5
Joyce’s Shakespeare
A View from Trieste
JOHN MCCOURT
“Ah, there’s only one man he’s got to get the better of now, and that’s that Shakespeare!”
I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image . . . Marked you that?” (GJ, 10)
For James Joyce, minor poet, failed playwright, getting the better of William Shakespeare was always going to be a challenge, one with which he battled throughout his entire writing career and which had a major impact on his final two novels. His Triestine period turned out to be a crucial one in the genesis of his understanding of Shakespeare and, in particular, Hamlet. In Trieste, among other things, he delivered a series of a dozen lectures on Hamlet in 1912, which would come to form the core of Stephen Dedalus’s Hamlet theory in Ulysses. Only some rather scant notes for these talks remain, which can trigger little more than conjecture about how Joyce tackled what he later, in Finnegans Wake, called “the puchypatch of hamlock” by the looming presence that was “Great Shapesphere” (FW 31.23 and 295.04). The texts of these talks would undoubtedly have provided hugely revelatory evidence as to Joyce’s growing fascination with Shakespeare’s play, which later came to exercise such a fundamental and indeed foundational role in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Just a few years after the Shakespeare lectures, in or around 1915, Joyce began the long process of writing the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. By April 9, 1917, he told Ezra Pound that the only episode he had ready to send him was the “Hamlet chapter” (LI 101). It was already his habit to refer to the episode in this way, or as the library chapter, rather than by its Homeric name. It was the only episode that he referred to in such a singular way. At the end of 1918, on the last page of the fair copy version of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Joyce wrote “New Year’s Eve, 1918|End of First Part of Ulysses” (Crispi 2004), thus giving the episode a vital structural position within the overall body of his novel. The fact that “Scylla and Charybdis” was Joyce’s first completed episode, that he habitually referred to it as the Hamlet chapter, and that it came to occupy a turning point or a point of no return within the overall text (it’s the ninth of eighteen episodes), makes manifest the centrality of the Hamlet elements in Ulysses as a whole. In Ulysses, the force of Hamlet is felt in how Joyce explores the father-son relationship, themes of paternity and usurpation (literary and real), the subject of betrayal, the connections between a writer’s biography and his written texts, and the question of belonging for a great “national” writer.
At the episode’s core, Stephen puts forth his theory of Hamlet for a select audience of Russell, Lyster, Mulligan, and Eglinton at the National Library in Dublin but, as René Girard has commented, the “real ideas of the lecture shine only intermittently, tiny jewels almost invisible in the trampled mud of a pig pen” (Girard 2000, 261). In the face of a barrage of mostly hostile critical comments and platitudes from his four interlocutors, and developing the biographical trend of reading works according to their authors’ lives but contrary to contemporary popular takes on Shakespeare, Stephen Dedalus identifies the Bard not with Hamlet the prince, but with his father, the murdered king. This is the part that Shakespeare himself played when the tragedy was first performed. Hamlet the prince, on the other hand, is to be identified with young Hamnet Shakespeare, “who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever” (U 181).
The theme of betrayal lies at the heart of Stephen’s Hamlet, and its motivation is to be found in the fact that he believes Shakespeare is a cuckold who transferred his suffering over Anne Hathaway’s supposed affairs onto the play’s “guilty queen” when turning it into “a French triangle” (U 205). Stephen notes that Shakespeare left Hathaway his second-best bed in his will and that “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” (U 203). When Shakespeare’s face appears in “Circe,” the cinematic play within Joyce’s novel, it is “crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall” (U 528), by horns, that is, that symbolize the cuckold, in what might be taken for a parodic reflection of Joyce himself, who appears to have attempted to play the role of the cuckold in Trieste in what would indeed have been a French triangle, a bedroom farce involving himself, Nora, and his journalist friend, Roberto Prezioso, and which is later reflected in Exiles. A viable alternative to this Irish-Italian triangle might also be sought in the complicated Joyce-Nora-Stanislaus arrangement, which saw them sharing Triestine apartments for several years and where brotherly jealousies more than occasionally arose. Jean Kimball, in fact, sees the Joyce-Stanislaus nexus as the dominant paradigm behind the brother relationships in Joyce’s fiction (Kimball 1988, 227), and if this is so it gives added significance to the adulterous brother reading that Joyce provides with regard to Shakespeare.
