9
History and Possibility
Shakespeare and the Stage in Finnegans Wake
VINCENT CHENG
In Ulysses, John Eglinton (quoting Alexandre Dumas senior) asserts that “After God, Shakespeare has created most”—while Stephen Dedalus makes an equation between Shakespeare and the Creator, “the playwright who wrote the folio of this world” (“and wrote it badly,” Stephen adds [U 204]). In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce confirms this notion, referring to Shakespeare as “Great Shapesphere” (295.04). To Joyce, artist and god were equivalent; the quintessential artist was the greatest bard of all, the lord of language at the Globe.
Joyce was also in the habit of equating himself—and comparing himself—with Shakespeare as fellow artist-creators and playwrights who write the folios of their worlds.11 Furthermore, Joyce conceived of the world of Finnegans Wake as drama, as a Shakespearean play. Like Shakespeare, Joyce viewed the world as a stage, “the worldstage” (33.03) of the Wake. There are hundreds of allusions to Shakespeare and to his plays in the Wake; I have discussed and catalogued many of these in Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of “Finnegans Wake” (Cheng 1984). Adaline Glasheen has gone so far as to assert that “Shakespeare (man, works) is the matrix of Finnegans Wake” and that “Finnegans Wake is about Shakespeare” (Glasheen 1977, xxii, 260).
This essay is extracted and adapted from several sections of the author’s earlier book, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake, cited as Cheng 1984.
Foremost among the Shakespearean matrixes in the Wake is that of Hamlet, undoubtedly one of the “books at the Wake.” 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, Issy as Ophelia, 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. The other Shakespearean plays most alluded to are Macbeth and Julius Caesar, both for similar reasons: as parallels to the filial (Cad, Hosty, Shem-Shaun, Buckley, and so forth) overthrow and replacement of the father figure (HCE, Russian General, and so on). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is important to the Wake largely because of the notions of the drama as a dream, the play as Bottom’s dream, and the Wake as both the drama and the dream of all mankind. Finally, perhaps Shakespeare’s own life as a man and an artist offers the most important matrix of all, for the pattern and model that Shakespeare provides becomes that which Shem-Joyce must emulate and reproduce (similarly enduring the charges of plagiarism, forgery, and madness), as well as ultimately overthrow and supplant, a filial rival replacing the patriarch at the start of a new Viconian cycle.
But why did Joyce make Shakespeare—the man and his works—so central to his dreambook of universal history? In order to apprehend his reasons more fully, we first need to understand Joyce’s ideas about the contestation between history and imaginative possibility.
James Joyce’s mind is that of the essential poet: it works by analogy. A defecator, a lover, a father, a poet, and God are all, by analogy, equivalent—because they each create, or produce, something. Therefore, those somethings are also, by analogy, equivalent; Finnegans Wake, like the letter unearthed by Biddy the hen, is a creatio ex shitpile, a “letter from litter” (FW 615.01). Joyce—who unlike his predecessor and fellow creator-defecator-poet Shakespeare, knew much Latin and some Greek—was aware that the Latin word for, at once, letters of the alphabet, epistolary letters, and belles lettres, was litterae, a felicitous correspondence to the English word “litter” and its connotations of shit and birth. Thus, to the Joycean mind, poetic creations in English “litterature” are at once bilabial speech, biological offspring, and biodegradable waste. Each implies the others; the part reflects the whole. A poet is the god and creator of his own worlds—“After God, Shakespeare has created most”—while God is but a very major poet, “the playwright who wrote the folio of this world.” HCE, the archetypal father who “Haveth Childers Everywhere” (FW 535.34–35) and who thus also creates and populates a world, is but another version of both poet and god—of “Great Shapesphere.” Joyce himself, of course, is all of these things: like Stephen Dedalus’s Shakespeare, he is “all in all” (U 204). As a god and an artist, a poet triumphs over confining reality by creating worlds through the imagination—and each of his works is an exploration into the possible “history” of such worlds. As a god and an artist, Joyce carried the exploration of this general notion of “history” furthest in Finnegans Wake—with the construct of a dream, the perfect vehicle for repeated motifs and variations, for all possibilities and all history in the course of a night’s dream.
The Nightmare of History
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U 34). To the aspiring artist, history is a nightmare because of its destructive qualities: “Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?” (U 25).
In these crucial lines in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses, Stephen is referring to Aristotle’s theory that there is a room of infinite possibilities—if Caesar had not been knifed to death, he might have lived to a ripe old age, might have developed cancer, might even have come to America—but history limits, and chooses from that room one possibility (which is that Caesar gets knifed to death), thus destroying all others. History, then, is seen by Stephen as a usurper and a destroyer of creative potential, a restrictive force that limits other, perhaps more interesting, possibilities.
