Stephen Dedalus and the Mourning Echoes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet

This article practises genetic criticism on James Joyce and extrapolates new instances of literary influence between William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Joyce's Ulysses. Building on recent scholarship that sheds light on the compositional processes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, we unveil two Shakespearean echoes (one of them an allusion) hitherto undiscovered and unanthologised by Joyceans in “Telemachus”, and suggest that Shakespeare's impact on Joyce through Hamlet, though well-studied and much acknowledged, is more extensive than has been revealed. To that end, we examine afresh Joyce's familiarity with Hamlet and his creative practice of cross-referencing, and juxtapose the scene where Stephen Dedalus anchors himself next to the cape of Bay Head mourning the death of his mother with pertinent lines in Hamlet I.ii to reveal how both texts illuminate the physical attributes and woeful memories of Hamlet and Stephen. As a concluding remark, we highlight how Hamlet interweaves various episodes of Ulysses, in particular “Telemachus” and “Circe”, the latter of which may contain a part originally in Joyce's “the Hamlet chapter”.