Hamlet, prince of Denmark, or, as he comes to be named or better misnamed, “camelot prince of dinmurk” (FW 143.7), also occupies a vital place in Finnegans Wake becoming, as Vincent Cheng, among others, has argued, both “structurally and analogically important”: “There are by far more allusions to Hamlet than to any other play (Shakespearean or otherwise); and the parallels are more frequent, precise, and insistent: HCE as King Hamlet, Shem as the Prince, Shaun as Laertes-Polonius. References to Hamlet are ubiquitous; and, as in the case of Ulysses, the themes and motifs in Hamlet are structural counterparts to those in Finnegans Wake” (Cheng 1984, 6–7).
Although Joyce was undoubtedly well-acquainted with Hamlet long before moving to Trieste (having worked on his theory of the play as early as 1904), it was in the Adriatic city that he deepened and developed his understanding of it during the process of preparing his lectures. He did so in an environment in which debate about the Bard was extremely common, with many of Joyce’s Triestine acquaintances actively involved. His friend, Silvio Benco, doyen of Trieste’s literary journalists, was a longtime Shakespeare devotee (Gruber Benco 1972, 331) and cited the fantastic elements in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as important sources for his libretto for the opera Oceana (1903), written by Antonio Smareglia, longtime neighbor and later friend of Joyce. Italo Svevo, too, nurtured a lifelong Shakespeare passion. La Coscienza di Zeno contains an allusion to Hamlet that suggests Svevo was well acquainted with the text: “la profetica anima mia” (Svevo 1987, 108), a direct translation of the line from Hamlet “O my prophetic soul!” Even as a teenager away at boarding school, Svevo had “spent sleepless nights over Hamlet” until the headmaster, Dr Spier, confiscated his Shakespeare volumes before he could get to King Lear (Furbank 1966, 11). But Svevo was unperturbed and, on December 2, 1880, writing under the pseudonym Ettore Samigli, when given the opportunity to publish his first article in the Trieste newspaper L’Indipendente, he chose as his topic Shakespeare and concentrated in particular on the character of Shylock. Unlike Svevo but very similarly to Joyce himself, the young Triestine writer Scipio Slataper initially devoted his critical energies more to Henrik Ibsen than to Shakespeare. He wrote his degree thesis in 1912 on the Norwegian writer (and it was published, posthumously, in 1916). But he tired of Ibsen and turned to Shakespeare, complaining of Ibsen’s “Lutheran dryness” (“secchezza luterana”) his inability to cry, to let himself go, to love, all of which he compares unfavorably to the richness, generosity, love of the godlike Shakespeare (Slataper 1944, 216–17).22 In short, Joyce would have had no shortage of company, quite apart from Stanislaus, with whom to sharpen his ideas on Shakespeare.
To some extent we can reconstruct what Joyce might have said in his lectures “in lingua inglese sull’Amleto di G. Shakespeare” (the “G” standing for “Guglielmo,” as Joyce persisted in his habit of Italianizing English surnames). Initially invited to give ten lectures at the highly respected Società di Minerva on Via Carducci, 28, Joyce probably gave as many as a dozen, which were open to the public at a cost of ten crowns for the full series (five crowns for members of the Minerva).33 The fact that Joyce was asked to lecture, as he had earlier been invited to write for Il Piccolo della Sera, was proof of how influential Triestine friends, like editor Roberto Prezioso and lawyer Nicolò Vidacovich, gave him a helping hand by engineering high-profile invitations for him (which would, it was hoped, attract potential students for his English language lessons, his bread and butter in this period). Not for the first time, following disappointment away from Trieste, in Dublin and, indeed, in Rome, Joyce’s Triestine friends did what they could to enable him to bounce back in his adopted city. The choice to lecture on Hamlet was probably Joyce’s own, although it might also be presumed that his sponsors advised against the relatively obscure Irish topics that had been the subjects of his earlier lectures and articles in favor of something of more mainstream appeal.