For young Stephen, those imaginative possibilities are a liberating force. The question is one of control: who is in the driver’s seat, history or man? Does history control us by limiting our possibilities; or do we control history by creating new and different ones, by interpreting history in light of our own creative viewpoints? Does the father create the son; or the son, the father? Without the son, there would be no father; in the Metamorphoses, when Icarus dies, Daedalus (Ovid tells us) is nec iam pater, a “father no more.” Thus, if Stephen Dedalus can just as easily create Simon Dedalus, then, as he observes later in the library, “Paternity may be a legal fiction” (U 199). He is free to explore Aristotle’s room; and, once history is banished in favor of imagination, Leopold Bloom may as easily be Stephen’s father as Simon Dedalus. Imagination neutralizes history.
Stephen now goes on, in the “Proteus” episode, to give us an example of this alternative to factual history, creating a mental voyage to his Aunt Sara’s house and then for two pages having an imaginary conversation with his Uncle Richie—all of which we as readers at first assume is actually taking place. A little later, and a lot drunker, Stephen tries to pull off a trick of a greater order: in the library scene (“Scylla and Charybdis”), he once more unsheathes his Thomistic Aristotle: “Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. . . . Space, what you damn well have to see. . . . Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past” (U 178). He urges himself to keep to “the now, the here,” to stick to the Scylla of “hard facts” and not be swept away by the Charybdic “speculation of schoolboys” (U 176, 177). Still, despite A.E.’s warning that “all these questions are purely academic” (U 177), Stephen cannot avoid letting go of known history and speculating about Shakespeare. He devises a thorough and elaborate theory of Shakespeare’s life and works—again, exploring Aristotle’s room of infinite possibilities.
The fact that Stephen chooses Shakespeare as the subject of his speculative theories is significant. In Ulysses, history is composed of the hard facts of the external, material world—Bloom’s world. In “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen tries to break away from the nightmare of history; in Finnegans Wake, Joyce does so—and the nightmare becomes the dream of history, in which all possibilities, including actual reality, can be realized and explored—for history is ultimately uncertain and indeterminate, the subject of much gossip and varying interpretation. That is why Shakespeare is chosen: our knowledge of the Bard’s personal life and history is so scant and meager—based on a few Stratford documents and a host of unverifiable legends—that it invites interpretation, fabrication, and the speculation of schoolboys (as well as scholars). It is ripe ground for Stephen’s exercises in the artistic imagination and the exploration of possibilities. Significantly, this paucity of fact and specific detail may be precisely why Joyce finds it so easy, in the Wake as well, to use Shakespeare as a universal analogy, as man-father-creator-artist-god; for our knowledge of the Bard is apocryphal and neomythical, not actual nor linearly determinate: Shakespeare’s little-known life, with its still possible possibilities, allows for the universalization and fecundity of Viconian history. As Samuel Goldberg writes, his is the “Myth of Shakespeare, the particular hero in whose story may be found the universal laws that hold for all his type, in whose deeds may be found a universal wisdom” (Goldberg 1961, 67). Shakespeare is as myriad-minded and faceted as HCE.
Imaginative Possibilities: Finnegans Wake
And so Joyce’s notions in Ulysses about the “room of infinite possibilities” are carried out in the Wake, in which all history and literature are seen as uncertainty and gossip, the exploration of practically every possibility, and in which the study of the past is as uncertain as our knowledge of Shakespeare—his life, loves, plays (and their authorship), manuscripts, and so forth.
All of Finnegans Wake could be considered an attempt to answer the question, “What happened to HCE?” Like Hamlet, we want to know the truth; Willard Farnham has suggested that “the Hamlet problem of Hamlet problems” is “the theme of unsimple truth”: “It may be said that Hamlet is indeed about the pursuit of revenge but most deeply about the pursuit of truth” (Farnham 1969, 931–32). Finding the “truth” (if there is one) about HCE is a matter of digging through the countless possibilities, variations, and interpretations accumulated by the middenpile of time. Art and creation (and thus also shitpile and letter) are, for the Joyce of the Wake as well as for Stephen Dedalus and Aristotle, a “movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible” (U 25), an exploration of potential actualities from the room of infinite possibilities. The problem is the same with the story of HCE: we try to choose one version. But which one? Unfortunately, “Zot is the Quiztune” (FW 110.14), and Joyce, like Hamlet and Aristotle before him, knew it.
In describing the Wake’s explorations as “a sequentiality of improbable possibles” (FW 110), Joyce appeals to the dean of the Department of Possibilities and Probabilities, Aristotle (“Harrystotalies”). Joyce explains in this passage that the book explores a history of resonant uncertainty and indeterminate sequentiality, a sequentiality of improbable possibles that are as possible as anything, or as much so as the sequentiality put out by linear “history”: “for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be” (110.14–15). Nor, as we well know, is fact or history ever certain. The twentieth century gave us relativity and quantum mechanics; but historians and novelists have known for centuries that no event ever happens in a known or exclusively certain way, for what “happens” is ultimately determined by the beholder (in the forms of gossip, criticism, history books, and so on), and nothing is ever conclusive: every generation reinterprets history, just as each generation of critics reinterprets Shakespeare. Modern physics has given us a new terminology for this literary and historical resonance, explored by such novels as Tristram Shandy, Clarissa, The Good Soldier, and Absalom, Absalom!: we are dealing with the Uncertainty Principle in literature—or what I like to call the Rashomon effect.22 Finnegans Wake studies this effect by exploring all possibilities and all viewpoints which “are probably as like those which may have taken place.”33 In a sense, all of Finnegans Wake deals with the basic question, “What did happen to HCE?” What happened in the Park by the Magazine Wall? What was the crime? Was there a crime? What took place in the encounter with the Cad? Nothing is certain, though there are many versions of stories being bantered about. Like the question that worries Hamlet, the question of Finnegans Wake centers around the fact that we are dealing with unsimple truth, that we are in the dark (“as any camelot prince of dinmurk” [143.07]) and do not quite know what happened. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, this “drauma” (115.32), the gossip about HCE, is a tale of dubious accuracy and questionable authorship that has a great need for scholarship and critical interpretation; one way of looking at the Wake is to see it as a scholarly casebook on the HCE tale, including all the variant versions and interpretations thereof.
