Ulysses and Shakespeare's Will
I'm working my way through James Joyce's sometimes impenetrable Ulysses with the help of a class at the Newberry Library and Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. It's a struggle, but my pace is fairly light (10 pages a day), and the novel really does have a lot to offer. Besides the portrait of Dublin on June 16, 1904 and the rather obvious references to The Odyssey and other classical works, there is a surprising number of references to Shakespeare. In Chapter 9 ("Scylla and Charybdis"), one of the novel's main characters, Stephen Dedalus, talks about his theories on The Bard, Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare's wife), and Hamlet. He even works in a mention of some probate issues starting at line 686:
You mean [Shakespeare's] will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
[Hathaway] 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.
Of course, not much in Ulysses is straight-forward. Here Dedalus is talking about Shakespeare's relationship with his wife (which Dedalus felt was poor), and about the reasons why the only gift Shakespeare made to her in his Will was of "my second best bed."
This site gives a nice, short overview of what such a gift might mean.
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