[ p. 152-153 ]

-- All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of
his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or
Essex. Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art
has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The
supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life
does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting
of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet
bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's
world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys
for schoolboys.

A.E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation
strike me!

-- The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said
superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.

-- And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately
said. One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under
his arm.

He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos
who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the
fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

...

Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand
with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

-- That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings
about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable,
insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.

John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

-- Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare
Aristotle with Plato.

-- Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from
his commonwealth?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in
the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to
see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they
creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this
vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here,
through which all future plunges to the past.


[ p. 155-156 ]

How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

Marry, I wanted it.

Take thou this noble.

Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.

Do you intend to pay it back?

O, yes.

When? Now?

Well... no.

When, then?

I paid my way. I paid my way.

Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.

Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.

Buzz. Buzz.

But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.

I that sinned and prayed and fasted.

A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

A.E.I.O.U.


[ p. 174-175 ]

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 whoreson crookback, misbegotten,
makes love to a widowed Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins
her, a whoreson 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 unshielded 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
spatchcocked 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 Othello he is bawd and
cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a
perversion, like José 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 père?)
is right. After God 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 père 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 niggers
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, giants, ghosts, 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 god, 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.


See also the stylistic and typographical oddities: 162 
("Entr'acte"), 167 ("Bestabed"), and 171-172 ("A play!").