Que
voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.

--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of
my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the
lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under
which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty
and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in
the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, twice in _As you
like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure for Measure_--and
in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.

Judge Eglinton summed up.

--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
is all in all.

--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Othello_ he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he
kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago
ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

--Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

--And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _pere?)_ is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.

--Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there,