No More Learning

Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the
maiden hid_.

--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval.
We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if
at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.

--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy
in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His
art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the
art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar
of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter
Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his
back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had
underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied
there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love
and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's
wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in _Richard
III_ and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing,
took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate,
answered from the capon's blankets: _William the conqueror came before
Richard III_. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O,
and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is
suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.

Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux? _

--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.

Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

--And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from
neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
behind the diamond panes?

Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of
Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.
Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.

--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

Love that dare not speak its name.

--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.

Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained
yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her
poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the
first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her
sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.

O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he
has commended her to posterity.

He faced their silence.

To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
_Punkt. _
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.


Woa!

--Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

--He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her
his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in
peace?

--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.

--_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.

--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
Let me think.

--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget
Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean. . .

--He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

--What? asked Besteglinton.

William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house. . .

--Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands
and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. _
Lovely!

Catamite.

--The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.

Steadfast John replied severe:

--The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
and have it.

Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?

--And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the
famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to
his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging
and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked
forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ with
the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for
witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love's Labour Lost_.
His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory
of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and the play
Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.
The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid
meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere. _

--Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,'expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.

_Sufflaminandus sum. _

--He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.

--A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.

_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos. _

--Saint Thomas, Stephen began. . .

--_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.

There he keened a wailing rune.

--_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! _ It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!

All smiled their smiles.

--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his
wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his
manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

--Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.

_--Requiescat! _ Stephen prayed.

_What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago. . . _

--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as
rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven
parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her
at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in
which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She
read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry
Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought
over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual
Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her
lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

--History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.

Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with
a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten
forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then
you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.
The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to
hour it rots and rots.
He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised
that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first
and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and
objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be
a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love
him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea. _

Are you condemned to do this?

--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.

--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Am I a father? If I were?

Shrunken uncertain hand.

--Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if
the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet
of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not the
father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt
himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,
the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was
born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.

Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

--Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
_Coriolanus. _ His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
_King John. _ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter's Tale_ are we know.
Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may
guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.

--The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.

The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.

Door closed. Cell. Day.

They list. Three. They.

I you he they.

Come, mess.

STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.

MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What's in a name?

BEST: That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake. _(Laughter)_


BUCKMULLIGAN: (_Piano, diminuendo_)

_Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy. . . _

STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in _King Lear_, two bear the wicked uncles'
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his
brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.

BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name
. . .

_(Laughter)_

QUAKERLYSTER: (_A tempo_) But he that filches from me my good name. . .

STEPHEN: _(Stringendo)_ He has hidden his own name, a fair name,
William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in
the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name
is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend
sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer
than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name?
That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that
we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.
It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the
night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent
constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His
eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as
he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from
Shottery and from her arms.

Both satisfied. I too.

Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.

And from her arms.

Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?

Read the skies. _Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos. _ Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: _sua donna.
Gia: di lui. gelindo risolve di non amare_ S. D.

--What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?

--A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.

What more's to speak?

Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.

_Stephanos,_ my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.

--You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.

Me, Magee and Mulligan.

Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
_Pater, ait. _ Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing
be.

Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:

--That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three
brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The
third brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best
prize.

Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.

The quaker librarian springhalted near.

--I should like to know, he said, which brother you. . . I understand you
to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers. . . But perhaps
I am anticipating?

He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.

An attendant from the doorway called:

--Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants. . .

--O, Father Dineen! Directly.

Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.

John Eglinton touched the foil.

--Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.
You kept them for the last, didn't you?

--In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

Lapwing.

Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.

Lapwing.

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
(what's in a name? ), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard
the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The
other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,
the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which
Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and spatchcocked on to a
Celtic legend older than history?

--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine
a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que
voulez-vous? _ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.

--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery.