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 Lovesongs of Connacht. -- 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 Portrait of Mr W. H. 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: -- The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. 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-Andrè-des-Arts. In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle, C'est vendredi saint! 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 Diary of Master William Silence 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 Freeman. He wants to see the files of the Kilkenny People 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? Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good day, sir. Kilkenny... We have certainly... A patient silhouette waited, listening. -- All the leading provincial... Northern Whig, Cork Examiner Enniscorthy Guardian, 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. Life of life, thy lips enkindle. 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! The god pursuing the maiden hid. 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 Richard III 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: William the conqueror came before Richard III. 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. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Minette? Tu veux? -- 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 Hamlet 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. Punkt 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. -- Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, 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: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. 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: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love's Labour Lost. 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 Sea Venture 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 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 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. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere. -- Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman. Sufflaminandus sum. -- 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. Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos. -- Saint Thomas, Stephen began... -- Ora pro nobis, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair. There he keened a wailing rune. -- Pogue mahone! Asushla machree! 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. -- Requiescat! 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 Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. 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, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. 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, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, 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. Amor matris, 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. Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea. 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 Hamlet 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 Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale 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. (Laughter.) BUCK MULLIGAN (Piano, diminuendo.) Then outspoke medical Dick To his comrade medical Davy... STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, 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. (Laughter.) QUAKERLYSTER (A tempo.) But he that filches from me my good name... STEPHEN (Stringendo.) 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. Autontimerumenos. Bonus Stephanoumenos. Where's your configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D.: sua donna. Giþ: di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar. S. D. -- 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. Stephanos, 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. Pater, ait. 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 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 is 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 Josè 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 põre?) 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, 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 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. -- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka! 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 The Taming of the Shrew. -- 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 Hamlet 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? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap. -- You are the only contributor to Dana 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 Summa contra Gentiles 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. Notre ami 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 femme de trente ans. 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, marcato: -- 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