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.
