Stephen’s Theory

The Shakespearean Hydra and the Joycean Scylla

Platt’s (1992) analysis evokes the full potency of the image of facing "Scylla and Charybdis." In challenging the cultural myths of a society, one is confronted by the choice of constant, reflexive attack on all sides or retreat into the dark belly of complicity. Reading the chapter as a contention of philosophical or aesthetic choices can create a pleasant intellectual entertainment, but for Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the pyrrhic choice of ridicule or oblivion requires a radical break with the rules of the game.

The Henriad is menaced by its own mythical, multiheaded beast: the Hydra. Shakespeare weaves an intricate symbolic pattern around this image of the voracious, overpowering antagonist. It becomes the symbol of a nation in unrest. The rebellious armies are repeatedly referred to as "heads," and the rebellion as a whole specifically called "Hydra" (Henry IV, Part 2, IV.ii.38). Its symbolism reflects back on the illegitimacy of King Henry IV when, having dressed several of his nobles in his own coat of arms, Douglas cries out "Another King, they grow like Hydra’s heads" (Henry IV, Part 2, V.iv.25). It is also symbolic of fickle, mindless public opinion, which Rumour–borrowing from Virgil–refers to as the "blunt monster with uncounted heads" (Henry IV, Part 2, Induction.18).

Falstaff invokes the Hydra in the denouement of the Gadshill robbery. Prince Hal and Poins have set up a ruse to rob Falstaff after he has robbed some travelers on the road. Apparently unaware of Prince Hal’s deception, Falstaff later relates the events at the robbery while creating a crescendo of multiplying opponents. Mackenzie (1995) finds this to dovetail with the overall Hydra theme of the plays:

The whole incident at Gadshill was designed by the Prince and Poins to capture Falstaff by means of a syllogism: Falstaff ran away; cowards run away; therefore Falstaff is a coward. It proves instead to be a chance for Falstaff to show his rhetorical virtuosity by employing an argument that the prince is unable to deny without denying his own status. As soon as Hal reveals that he was one of the men in buckram, Falstaff responds with the syllogism that as Hal is the true prince, he could not help but recognize him, and therefore could not help but run from the danger of injuring the heir apparent (Forward, 1990). His story of the robbery further works to play on the question that Shakespeare poses throughout the Henry IV plays of whether the scofflaw ethics of Falstaff are to be inverted into the new "virtue" of the land under Hal:

Falstaff’s Hydra is an arguing beast; his battle against it symbolizes his rhetorical ability to prevail in argument over derision, the reigning social order and ideology, the accepted interpretation of facts, and even the facts themselves.

The classical and Shakespearean parallel of the Hydra to Joyce’s Scylla opens up some interesting possibilities that are unavailable in the Odyssean model. Odysseus must simply negotiate between two bad alternatives. When he actually suggests trying to fight the Scylla, Circe rebukes him strongly for his stubborn, willful ways. Hercules’ battle with the Hydra is, of course, a story of action, and Stephen has specifically chosen to take action in his dire straits. This is, as Schutte (1957) notes, a move that puts him at risk: "He sits in his chair forearmed with the required ‘three drams of usquebaugh’ and with two of the three weapons he allows himself, exile and cunning. The third is not at his side. He cannot be silent; he has contracted for a performance. Insofar as he has agreed to lay aside one of the artist’s weapons, he has betrayed his code" (p. 67). This choice will prove to be transformative during his hour in the library; now it is Stephen who must play the fool. In the library, Stephen must take on the fool’s role of critiquing the society that he plays in. He will, however, be a fool informed by the power of his medieval jew-jesuit mind and his skills in dialectic.

