Hamlet, Shakespeare-Biographie und die Struktur des Ulysses

In Chapter 9 of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“Scylla and Charybdis”) Stephen Dedalus, quite often alter ego of the author, has to stand a discussion in the National Library in Dublin about life and art, in particular about Hamlet and Shakespeare’s biography. Stephen develops the seemingly absurd theory that Hamlet is Shakespeare, only to deconstruct it later on. Far from a mimetic conception of art, the author and his alter ego refute the assumption of many Shakespeare biographies – old and new – that Shakespeare’s art imitates his life. Nevertheless, Joyce’s innovative narrative technique – the presentation of consciousness – has been used so convincingly to give a life-like impression of his characters’ minds that its basic form and contents became very influential. It was for instance taken up by Antony Burgess, Shakespeare and Joyce critic, in his fictional Shakespeare biography Nothing Like the Sun. As Germaine Greer complains in her book Shakespeare’s Wife, the idea of Shakespeare’s biography and in particular his relationship to his wife Anne Hathaway, which the young artist Stephen Dedalus develops in this chapter, comes up in a number of contemporary Shakespeare biographies. One target of this paper is to point to Joyce’s Shakespearean biographical knowledge and his theoretical approach concerning life and art. Another one is to show the central function of the Hamlet-allusion within the structure of Ulysses. Only when assuming that Ulysses has a plot with beginning, middle and end, the function of the Hamlet-allusion – far from being accidental – becomes clear.