What did happen to HCE? The research done on the original manuscripts and early folios on HCE’s small folly is inconclusive; all we know is that “the great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H. C. E.” (FW 32.12–14). As with the few documents we have about Shakespeare, little else is known for certain about HCE aside from his signature. Presumably, on the “historic date,” he went out and committed a crime for which he probably suffered a fall of some sort; and subsequently, he had an encounter with a younger man. Little else is known for certain, including the “historic date” itself. Much of the book explores possible variations of those events from the room of infinite possibilities.
Whatever it is that actually happens on that historic date, news of HCE’s crime immediately spreads around town, “bruited” (FW 33.16) about and noised from ear to ear, until the poet Hosty collects the rumors and composes “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”; this signals the downfall of Earwicker. The Cad’s wife whispers poisonous gossip about this profane story into the ear of her confessor: “the gossiple delivered in his epistolear” (38.23); so also the news “hushly pierce[s] the rubiend aurellum of one Philly Thurnston” (38.34–35), and goes on and on. Pouring poison into one’s ear was an image that fascinated Joyce. Earwig, namesake of H. C. Earwicker, is, according to the OED, a verb meaning to whisper or to insinuate: it is also “an insect . . . that poisons the brain by penetrating the head through the ear”; an ear-whisperer, gossiper, or parasite; and a madman who has a maggot or a craze in the brain.
Joyce associated the motif of the spread of gossip by pouring slanderous poison in one’s ear with Hamlet—for the ghost recounts that he (King Hamlet) had been killed in this manner while he slept: “And in the porches of my ears [Claudius] did pour / The leperous distilment” (I, v, 63–64). This drama, reenacted and recoursed in Hamlet’s staged dumb show, obsessed Joyce. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus recalls the words of King Hamlet’s ghost to the prince:
List! List! O List!
My flesh hears him; creeping, hears.
If thou didst ever . . .
—What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy . . .
Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit
(U 180)
Stephen has King Hamlet’s death by poisoning on his mind all day, but especially while he is in the library, where he pours the poison of his own Shakespearean speculations (from the room of infinite possibilities) into the ears of his listeners: “They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour” (U 188). As with Hamlet père, HCE’s demise as the father figure is caused by the poison poured into people’s ears. That ear-piercing gossip is aptly titled “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” the ear-piercing (perce-oreille, or earwig) ballad of H. C. Earwicker; thus it is appropriate that HCE is repeatedly associated with King Hamlet. Like Hosty and like the Cad, Stephen Dedalus, a poet and a son, spreads rumors about Shakespeare, one of his own acknowledged father figures. Joyce also does this: in Finnegans Wake he anthologizes all sad stories and variations of the death of kings and fathers. “List! List!” becomes a call to listen to such poison, a call repeated throughout the Wake ad nauseam in every conceivable variation.44 The Wake is a collection of all the poisonous and “gossipaceous” (195.04) variations of the HCE tale. King Hamlet’s death by poison poured in his ear; the tales told about Hamlet and Shakespeare by Stephen Dedalus; every scholar’s reading or retelling of Hamlet; H. C. Earwicker and earwigs; the rumors and gossip that bring about HCE’s downfall, the various and variant versions and interpretations of HCE’s tale; the stories at the Wake to which we, as guests and auditors, are called to list; the Wake itself; and, finally, every past, present, and future reading or interpretation of Finnegans Wake—all are related by analogy, by equating poison in the ear with gossip or speculation.
Chapter 3 of book 1, a second retelling of the “humphriad of that fall and rise” (FW 53.03; involving Humphrey Chimpden and the Cad), contains various versions of the story of HCE’s fall and his subsequent encounter with the Cad, including several which involve a drunken Cad and a porter, like that in Macbeth, at a gate. This “play” is constantly subject to new interpretations. All is slander and gossip, poison poured in the porches of one’s ears. Thus, this chapter is about gossip and uncertainty, about incommunicability and the impossibility of learning the truth, about the attempts of literature, scholarship, and history to state truth by fabricating varying accounts or interpretations of every incident. The chapter pursues the Rashomon effect, interviewing men and women on the street—including three soldiers, an English actress, an “entychologist,” Shaun-Kevin, a jaunting car driver, the great cook Escoffier, a tennis player, a barmaid, a Board of Trade official, a girl detective, and so forth (FW 58–61)—and each one espouses his or her own view of the HCE tale. Though each evidence-giver has his or her own interpretation, nothing can be proved; and they are all probably “meer marchant taylor’s fablings” (61.28)—mere lies and fables about a sailor and a tailor. All this Irish gossip is erroneous misunderstanding, and Joyce tells us that HCE, “the Man . . . [was] subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland (perorhaps!)”—perhaps, for even that is uncertain (62.23–25).
