Hamlet’s sledded poleaxe
U 9.130-2: Not for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. As Stephen holds forth in the library, regaling his captive audience with his biographical theory of Hamlet, he conflates bits of Shakespeare’s text with passages from the commentaries, demonstrating his wit and ability to construct an entertaining scholarly melange. At one point he imbeds, in a supposition about John Shakespeare’s occupation, a description of William’s activities, using Hamlet père’s battle-axe as a butchering tool.
It is possible that Joyce found the butcher occupation in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, but he did have in his library another source, George Brandes’s William Shakespeare, A Critical Study:
The poleaxe as a butcher’s term could also be familiar to his auditors. The OED lists several instances of this definition and Bloom had earlier thought:
And the assembled literati would no doubt be familiar with the textual conundrum posed by the variants “Polacks" and “poleaxe”: Hamlet the King either slaying the sled- (or sledge-)riding Polish soldiers or forcefully striking the icy field with his weapon. The adjective “sledded”, however, may have been a puzzler to someone picturing a butcher’s axe, rather than a weapon, unless of course it passed unnoticed in Stephen’s verbal torrent. Joycean scholars too – Gifford, for example - have not explicated the “sledded” part of the phrase, referring only to the “poleaxe”. Nevertheless, we do know that Joyce (and presumably Stephen) read footnotes, often the more obscure the better, so it would not be totally improbable for Stephen to intend the meaning of “weighted” for a “sledded” butcher’s poleaxe. In one of the books in Joyce’s library, The tragedy of Hamlet / [William Shakespeare]; edited for the use of students by A. W. Verity, occurs a note on “sledded”:
And earlier in the Glossary:
Despite Verity’s caveat, weighted butcher axes did exist in Shakespeare’s time, as well as in Stephen’s, and the phrase “sledded poleaxe” found in some editions of Hamlet certainly suits Stephen’s rhetorical intentions. It may also be worth noting that in “Cyclops”, “poleaxe” adds an additional ethnic identification to the Polish pianist, patriot and prime minister, Ignacy Jan Paderewski (with the traditional Polish honorific “Pan,”) and a Celtic touch in “Paddy,” the complex becoming Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky (12.565).1 Robert Janusko 1 Puns on Paderewski’s name were not uncommon. "Later May recounts that her mother interrupted
a concert by a famous Polish pianist, Ignacy Paderewski, to ask her, 'Phwat county in Ireland did Paddy Roosky come from?'" (The Irish 400 (1897), Vaudeville act by the Elinore Sisters quoted by M. Alison Kibler in: Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville, Chapel Hill: 1999, p. 103). |
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