rightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.
     Mr Best turned to him:
     -- Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's <i>Lovesongs of Connacht</i>.
     -- I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
     --  The bard's fellowcountrymen,  John Eglinton  answered,  are  rather
tired perhaps  of  our brilliancies  of  theorising. I hear that  an actress
played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an Irishman?
Judge  Barton, I  believe,  is  searching  for  some clues.  He swears  (His
Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.
     -- The most brilliant of all  is  that  story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That <i>Portrait  of Mr W. H</i>. where  he  proves
that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.
     -- For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
     Or Hughie Wills. Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?
     -- I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending  his gloss easily.
Of course  it's all  paradox, don't you  know, Hughes and hews and  hues the
colour, but it's so typical the way he  works  it out. It's the very essence
of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.
     His glance  touched their faces  lightly as he smiled, a  blond ephebe.
Tame essence of Wilde.
     You're  darned  witty. Three  drams  of usquebaugh you  drank  with Dan
Deasy's ducats.
     How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
     For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
     Wit. You would give your five  wits for youth's proud livery  he pranks
in. Lineaments of gratified desire.
     There  be many  mo.  Take  her for me.  In  pairing time.  Jove, a cool
ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.
     Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.
     -- Do you think  it is only a paradox, the quaker librarian was asking.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
     They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.
     Buck  Mulligan's again heavy face eyed  Stephen awhile. Then, his  head
wagging, he came near, drew  a  folded telegram  from his pocket. His mobile
lips read, smiling with new delight.
     -- Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
     He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
     --  <i>The sentimentalist  is  he who  would  enjoy  without incurring the
immense  debtorship for a  thing done</i>. Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch
it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt
is going to call on  your unsubstantial father.  Telegram! Malachi Mulligan,
the Ship,  lower Abbey street. O,  you  peerless mummer!  O, you priestified
kinchite!
     Joyfully he thrust the message and envelope into a pocket but keened in
querulous brogue:
     --  It's  what I'm  telling you, mister honey,  it's queer and sick  we
were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
for a  gallus potion would rouse  a  friar,  I'm thinking, and he limp  with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three  hours in Connery's sitting
civil waiting for pints apiece.
     He wailed!
     -- And  we to be there,  mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst  sending us
your conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
     Stephen laughed. Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down:
     -- The tramper Synge is looking  for  you, he  said, to murder  you. He
heard  you  pissed on his halldoor in  Glasthule. He's  out in pampooties to
murder you.
     -- Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
     Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back,  laughing to  the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
     -- Murder you! he laughed.
     Harsh  gargoyle face  that  warred against  me over our mess of hash of
lights  in rue Saint-AndrØ-des-Arts. In words of words  for words, palabras.
Oisin  with  Patrick.  Faunman  he  met  in  Clamart  woods,  brandishing  a
winebottle, <i>C'est vendredi saint!</i> Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he
met. I mine. I met a fool i' the forest.
     -- Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
     -- ... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in  his
<i>Diary of Master William Silence</i> has found the hunting terms... Yes?  What is
it?
     --  There's a gentleman here,  sir, the attendant said, coming  forward
and  offering a card.  From the  <i>Freeman</i>. He wants  to see the  files of the
<i>Kilkenny People</i> for last year.
     -- Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...
     He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down, unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:
     -- Is he?... O there!
     Brisk  in a galliard  he was  off  and out. In the daylit  corridor  he
talked with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.
     -- This gentleman? <i>Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People?</i> To be sure. Good
day, sir. <i>Kilkenny</i>... We have certainly...
     A patient silhouette waited, listening.
     --   All  the  leading  provincial...  <i>Northern   Whig,  Cork  Examiner
Enniscorthy  Guardian</i>,  1903...  Will you  please?...  Evans,  conduct  this
gentleman... If  you just follow  the  atten...  Or  please allow me... This
way... Please, sir...
     Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
     The door closed.
     -- The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
     He jumped up and snatched the card.
     -- What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
     He rattled on.
     -- Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him  over in the
museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth  that has
never been twisted  in prayer. Every day we must do homage  to  her. <i>Life of
life, thy lips enkindle</i>.
     Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
     -- He knows you. He knows  your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon  her  mesial groove. Venus
Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! <i>The god pursuing the maiden hid</i>.
     We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be  interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all,
as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
     -- Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from  Kyrios  Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare  of  Troy in
whom a score of heroes  slept, and handed it  to poor Penelope. Twenty years
he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew  a salary equal to
that of the lord  chancellor of Ireland. His  life was rich.  His  art, more
than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.
Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane,
gooseberried  pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they  arrested
him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair  of fancy stays.
The  gombeen woman Eliza  Tudor had underlinen  enough to  vie  with  her of
Sheba. Twenty years  he dallied there between  conjugal love and  its chaste
delights and  scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know  Manningham's
story of the  burgher's  wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had
seen  him in <i>Richard III</i> and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without  more ado
about nothing, took the cow by  the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at
the gate, answered from  the  capon's  blankets: <i>William  the conqueror came
before Richard III</i>. And the gay lakin, Mistress Fitten, mount and cry O, and
his dainty  birdsnies, Lady Penelope Rich, a  clean  quality woman is suited
for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
     Cours-la-Reine. <i>Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux?</i>
     -- The  height  of fine society. And  sir William Davenant  of Oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for every cockcanary.
     Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
     -- Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
     --  And  Harry  of  six wives'  daughter and  other  lady friends  from
neighbour  seats,  as  Lawn Tennyson, gentleman  poet, sings.  But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind
the diamond panes?
     Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter Lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he  walks, greyedauburn.  An azured harebell like her  veins. Lids of Juno's
eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body.  Do. But do. Afar,  in a
reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
     Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
     -- Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
     -- Say that he is the spurned lover  in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
     Love that dare not speak its name.
     -- As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved  a
lord.
     Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
     -- It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and  for all
other  and singular  uneared  wombs, the holy office an ostler does  for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew
to wife. But she,  the giglot  wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are
rank in that  ghost's mind: a broken vow and  the dullbrained yokel on  whom
her favour  has declined, deceased husband's brother.  Sweet  Ann I take it,
was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer.
     Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
     --  The burden of proof is with you not with me,  he said, frowning. If
you deny that in the fifth scene of <i>Hamlet</i> he  has branded her with  infamy,
tell  me why there  is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between
the day she married  him  and the day  she buried him.  All  those women saw
their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor
     dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first
to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan,
her husband  too, while  Susan's  daughter,  Elizabeth,  to use granddaddy's
words, wed her second, having killed her first.
     O  yes, mention  there is.  In the  years when he was  living richly in
royal  London to pay  a debt  she  had to  borrow forty shillings  from  her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
     He faced their silence.
     To whom thus Eglinton:
     You mean the will.
     That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
     She was entitled to her widow's dower
     At common law. His legal knowledge was great
     Our judges tell us.
     Him Satan fleers,
     Mocker:
     And therefore he left out her name
     >From the first draft but he did not leave out
     The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
     For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
     And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
     As I believe, to name her
     He left her his Secondbest
     Bed.
     <i>Punkt</i>
     Leftherhis
     Secondbest
     Bestabed
     Secabest
     Leftabed.
     Woa!
     -- Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
     -- He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said,  with  a  coat of arms
and  landed  estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland  yard, a  capitalist
shareholder, a  bill  promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not  leave her his
best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
     --  It is  clear that  there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.
     --  <i>Separatio  a mensa et a thalamo</i>,  bettered  Buck  Mulligan  and was
smiled on.
     --  Antiquity   mentions  famous   beds,   Second  Eglinton   puckered,
bedsmiling. Let me think.
     -- Antiquity  mentions that Stagyrite  schoolurchin  and  bald  heathen
sage,  Stephen said, who  when dying  in  exile frees and endows his slaves,
pays tribute to his elders, wills  to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget Nell
Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
     -- Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
     -- He died dead drunk, Buck  Mulligan  capped. A quart of ale is a dish
for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
     -- What? asked Besteglinton.
     William Shakespeare and  company,  limited.  The people's William.  For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
     --  Lovely!  Buck  Mulligan  suspired amorously.  I  asked him what  he
thought  of the  charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his
hands and said: <i>All we can  say is  that life ran very high in  those  days</i>.
Lovely!
     Catamite.
     -- The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.
     Steadfast John replied severe:
     -- The  doctor  can tell us what those words mean. You can not eat your
cake and have it.
     Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?
