The reading stopped at ". . . he any son?" (9.844)
Summary:
Amidst all such buffoonery by Mulligan, an attendant opens the door to inform the librarian that a gentleman has come from the Freeman, wanting to see the files of the Kilkenny People for last year (9.586). The librarian goes off to assist the gentleman. Mulligan snatches the card the attendant has brought in, wondering who it could be, and sees that it is Bloom.
As John Eglinton and Mr Best want to hear more of what Stephen has to say about Mrs S (Mrs Shakespeare), Stephen's discourse starts with a reference to Penelope. But soon Stephen is back to Shakespeare and his twenty-year long sojourn in London. (Odysseus also spent twenty years away from home.) Stephen says that Shakespeare led a rich life, had property, and had many liaisons. This part interspersed with Buck Mulligan's buffoonery and Stephen's interior monologue is not always easy to decipher. Additionally Stephen's discourse demands that the readers be very well versed not only with Shakespeare's works, which he liberally quotes from, but also with his life as well as with the lives of Aristoteles, Socrates, Plato etc.
The talk then moves on to Shakespeare's will, according to which he left only his secondbest bed (9.698) to Ann though he was rich, a fact that seems to bother Stephen. According to him, Shakespeare does not come out with flying colours when his behaviour is compared with that of Aristotle or with that of Charles II.
Other topics they touch upon include homosexuality and the bard's strict sense of business dealings which led him to create, for example, the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Whether or not Shakespeare was a Jew is also touched upon, with Eglinton quoting from a paper by the dean of Studies at the University College in Dublin that Shakespeare was catholic.
Mulligan’s groaning, “Ora pro nobis" (9.773), saves the day when Stephan starts on Saint Thomas. Stephen continues comparing what he thinks were the ideas of St. Thomas with those of the new Viennese school (i.e., Freud) regarding incest. He then brings Shakespeare and his plays back into the discussion, quoting from The Winter's tale. Mr Best's comment, “Gentle Will is being roughly handled” (9.793), starts off a play of words regarding will: will as the modal verb, will as the shortened version of the name, William, and will as wish.
Eglinton intervention (why they should care for Shakespeare's wife or father), leads to a discourse on the relationships between fathers and sons including Shakespeare's writing Hamlet soon after the death of his own father John, and Stephen's thoughts about his relationship with his own father, Simon Daedalus. Neither a reference to Jesus and the Church is left out.
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
