Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Feuer, Louis. "Joyce the Postmodern: Shakespeare as Character in Ulysses." In The Author As Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, edited by Paul Franssen and A. J. Hoenselaars. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1999.
Related topics:
Bodies
Creation and Making
Doubles
Reproduction
Union and Division
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/author-as-character-representing-historical-writers-in-western-literature/oclc/39695649&referer=brief_results
Feuer begins his article by discussing how the variety of narrative voices in Ulysses causes characters to become plastic, "shifting from section to section" (167). He then points to the appearance of Shakespeare in the "Circe" episode (U 15.3821-24), and says that by reading Shakespeare as a character, the reader may better understand Joyce's relation to the novel. Building on William Schutte's reading of Shakespeare' ghostly omnipresence in Ulysses, Feuer discusses the history and development of Shakespeare within the text. He points to the character of Shakespeare as he appears in Stephen's voice in "Scylla and Charybdis" (U 9) and onward, explaining how the use of Shakespeare in the novel reflects both Stephen and Bloom as characters, and how Stephen's own interpretation of Shakespeare, with its notions of "sonship and paternity," mirror "the web of relationships so central to Ulysses" (171). Stephen relates Shakespeare to both Hamlet the father and Hamlet the son, which recalls Joyce's creative relationship with Bloom and Stephen, whose merging occurs as they see Shakespeare's image in Bella Cohen's mirror. Not only does this mirror doubling take place in "Circe," but Joyce has created this type of effect throughout the novel and, in the context of Ulysses, the self in the mirror is the image of the other. Feuer concludes his argument that Joyce, by putting Shakespeare—the "quintessential artist" (178)—all over the page, emphasizes (his own) authorial presence throughout Ulysses.
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