James Joyce once said he had put enough enigmas into Ulysses to “keep the professors busy for centuries”, but it still might surprise him to be connected with a big Irish night at this year’s Hollywood Oscars.
When I was ambassador in London, I was invited to Stratford-upon-Avon in 2014 for William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday where I was asked to pay tribute to The Bard on behalf of the Diplomatic Corps. I did what I could to connect the birthday boy with Ireland, but it was a bit of a stretch.
I would have a lot more to say this year as Shakespeare’s latest Hollywood appearance, in Hamnet, has a decidedly Irish flavour, with its two main actors, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, and the screenplay co-written by Maggie O’Farrell who helped adapt her bestselling novel. And if that were not enough, the Hamlet/Hamnet strand in the film may have originated with Joyce.
Ulysses has been described by the literary critic Harold Bloom as “Shakespeare-soaked”. In the novel’s opening episode, Buck Mulligan sends up Stephen Dedalus’s unorthodox views about Hamlet: “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”
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In Hamnet, Mescal’s Shakespeare plays the role on stage of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, something we know that Shakespeare did when Hamlet was first performed in the early 17th century.
Stephen dwells on the fact that Shakespeare had a son, Hamnet, who died in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1596 at the age of 11, just a few years before Hamlet was written. This equation of Shakespeare with Hamlet’s father allows Stephen to draw parallels between Hamlet’s mother, the faithless Gertrude, and Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway (Agnes in Hamnet), who he charges with infidelity, claiming she had an affair with one (or maybe both) of Shakespeare’s brothers, Richard and Edmund.
There is no evidence to support that salacious suggestion as Shakespeare’s private life has always been a bit of a black hole into which endless speculation has been poured. We do know, however, that Shakespeare saw little of his wife and family in Stratford during the 11 years he spent in London establishing himself as an actor and playwright.
The Shakespeare soakage in Ulysses is most evident in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode set in the National Library on Kildare Street, Dublin, where Hamlet is the subject of an extended intellectual discussion. In it, John Eglinton (William Kirkpatrick Magee) observes how “our young Irish bards have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet”.
Joyce himself referred to “Scylla and Charybdis” as the “Hamlet chapter”. Nora Joyce once said about her husband: “Ah, there’s only one man he has to get the better of now, and that’s that Shakespeare.”
I hope I will be forgiven for this spoiler alert, albeit an intricate one, but Joyce wrote in Ulysses how “Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare”. He imagines a performance of Hamlet at London’s Globe Theatre. “The play begins. ... the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life ... in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him ... Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit ... 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.”
That pretty much sums up the memorable closing scenes of Hamnet in which Shakespeare’s wife realises that Hamlet is her husband’s tribute to their late son. This is captured beautifully in O’Farrell’s novel. When Agnes sees Hamlet on stage, she concludes that it is her dead son: “This is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.”
I do not know if O’Farrell was aware of what Joyce wrote in Ulysses, but it doesn’t matter. Either way it would not detract from her great achievement because writers routinely borrow ideas when crafting their works. Joyce mined his knowledge of Shakespeare from the works of three late-19th century Shakespearean scholars including Galway-born Frank Harris.
In Ulysses, George Russell (AE) pours cold water on Stephen’s speculations. “All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracles out of his shadow. ... The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom. Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.”
It is Buckley’s powerful evocation of “the eternal wisdom”, embedded in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in O’Farrell’s Hamnet, that may well net her an Oscar on Sunday.
Daniel Mulhall is the author of Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books, 2022)
