Bacon and Algebra 

The Stephen Dedalus theory about Shakespeare may have been one of the first parts of Ulysses to have been written, if we can believe Joyce’s offer to Ezra Pound in April 1917 that he could send him a “Hamlet chapter” (Letters I 101). But that the theory is crucial for the novel is indicated by the fact that it is announced in the first version of the first chapter that has survived (the Rosenbach manuscript) in a passage from November of that year. When Haines is eager to hear about the theory, he asks “amiably” if it is “some paradox”:

— Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. (U 1. 553-7)

  This passage for five years remained unaltered until the publication of the novel, but four years later, when Joyce began work on the final chapter of his book, Joyce noted the crucial phrase “proves by algebra” twice in the Ulysses notesheets (once in the sheets headed “Ithaca” and once in the “Penelope” sheets), and he copied it twice more, on the same page, in the NLI notebook Add. MS 36,639/5B. At the time Joyce was immersed in algebra and geometry books, harvesting terminology for use in “Ithaca”.1 He must have been delighted that with the phrase he had predicted his future interest.

  Although in “Scylla and Charybdis” Joyce tried to locate all elements of the Shakespeare theory situated in 1904, the algebra phrase is an anachronism.2 This is not Buck Mulligan’s wit (or Oliver St John Gogarty’s): the author, appropriately was the erstwhile Hamlet actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who in 1915 had published an article on “The Importance of Humour in Tragedy” in the English Review that was republished in his final collection of essays Nothing Matters from which I will be quoting: to provide some context: this is page 218:

  We don’t know in what form Joyce read the essay which had been “a presidential address delivered at the Birmingham Midland Institute in 1915” (v). By the time of publication Beerbohm Tree was in the United States (to make movies) and the preface to his book of essays is signed “California, 1916.”

  The author was perhaps the most important theatre personality of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, as actor, as manager, and as founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Although he also promoted new drama such as that of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, and Wilde, he was especially famous for his productions of Shakespeare plays, including films. In California he played MacBeth in a film directed by D.W. Griffith.

  The year 1916 was the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, and despite the horrors of the world war and the inconvenient fact that Germans considered the Swan of Avon as one of their own, the event was celebrated everywhere in the English-speaking world, and Beerbohm must have given his lecture in the United States as well. On the occasion of the Tercentenary the lecture was reprinted and excerpted in different newspapers, so it is difficult to know in what guise (or what language) Joyce may have read the witticism, but since this was published between his Hamlet lectures in Trieste and his writing down his Shakespeare theory for Ulysses, Joyce was obsessed with Shakespeareana, including the theories about Bacon. Not everybody liked the actor: “When Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree first performed Hamlet in London, a hostile critic wrote the next day: ‘Now we can settle the question of who wrote the plays, Shakespeare or Bacon. All we have to do is to open both graves and see who turned over last night!’” And you can judge for yourself.3

Geert Lernout