Decoding Dedalus: He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line.

The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p. 204 - 205 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “—And the sense of property…” and ends “...depths of the buckbasket”

Stephen Dedalus is about to reach his intellectual crescendo, deep into Ulysses’ ninth episode, “Scylla and Charybdis.” He has steadfastly pulled his Shakespeare discussion back on track after Buck Mulligan’s intrusion and his salacious story of bothering Shakespeare scholar Edward Dowden. Stephen drops some red hot takes in this passage, but they may be some of his best analysis yet.

James Joyce greatly admired Shakespeare and had not only read the latest Shakespearean scholarship while writing “Scylla and Charybdis,” but also painstakingly took notes and wove them into his novel in great detail. Joyce’s scholarly sources for Shakespeare’s life and work are meticulously detailed in William Schutte’s book, Joyce and Shakespeare; A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses and is a great resource if you’d like deeper discussions of some of the topics covered in this blog post. For our purposes, Joyce relied mainly on the work of Georg Brandes, Sidney Lee, and Frank Harris. Not all of these scholars’ arguments have stood the test of time (some are heavy on speculation), but understanding these sources helps us get into Joyce’s mind and understand where he is coming from as he builds Stephen's argument in this passage. And of course, Joyce is not always a reliable Shakespeare historian; he was perfectly happy to modify the details of Shakespeare’s life in the pages of Ulysses (just as he did with own biography). Scholar Robert Adams wrote in his book Surface and Symbol that Joyce set to “simplifying radically where it suited his convenience” and “served his novelistic purpose.”

We must also keep in mind that the vast majority of Shakespeare’s personal life and even his artistic influences is unknowable even to the most gifted scholars as there are so few records of any of it. As such, we can’t truly know what was on the Bard’s mind outside of what ended up in his plays. That hasn’t stopped centuries of scholars from doing their damnedest to read the few tea leaves that exist, of course.

Likewise, this doesn’t stop Stephen from swinging for the fences at this late stage of his Shakespearean dialectic. He ruthlessly tears into Shakespeare from word one in this passage. For instance, it’s plausible that an author would base a hero on their own autobiography, even a tragic hero like Hamlet, but what about one of his most heinous villains:

“—And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots.”

Stephen opens with his most scandalous claim: that Shakespeare somehow based Shylock on himself. It’s easy to dismiss out of hand, as John Eglinton adamantly does once Stephen concludes his monologue:

“—Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman.”

Eglinton’s retort misses the point, though. Stephen's statement here isn’t really about religion or ethnicity, but rather about social class and economics. Though Shylock represents many pernicious antisemitic stereotypes, Stephen’s assertion contains more complexity than Eglinton allows. Let’s set Shakespeare-Shylock to the side for just a moment and first consider another Shakespeare: his father John. Stephen asserts that John Shakespeare was a jobber (or wholesaler) of malt and a moneylender, and that Will was in turn a jobber of corn and a food hoarder during a famine. Some of these allegations are more damning than others, but is there any truth to them?

Turning first to Joyce’s sources, Harris said that John Shakespeare sold malt, while Lee wrote that he sold malt, corn, wool, meat, skins, and leather. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (whose website Joyce didn’t have access to) paints quite a different picture of John Shakespeare’s career, however. It seems ol’ John tried out quite an array of business ventures, most of them legal. Nowadays, we’d call John a serial entrepreneur. He appears inauspiciously in Stratford records in 1552 when he was fined for an unwarranted midden heap. A few years later, John earned the prestigious position of ale taster, which led to various civic positions, including a stint as high bailiff in 1568. John’s primary occupation was as a glover and whittawer (or leather maker), which was smelly work to say the least. On the side, John took up as a wool brogger, or illegal wool seller, which ultimately landed him in legal hot water. As for the moneylending, it seems Will did his fair share of loaning out money, though it is less clear to me that John did, too. Based on his wool brogging, I think John would be ok bending the rules to make a few extra shillings here and there.

Onto the corn.

Brandes and Lee both note that William Shakespeare held quite a large store of corn during the corn famine of 1598; Brandes specifically stated that he held the third largest stock in town. A dirtbag move in any context, but when described in an Irish context like Ulysses, it feels straight out of “The Fields of Athenry.” Scholar Margot Norris argues that the mention of hoarding “scarce and profitable” corn during a famine is meant to conjure images of the Irish Famine of the 1840’s. To me, it recalls Charles Trevelyan, the British government official in charge of managing the Famine in Ireland. His passion for laissez-faire economics led him to withhold vital aid and to export corn while the Irish were starving en masse, cementing his legacy as one of the great monsters of history. Stephen is intentionally drawing this parallel by invoking the nightmare of a historical event so recent even Mr. Deasy remembers it.