Similarly, Joyce begins chapter 8 of book 1 by trying to investigate HCE’s crime: whatever it was the three soldiers tried to make out that he tried to do to the two girls in Phoenix Park (FW 196.09–11). Once again, we attempt “to make his private linen public” (196.16). Still, what was the crime? As always, all is uncertainty and misunderstanding, as is often pointed out in the Wake: “No, no, the dear heaven knows, and the farther the from it, if the whole stole stale mis betold, whoever the gulpable, and whatever the pulpous was” (396.21–24). We can only listen to (or read) the Wake’s compilation of all the gossipy possibilities and speculative misunderstandings of history and the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly. Thus, we are called to “List, list!” to a review of human history: “Hirp! Hirp! For their Missed Understandings! chirps the Ballat of Perce-Oreille” (175.27–28). As such a compilation, the Wake is thus an exploration of the “Notpossible!” (175.05).
The Letter From Litter
“Learned scholarch[s]” also engage in such explorations. Scholarship and artistic creation, connected by the role of language (litterae as “litterature” and letters), are both concerned with finding, if possible, the right interpretation from the dungheap of infinite possibilities. Joyce was clearly aware of the similarity between reading the Wake and researching purple passages of literature; a twentieth-century foliowright, he describes his own “problem passion play” (FW 32.32) as “the purchypatch of hamlock” (31.23–24),55 “the patchpurple of the massacre” (111.02), “theirs porpor patches!” (200.04), “paupers patch” (316.23), and a “puling sample jungle of woods” (112.04)—a pure and simple jumble of words. Joyce further emphasizes this similarity by his repeated references to holographs, folios, librettos, original manuscripts, and Shakespearean scholars and ghosters.
Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s attempt to compile these error-possibilities of HCE’s comedy of errors—in other words, all history. A problem play has purple patches that engender much critical speculation and scholarly research; in this sense, Finnegans Wake is, like the letter unearthed by Biddy the hen, an attempt to dig into the middenheap and find the “gossiple” truth. Throughout the Wake, Biddy the hen scrabbles for evidence in the littermound, keeping her “kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments” (FW 66.25–26). As chapter 8 of book 1 (“Anna Livia Plurabelle”) opens, Biddy sifts through all the possibilities of HCE’s crime, the tale of “Don Dom Dombdomb and his wee follyo” (197.18): HCE’s folly in the park is made equivalent (history=literature) to Shakespearean folios. Joyce’s works are like Shakespeare’s; and HCE himself is like Shakespeare the man, for little is known for certain about the lives and histories of either.
The problem play of Finnegans Wake is, like the letter unearthed by Biddy the hen, an attempt to dig the truth out of the middenheap of possibilities. Like the hen, Joyce faces in chapter 4 of book 1 the question of whether or not to attempt wading through all the muddy misinterpretations, like some Shakespearean scholar, to find the original manuscript and learn the truth. The issue is, Hamlet-like, to dig or not to dig, like the gravedigger in Hamlet, into the graveyard of past literature and history for his style and his subject matter; Joyce describes his technique as the “mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns” (FW 121.32). Digging for old skulls, like that of Yorick, is like the scholarly digging that unearthed Shakespeare’s will, which left Anne Hathaway his “secondbest bed.” Similarly, Biddy the hen digs out of the graveyard of “litterature” alphabetical letters, belles lettres, and postal letters; thus, it is only appropriate that Biddy’s discovery from the litter pile is a letter, literally a “letter from litter” (615.01).
Chapter 5 of book 1 concerns the letter, scholarship, and textual studies. Here again, Joyce tries to equate his works (the letter as the Wake and as all of literature) with those of Shakespeare—especially Hamlet—including “disjointed times” (FW 104.05), “Ophelia’s Culpreints” (105.18), “the drame of Drainophilias” (110.11), “me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune” (110.14), “from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit” (114.19), “dummpshow” (120.07–08), “very like a whale’s egg” (120.11), “his Claudian brother” (121.01), and “a grand stylish gravedigging” (121.32).
The chapter begins with a catalogue of possible names for the letter (FW 104–7), an exploration into the many possibilities for titling the “untitled mamafesta” (104.04). The speaker then begins a lecture on the letter and on scholarship about the letter. He raises the question of textual scholarship. As with Shakespeare, some plays may have been written by forgers, “claimants,” or collaborators. The chapter pursues several of the many possibilities.
