Khaki Hamlets

Shakespeare, Joyce, and the Agency of Literary Texts

Authors

  • Mark Bayer University of Texas at San Antonio

Abstract

Cluster: Shakespeare's Literary Afterlives

Edited by Mark Bayer

In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalaus and his friends debate the cultural afterlife of Hamlet. Stephen concludes that Hamlet has had a decidedly negative impact on successor cultures. There is, however, considerable irony in Stephen's position: Stephen's prosecution of Hamlet is eerily similar to the trials of Ulysses, itself the target of years of censorship amid accusations that the book was obscene, with a strong tendency to corrupt its readers. Stephen's comments in Ulysses and the novel's legal travails illustrate that the modernist desire to bracket artistic works as autonomous and separable from moral considerations is ultimately illusory and falls prey to its roots in a Kantian project that refuses such a separation.

Author Biography

Mark Bayer, University of Texas at San Antonio

Mark Bayer is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and numerous articles on early modern literature and the worldwide cultural authority of Shakespeare's plays.

Issue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010. Image: A woman holds an orb with a serious facial expression.

Downloads

Published

2010-05-01

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2010): Spring/Summer

Section

Articles