Trapping the Fox You Are with a Riddle: The Autobiographical Crisis of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses - n't - Critical Essay

Before we examine the importance of Stephen's Shakespearean posturing and his autobiographical theory, however, let us first register something of the magnitude of Stephen's obsession, since, as Edmund Wilson has noted, "the lecture has little to do with Shakespeare, but a good deal to do with Stephen himself" (198):

* In the Proteus episode of Ulysses, Stephen refers to his "Hamlet hat" (48), a remark that becomes less oblique later when he refers to "my cockle hat and staff and his my sandals shoon" (51)--part of the ballad sung by Ophelia: "How should I your true love know / From another one? / By his cockle hat and staff / and his sandal shoon" (4.5.23--26). Don Gifford notes that "the cockle hat (with a scallop shell as a sign of pilgrimage) and the staff suggest the conventional metaphor of the lover as pilgrim" (65). In Hamlet, the song carries significance for Ophelia because her lover the prince has become, if not strictly a pilgrim, at least an exile: Claudius charges him to go to England after he has slain Polonius. Stephen has exiled himself too: "I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go" (24).

* Cogitating metaphysics with closed eyes, Stephen thinks about the literal prospect of falling down in Horatio's words that warn Hamlet of the danger of madness: "If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base" (38; 1.4.69--70).

* Contemplating paternity, one of the unlikely issues of his Shakespearean talk, Stephen, about the stifling conventionality of Ireland, thinks: "Where is dear Arius to try conclusions?" (39). This rhetorical question refers to Hamlet's speech to Gertrude in her bedchamber, when he anticipates her predisposition to betray him:

No, in despite of sense and secrecy,

Unpeg the basket of the house's top,

Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,

To try conclusions, in the basket creep

And break your own neck down. (3.4.192--96; emphasis mine)

* The narrator in "Proteus," mired much in the thoughts of Stephen, calls the wind romping around Stephen, in a borrowing from Horatio, "nipping and eager airs" (39; 1.4.2).

* In his lecture, Stephen employs a pun to depict Shakespeare, who originally acted the part of the revenant of Hamlet's father, as--according to a situation like his own, in another sense of the words--"made up in the castoff mail of a court buck" (186).

Other examples could be proffered, but what perhaps reveals most about Stephen's obsession is when others take notice of his posturing. The Englishman Haines, for instance, indulgently calls Stephen's attention to the similarities of their setting by the Martello tower and the setting of Hamlet: "This tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o'er his base into the sea, isn't it" (20). Buck Mulligan, more directly, recognizes Stephen's identification with Shakespeare when he mocks Stephen's Shakespeare theory by replacing the name of Shakespeare with his nickname for Stephen (thus intimating the reflexivity of the theory) when he calls Stephen "0 Shade of Kinch the elder" (19).