On page 110 the speaker launches into a sort of “Proteus” episode (from Ulysses), quoting Hamlet’s famed soliloquy, referring to Aristotle’s room of infinite possibilities, and wondering whether the possibilities explored in the letter were likely ones. The speaker begins to talk about the “original hen” (FW 110.22) and the object at which she is scratching, “a goodish-sized sheet of letter-paper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.)” (118.08–10). The hen has uncovered the celebrated letter, and the rest of the paragraph records its contents: a talky letter, its contents are commonplace and it sports a large teastain. The speaker now discusses the condition of the manuscript, flavoring his words with Stephen’s Aristotelian-Thomistic aesthetics (“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse” [U 178], and so on). He admits that the letter is a jumble of words, that he hasn’t “the poultriest notions” (112.05) of what it is about; and that, actually, it is fair game for Gypsy scholars (“Zingari schoolerm” [112.07]).
He therefore calls for us, as literary scholars, to make inspection of the letter and to study the hearsay of literature (FW 112.29). The speaker launches into a textual study of the missive, noting that the characters slide up and down on the page in a pattern of fall and ricorso, and that the letter resembles the problem play of Hamlet (“tham Let” and “Hum Lit”): “But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit” (114.16–19; “thithaways” and “hithaways” may refer to Anne Hathaway). In these lines, Joyce predicts that the Wake will eventually attain a literary prominence like that of Hamlet (see also Cheng 1984, 108–9).
Because there are an infinite number of possible meanings for the letter’s sequentiality of improbables, scholarly study of this work arrives at different interpretations in differing schools of criticism. The speaker follows with an imitation of psychoanalytic criticism (FW 115), like that of Freud or Shakespearean critic Ernest Jones, and then one of Marxist criticism (116). The message (and language) of this Viconian letter (the Wake) could be “anythongue athall” (117.15–16); yet, while we may have doubts about its sense, “we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness” (118.04). The speaker then argues—as some Shakespearean scholars have done on the issue of authorship—that the fact is that the affair was done once and for all, and someone wrote it down, regardless of subjective phenomenology; he goes on to compare the letter with the Bible and the Book of Kells, admitting that it looks pretty blurred and stained. Equated with Joyce’s works, the letter is similar to great literature, and specifically to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The professor, in his textual study of the Wakean letter, concludes about this “dummpshow” (120.07—the dumb show on the middendump): it is a “prepronominal funferal [the Wake as a funeral and fun-for-all], engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia” (120.09–14). This work, like Shakespeare’s, has been retouched and worked over; and, like the plays or the Wake, it is meant to be puzzled over for a trillion nights by that ideal dreambook and insomniac reader. Finally, the passage describes the Wake’s Protean qualities as an exploration of infinite possibilities, which, like the cloud observed by Hamlet and Polonius, takes on many shapes, “Very like a whale” (III, ii, 367)—this line has been quoted before, by Stephen, in, appropriately, the “Proteus” episode (U 41), Ulysses’s exploration of infinite possibilities.
Like Shakespearean folios, then, or like littermounds, works of literature are comedies of errors, compilations of misunderstandings. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s “lifewand” makes “the dumb speak” (195.05), exploring the infinite possibilities neglected by history and time, those imaginative alternatives that allow a cloud to become a whale.
All the World’s a Stage
Joyce conceived of Finnegans Wake as essentially dramatic, a Shakespearean play acted out on the “worldstage” (FW 33.03) by the archetypal family members of a dramatic company. What I call the “dramatic metaphor”—that is, that all the world is a stage and all the figures of history merely players—underlies all the “action” in Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s chronicle of history. Joycean history, as we have seen, is an exploration into many possibilities; in the Wake these possibilities take on the forms of various plays, particularly Shakespearean plays, each recreating a different view of the possibilities of history. Joyce sets his dream of all-history in the context of the dramatic milieu: the dream as drama.
Like Shakespeare before him, Joyce had increasingly come to think of an artist as a playwright and a creator-god, and of the artist’s works as a stage peopled by his creations, “all the charictures in the drame” (FW 302.21–32). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Dedalus had proclaimed that, in the dramatic form, “the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (P 215). Joyce was fond of the metaphor of the artist as both playwright and god. Creating his own worlds, a poet is a god and a father; God is the playwright who penned “the folio of this world”; Shakespeare, God, HCE, and Joyce, are all, like Hamlet’s father (with whom, according to Stephen, Shakespeare identifies), “all in all” (U 204).