One of the attributions of the word fool is from "follis," the pig’s bladder filled with air that was one of the tools of medieval court jesters. Imagistically, the fool is fundamentally tied to the concept of air and wind. As Stephen breaks his silence and deigns to become one of the "weavers of the wind," he begins to take on Falstaffian attributes. Shakespeare appropriated his fools from the Fools and Vices of the medieval morality plays. A standard motif of their schtick was the misappropriation of objects–hence the lathe dagger of Vice. Shakespeare plays with this tradition when Falstaff and Hal take turns playing the King:

Stephen, having his own windmills to tilt at, likewise sees himself in such carnivalesque terms:

As the transubstantiation of his ashplant indicates, Stephen needs none of the physical trappings of the fool; those are decidedly the accessories of Mulligan. He does however take on the intellectual role of Falstaff. In the quiet chambers of Protestant Dublin’s National Library, he appalls and thrills his audience by turning their sacred truths upside down in a Fat Thursday of misrule.

One of the subtleties of Falstaff’s Hydra is the manner in which it allows him to make a critique of Hal’s loyalty. When Hercules faced the Lerneaen Hydra, he brought his nephew Iolaus to drive his chariot. At first he attacked the monster single-handedly before he knew its full power. For every head he crushed, however, two more grew back. It was finally only with the aid of Iolaus that he was victorious. As he would cut off a head, Iolaus took a burning brand and cauterized the stump to prevent its regrowth. Possibly Falstaff did in fact recognize that it was the prince who robbed him at Gadshill and had time to prepare his argument; more likely it is his lightning wit that inspires him to subtly imply his chagrin at the prince hindering rather than helping him.

Stephen displays similar speed of allusive association when Mulligan interrupts him yet again. As Stephen begins to refer to Saint Thomas, Mulligan breaks out in imitation of a peasant from Synge:

As Platt (1992) notes in his analysis of the Anglo-Irish/Catholic struggle that underpins Stephen’s discourse, there is a degrading insinuation in Mulligan’s drollery:

Stephen’s response in the previous quote directly parallels Falstaff’s words when he performs the first robbery at Gadshill:

Here Joyce has Stephen draw an intertextual parallel that continues to function beyond a simply clever allusion. He points out that, like Falstaff with Hal, he is under no misapprehensions about what side Mulligan is taking. Falstaff’s "Grand-jurors" is an insinuation about the social pretensions of the franklin he is robbing. Likewise Stephen’s remarks on incest are worded so as to cut down the class solidarity of his Anglo-Irish interlocutors. His use of "gorbellied" is even a fitting attribute to the famously fat Saint Thomas Aquinas (Gifford & Seidman, 1974, p. 43). This is a prime example of the multileveled interweaving of meaning that can be called Falstaffian wit–something to which Mulligan never comes close.

Frank Harris and Stephen’s Theory

Stephen is forming a theory that will combine fatherhood, betrayal, and the art of creation into a new aesthetics for the exile. He is working in a Falstaffian frame of mind, observing the very roots of the concepts that would hide ideological meaning in familiar sentiment. His debt to Falstaff is most apparent when he has first begun to broach his synthesis of father and creator just prior to Mulligan’s entrance:

The words, and the idea, are lifted directly from Falstaff, when he is interviewing one of his conscripts, Simon Shadow:

It is necessary to take a digression again into Schutte (1957), because he has glossed over the very important contribution that Frank Harris made to Stephen’s theory. Schutte did not like Frank Harris:

Schutte regards Harris as a philistine, and he is correct in his assessment. Harris’ book, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (1909), was a magazine serialization produced for public consumption; it is a real potboiler. His use of facts would make a proponent of the flat earth blush. Harris is, however, vastly closer in style and objective to the construction of Stephen’s theory than either Brandes (1989) or Lee (1906). Schutte (1957) actually acknowledges this but cannot manage to delve any deeper into the matter (p. 156-157; p. 172). Each time he broaches this topic he abandons the point on the pretext that Harris was a poor source of factual information. Most egregiously, he has omitted any study of a second book by Harris, even more relevant to Joyce’s work, The Women of Shakespeare (Harris, 1912).

Schutte (1957) is vague about his criteria for accepting sources for Stephen’s theory. It appears that he is only using works that were available up to 1904. He fudges on this specifically with Harris, however, noting: "Although it was not published until 1909 and Stephen would have had only the articles in the Saturday Review to rely on, Joyce himself presumably used the book in putting together Stephen’s theory" (p. 153). Anyone who has read The Man Shakespeare (Harris, 1909) from cover to cover would be very suspicious of that use of "presumably."