The greater part of Joyce’s lectures was philological—a study of Shakespeare’s words and their origins. As Joyce put it himself in his letter asking for permission from the “Direzione di Polizia” to give the lecture series, he wished to offer “a verbal commentary and a critical and etymological elucidation” of Hamlet.44 Joyce mostly read and commented on passages from Shakespeare’s play for his Italian audience, having provided contextual background to the writer and his times in the opening talks, which drew heavily on Georg Brandes’s William Shakespeare (1898), Sidney Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare (1898), and Frank Harris’s The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (1909). He would not have pitched his talks “Shakespearian scholars, who are well provided with volumes of research and criticism,” but would have sought to render Hamlet “more interesting and intelligible for the general reader,” to quote his own scathingly negative 1903 Daily Express “Shakespeare Explained” review of A. S. Canning’s Shakespeare Studied in Eight Plays (OCPW 98). At the same time, it can be presumed that Joyce sought to offer interpretations that were very different from what he termed the “meagre, obvious, and commonplace” observations offered by Canning, devoid of “psychological complexity . . . cross-purpose . . . interweaving of motives such as might perplex the base multitude” (OCPW 98). It can be assumed that many of the perplexing theories elaborated by Stephen in Ulysses received their first public outings before what must have been a stoic Triestine audience.
Joyce did not limit himself to English scholarly explication of Shakespeare. Quite the contrary. Indeed, he had already voiced, in his 1907 “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” lecture, his dismissal of the provincial nature of much early English Shakespeare analysis, pointing instead to the influence of German scholarship in the strengthening of Shakespeare’s reputation: “it cannot be denied that these learned Germans were the first to present Shakespeare as a poet of world-wide significance, before the amazed eyes of his compatriots (who up until then had considered William as a person of secondary importance, a decent devil with a nice bent towards lyric poetry, but perhaps a bit over-fond of English beer)” (OCPW 109). In “Scylla and Charybdis” Thomas Lyster, referring to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, in which Hamlet is performed, interprets the play in terms of German Romanticism: “a hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles” (U 176). Elsewhere in the episode references abound to other continental readers of Shakespeare from Mallarmé and Renan, to the extent that, as Richard Brown has argued, it needs to be read in the context of “Joyce’s own particularly transient and cosmopolitan cultural situation and particularly to the complex cultural situation of Zürich during the war years” (Brown 1999, 345). But the episode also draws on the equally cosmopolitan environment in Trieste in the decade immediately before this.
Elsewhere, Joyce would further emphasize the European nature of Shakespeare’s art. In his essay entitled “Realism and Idealism in English Literature Daniel Defoe—William Blake,” he pointed to the number of Shakespeare types that had been imported into stay-at-home Shakespeare’s plays from European sources: “A boorish peasant, a courtjester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger” (OCPW 164). Joyce also asserted that Shakespeare’s great protagonists are almost all of foreign derivation. They all “come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff” (OCPW 164). Shakespeare’s hybrid imports provided Joyce with a useful set of prototypes for his Hungarian-Jewish-Irish Bloom and his Spanish-Jewish-Irish Molly in Ulysses. Similarly, if Joyce himself can be seen to have become a Triestinised Irishman, a Giacomo Joyce, it was in part because he had come to see the value of cultural crossover and to appreciate Shakespeare as a foremost example of this: “Shakespeare, with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman” (OCPW 164).
Joyce’s portrait of a European Shakespeare reads almost as a direct response to contemporary readings of the Bard that were being constructed and to what Felperin has called his “newly allegorized professional career” in the service of “the needs of empire” (especially through readings of the figure of Prospero in The Tempest) (Felperin 1990, 178). These interpretations were being written in England and, perhaps more pointedly, in Dublin by Edward Dowden, professor of English at Trinity College from 1867 to 1913. In his seminal study Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and His Art ([1875] 1880), described as “the most influential Shakespeare biography in the history of literary criticism” (Wallace 2005, 801), in his later, condensed Shakespeare Primer (1877), and in his Introduction to Shakespeare ([1893] 1906) Dowden defined Shakespeare criticism for at least a generation, providing what Joyce calls in Ulysses “The people’s William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house” (U 196). Dowden read the playwright biographically by studying the works chronologically and took issue with foreign—especially German—readings of Shakespeare, writing, in the course of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and His Art, that “it is somewhat hard upon Shakespeare to suppose that he secreted in each of his dramas a central idea for a German critic to discover” (108). He argued, instead, in Introduction to