Given the disparity between Stephen and his interlocutors, it is no wonder that his theories about the enigmatic Shakespeare seem a bit arcane. They certainly differ from Lyster's, as the reader discovers at the opening of the chapter. Lyster, the Quaker librarian, who cites Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1796, believes, as did Goethe, that Hamlet's problems stem from ineptitude in his character, from his being an "ineffectual dreamer." Goethe, as the English poet Coleridge was to do some two decades later, believed Hamlet to be a sensitive prince who was too immersed in the subtleties of his own personality to act in a "manly" way. (Of course, both Goethe and Coleridge ignore the fact that during the play, Hamlet does manage to kill several people.) Russell, who constantly stresses the idea that modern exegetes have no right to peer into the biographical data of the Bard, finally appears naive, when compared to the complex Stephen. To Russell, it matters not whether Hamlet is Shakespeare's fictional portrait of Essex or James I. To him, only the "formless spiritual essences" are important, and he objects to "prying into the family life of a great man." But if the portrait of Russell can be explained as mere caricature by Joyce, who felt that the Irish Renaissance was a wasteful illusion, certainly the citation of the French poet MallarmŽ, sentimentally believing that Hamlet was walking about "reading the book of himself," cannot be so easily dismissed; he alludes to a town poster announcing a performance of Hamlet with the subtitle "Le Distrait," the absentminded or distracted one.
Stephen, obsessed with the ghosts of his own past, including his mother (a parallel with the Odyssey in which Odysseus met his own mother in Hades), believes that Shakespeare himself was very much like King Hamlet of Denmark, who appears as a ghost to his son. And to begin his thesis, Stephen pictures the Globe Theater as it was in Shakespeare's day: "The play begins." Stephen's method is "composition of place," a technique which the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola, used in his Spiritual Exercises to help believers summon up a physical picture of the locale of a spiritual mystery. For example, the novice tried to imagine the dress that Mary was wearing when Gabriel appeared to her to announce that even though she was still a virgin, she would be the mother of God, and, in addition, the novice was expected to picture what the angel looked like. Joyce employed this method of artistic detail to describe Hell in Book Three of A Portrait, and Stephen uses the same technique in "Scylla and Charybdis."