The metaphor of playwright as god becomes even more recurrent and insistent in the Wake, Joyce’s chronicle of the world and world history. The prime mover behind the force of destiny is a playwright, “the compositor of the farce of dustiny” (FW 162.02–03); this production of the play about Viconian history is presented by “the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar)”—Joyce as the author of the Wake and God as the author of history, alias Giambattista Vico and John the Baptist (255.27). God-Shakespeare-Joyce-HCE is a “worldwright” (14.19) and a “puppetry producer” (219.07–08); like Prospero, he is a “pageantmaster” (237.13) and the “god of all machineries” (253.33). In the Wake, the most recurrent symbol for the creator-father-god figure is, however, Michael Gunn, manager of Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, and father of Joyce’s friend Selskar Gunn; repeatedly HCE is referred to as, or compared with, Michael Gunn, in the role of manager of his worldstage. In chapter 1 of book 2, that most “dramatic” of Wake chapters, HCE is introduced as “HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone)”; as stage managers, Michael Gunn and God can both make all things come or go. At the end of the same chapter, after loud applause, the exiting HCE is described as “Gonn the gawds, Gunnar’s gustspells” (257.34); Gunn as god is gone; the play, Gunn’s and God’s gospels, is over. In 481.19 Joyce describes HCE as a builder of cities, a populator and a patriarch: “We speak of Gun, the farther”—HCE as Gunn and God the Father. So also he is described in 434.08–10 as “the big gun,” waiting “for Bessy Sudlow” (Michael Gunn’s real wife, and an actress in his troupe at the Gaiety) to serve him his dinner. In keeping with the theme of Viconian ricorso, HCE will also become, in a felicitous coinage, the “cropse of our seedfather” (55.08)—the corpse will become the earth-laden seed and father of future crops and generations. Thus, finally, in this “worldwright” metaphor, HCE is a “gunnfodder” (242.10): at once Brecht’s cannonfodder; a phallic gun; Michael Gunn, a father and a creator, a grandfather, and the fodder for future Gunns, guns, and generations. Even after death, after Makeall Gone has made all gone (himself being but cannonfodder), even then will there be the “Hereweareagain Gaieties of the Afterpiece”—a joyous play (pièce) at the Gaiety in our afterlife. This will be supervised by this new Gaiety’s manager, Michael Gunn, “the Royal Revolver of these real globoes” (455.25–26), the god and gun who makes this world revolve, the stage manager of the Globe Theatre and the global world. As “Makeall Gone,” “Gun, the farther,” “gunnfodder,” and “the big gun,” Joyce is a playwright-god whose phallic gun is the creative pen of Shem the Penman.
The Dramatic Metaphor
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce repeatedly makes the punning equation between “dream” and “drama” (see Cheng 1984, 35–38). The Wake’s “prepossessing drauma” (FW 115.32) is both a traumatic dream sequence, the nightmare of history, and the archetypal family drama, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (see Cheng 1984, 49–53). A poet-playwright—by analogy, HCE and all men—dreams the nightmare of all time, the “drema” (FW 69.14) of the world. The metaphor of the world as stage, the dramatic metaphor, is suggested recurrently in Finnegans Wake, and most insistently in the two passages (30–33 and 219–21) in which Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre is aptly transformed into the Globe.
James Atherton has observed that “one of Joyce’s favourite images for the world, or the Wake, is the stage—although the famous quotation is never made” (Atherton [1959] 2009, 149). Of course, few direct quotations are made in Finnegans Wake without being refracted through puns and double meanings. Pages 30 to 33, however, contain a cluster of allusions to Shakespeare and to the stage, most conspicuous of which is the description of HCE as “our worldstage’s practical jokepiece” (33.02–03). Clearly, this is a direct reference to As You Like It’s Jaques (the “jokepiece”?), who said, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (II, vii, 139–40). As a drama on the worldstage, HCE’s story is a nightly reenactment, to which the public is invited, of an archetypal story, a “druriodrama” (50.06) in this Drury Lane world of ours.
The reader first sees HCE, like the “old gardener” Adam in his “prefall paradise,” sitting about in his garden “under his redwood tree” (FW 30.13–15), as the king approaches. These lines again echo As You Like It and “Under the greenwood tree” (II, v, 1), in a context which informs that the world has been a stage from the beginning of time, and that the Green World of the Forest of Arden (in which Jaques makes his “worldstage” metaphor), Shakespeare’s correlative for the world of dramatic romance, is none other than Eden and all gardens. “Under the greenwood tree,” a song sung by Jaques and Amiens (549.31—“amiens”), is Shakespeare’s invitation to this Green World: “Under the greenwood tree, / Who loves to lie with me. . . . / Come hither, come hither, come hither” (II, v, 1–5).
So here also, at the beginning of chapter 2 in book 1, is Joyce’s own “come hither,” his invitation to attend the play about HCE, a production to be “staged by Madame Sudlow” (FW 32.10) at the King Street Theatre (“king’s treat house” in 32.26). Bessy Sudlow (so named in 434.08) and Michael Gunn managed the Gaiety Theatre—on King Street in Dublin—where Christmas pantomimes were annually produced. This particular “pantalime” (32.11), to be staged by the proprietress, bears certain resemblances to Shakespearean plays performed at the Globe, particularly Hamlet. Admission to sit in the “pit stalls and early amphitheatre” (33.10) is two bits (“two pitts” in 32.11). The seating choices are “Pit, prommer and parterre, standing room only” (33.12). The habitual theatregoers are all out tonight to see our “worldstage’s practical jokepiece,” HCE: “Habituels conspicuously emergent” (33.13; emphasis added). Like Hamlet, this piece is a “problem passion play” (32.32): Hamlet is one of the “problem plays”—and the Wake is a “passion play” (since, as Joyce said, book 3 was written in the form of the fourteen stations of the Cross). Hamlet’s presence is strong in these pages, with references to “Offaly” (31.18), “hamlock” (31.24), and “metheg in your midness” (32.05). This problem play at the Gaiety/Globe may well be “the purchypatch of hamlock” (31.23–24), the purple patch of Hamlet. In any event, history is seen as a play or pantomime presented on a worldstage.