Shakespeare, for the Englishness of the Bard, claiming that Shakespeare expresses “an exultant patriotic pride and an exhilarating consciousness of power” which exudes “the spirit of Protestantism” (44). This was the anticipatory English counterpart to the ludicrous Patrick W. Shakespeare, Irish hero of the “Cyclops” episode (whatever the allusions to Patrick W. Joyce and indeed to Shakespeare’s purported Irish background). Unlike Yeats, who, as Andrew Gibson has shown, openly opposed Dowden’s reading of Shakespeare (believing he had turned him into an English Benthamite), Joyce was always anxious to disrupt the kinds of binary opposition the imperialist Dowden sought to establish between Irish and English culture and which many Irish writers simply cemented by responding to in kind. Rather than offer a direct retort to Dowden’s provocative stances (in an 1865 letter he wrote that he could not “believe that Ireland will produce such a thing [as a Shakespeare] or anything but long-eared asses; . . . the idiotic noises the true Irishman makes from generation to generation are certainly not human, but are part of the irony on humanity of the Aristophanic Spirit who presides over the World-Drama—a chorus of Asses”55), Joyce came at the problem from another, wider angle. He was no more taken by Dowden’s belief in the inferiority of Irish culture or his exaltation of its English equivalent than he was with Yeats’s and the other revivalists’ polemical reversal of this. Feeling estranged and rejected by the architects of revivalism and refusing to play on the narrow Ireland-England pitch, Joyce sought instead to accommodate Shakespeare and, in “Oxen of the Sun,” all of English literature, on his own even larger personal playing field, that is, within his European Irish epic of Ulysses. This was his way to counter Dowden’s patronizing attempt to accommodate Irish literature as a minor presence to be tolerated within what he saw as great “English culture” but also to distance himself from any narrow or defensive Irish response by seeking refuge in a greater European canonic tradition where even Shakespeare himself was redimensioned.
It was precisely against narrow, imperialist readings of the ultra-English Shakespeare that Joyce pitched the lectures in Trieste that came to form the core of his Hamlet theory in Ulysses. Given that Joyce made his claims for Shakespeare as “an Italianized Englishman” in two further lectures given at the Università Popolare in Trieste, just two months after his Hamlet series, there is every reason to believe that Joyce underlined the European contexts of Shakespeare’s material and indeed his style in the longer series of lectures. Once again there is an element of Joycean self-fashioning in all this: he was delivering these lectures just as he was also launching into the Ulysses project that would eventually be heralded as Ireland’s return into the literary culture of Europe. Establishing Shakespeare as a precursor—with Homer and Dante—if only in his own head for the moment, could not, in the long term, be a bad move. In Joyce’s view, Shakespeare and the Renaissance lay at the root of the modern age. With the Renaissance, “a sharp, limited and formal mind” was deposed in favor of “a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging . . . restless and somewhat amorphous” (OCPW 188). Joyce identifies this new mentality, in this own times, with journalism and cinema, two modern media that exercised a powerful formal influence on Ulysses. In Joyce’s words: “Shakespeare and Lope de Vega are to a certain extent responsible for modern cinematography. Untiring creative power, heated, strong passion, the intense desire to see and feel, unfettered and prolix curiosity have, after three centuries, degenerated into frenetic sensationalism” (OCPW 188).
Following his final lecture, Il Piccolo published a highly positive review article, part of which is included here:
Yesterday evening, Dr James Joyce concluded his series of lectures in English on Hamlet. The hall was well attended during all twelve lectures. The English colony appeared to be thinly or not at all represented, so the steady attendance redounded to the credit of the lecturer especially, but also of his Italian audience who have been able to follow a text that was not easy.
As Joyce indicated yesterday, he had purposely refrained from critical or philosophical disquisitions about the play he was reading and interpreting. His first task was to explain the words. His original and slightly bizarre talent changed the nature of his commentary, which might otherwise have been dry, into attractive “causeries.” The words, the manners, and the dress of the Elizabethans stirred the lecturer to literary and historical recollections which proved of keen interest to an audience which had been his for so many hours.
Yesterday evening, accepting the duty of closing such a work with a critical synthesis, he read (in English translation) the attack of Voltaire on Hamlet and then, suddenly, the eulogy of the same work by Georg Brandes. (JJA 776)66
Presumably Joyce would have quoted from Voltaire’s famous letter to Bernard Joseph Saurin in which he describes Shakespeare as “a savage . . . who had some imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only at London and in Canada. It is not a good sign for the taste of a nation when that which it admires meets with favor only at home” (Lounsbury 1902, 318). For Voltaire, Shakespeare’s art seems to lack a universal appeal and this because it breaks the rules of theater that Voltaire felt were so important and to which he adhered in his own work.