Stephen is making an extremely nuanced and complex anti-colonial critique in this passage. There is a fundamental cognitive dissonance in these devoted Irish Nationalists’s bardolatry. This is the first of a litany of examples from Stephen that clearly demonstrate that Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the artist were anything but apolitical. His imperialist worldview should be antithetical to British colonial subjects' desire for self-governance. To be clear, Joyce loved Shakespeare and considered him one of the greatest to ever write in the English language, but that does not mean the Bard is above rebuke, either. Though we know so little about Shakespeare the man, his image and art have been used as propaganda for the superiority of British culture since the Elizabethan era. Belief in such a superiority creates a mandate for Britain’s colonial project.

Shakespeare’s penchant for property acquisition is a particular point of contention for Stephen. Land grabs are central to colonization, and the Dubliners in Ulysses are acutely aware that their own land has been acquired as British property. In Ulysses, money is a major preoccupation of the British ruling class and their loyal subjects. For example, in “Nestor,” Mr. Deasy even quotes Shakespeare as he sings the praises of financial responsibility to Stephen:

“You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse…. He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?... I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life.”

Mr. Deasy doesn’t know much about the art that he’s quoting from, but to him Shakespeare is a symbol of English pride, which is first and foremost pecuniary. To him, Shakespeare is a paragon of penny pinching, even if it requires quoting Iago to make his point. Like Shakespeare, Deasy is very quick to see the Jews as the root of England’s problem (we’ll get to that in a moment). Shakespeare wrote a play making this point, while Deasy just rants at Stephen. Ironically, both Deasy and Shakespeare espouse antisemitism while exemplifying the common antisemitic stereotype of money obsession. In Shakespeare’s case, this extended to literal moneylending. This negative stereotype becomes a virtue when practiced by a wealthy Englishman. If he had known about them, I think Mr. Deasy would admire Shakespeare’s good business sense and clever investments, likely even more so than his plays.

But, you might be saying, even if Shakespeare lent the odd shilling here and there, he wasn’t demanding a pound of flesh as collateral like a mad man, surely! Stephen has some thoughts on this, beginning with a sarcastic rebuttal:

“His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.”

Henry Chettle was a dramatist, printer and contemporary of Shakespeare. In 1592, Chettle printed a pamphlet by the author Robert Greene entitled Greene's Groats-worth of Witte Bought with a Million of Repentance. Stephen has quoted from Greene already in “Scylla and Charybdis”:

“—A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said.”

You can read my thoughts on that comment here. Greene had some strong words for poor Shakespeare in Groats-worth, such as calling the Bard an “upstart crow.” Absolutely scandalous. Apparently Chettle regretted the upstart crow business, as he issued an apology for printing Greene’s pamphlet, stating that “divers of worship have reported [Shakespeare’s] uprightness of dealing.” In other words, everybody says Shakespeare is nice, actually. There’s an eye-roll built into Stephen’s allusion to Chettle's apology, implying he thinks Shakespeare was more likely a penny-pinching debt collector for the “divers of worship.”

Stephen refers to the printer as “Chettle Falstaff” because there is a rumor that Chettle was the inspiration for the fat knight. While both Harris and Brandes mention this speculation, I can’t say that there is any hard evidence for this claim either way.

In any case, while Henry Chettle says Shakespeare was a rad dude, Stephen is anything but convinced:

“He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick?”

Stephen now hints at another tale of Shakespeare unleashing his inner Shylock. This one appears in the actual historical record and concerns a Stratford apothecary by the name of Philip Rogers. In the early 1600’s, Rogers borrowed small quantities of malt from the Shakespeares and borrowed a few additional shillings from them on top of that. When Rogers failed to repay his debts, Shakespeare sued him for the arrears. There is a court record of the lawsuit but not the outcome, so we don’t know if Will ever exacted his pound of flesh. This does, however, give us solid evidence that Shakespeare engaged in moneylending. Additionally, Brandes wrote that although it was technically illegal for Christians to lend money at interest, many did so anyway, including Will Shakespeare.