     -- And the sense of  property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a  maltjobber and moneylender  he was himself  a
cornjobber  and moneylender  with  ten tods of  corn hoarded in  the  famine
riots. His borrowers  are  no  doubt  those divers  of  worship mentioned by
Chettle  Falstaff  who  reported  his  uprightness of  dealing.  He  sued  a
fellowplayer for the price of  a few bags of malt  and exacted his  pound of
flesh in interest for every money  lent. How else could Aubrey's  ostler and
callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes
with the jewbaiting that followed  the hanging and quartering of the queen's
leech Lopez, his  jew's heart being  plucked forth while the sheeny was  yet
alive:  <i>Hamlet</i>  and  <i>Macbeth</i>  with the  coming  to the  throne of  a  Scotch
philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in
<i>Love's  Labour Lost</i>. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide
of  Mafeking  enthusiasm. Warwickshire  jesuits  are  tried  and we  have  a
porter's theory of equivocation.  The <i>Sea Venture</i>  comes home  from Bermudas
and  the  play Renan  admired  is written  with Patsy Caliban,  our American
cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carroty Bess, the  gross virgin who inspired <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, let
some meinherr from Almany  grope his  life long for deephid  meanings in the
depth of the buckbasket.
     I  think you're  getting  on very nicely.  Just  mix  up  a mixture  of
theolologicophilolological. <i>Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere</i>.
     -- Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
     <i>Sufflaminandus sum</i>.
     --  He was  made in  Germany,  Stephen replied, as the  champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.
     --  A  myriadminded  man,   Mr  Best  reminded.  Coleridge  called  him
myriadminded.
     <i>Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos</i>.
     -- Saint Thomas, Stephen began...
     -- <i>Ora pro nobis</i>, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
     There he keened a wailing rune.
     -- <i>Pogue mahone! Asushla machree!</i> It's destroyed we are  from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!
     All smiled their smiles.
     -- Saint Thomas, Stephen, smiling, said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading  in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from
that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and
curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that  the love so  given
to one near in  blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who,  it may
be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races
the  most  given  to  inter-marriage.  Accusations are  made  in anger.  The
christian laws which  built up the hoards of the jews (for  whom, as for the
lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel.
Whether  these be  sins or virtues  old Nobodaddy will  tell  us at doomsday
leet. But a  man who holds  so tightly to what he calls his rights over what
he calls his debts  will hold tightly  also to what he calls his rights over
her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his
wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
     -- Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
     -- Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
     -- Which Will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
     -- The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for  poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.
     -- <i>Requiescat!</i> Stephen prayed.
     What of all the will to do?
     It has vanished long ago...
     -- She lies  laid out in stark  stiffness in  that secondbest  bed, the
mobled  queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as
a motor car is now and that its carvings were the  wonder of seven parishes.
In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a
quart  of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it  skills not to
ask) and heard  she had  a  soul. She  read or had read to her his chapbooks
preferring  them  to the <i>Merry Wives</i>  and, loosing her nightly waters on the
jordan, she thought over <i>Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches</i> and <i>The most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze</i>.  Venus had  twisted
her lips  in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an  age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
     -- History shows that to be true,  <i>inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos</i>. The
ages  succeed one another.  But we have  it on  high authority  that a man's
worst enemies shall  be  those  of  his  own  house and family. I  feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that
only family poets have family  lives. Falstaff  was not a family man. I feel
that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
     Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny  thy kindred, the  unco  guid. Shy supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in  Ultonian Antrim bade it him.
Visits  him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's  a gentleman to see
you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give  me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor
Matthew, a  rugged rough  rugheaded  kern,  in  strossers  with  a  buttoned
codpiece, his nether  stocks bemired with clauber of ten  forests, a wand of
wilding in his hand.
     Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
     Hurrying to her  squalid deathlair  from gay  Paris on  the quayside  I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending
her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
     --  A  father,  Stephen  said,  battling  against  hopelessness,  is  a
necessary  evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed  his father's
death. If you hold that he,  a greying  man with two marriageable daughters,
with thirtyfive  years  of life, <i>nel mezzo del cammin  di  nostra vita</i>, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you
must  hold that his seventyyear  old mother is the  lustful  queen.  No. The
corpse  of John  Shakespeare does not  walk the  night. From hour to hour it
rots  and  rots.  He  rests,  disarmed of  fatherhood,  having devised  that
mystical estate upon his  son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last
man  who felt himself  with child. Fatherhood,  in  the sense  of  conscious
begetting, is  unknown  to  man.  It  is a  mystical  estate,  an  apostolic
succession,  from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on
the  madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the  mob of Europe
the church  is founded and  founded irremovably  because  founded,  like the
world,  macro-   and  microcosm,  upon  the  void.  Upon  incertitude,  upon
unlikelihood. <i>Amor matris</i>,  subjective and  objective  genitive, may  be the
only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father
of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
     What the hell are you driving at?