Elsewhere in his Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne, Voltaire gives a more balanced reading of Hamlet, praising, in particular, its use of ghosts (a decisive element, this, for Joyce’s appreciation of the play), as John Morley in his Voltaire ([1871] 1886), which Joyce may well have read, points out:
Even the famous criticism on Hamlet has been a good deal misrepresented. Voltaire is vindicating the employment of the machinery of ghosts, and he dwells on the fitness and fine dramatic effect of the ghost in Shakespeare’s play. “I am very far,” he goes on to say, “from justifying the tragedy of Hamlet in everything: it is a rude and barbarous piece. . . . Hamlet goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes mad in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress, pretending to kill a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on the stage; the grave-diggers jest in a way worthy of them, with skulls in their hands; Hamlet answers their odious grossnesses by extravagances no less disgusting. Meanwhile one of the characters conquers Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and his stepfather drink together on the stage; they sing at table, they wrangle, they fight, they kill; one might suppose such a work to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage. But in the midst of all these rude irregularities, which to this day make the English theatre so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet by a yet greater incongruity sublime strokes worthy of the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had taken a delight in collecting within the brain of Shakespeare all that we can imagine of what is greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness without wit can contain of what is lowest and most detestable.” (133)
The use of ghosts in Hamlet, approved of by Voltaire and Joyce, would also loom large in the popular appreciation of Shakespeare being built in these years through theatrical and cinema productions that often put a particular focus on the spectral (and, to recall Joyce’s words above, the sensational) and indeed augmented it. In Trieste, Joyce had the opportunity to attend many such Shakespeare performances, such as those at the Teatro Rossetti, which included important productions of Hamlet starring Gustavo Salvini, in February 1908, and Ferruccio Garavaglia, in the autumn of 1910. In his unpublished Trieste diary, Stanislaus recorded Joyce’s opinions the day after he went to see the Salvini Hamlet:
Talking of “Hamlet” today, Jim said that it was full of gross dramatic blunders. I asked him to cite an example. He said that Ophelia’s madness took all the force out of Hamlet’s simulation, and that her love for her father, whom the audience have seen to be a paltry old imbecile, is a caricature of Hamlet’s passion; and the evil in the King’s character that accounts for Hamlet’s hatred must be supposed for it is not dramatically explained. Salvini acted with energy and intelligence but the rest of the company was wretched. S. acted the piece in six acts and at half past twelve, when Jim came away, it had not yet ended.77
If Joyce felt overwhelmed by the sheer length of Salvini’s six-act Hamlet (interestingly, Maud Ellmann has read both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as sixth acts or “extra comic acts to Shakespeare’s masterpiece” [Ellmann 2003, 137]), he could have found many far shorter versions competing for his attention at the cinema. By this time, Shakespeare adaptations had become popular in cinemas struggling to assert themselves as something other than places of lowbrow entertainment and which were happy to take whatever cultural plaudits were to be garnered from being associated with the Bard. The very first Shakespeare film, Beerbohm Tree’s King John, was made as early as 1899 and was followed by at least thirty-six American Shakespeare productions between 1908 and 1913 and many more in Britain and Europe (Pearson and Uricchio 2004, 148). Hamlet had first made it on screen in 1900 with Sarah Bernhardt, whom Joyce saw performing in Paris in 1903, cross-dressing to fill the role in the very short, silent Le Duel d’Hamlet. In reality this film presented only the sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes, but of course Bernhardt had already played the prince on stage in a full production in 1899. In a letter to the London Daily Telegraph, Bernhardt made it clear she wanted no truck with the rather traditional construction of Hamlet as an “effeminate” but described him instead, as “manly and resolute, but nonetheless thoughtful . . . [he] thinks before he acts, a trait indicative of great strength and great spiritual power” (Gay 2002, 164). As Tony Howard has commented, Bernhardt’s “version was not just the apotheosis of the traditional female Hamlet [but] heralded its demise” (Howard 2007, 92). Another famous female Hamlet film, a Danish one, this time, appeared in 1920 with Asta Nielsen in the title role (directed by Sven Gade and Heinz Schall).
The critical basis for Hamlet being played by a woman was to be found in Edward P. Vining’s The Mystery of Hamlet, although this text seems to endorse the more traditional view of the effeminate Hamlet which Bernhardt rejected. Vining argued that “Hamlet lacks the energy, the conscious strength, the readiness for action that inhere in the perfect manly character” and claimed that he was “a woman attempting to play a man’s part” (Vining 1881, 46). Vining quotes from Carl Rohrbach’s 1859 Shakespeare’s Hamlet erläutert: “He always talks more than is necessary . . . At all events, he can under this mask [of madness] give free play to his tongue, and that, and not the use of his hands, suits him above all things. Were he a whole man and no weakling, and if he would go wisely to work, why does he not at least keep his mouth shut? . . . He is a weakling. When he says, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman,’ he might have used his own name here” (49).
