not come off the road. What was lost is given back, the daughter's child. A man with genius takes his own image as the standard, and other men of his blood repel him. Beware of what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life. The first undoing was the cornfield. No later undoing undoes it. He will never be a victor in his own eyes, and a darker passion follows the first, the two rages running together. Poison was poured in a sleeping ear. The ghost could not know the manner of his death unless his creator endowed him with that knowledge. So the speech is always turned backward, and the son is consubstantial with the father. Amen, said Buck Mulligan from the door. He had the telegram. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Signed Dedalus. He keened over the wait in Connery's, then bent down and said Synge was out to murder Stephen for a piss on a halldoor, which Stephen called Mulligan's own contribution. An attendant brought a card. A gentleman from the Freeman wanted last year's Kilkenny People. Lyster led him off, a dark figure bowing behind, and the door shut. Mulligan snatched the card. The sheeny. Ikey Moses. Bloom. He had found him in the museum, hail to Aphrodite, eyes on the groove of her, Greek mouth never twisted in prayer. He knows you. He knows your old fellow. Eglinton wanted more of Mrs Shakespeare. They had thought her a patient Griselda, a Penelope who stayed at home. Stephen gave them the twenty London years, conjugial love and the other kind, and Manningham's story: the wife bids Burbage to her bed after Richard the Third, Shakespeare gets there first, and answers the knock from the blankets, William the conqueror came before Richard. What was Penelope doing behind the diamond panes all that time? The burden of proof, he said, was theirs. Let them explain the silence of thirty-four years between the marriage and the burial, the forty shillings she had to borrow from her father's shepherd, and the will. He left her his second-best bed. Not the best. Best made a phrase of the two beds. Mulligan capped it. Stephen went on. In her old age she takes up with gospellers, hears she has a soul, and prefers the chapbooks to the plays.
Eglinton had heard enough of the family. Russell was right. What is his wife or his father to us? Only family poets have family lives, and Falstaff is the supreme creation. Stephen said a father is a necessary evil. If the greying man who wrote the play is the student from Wittenberg, then his old mother is the lustful queen. No. John Shakespeare's corpse does not walk. It rots. Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Amor matris may be the only true thing in life. What links father and son in nature is an instant of blind rut, and a bodily shame so steadfast the annals hardly record its breach. Writing Hamlet, being no more a son, the poet felt himself the father of his race. Mulligan clutched his paunch and said he was big with a play. Stephen named the three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard, and the villains who carry two of those names, and the star that rose at the poet's birth and shone by day brighter than Venus by night. Why those chronicles, those usurpers? Because the false or adulterous brother is always with him, and the note of banishment sounds from the early plays until Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book. It sounds again near the grave, when the daughter Susan is accused. He laughed, to get free of his own argument. Eglinton split the difference. The truth is midway. Shakespeare is ghost and prince, all in all. Stephen took that, and more. He is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. We walk through ourselves and meet robbers, ghosts, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always ourselves. The lord of things as they are, hangman god, is all in all in all of us. Eureka, Mulligan said, and scribbled. Eglinton called Stephen a delusion. A French triangle, after all that way. Did he believe his own theory? No, Stephen said. Then why should he be paid for it, Eglinton asked. Other men believe theirs. Fred Ryan wanted the space in Dana for economics. For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview. Nobody offered it. Mulligan read out a farce he had just conceived, Everyman His Own Wife, and led him down out of the room, the bards must drink. In the doorway Stephen stood aside. A man passed between them, bowing. Good day again. They followed the dark back out under the gate, and Mulligan whispered that the wandering Jew had looked on Stephen to lust after him. The theory had been said through to the end, and the room had not crowned him.