     I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons.
     <i>Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea</i>.
     Are you condemned to do this?
     -- They are sundered by a bodily  shame  so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly
record its breach.  Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters,
loves that  dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers,  jailbirds
with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The sun unborn mars beauty: born, he
brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He  is a male: his growth is
his father's decline, his youth his  father's  envy, his friend his father's
enemy.
     In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
     -- What links them in  nature? An instant of blind rut. Am I father? If
I were?
     Shrunken uncertain hand.
     -- Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His  Own Son. The bulldog  of Aquin,
with  whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who
has not a son be  not a father can the  son  who has not a father  be a son?
When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another  poet of the same name in
the  comedy of errors wrote <i>Hamlet</i> he was  not  the father  of  his own  son
merely but, being  no more a son, he was and felt  himself the father of all
his race,  the  father of  his own  grandfather, the  father of  his  unborn
grandson  who,  by  the same token,  never was born for nature, as Mr  Magee
understands her, abhors perfection.
     Eglintoneyes,  quick  with  pleasure,  looked  up  shybrightly.  Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
     Flatter. Rarely. But Flatter.
     --  Himself his own  father,  Sonmulligan told  himself. Wait. I am big
with child. I  have an unborn child in my brain.  Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
     He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
     --  As  for his family,  Stephen said, his mother's name  lives in  the
forest of  Arden. Her death brought from  him  the scene  with  Volumnia  in
<i>Coriolanus</i>. His  boyson's  death is  the deathscene of  young Arthur in <i>King
John</i>.  Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in <i>The
Tempest</i>,  in <i>Pericles</i>, in <i>Winter's Tale</i> are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot
of Egypt, and Cressid  and  Venus  are we may  guess.  But  there is another
member of his family who is recorded.
     -- The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
     The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
     Door closed. Cell. Day.
     They list. Three. They.
     I you he they.
     Come, mess.
     STEPHEN He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one
time mass he  did and he seen  his brud Maister  Wull  the playwriter  up in
Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage filled
Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but  an Edmund and a  Richard are recorded in
the works of sweet William.
     MAGEEGLINJOHN Names! What's in a name?
     BEST That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are  going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
     (<i>Laughter</i>.)
     BUCK MULLIGAN (<i>Piano, diminuendo.</i>)
     Then outspoke medical Dick
     To his comrade medical Davy...
     STEPHEN  In his trinity of  black Wills, the  villain shakebags,  Iago,
Richard  Crookback, Edmund in <i>King  Lear</i>, two bear the wicked uncles' names.
Nay, that last  play was written or being  written while his  brother Edmund
lay dying in Southwark.
     BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name.
(<i>Laughter</i>.)
     QUAKERLYSTER (<i>A tempo</i>.) But he that filches from me my good name...
     STEPHEN (<i>Stringendo</i>.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his
face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where
there  is Will in overplus. Like John O'Gaunt his name  is dear to  him,  as
dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend sable  a spear or steeled
argent,  honorificabilitudinitatibus,  dearer than  his  glory  of  greatest
shakescene in the country.  What's in a name? That  is what we ask ourselves
in childhood  when  we write the name that  we are told is  ours. A  star, a
daystar, a  firedrake rose  at  his birth. It  shone  by day in  the heavens
alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in
Cassiopeia,  the  recumbent  constellation  which  is the  signature of  his
initial among  the  stars.  His eyes  watched it,  lowlying on  the horizon,
eastward  of  the  bear,  as he walked  by the slumberous  summer fields  at
midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.
     Both satisfied. I too.
     Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
     And from her arms.
     Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
     Read  the skies. <i>Autontimerumenos. Bonus  Stephanoumenos</i>.  Where's your
configuration? Stephen,  Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D.: <i>sua donna. Giî:
di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar. S. D.</i>
     --  What  is  that,  Mr Dedalus? the  quaker librarian asked.  Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
     -- A star by night, Stephen said, a pillar of the cloud by day.
     What more's to speak?
     Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
     <i>Stephanos</i>, my crown. My sword. His  boots  are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
     -- You make good  use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name
is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
     Me, Magee and Mulligan.
     Fabulous   artificer,    the   hawklike   man.   You   flew.   Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. <i>Pater,
ait</i>. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.
     Mr Best's eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
     -- That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths.  Just what you say. The  three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third brother
that marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
     Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
     The quaker librarian springhalted near.
