But the appearances of Mulligan—and of Bloom—do provide much needed comic relief from the intricacies of Stephen’s exposition, while the long pages of exposition continue Joyce’s major themes. The grand entrance of Buck Mulligan follows Stephen’s summary statement about Hamlet, that the “son [is] consubstantial with the father”—that is, Shakespeare is both King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet and, by implication, that Joyce is both Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses. (Stephen is the age of Joyce in 1904-22; and Bloom, the age of Joyce—38—when the major sections of Ulysses were being composed.) The term entr’acte refers to a break between the acts, and Mulligan’s blasphemous humor (seen before in “Telemachus”) resembles the combination of piety and broad farce found in medieval “interludes” and also in the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet.
Mulligan’s scorn falls on all alike: on Shakespeare (“I seem to know the name”); on Synge, because of Yeats’s elaborate comparison of him to Aeschylus; on Stephen, because of his mystio-biographical interpretation of all reality (“The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father,” a parody of Stephen’s musings about consubstantial fatherhood, which Mulligan overheard as he was entering the discussion room); and even on Bloom—especially on Bloom, who, Mulligan detects, is Jewish. Poor Bloom, the eternal loser, the Irish Charlie Chaplin, has failed once again. In spite of all his elaborate precautions, he has been observed, staring at the anus of a museum goddess! And of all the people in Dublin to discover him, it was Buck Mulligan. Looking at Bloom’s name on the card that he fills out to examine the Kilkenny People file (for the Keyes ad), Mulligan ties together several strands in Ulysses as he turns suddenly to Stephen and says, “He knows you. He knows your old fellow [Simon, Stephen’s father, a brief reference to the father-son theme]. O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks [a pederast, but also a reference to the Greek Odysseus]. His pale Galilean eyes [Bloom paralleled with Christ] were upon her mesial groove.”
Yet Mulligan, to give him his due, reveals his admirable buoyancy when he praises Stephen’s wit in the telegram that informed Mulligan that Stephen would not meet him for lunch. Although Mulligan calls the telegram a “papal bull,” emanating from the lapsed Jesuit Stephen, Mulligan thinks that sending it was “wonderful inspiration!” The telegram’s quotation about the sentimentalist is a paraphrase of a passage from George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859); it probably refers both to Mulligan’s blithe habit of literary borrowing and to his refusal to look seriously at traditions which he ridicules.
Just before the allusion to Meredith and the telegram, however, a much more important passage occurs, one in which Mulligan, significantly, does not take part. This concerns the discussion of Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W H. (1889), which argues that “Mr. W. H.,” the person who Shakespeare said was the inspiration behind his sonnets, was really a boy actor named Willie Hughes. Of course, references to the mysteries behind the sonnets were not new to Joyce, and naturally the discussion does add to the mystifying “Charybdis” tone of the entire episode, but one wonders why Mulligan does not say anything when the theory of the homosexual Wilde is brought up. Mulligan, after all, is the one who humorously suggests that Stephen should be wary of Bloom’s sexual preference; this possible homosexuality of Mulligan has tantalized many critics.
Continuing his theory about Shakespeare after the Mulligan entr’acte has ended, Stephen goes on to examine the character of Anne, who was, he feels, scarcely a faithful Penelope who remained in Stratford awaiting the return of her long-absent husband. Dismissing Shakespeare’s rumored pederasty and his affairs with London slatterns as symptoms more than causes, Stephen maintains that the great wound of the Bard’s life came after his marriage—when Anne betrayed him. His proof of this point, which was implied earlier in the episode, is twofold: Shakespeare never mentions Anne in all 34 years of his marriage to her, and he left her only his second-best bed as a legacy, after excluding her entirely from his first will. Stephen counters the tired arguments that center around the “second-best bed” by chanting in blank verse to the somewhat “blank” John Eglinton and by pointing out that such a bequest would have been an insult to the survivor, coming as it did from such a wealthy playwright, as Shakespeare would (or should) have been.
Nor does Shakespeare himself escape unscathed from Stephen’s critical examination. Stephen feels that in many ways Shakespeare was extremely narrow minded. He was parsimonious, and to some extent Shylock and Iago are self-portraits. He capitalized upon popular (and “conservative”) causes: anti-Semitism and voyages of discovery to the New World, such as the one to Bermuda that is believed to have inspired The Tempest. Also, Shakespeare transmogrified into art certain hostilities that he felt towards his two “usurping” brothers, Richard and Edmund; the mesomorphic Gilbert doesn’t count: “The playhouse sausage filled . . . [his] soul.”
Richard Shakespeare, according to Stephen, became in Shakespeare’s works the unredeemed villain Richard III, and Edmund became the illegitimate, literally usurping son of Gloucester in King Lear. Stephen draws great significance from the fact that the last four acts of Richard III seem simply grafted on to the courtship of the ugly Richard and Lady Anne in Act I, and the autobiographical reference to Shakespeare is obvious. In King Lear, Stephen maintains, the Edmund subplot really has no relevance to the ancient Celtic myth.
Stephen’s view of Shakespeare, then, encompasses many aspects of the human psyche and indeed the soul: the Procession of the members of the Holy Trinity; the relation of the past to the present; the nature of change, which always returns upon itself (“We walk through ourselves. . . .”); and the permanence of love. Basically, however, Stephen’s exposition is an elaborate effort to try to identify his own place in life. His mother is dead; his father, though well meaning at times, is separated from him by an abyss of temperament. And, so far, Stephen has not succeeded in living up to the mystical and metaphorical components of his name (“What’s in a name?”); he has tried to leave Ireland, to fly from its entanglements like the “hawklike man,” Daedalus, but he has been forced to return to earth. He is more like Icarus, whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
After Stephen’s intellectual acrobatics, “Scylla and Charybdis” returns to more mundane matters. Stephen is criticized by Eglinton for demanding money for the publication of his ideas in Dana; another reference is made to Moore’s upcoming get-together; Lamppost Farrell is sitting in the library’s readers’ room; Mulligan chides Stephen for his derogatory review of Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers in The Daily Express (March 26, 1903); and Mulligan recites his hymn to masturbation, “Everyman His own Wife.” It is this last episode that finally convinces Stephen that there are “seas between” him and Mulligan, and coinciding with this distressing insight is Stephen’s perception that there is someone behind him, the someone being Bloom, who is also leaving the library.
This linking of events strengthens the importance of the last several lines of this chapter. Stephen remembers that he once stood upon the library steps and interpreted a flock of birds as being an augury of his own destiny (Chapter Five of A Portrait), and the reader wonders if the symbolically rich sundering of Stephen and Mulligan—necessitated by Bloom’s passing between them—will augur well for the young protagonist. Stephen’s dream of the exotic East and the “creamfruit melon” foreshadows Bloom’s kissing his wife’s melons (buttocks) in “Ithaca.” The allusion to Bloom as the Ancient Mariner places Stephen in the position of the Wedding Guest, one able to learn from the more experienced canvasser. And Mulligan’s warning to Stephen to beware of Bloom (“Get thee a breechpad”) is much more indicative of Mulligan’s own latent homosexuality than of any nefarious intent on Bloom’s part. In fact, with the charity that the Dublin Jew lends to Stephen, Bloom emerges in the novel’s later chapters as the young man’s true “father,” the mystical father who, Stephen believes, is related to the son in “a mystical estate”—in contrast to physical paternity, which may be, according to Stephen, “legal fiction.”