Whatever the reasons for the omission, this obfuscation has denied Joycean literature an easy reference to a potent intertextual source for Stephen’s theory. For example, The Women of Shakespeare (Harris, 1912) is a source for referring to Shakespeare as "A pillar of the cloud by day" (Harris, 1912, p. xv; U.9.944) and to Anne Hathaway as Xanthippe (Harris, 1912, p. 50; U.9.234). It would require a complete study to detail all of the potential intertextual parallels that Schutte underplays in his analysis of The Man Shakespeare (Harris, 1909) and omits entirely by ignoring The Women of Shakespeare (Harris, 1912). For the present analysis, I would offer the following as an indication the richness of Harris’ works as an inspiration for elements of Ulysses: Near the end of The Women of Shakespeare, Harris wildly speculates that Shakespeare "was probably called back to Stratford by the news of his mother’s illness" (p. 249). He infers from scant evidence in Coriolanus that:

I find this to have some similarities to the themes of the death of May Dedalus. In the absence of independent critical synopses of Harris’ contribution, I must work with a broad brush to assert the contribution of Harris to the psychological and aesthetic characteristics of Stephen’s Shakespeare.

Harris’ (1912) chapters, written for magazine serialization, can become almost tedious when read in book form, because of their reiteration of his central theme. He is, however, doggedly consistent in creating a Shakespeare who is always in the extremes of his passions. Harris gradually builds up a picture of a man who can identify and even brilliantly portray the torments of his soul, but who shows no sign of even beginning to reconcile the passions that drives him–and drive his art. As Harris concludes his second book he addresses the detractors of his analysis:

In his introduction, Harris sets out the central thesis that his inquiry into Shakespeare will be an investigation of the passions of the poet:

Harris portrays his essays as a rebellion against "dryasdust" Victorian scholars who would portray Shakespeare by finding what they deem to be noble in Shakespeare. Through a scholarly bowdlerization they attribute all the unseemly aspects of Shakespeare’s works to either his sources, collaborators, or revisers. Through the aid of careful editing and footnoting these scholars examine Shakespeare and find a saint. Harris is arguing for the role of sensuality as fundamental to the makeup of the human psyche. Shakespeare is, for him, the best example of a sensualist who is able to record his passions in literature. Harris argues that he has examined Shakespeare as whole–in his lofty aspirations and his dark visions–and found a human being. The passions revealed in Shakespeare’s plays are the passions of Shakespeare:

The characters who are different from Shakespeare himself are all sketches taken from life. Thus Harris argues that Falstaff is drawn in whole cloth from Paul Chettle (pp. 150-151; pp. 372-373). All are, however, drawn through the lens of Shakespeare’s understanding of himself. Thus the women who he develops into living creatures are the objects of his desire: "I had thought of calling [this book] The Woman Shakespeare; for the woman a man loves is the ideal in himself; the veiled goddess who corresponds to all the desires, conscious and unconscious, of his nature as lock to key, as light to the eye" (p. ix). Thus the women of his early plays are either the two-dimensional renderings of the inexperienced young man’s idealized imaginings or are the fully developed shrews drawn from his wife. For Harris, it is only when Shakespeare meets his dark lady that he encounters and can represent the ecstasy and frustration of finding his ideal embodied in another. The Man Shakespeare (Harris, 1909) puts the matter very plainly: "The story of his idolatrous passion for Mary Fitton is the story of his life" (p. 212). Although Shakespeare’s genius can completely detail the throes of his passion in his drama, he cannot manage to identify the sources of those desires in his own psyche:

It is this Shakespeare, revealing all of himself to the world yet strangely unable to reveal that truth to himself, that Stephen appropriates to battle his ideological opponents in the library.