     -- I should like  to know, he said,  which  brother you... I understand
you to suggest there was misconduct with one of  the brothers... But perhaps
I am anticipating?
     He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
     An attendant from the doorway called:
     -- Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
     -- O! Father Dineen! Directly.
     Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
     John Eglinton touched the foil.
     --  Come,  he  said.  Let us hear what you have to  say of  Richard and
Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
     -- In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie  and
nuncle  Edmund,  Stephen answered, I  feel I am asking  too much  perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
     Lapwing.
     Where  is your  brother?  Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone.  Him,  then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act.  Act speech. They mock
to try you. Act. Be acted on.
     Lapwing.
     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  <i>King  Lear</i>  in which Edmund figures lifted  out of
Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i> 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. <i>Que
voulez-vous?</i>  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 is not, always  with him.  The note of banishment,  banishment
from the heart, banishment from  home,  sounds  uninterruptedly from <i>The Two
Gentlemen of Verona</i> 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 <i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>,
twice in <i>As you  like It</i>, in <i>The Tempest</i>, in <i>Hamlet</i>, in <i>Measure for Measure</i>,
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 <i>Cymbeline</i>, in <i>Othello</i> he is bawd and cuckold. He  acts
and  is  acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like JosØ 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  <i>fils</i> (or is it Dumas  <i>påre</i>?)  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 <i>pØre</i> and Hamlet <i>fils</i>. 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: <i>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</i>. 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 <i>dio boia</i>, 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.
     -- <i>Eureka!</i> Buck Mulligan cried. <i>Eureka!</i>
     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 <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>.
     -- 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 <i>Hamlet</i>  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?  <i>Egomen</i>. Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.
     -- You are the only contributor to <i>Dana</i> who asks for pieces of  silver.
Then  I  don't  know about  the next number. Fred  Ryan wants  space 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  <i>Summa contra
Gentiles</i> in  the company of two gonorrheal ladies,  Fresh Nelly and Rosalie,
the coalquay whore.
     He broke away.
     -- Come, Kinch. Come, wandering &Aelig;ngus 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. <i>Notre ami</i>  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 thoughts.
     What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
     Walk like Haines now.
     The constant readers' room.  In the readers' book Cashe  Boyle O'Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad?
The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
     -- O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...
     Amused   Buck  Mulligan   mused  in   pleasant  murmur  with   himself,
selfnodding:
     -- A pleased bottom.
     The turnstile.
     Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...
     The curving balustrade; smoothsliding Mincius.
     Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
     John Eglinton, my jo, John.
     Why won't you wed a wife?
     He sputtered to the air:
     O, the chinless  Chinaman! Chin Chon  Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and  I, the plumbers' hall.  Our players  are creating a new
art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the
public sweat of monks.
     He spat blank.
     Forgot: any  more than he forgot the  whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
left the <i>femme de trente ans</i>.  And why no other children born? And his first
child a girl?
     Afterwit. Go back.
     The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.
     Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...
     -- Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...
     I hardly hear the purlieu cry
     Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
     Before my thoughts begin to run
     On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
     The same that had the wooden leg
     And that filibustering fillibeg
     That never dared to slake his drouth,
     Magee that had the chinless mouth.
     Being afraid to marry on earth
     They masturbated for all they were worth.
     Jest on. Know thyself.
     Halted below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
     --  Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan  moaned. Synge has  left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
     A laugh tripped over his lips.
     -- Longworth is awfully sick, he  said, after what you wrote about that
old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jew jesuit! She gets you a job
on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn't you do
the Yeats touch?
     He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:
     -- The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.
     He stopped at the stairfoot.
     -- I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
     The  pillared  Moorish  hall,  shadows  entwined. Gone the  nine  men's
morrice with caps of indices.
     In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:
     Everyman His own Wife
     or
     A Honeymoon in the Hand
     (a national immorality in three orgasms)
     by
     Ballocky Mulligan
     He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:
     -- The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
     He read, <i>marcato</i>:
     -- Characters:
     TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
     CRAB (a bushranger)
     MEDICAL DICK
     and (two birds with one stone)
     MEDICAL DAVY
     MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
     FRESH NELLY
     and
     ROSALIE (the coalquay whore)
     He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
     -- O, the night in the  Camden hall when  the daughters of Erin had  to
lift  their skirts  to step  over you  as you  lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!
     -- The  most innocent  son  of Erin, Stephen  said,  for whom they ever
lifted them.
     About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
     Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come
to, ineluctably.
     My will: his will that fronts me. Sea