This pantomime of the Wake is the drama of history, in its “homedromed and enliventh performance . . . of the millentury, running strong since creation” (FW 32.31–33). It is an archetypal family drama: it is the tragedy of HCE’s fall and his falling-out with his wife (“A Royal Divorce” [a play about Napoleon and Josephine] and “Napoleon the Nth” in 32.33 and 33.02) and his daughters (“The Bo Girl” [Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl] and “The Lily” in 32.35). Brothers (“our red brother” in 31.25) and sisters (“his inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers, Skertsiraizde with Donyahzade” in 32.07–09—Scheherazade and Dunyazade, skirt-raised sisters from the Arabian Nights) are also here, as is the Holy Trinity, “the triptychal religious family symbolizing puritas of doctrina, business per usuals, and the purchypatch of hamlock” (31.22–23).
The World as Family Drama and Stage Company
This drama is a family affair. Joyce pursues this analogy in the Wake by frequently referring to the characters in the drama of the Wake as both family members and actors in a stage company. The drama on this worldstage is “real life”—or history—and the roles are played by a theater company (whether the Gunns, Porters, Bonapartes, Hamlets, or Holy Trinity) whose cast members are the archetypal family itself: “Real life behind the floodlights as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce” (FW 260n3). The cast members are, as we know, the members of HCE-Porter-Gunn’s household, and their Gaiety Theatre globe-stage is none other than the publican’s inn and residence in Chapelizod; thus, the word “house” is used throughout the Wake in three senses: domestic, tavernal, and theatrical. The cast is first introduced on page 13 of the Wake: the family members are an “alderman” (older man) with a hump (“bulbenboss”) and a stutter, or Humphrey-HCE; his wife, ALP, a poor old woman; his daughter Issy, an “auburn mayde”; and his twin sons, the Pen and the Post, Shem and Shaun. There are five so far in the cast, and yet that is not all. This household troupe is actually a “howthold of nummer seven” (242.05), having two additional, non–family members in the household: a male servant (Sickerson, Sanderson, etc.) and a female servant (Kate). At the start of chapter 1 of book 2, the performance of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies is prefaced by the proper theatrical introductions of the cast: “featuring: GLUGG (Mr Seumas McQuillad). . . . IZOD (Miss Butys Pott). . . . CHUFF (Mr Sean O’Mailey). . . . ANN (Miss Corrie Corriendo). . . . HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone). . . . SAUNDERSON. . . . KATE” (219.21–221.12)—that is, Shem the Penquill, Issy the Beauty Spot, Shaun the Post, Anna Livia (the running—corriendo—waters of the Liffey), HCE–Michael Gunn, Saunderson, and Kate. These are the elements of our domestic drama, “the family umbroglia” (284.04).
In an acting troupe of only seven members, each actor or actress must be able to assume a number of roles on call, depending on the particular family imbroglio being performed that evening; thus, each member is symbolic of a family “type,” able to be recast into almost any old play or version of a royal divorce. “Like the newcasters in their old plyable of A Royenne Devours” (FW 388.07), they must be ready to take over history’s old plays, each actor performing the role assigned to him by the “worldwright” and puppetry producer. This concept is important and fundamental. The notion of an archetypal cast performing different plays, or different interpretations of an archetypal play, corresponds marvelously with Joyce’s concept of history as a resonant exploration of different possibilities. As the Wake is about history, the different variations (and possibilities) of reality and history become the different plays in the repertoire performed by the acting troupe and family, “the whole stock company of the old house” (510.17), where each member is able to act the part for his “type” in each new play. The Wake is thus full of references to stock companies and acting troupes, with the same basic “types” playing different roles under each character “type.” There could be no better model for Wakean history and Viconian ricorso. HCE can be the same basic actor under the various historical guises of Adam, Tim Finnegan, Finn MacCool, Shakespeare, and so forth; the filial usurper (Cad, Hosty, Paul Horan, etc.), “Under the name of Orani . . . may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustaining long parts at short notice” (9.19–21). The family is a house troupe, which performs “with nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters” (219.06–08).
Pages 323 and 324 provide an excellent illustration of how Finnegans Wake is presented as a stage drama played by “the whole stock company of the old house”: “tummelumpsk . . . that bunch of palers. . . . Toni Lampi. . . . ghustorily spoeking, gen and gang, dane and dare, like the dud spuk of his first foetotype. . . . And ere he could catch or hook or line to suit their saussyskins, the lumpenpack. . . . Sot! . . . change all that whole set. Shut down and shet up. Our set, our set’s allohn” (323.28–324.16).