Because Stephen’s Shakespeare is so similar to that of Harris, his points of divergence from that model allow for a precise insight into the motivation of the character he is creating. The most salient difference is in the object of desire that drives Shakespeare’s creative genius. Lyster brings up the subject of Harris in the midst of Stephen’s argument: "Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant. Oddly enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets" (U.9.440-442). Stephen’s immediate response is an explanation of why Shakespeare sent another to woo for him and an elucidation of the self-doubt that drives all of his actions:

Ann Hathaway’s conquest of Shakespeare in marriage is the first action that sunders his psyche from finding security in himself as a subject. It therefore becomes the archetype of all later hindrances to his self-knowledge.

In order to emphasize the inner turmoil of his creation, Stephen deliberately alters the material characteristics of his Shakespeare in contrast to the model of Harris (1909, 1912). Harris’ Shakespeare is an effete, sensual, and delicate man. He is unworldly and incapable of managing money. The only reason he is wealthy is that he makes so much more than he can spend. Stephen’s Shakespeare is a "wellset man with a bass voice" (U.9.165) who is a master of monetary and social matters. He emphasizes the material gains that Shakespeare accumulated: the coat of arms, the vast wealth, the aristocratic friendships, New Place, and the adoration of women. He manages money and lawsuits with dispassionate skill. He can beat the drum of patriotic jingoism to the benefit of his own pocket. Yet the Shakespeare who sees dramatic closure in the ascension of a just king finds no pleasure in the social status he has worked so hard to gain. The man who portrayed Justice Shallow and "lousy Lucy" (U.9.1134) has not found fulfillment in the role of the prosperous country gentleman.

Shakespeare’s male prerogative in marriage was stolen when he was conquered by Ann Hathaway. His identity as patriarch was betrayed by her with his blood kin. When his son was taken away by death, the estate and coat of arms he had amassed are transformed into so much paper. It is following the death of Shakespeare’s "unsubstantial father" John that his psyche falls into the "hell of time" (U.9.401) introduced by Hamlet. Shakespeare raises the ghost of his dead son to ask how his own spirit might be avenged. The "bloodboltered shambles in act five" (U.9.133-134) is the rage of "William Shakespeare, Gentleman" unable to see himself in the mirror.

What this Shakespeare reveals but cannot teach to himself is Stephen’s insight into the unrequited desire that empowers the social construction of the fiction of fatherhood:

Stephen understands that the chief psychological tool of the church–and its secular successors–is founded upon the manipulation of displaced desire for atonement with the father. Maryolatry, rooted in biological reality and informed by rituals and beliefs that dim into the mists of prehistory, is a tool for placation of the masses–"Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life" (U.9.842-843). It is the artificial creation of the unattainable desire for perfect self-identification in the hierarchy of patriarchal order–and the promise of fulfillment of that desire through institutional obedience–that enables patriarchal powers to conscript the individual minds that are needed to shepherd those masses to the sovereign order.

After a lifetime of building up his place in the social hierarchy, Shakespeare still finds himself in exile from the social order he so believes in, "but, because loss is his gain, he passes on toward eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed" (U.9.476-478). Klein (1993) concludes that this is the crux of the array of oppositions built up by Stephen’s argument, resisting Hegelian synthesis for a Socratic moment of truth:

When Eglinton attempts to summarize the theory with his own conclusion about "all in all" (U.9.1018-1019), Stephen partly agrees and repeats "all in all" (U.9.1020-1021) but does not respond to the assertion that "The truth is midway" (U.9.1018). Stephen chooses instead to describe Shakespeare as a list of opposite qualities (p. 443). Klein argues that this is because Stephen’s real purpose is to reveal the unfulfilled desire that is Shakespeare’s "goad of the flesh" (U.9.462):

Thus Stephen’s "androgynous angel" in the "economy of heaven" (U. 9.1051-1052) is not a surrender to Platonic idealism but an acknowledgment of the inevitability of desire in the real world:

Stephen achieves a Falstaffian analysis of the role of the father as the prime signifier of patriarchal order. Falstaff does not choose between honor and dishonor; he moves up an epistemological level and uses honor as a tool. Because he will be neither master or slave, Stephen likewise breaks with the pattern of Prince Hal by refusing to participate in the patriarchal search for the father. Stephen has learned the lesson that Shakespeare taught but could not teach himself.