You might be tempted to sympathize with Shakespeare as the wronged party here, but that was emphatically not Joyce’s intention. Adams wrote that Stephen includes this story to show “Shakespeare’s sense of property as stronger than his sense of good fellowship.” Frank Budgen, in his book James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, says of Shakespeare in this passage, “From his debtors he exacted the uttermost farthing.” Shakespeare, an incredibly wealthy and famous man, was willing to drag this humble apothecary through the court system for the sake of a few bags of malt and an inconsequential sum of money. This must have been especially heinous to Stephen, who is drowning in debt of his own. Among Joyce’s sources, Brandes felt that Shakespeare’s interest in property and collecting debts, combined with a powerful egoism, demonstrates a man who was willing, among other things, to abandon his young family in the pursuit of wealth and property.

One might assume Shakespeare got rich due to his unparalleled genius as an artist, but Stephen is skeptical. Both an “ostler” and “callboy” were menial positions within a theatre. An ostler watched audience members’ horses, while a callboy was a prompter’s attendant, helping actors remember their lines and cues. Either of these would be a plausible starting point for a career in theatre, but did Shakespeare ever do these jobs? Stephen cites John Aubrey, who wrote about Shakespeare in the 1680’s, but Aubrey doesn’t mention Shakespeare as either an ostler or callboy. Aubrey wrote that Shakespeare worked as both a schoolmaster and butcher before making it big in London. Stephen does subsequently refer to Shakespeare as an “ostler and butcher,” but the first mention of Shakespeare as an ostler came in the 1750’s, and his career as a callboy wasn’t referenced until the 18th and 19th centuries. Harris, Lee, and Brandes are all reluctant to advance these claims about Shakespeare’s early career. Stephen needs to reinforce his dark rags-to-riches story for Shakespeare, so he rolls with it nonetheless.

Stephen will now demonstrate that Shakespeare’s ideas didn’t shimmer into existence from formless spiritual essences:

“All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive:”

Stephen argues for the rest of this passage that Shakespeare was the Aaron Sorkin or Dick Wolf of his day, with many elements of his work ripped straight from the headlines. A prime example is the horrific event that Stephen alludes to in this statement. Rodrigo Lopez, a Portuguese man of Jewish heritage, was Queen Elizabeth I’s chief physician. In the 1590’s, Lopez became embroiled in a plot against Don Antonio, the pretender to the throne of Portugal. Lopez secretly allied himself with the court of Spain, the archnemesis of the English in the Elizabethan era. The queen’s doctor scheming with the Spanish erupted into a major scandal. Lopez was accused of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth, though historians are divided on whether there was valid evidence for this specific claim. Nonetheless, a scapegoat was needed, and Lopez’s Jewish heritage played a role in the harshness of his treatment, never mind the fact he had converted to Christianity. He was ultimately hanged, drawn and quartered for his alleged crimes and went to his death declaring his love for the Queen and Jesus.

Lopez’s trial and execution led to an upsurge of antisemitism in London in the 1590’s and is seen as the inspiration for The Merchant of Venice, a play that centers on the trial of a Jewish man. In fact, an early version of The Merchant of Venice was performed around two months after Lopez’s execution. It’s no coincidence, then, that Shylock attempts to exact a pound of flesh from a protagonist named Antonio. Norris argues, along with Stephen, that rather than springing from those aforementioned spiritual essences, Shakespeare’s plays sprang largely from his historical context. Viewing his plays this way, Norris argues, creates an “unsentimental and de-romanticized” view of Shakespeare and connects them to “an equally unsettling view of the present.” The first such example in this passage is the antisemitism that connects both the Elizabethans and the Edwardians. Stephen drops the antisemitic slur “sheeny” into this statement, which had been uttered moments before by Buck Mulligan to describe Leopold Bloom. Stephen is calling out Mulligan’s antisemitism in this remark as well as Shakespeare’s, implicating both in the nightmare of history.

Shakespeare had the task of delighting and appeasing two British monarchs during his career:

“Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting.”

We turn now to examine the tastes of James I, king of Scotland and England. A “philosophaster,” by the way, means “a pretender to philosophy.” Sick burn, actually. James I was obsessed with demons and witchcraft, but not in a cool and fun way. He wrote a book in 1597 entitled Daeomonologie on the subject, and then proceeded to execute hundreds of women for the witchcraft and devil-worship he had imagined, which brings us to the Scottish Play.

