Abstract
Not long before he collected ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ in Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats bumped into James Joyce on the steps of the National Library. The pair ducked into a café on O’Connell Street. In the brief interview that followed Joyce proved every bit the precocious upstart. ‘Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folklore, with the historical setting of events’, Yeats has Joyce demand of him in a preface written for but never published in that volume. ‘Above all why had I written about ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations?’1 Yeats recalls ‘explaining the dependence of all good art on popular tradition’, a relationship to which Shakespeare testifies for him here as elsewhere. ‘In big towns, especially in big towns like London, you don’t find what old writers used to call the people; you find instead a few highly cultivated, highly perfected individual lives, and great multitudes who imitate and cheapen them.’ To this defence of the folk and their lore against the debasing forces of modernity — a defence that he made in essays and introductions written throughout the 1890s — Yeats has it that Joyce replied: ‘Generalizations aren’t made by poets; they are made by men of letters. They are no use.’ A hefty generalisation on Joyce’s part, to be sure, but one that forced Yeats to face an inconvenient truth: the game of Anglo-Irish cultural politics in which he wagered his early reputation as an Irish poet had played to a stalemate.
desdemona I am not merry, but I do beguile
The thing I am by seeming otherwise.
Come, how wouldst thou praise me?
Othello, 2.1.134–6
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Notes
Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 103.
James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry and trans. by Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 26.
Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 16, p. 10.
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1944, 1963), p. 29.
See Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986)
and R.B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
For a recent example, see Tracey Teets Schwarze, Joyce and the Victorians (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002).
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 204–15.
Ian Crump, ‘Refining Himself out of Existence: The Evolution of Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory and the Drafts of A Portrait’, in Joyce in Context, ed. by Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 223–39 (p. 228).
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: fames Joyce’s Early Years, ed. by Richard Ellmann (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003), pp. 99–100. Matthew Arnold’s younger brother, Thomas, served as professor of English literature at University College Dublin from 1882 until his death in November 1900.
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’, The North American Review, 169.517 (December 1899), 855–67 (p. 866).
W.B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 107.
W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, ed. by J.B. Frayne, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970–75), I, p. 174. Of course, this statement does not represent the final word for Yeats on the matter. Rather, his initial effort to relate the ‘fair equivalents’ of Irish folklore would morph first into a desire to capture the ‘divine substances’ of his sources and later into his spiritualised conception of personality. Significantly, Yeats deploys the example of Shakespeare at each stage in this evolution.
See Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 40–97.
Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays, trans. by William G. Hutchinson (London: Walter Scott, 1896), p. 5, p. 72.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: The Bodley Head, 1986). Cited parenthetically in text by episode and line number.
See William T. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 123–4. Harry Levin has called it ‘possibly an oversimplification’ but not problematically so in James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1960), p. 118.
John Gordon, ‘Getting Past No in “Scylla and Charybdis”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 44.3 (Spring 2007), 501–22 (p. 518, n. 9).
Alistair Cormack, Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 100–1.
William M. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971), p. 191.
Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 85.
L.H. Platt, ‘The Voice of Esau: Culture and Nationalism in “Scylla and Charybdis”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 29.4 (Summer, 1992), 737–50 (p. 740).
For Lanigan, see Patrick J. Corish, ‘Lanigan, John (1758–1828)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
For Ledwich, see Clare O’Halloran, ‘Ledwich, Edward (1739–1823)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
For Best, see Rolf Baumgarten, ‘Best, Richard Irvine (1872–1959)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for fames Joyce’s Ulysses, 2nd edn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 193.
Hugh Kenner appropriated the term ‘arranger’ from David Hayman, who first used it ‘to designate a figure or a presence that can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but that exercises an increasing degree of overt control over his increasingly challenging materials’. See Hayman, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning, rev. edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 84,
and Kenner, ‘The Arranger’, in James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook, ed. by Derek Attridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 17–32.
See William H. Quillian, ‘Shakespeare in Trieste: Joyce’s 1912 “Hamlet” Lectures’, James Joyce Quarterly, 12.1/2 (Fall 1974–Winter 1975), 7–63.
Edward Dowden, Letters of Edward Dowden and his Correspondents, ed. by Elizabeth D. and Hilda M. Dowden (London: Dent, 1914), pp. 120–1.
Compare Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 62.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 92.
See R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 38.
See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 16.
Gibson avoids repeating in this way the problematic position of Irish historian F.S.L. Lyons, for whom Yeats emerged during the Revival ‘trying to hold a middle position between the anonymity of cosmopolitanism and the parochialism of Irish Ireland’ (Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 71). But Joyce the stubborn cosmopolitan belongs for Lyons alongside Dowden in their mutual refusal to back either ‘Anglo-Ireland’ or ‘Irish Ireland’, Celtic or Gaelic revivalisms. For Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce, ‘the battle of two civilisations was, in effect, pointless’ (Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 25). Emer Nolan has observed, however, that Joyce’s ‘rejection of Revivalism is a characteristic gesture of the world of native Catholic nationalism’ (James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 48). Gibson’s own position — particularly, in its treatment of Malone’s scholarship — is consistent with Nolan’s argument that Joyce’s ‘effective exclusion of Anglo-Irish culture from his fiction indeed parallels its exclusion by nativist nationalism’ (ibid.).
Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 54.
James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. by Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 38.
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King, 1875), p. 5.
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H., in Complete Short Fiction, ed. by Ian Small (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), pp. 49–79 (p. 75).
See Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (London: Cape, 1927).
Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, rev. edn (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 113.
Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 81.
Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 608.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession (New York: printed and published by the author, 1916).
Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Harris, James Thomas [Frank] (18567–1931)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
See Frank Harris, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (London: Frank Palmer, 1909), pp. xvi–xvii.
Frank Harris, Frank Harris to Arnold Bennett: Fifty-eight Letters, 1908–1910, ed. by Mitchell Kennerley (Merlon Station, PA: American Autograph Shop, 1936), p. 23.
G.B. Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. by Edwin Wilson (New York: Applause, 1961), p. 199.
Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (London: Faber, 1977), p. 102.
Quoted in Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 163.
Benjamin Boysen, ‘On the Spectral Presence of the Predecessor in James Joyce — With Special Reference to William Shakespeare’, Orbis Litterarum, 60 (2005), 159–182 (p. 162).
Tyler first proposed Mary Fitton as the ‘dark lady’ with his introduction to the facsimile edition of Shakspere’s Sonnets: The First Quarto, 1609 (1886). His theory earned a second airing in his next edition, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1890). Tyler added for its substantial introduction his claim that Mr. W.H. was William Herbert and the ‘rival poet’ was Chapman. In Gossip from a Muniment Room (1897, 1898), Lady Newdigate-Newdegate challenged Tyler. From extant portraits at Arbury, Lady Newdigate-Newdegate showed that Mary Fitton had a fair complexion. Lee contests Tyler’s view in his Life. Tyler would answer their criticism in The Herbert-Fitton Theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Reply (1898) by disputing the authenticity of the Arbury portraits. See W.B. Owen, ‘Tyler, Thomas (1826–1902)’, rev. by Donald Hawes, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, trans. by William Archer and Mary Morison, 3 vols (London: Heinemann, 1898), II, p. 27.
See Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 364. This discussion of Brandes’s career owes a great deal to Schoenbaum.
Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, trans. by William Archer and Mary Morison, 3 vols (London: Heinemann, 1898) I, pp. 280–1.
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© 2013 Adam Putz
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Putz, A. (2013). James Joyce. In: The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027665_5
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