Four Novels by James Joyce. James Joyce

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.

      Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H.P.B.'s elemental.

      O, fie! Out on't! PFUITEUFEL! You naughtn't to look, missus, so you naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.

      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.

      Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

      --Haines is gone, he said.

      --Is he?

      --I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't you know, about Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT. I couldn't bring him in to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

      BOUND THEE FORTH, MY BOOKLET, QUICK TO GREET THE CALLOUS PUBLIC. WRIT, I WEEN, 'TWAS NOT MY WISH IN LEAN UNLOVELY ENGLISH.

      --The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

      We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

      --People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.

      From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

      --Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about HAMLET. He says: IL SE PROMENE, LISANT AU LIVRE DE LUI-MEME, don't you know, READING THE BOOK OF HIMSELF. He describes HAMLET given in a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

      His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

      HAMLET OU LE DISTRAIT PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE

      He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:

      --PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE, don't you know. It's so French. The French point of view. HAMLET OU ...

      --The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

      John Eglinton laughed.

      --Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

      Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

      --A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

      Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

      WHELPS AND DAMS OF MURDEROUS FOES WHOM NONE BUT WE HAD SPARED ...

      Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

      --He will have it that HAMLET is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.

      LIST! LIST! O LIST!

      My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

      IF THOU DIDST EVER ...

      --What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from LIMBO PATRUM, returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?

      John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

      Lifted.

      --It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.

      Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

      --Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has other thoughts.

      Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

      --The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied HAMLET all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name:

      HAMLET, I AM THY FATHER'S SPIRIT,

      bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

      Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

      --But