Macbeth is generally seen as a play written to tickle James’ fancy, with its supernatural themes and Scottish setting. In one instance, James blamed witches for a storm that caused a dangerous sea crossing for him and his bride from Denmark, and in turn, the witches in Macbeth speak of raising the winds at sea to cause mayhem in Act I. The story of Macbeth is based on the Holinshed's Chronicles' history of the kings of Scotland (James’ ancestors), though the Chronicles are heavily fictionalized and include a lot of mythical creatures alongside the more grounded figures in their “histories.” In any case, a Macbeth-like figure named Donwald and his pal Banquo murder the king of Scotland in the Holinshed's Chronicles version of history. As Shakespeare crafted stories that were politically correct in the literal sense of the term, he bent tales to fit the whims of whoever sat on the throne. Banquo was believed to be one of James’ forebears, so he becomes a virtuous victim of the regicidal maniac in Shakespeare’s version of the story. As for Hamlet, which also contains supernatural elements, Joyce’s trio of Shakespeare scholars don’t think it was also written for James I given the timeline of when the play debuted and when James took the throne.

Well, how about all of Shakespeare’s comedies? Surely those didn’t have a political agenda:

“The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost.”

In 1588, the Spanish Armada sank off the west coast of Ireland, cementing the supremacy of British sea power. But have you really vanquished your enemies on the high seas if they’re not lampooned in a Shakespearean comedy? Love’s Labour's Lost debuted in the 1590’s, featuring a foolish and boastful Spanish character named Armado. You couldn’t even call that subtext. Gifford and Seidman note in their annotation of Ulysses that Love’s Labour's Lost is considered a particularly difficult play in Shakespeare’s canon because of the large amount of topical references.

Naturally, Shakespeare’s histories are also steeped in the nightmare of history:

“His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm.”

A contemporary depiction of the siege of Mafeking

Stephen diminishes Shakespeare’s history plays as mere “pageants.” They might as well have Turko the Terrible hanging out with all those Richards and Henrys. “Mafeking” refers to a siege that took place in South Africa during the recently concluded Boer War. In 1900, the English garrison was able to hold out against the attacking Boers for over 200 days until the Boers were forced to withdraw. In London, this news was received with uproarious and over-the-top celebration for this British victory, despite the fact that it wasn’t particularly crucial to the war overall.

Stephen doesn’t single out one of Shakespeare’s history plays with this criticism, but instead argues that the history plays as a body of work are just as ludicrous and overblown in their portrayal of British history as those Mafeking celebrations. Scholar Irina Rasmussen describes Shakespeare as “a messenger from the sixteenth century when the imperial scramble for world markets began…” and his history plays as simply pageants of war and bloody feuds, exploited “for those peddling in national pride.” Like his other works, Shakespeare’s histories have a specific political agenda to make English kings look heroic and their enemies look dastardly. In Shakespeare’s plays, his fools often speak truth to the king when no one else can, but Shakespeare was no fool.

This royal-worshipping orthodoxy should be problematic for the Irish Nationalist artists assembled in the Library with Stephen. Catholic identity was a pillar of Irish Nationalism in 1904, and despite what Eglinton alleges (“Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman.”) there is anti-Catholic sentiment in Shakespeare’s plays as well:

“Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of equivocation.”

Stephen alludes here to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament and James I. In 1606, Fr. Henry Garnet, a Jesuit from Warwickshire (Shakespeare’s home county), was put on trial for the failed conspiracy. During the course of his trial, Garnet argued that it was, in fact, fine for him to lie under oath by the Doctrine of Equivocation, stating that lying was ethical as long as it upholds the “Greater Glory of God.” Unfortunately for Garnet, the judge wasn’t particularly sympathetic to this gambit, and Garnet was executed later the same year. The porter mentioned by Stephen appears in Act II of Macbeth, where he states:

“Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.”

The porter mentioning equivocation and treason in this context doesn’t make sense. It is a bald wink and nod to the political biases of the audience.

If life in Shakespeare’s Britain has got you down, maybe you could try founding a colony in the New World:

“The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.”