Fritz Senn has pointed out that this passage (quoted in part) refers to a particular stage performance of Hamlet in Dublin at the Crow Street Theatre. Referring to “the versatility of the Dublin stock companies” (and quoting from Samuel Fitzpatrick’s Dublin: A Historical and Topographical Account of the City [1907], one of Joyce’s source books for the Wake), Senn writes:
“At Crow Street Digges [‘Digges’ in 313.26] was playing ‘Hamlet’ and ruptured a blood vessel. The play was immediately stopped and She Stoops to Conquer substituted for it. The manager’s apologies having been accepted, the performers, who were all in the house, hastily dressed and went on. A gentleman in the pit had left the building immediately before the accident to Digges, for the purposes of buying oranges. He was delayed for some little time, and having left ‘Hamlet’ in conversation with the ‘Ghost,’ found on his return the stage occupied by ‘Tony Lumpkin’ and his companions at the Three Jolly Pigeons. He at first thought he had mistaken the theatre, but an explanation showed him the real state of affairs” (Fitzpatrick, 256–57). In FW, all actors play multiple parts, often simultaneously, and we [readers] all think, again and again, that we have mistaken the theatre. In particular, Joyce used the incident in the paragraph beginning 323.25, where She Stoops and Hamlet are among the things that go on at the same time. (1962, 6)
With much going on at once, the passage on pages 323 and 324 is a murky one at best; in context, it seems that HCE, in the role of the Norwegian Captain, has momentarily left the tavern for the outhouse (much as the spectator at Crow Street goes out to buy oranges), and returns to find the set (tavern=theater=house, of course) completely changed, as happened with She Stoops to Conquer and Hamlet. This historic worldstage seems to be constantly changing sets, exploring new and different variations and possibilities. The drinkers at the tavern have suddenly become “that bunch of palers” (a bunch of players); Sheridan’s Tony Lumpkin appears as “tummelumpsk” and “Toni Lampi.” The first play concerned Danish ghosts: both the ghost of King Hamlet, King of Denmark (“ghustorily spooking . . . dane and dare”) daring his son on (a father spooking and speaking, “like the dud spuk,” to his firstborn, “his first foetotype”); and Ibsen’s Ghosts (Gengangere in Dano-Norwegian; here, “gen and gang”). However, suddenly the set has changed back to Tony Lumpkin and the Three Jolly Pigeons—back to the “lumpenpack” accompanied by the shout: “Sot! . . . change all that whole set. Shut down and shet up. Our set, our set’s allohn”—our set’s all one in the versatile drama of all-history. (The prop men, crying to shut down and set up, seem to be Sinn Feiners: ourselves, ourselves alone.) Change the set, but the show (and history) must go on, “like the newcasters in the old plyable” (388.07). For the nightly shows put on by this stock company and family troupe consist of the infinite possibilities of all history, new castings of a pliable old play. The archetypal family drama is a tale renewed and reenacted nightly on the worldstage, a daily dubbing of Hamlet (and all family dramas) at the Globe.
1. See Cheng 1984, 1.
2. In the classic Japanese film (and novel) Rashomon, a sequence of events centered around a rape is reenacted four different times in four significantly different versions—as recollected by the raped woman, then by the rapist, by the woman’s husband (tied to a tree and forced to witness the rape), and, finally, by an unsuspected fourth witness to the crime. Such literary relativity in shifting points of view is masterfully explored by modern writers such as Ford, Faulkner, and Durrell. Joyce would have been familiar with similar effects in Browning’s The Ring and the Book.
3. Similarly, Clive Hart notes in Structure and Motif (1962) that “[i]n Finnegans Wake [Joyce] was particularly concerned to reproduce relativity and the uncertainty principle. The latter functions in the book exactly as it does in the physical world. The large cyclic books of the constituent material are both clearly defined and predictable, but the smaller the structural units we consider, the more difficult it is to know how they will function. . . . There is in fact no absolute position whatever in Finnegans Wake. . . . From whichever standpoint we may examine the Joycean phenomena, all other possible frames of reference, no matter how irreconcilable or unpalatable, must be taken into account as valid alternatives” (65–66).
4. In Shakespeare and Joyce (Cheng 1984), I have listed fifty or so variants. Here are a few examples: “Heed! Heed!” (FW 5.26), “List!” (13.16), “Year! Year!” (15.08–09), “Lissom! Lissom!” (21.02), “lust!” (51.09), “Lou! Lou!” (58.06), “lo! lo!” (58.18), “Hear, O hear” (68.25), “Oyeh! Oyeh!” (85.31; Oyez, oyez!), “Liss, liss!” (148.26), “List!” (238.23), “land me arrears” (278.L3, or Mark Antony’s famous line in Julius Caesar), “Ear! Ear! . . . Eye! Eye! (409.03), and “Oyes! Oyeses! Oyesesyeses!” (604.22).
5. The “problem plays” is a term first used by F. S. Boas (1896) to describe four Shakespearean plays containing great problems of interpretation; these include Hamlet (“the purchypatch of hamlock”), a play full of purple passages (also commonly known as purple patches).