In short, Hamlet’s behavior resembles that of “a gently-nurtured woman, rather than from a fervid young prince glowing with desire to end unequalled wrongs” (Vining 1881, 53), a woman in disguise and very much in love with Horatio:
The question may be asked, whether Shakespeare, having been compelled by the course and exigencies of the drama to gradually modify his original hero into a man with more and more of the feminine element, may not at last have had the thought dawn upon him that this womanly man might be in very deed a woman, desperately striving to fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted, and, in her failure to do that which it was impossible for her to do, earning an admiration and a pity which no mere weakling, dawdling about his proper task and meanly failing to achieve it, could inspire. (59)
Vining later comments on instances of cross-dressing used by Shakespeare, noting that “a favorite fancy it was of Shakespeare’s to allow his heroines to masquerade in male attire” and claiming that he had “an intuitive fondness for placing his characters in the situations most foreign to their natural dispositions, and then allowing their natural peculiarities to show themselves and reveal the real nature of the human being whom he had created, in spite of all disguises and through them all” (60). Victorian Vining’s text is full of sexist speculation on Hamlet’s femininity, which is located in his melancholy, hysteria, faintness, excessive poetizing, and lack of strength and courage, demerits, these, “that are far more in keeping with a feminine than with a masculine nature” (48). As if all this were not enough, Hamlet, we learn “has a woman’s daintiness and sensitiveness to perfumes” (77). Vining was neither the first nor the last to emphasize Hamlet’s feminine side, as David Leverenz has pointed out:
Hamlet is part hysteric as Freud said, and part Puritan in his disgust at contamination and his idealization of his absent father. But he is also, as Goethe was the first to say, part woman. And Goethe was wrong, as Freud was wrong, to assume that “woman” means weakness. To equate women with weak and tainted bodies, words, and feelings while men possess noble reasons and ambitious purpose is to participate in Denmark’s disease that divides mind from body, act from feeling, man from woman. (Leverenz 1980, 123)
Vining’s was not an original theory, but it was probably the most cogently argued version of it. In Ulysses, we find a reference to the female Hamlet hypothesis, when Bloom thinks about this possibility in connection with Rudolph Virag. In “Calypso,” he recalls 1865 (the year of his birth) and what is, effectively, the second chronological “fact” in his family history as it is constructed in the novel. Bloom remembers that Rudolph saw Kate Bateman play Hamlet in London that year:
Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery’s Summer Sale. No, he’s going on straight. Hello. LEAH tonight. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Like to see her again in that. HAMLET she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive. (U 73)
If Hamlet were a woman this would, as Bloom suggests, provide a more ample justification of Ophelia’s suicide and would neatly answer Joyce’s criticism, posed in Trieste after the Salvani production, that she weakened the overall structure of the tragedy.
While the character of Hamlet has traditionally been most strenuously associated with Stephen Dedalus, the idea that Hamlet was a woman or at least was “womanly” would bolster the arguments to associate him with Bloom. Both protagonists are fatherless and sonless, both are haunted by the ghosts of their dead fathers and are afflicted by similar forms of passivity, frustration, prevarication, and powerlessness, and also united by their having a common artistic bent. All of these common features make it entirely possible that this womanly Hamlet may have been a source for Joyce of his own rather androgynous Bloom, who is presented as a “womanly man” in Ulysses, in the text’s most obviously theatrical episode, “Circe”:
DR DIXON
(reads a bill of health) Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found him a dear man, a dear person.
(U 465)
If Bernhardt’s (or Vining’s) female Hamlet in some way contributed to the construction of Bloom’s vision of the play, other specific Hamlet films, along with the infinitely more important text of the play itself, may have influenced Joyce’s own writing of Ulysses, a text that numerous critics have shown was receptive to the innovative modes of cinema to which Joyce attempted to respond and even sought to replicate in his prose.88 Many of the early filmmakers turned their hands to Shakespeare adaptations, most often to Hamlet. In 1907 George Méliès directed a silent Hamlet that was followed by (among others) three separate Italian productions in 1908 by Mario Caserini, Luca Comerio, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, and a French one with Mounet-Sully in 1909. The year 1910 saw a British production of Hamlet by William George Barker, a Danish one by August Blom, and a French production made by Henri Desfontaines. In 1913, Cecil M. Hepworth’s one-hour version appeared with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the leading Shakespearean actor of his time, in the title role. In short, there was no escaping the ghost of Shakespeare, who appeared through his multitude of characters on stage and screen with alarming regularity.