In 1609, the Sea Venture wrecked in the Bermudas on its way to the recently established Jamestown colony in Virginia. The surviving sailors were able to build a new ship and return to England, but their harrowing adventure of survival in parts unknown became the focus of public fascination. Shakespeare seized on the hot story of the moment, as it is believed to have inspired The Tempest in 1611, which tells the story of shipwreck survivors on a fantastical island. The sailors aboard the Sea Venture reported seeing St. Elmo’s fire atop the masts of their ship. In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel takes credit for the same phenomenon, implying that it caused the shipwreck in the play. French writer Ernest Renan was a big fan of The Tempest and wrote a sequel in 1888 called Caliban.

“Patsy Caliban,” in Norris’ interpretation, is Stephen’s Irish twist on The Tempest’s famous monster-man. For all the talk of the Elizabethans’ colonial activities, Stephen hasn’t directly mentioned their closest colony, just to the west. Stephen’s “Patsy Caliban” plays into the history of racializing the Irish as white-but-not-quite that persisted into the 19th century. A common trope of colonizers’ tall tales right through the early twentieth century was landing in some far off land and meeting monsters and magical people. We discussed this previously when analyzing Bloom’s orientalist fantasies, particularly those about cannibals (“Caliban” is an apporximate palindrome of “cannibal”). Dehumanizing the people in colonized territories, in this case literally portraying them as non-human entities, was an important component to imperial propaganda. It’s not as bad to conquer and steal land and resources from people who aren’t quite human. Finally, Our American Cousin is the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated, perhaps a curse for those stout sailors hoping to tame the North American continent and its people.

Don’t worry, Stephen didn’t forget the sonnets:

“The sugared sonnets follow Sidney’s.”

Both Brandes and Lee list Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets as an influence on Shakespeare’s. Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was likely composed in the 1580’s, predating Shakespeare’s which were first printed in 1609. In 1598, Francis Meres wrote about Shakespeare’s “sugred sonnets” as works known only to Shakespeare’s friends. There is an accusation of imitation in Stephen’s brief reference; they’re not plagiarism, exactly, but also not a product of formless spiritual essences downloaded from the Akashic records, either.

“As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.”

And at long last we arrive at carrotty Bess, better known as Queen Elizabeth I, a famous ginger. “Fay Elizabeth” is an allusion to Edmund Spenser’s 1590 epic poem The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser wrote multiple virginal representations of Elizabeth into his narrative in which he also traces her illustrious ancestry back to King Arthur. Like Shakespeare, Spenser knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Tradition has it that Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor for ol’ carrotty Bess, who was so taken with Falstaff in the Henry histories that she asked Shakespeare to write a play where he fell in love. As for the image of the “meinherr” groping in the depths of her “buckbasket,” I think you can unravel that particular metaphor yourself. Liz famously claimed to be a lifelong virgin, but Stephen is skeptical of those claims.

Taken as a whole, Norris described this passage as “Stephen’s most powerful ethical charge against Shakespeare, demonstrating how Shakespeare’s plays promoted the excesses of British imperialism: economic exploitation, racism and colonial adventurism. She further argued that Stephen provides the reader the “most brilliant demonstration of what an Irish perspective can bring to a Shakespearean critique.” Stephen’s argument in this passage clearly illustrates that Shakespeare’s works were inherently political. From the comfortable remove of history, it is easy to be swept up in the poetry of Shakespeare’s plays, to be “wooed by grace of language and gesture” and to lose sight of the nightmare of history hidden in all that lovely iambic pentameter. Shakespeare was a great artist, absolutely, but his work was commercial and political in nature as well. His work was never subversive or challenging to the status quo, and thus he was able to enrich himself, amassing property in the process. While Shakespeare’s political commentary is firmly grounded in the Elizabethan era, in our own era, we are left to grapple with the legacy of those excesses of imperialism that Norris listed.

Stephen is desperately trying to show the cognitive dissonance of this assembled group of Irish writers, the nexus of a new Irish literary movement, who are still obsequiously devoted to Shakespeare, and by extension, the imperial order. Apart from Stephen and Mulligan the mocker, the other men are uncomfortable with any substantial criticism of Shakespeare as a man. Deconstructing Shakespeare is not disgracing the man or his art, but it is a necessary step in uncoupling from the legacy of colonialism inherent in his plays. Stephen’s audience in this episode are wealthy Protestants. The political order in which they flourish is the cause of the paralysis that Stephen feels so acutely. In the end, they are unable to hear Stephen because earnestly integrating his criticism of Shakespeare would fatally undermine their worldview.

Decoding Dedalus: He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.

Further Reading:

The Chap that Writes like Synge