Conclusion

William Schutte did not write the last word on the interrelationship of Hamlet with Ulysses. Since his seminal work, most of the Joycean critical studies involving Shakespeare have been expansions on the various exquisite subtleties of the Hamlet metaphor in the presentation of Stephen Dedalus. Schutte has, unfortunately, become the de facto last word on Shakespeare and Ulysses. Perhaps it was the very scope and depth of his work that had dissuaded further investigation into the intertextuality of Shakespeare and Joyce. Joyce and Shakespeare (1957) demonstrates the heroic quantity of work involving reading, concordances, and notes with which Schutte had to contend. Where I have found a narrowness of interpretation in Schutte, I cannot greatly fault him when I recall how truly cumbersome were the tools he had at his calling. Within the limitations of a master’s thesis, the present demonstration of an intertextual web associating Stephen with another of Shakespeare’s taciturn princes would have been an impossible task of research but for the aid of current electronic search engines.

I am quite certain that these new tools could rapidly open up the subject of Shakespearean intertextuality for the field of Joyce studies. There is, for example, much more to be explored in terms of the relationship of Ulysses and the Henriad. I have felt obliged in this paper to concentrate on presenting a coherent pattern of allusion that leads to a rational closure in the logic of its motifs. It was therefore necessary to pass over several potential avenues of reference that would not have directly advanced my thesis. One example would be Mulligan’s appraisal of Stephen and his Shakespeare theory: "– O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!" (U.1.561). In terms of Shakespearean allusions, "Japhet" leads directly and only to Prince Hal (Henry IV, Part 2, II.ii.136) and would provide fodder for a nice essay on the creation of familial status. The course of my research also led me to Shakespearean allusions from plays other than the Henriad and outside of the citations given by Schutte. From this experience I would propose a project that would make good use of current technology in creating a resource for anchoring further investigation of Shakespearean intertextuality in Ulysses.

My hunch is that we should take the time to evaluate Shakespearean rare words. There is, for instance, the curious description of Buck Mulligan when he enters the library office: "Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble (U.9.489-490, Italics Added). It is difficult to find any reason in the immediate text for Mulligan’s hat to be a "bauble." When we go fishing in Shakespeare, the results seem at first to be equally uninspiring. Shakespeare uses "bauble" nine times in widely varying plays. Usually he is using it in its sense of ‘worthless trinket,’ although he also uses it twice to describe ships foundering on the waves. On closer inspection it turns out that "bauble" occurs twice in The Taming of the Shrew. The first instance is when Petruchio is still trying to bring Katharine to heel by presenting her with clothes and then taking them away. He refers to the hat she has tried on as a "bauble" and counters her will by claiming she does not like it (IV.iii.82). The second occurrence is after Katharine has been ‘tamed.’ At the climax of his bet with the other husbands, Petruchio says, "Katharine, that cap of yours becomes you not:/ Off with that bauble, throw it underfoot" (V.ii.121-122). Katherine readily complies and presently relates her famous speech about male sovereignty. It does not require elaboration to see how this intertextual allusion could work on various levels with the sycophantic interplay that surrounds Mulligan’s arrival "with his doffed Panama."

I found this potential allusion as I was searching for connections germane to my own subject. I applied a rather hit-and-miss process of making an educated guess about words that sounded Shakespearean and then followed up on those guesses with an electronic search. The exciting prospect is that I encountered many other false trails besides the "bauble" example above. They were false trails to the extent that I could not use those findings in this study. I repeatedly found, however, that distinctive words from "Scylla and Charybdis" led to only a few occurrences in the works of Shakespeare. Several of those occurrences appeared to form relationships with Ulysses that were equally as intriguing as the "bauble"–but I was unable to follow up on them at the time.

My impression from this experience is that Joyce carefully salted "Scylla and Charybdis" with rare words from Shakespeare. Further, I suspect those words were chosen for their ability to ‘point’ to specific plays and provide intertextual commentary such as I briefly described in the example above. It would be relatively easy with current statistical analysis programs to investigate the potential of this proposition. The complete text of "Scylla and Charybdis" can be compared to a list of nontrivial Shakespearean rare words. Preliminary research would be required to choose the number of occurrences to define as ‘rare’; the "bauble example shows that the rate should be at least nine. The matches of that result could then be cross-referenced to the specific occurrences in the plays. The result would be a ‘cheat sheet’ of Shakespearean rare words in "Scylla and Charybdis" followed by citations of the plays and poems in which they occur. If the results confirm my hypothesis of rare words, the resulting product would be a tool to ensure that–for Joycean studies–the ghost of Hamlet will never rest easy again.