Caserini’s was the first Italian adaptation of the complete work, but was preceded internationally by Méliès’s 1907 film. Neither survives today, but it is safe to say that it made use of Méliès’s characteristic techniques and tricks, such as the stop-action method, the dissolve, and multiple-exposure or transparency, which was very useful for the screening of ghosts. Although Méliès’s Hamlet, in which the director himself played the title role, no longer exists, we have a rich description of it, penned by his brother, Gaston:
The melancholy disposition of the young prince is demonstrated to good advantage in the grave-yard scene where the diggers are interrupted in their weird pastime of joshing among the tombstones by the appearance of Hamlet and his friend. After questioning them he picks up one of the skulls about a newly-dug grave, and is told that it is the skull of a certain Yorick, who was known to Hamlet in his natural life. Hamlet slowly takes up the skull, and his manner strongly indicates, “Alas, poor Yorik, I knew him well!” The following scenes combine to show the high state of dementia of the young prince’s mentality. He is seen in his room where he is continually annoyed and excited by apparitions which taunt him in their weirdness and add bitterness to his troubled brain. He attempts to grasp them but in vain, and he falls to brooding. Now is shown the scene in which he meets the ghost of his father and is told to take vengeance on the reigning monarch, his uncle; but not content with this, Hamlet’s fates tantalise him further by sending into his presence the ghost of his departed sweetheart, Ophelia. He attempts to embrace her as she throws flowers to him from a garland on her brow, but his efforts are futile; and when he sees the apparition fall to the ground, he, too swoons away, and is thus found by several courtiers. He is raving and storms about in a manner entirely unintelligible to them; but they calm him gradually.99
In the hands of filmmakers like Méliès, early cinema (like Shakespeare before it, who would be attacked for his vulgarisms by Ben Jonson) reveled in trucage, in optical illusion, in ghosts and the spectral, in spiritualism and transformations, and would often be criticized for these spectacular elements. Yet these were among the core ingredients Joyce would borrow in Trieste and elsewhere as part of the rich cornucopia of elements he needed for Ulysses. Cinema tore up the rules of time and space and, by following its lead, helped Joyce produce scenes such as that in “Circe” when Stephen, Bloom and Shakespeare somehow merge into one in the mirror: “Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall” (U 528).
Shakespeare in this image is captured in a “still,” frozen or paralyzed—momentarily paralyzing both Stephen and Bloom but not their creator, Joyce, who is, as ever, pulling all the strings not in the least inhibited by having had to spend so much of his creative life being exercised by the hyperpresence of the long-dead Bard, a ghost who would not lie down but demanded to be read, reread, and subsequently rewritten by the Irish author in the pages of his final two novels. Joyce, too, would later press a similarly enabling/paralyzing demand on his own literary followers, and in doing so achieved what he set out to achieve: to take his place, always on his own terms, in the canon beside, among others, his Europeanized Shakespeare, whom he has been so good as to allow to speak only “in dignified ventriloquy” (U 528).
1. As recalled by Frank Budgen, according to Clive Hart (1962, 163).
2. The original reads: “Ibsen non piange, non s’abbandona, non ama . . . Mondo povero . . . Mondo dedotto e non indotto. Secchezza luterana e non comprensione cattolica. Leggendo, e rileggendo, tornando a rileggere Ibsen a un tratto vi prende una smania indicibile: ma! sangue! Riprendete Shakespeare.”
3. A copy of the printed ticket to “Amleto di G. Shakespeare” is kept at the Cornell University Library.
4. Letter of November 9, 1912 published in Schneider (2004, 14).
5. Dowden is quoted by Nathaniel Preston Wallace (2005, 803).
6. Il Piccolo, February 11, 1913, p.2 (this English translation is taken from JJII 776).
7. Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine Book of Days, February 10, 1908. A copy of this documented was consulted at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
8. See, most recently, John McCourt (2010) and Thomas Burkdall (2001).
9. Gaston Méliès is cited in Ball (1968, 34–35).