Was James Joyce a Shakespeare Doubter?
Part One
“I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap.”
In August 2021, I left the UK and re-located to Ireland. As I arrived, preparations were underway throughout the country to celebrate the centenary of the publication of what many consider the greatest novel ever written; James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922. By coincidence, at around the same time, I was turning my thoughts to preparing something for the Shakespearean Authorship Trust’s centenary celebrations, which were also due to take place the following year, as the SAT was founded in the same year as the publication of Ulysses, 1922.
As I began to look through the founding documents of the SAT (held at Brunel University London) the importance of J Thomas Looney’s book Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford in the formation of the SAT became very clear; the book having been published in 1920 and having made a significant impact on the subject of Shakespeare and authorship attribution.
As I read through Ulysses (for the third time) and noticed (for the first time) how interested Joyce clearly was in the Shakespeare authorship issue, I began to wonder if Looney’s book had had a similar impact upon him. Monday 16th June 2025 is Bloomsday in Ireland, where celebrations of the same date in 1904, the day on which all the action of Ulysses takes place. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, one of the novel's central protagonists. Now, with Bloomsday upon us, it would seem a good time to set down my thoughts on Joyce, Shakespeare, and the authorship question.
The centrality and importance of Shakespeare to Joyce is clear; in Ulysses, Joyce refers to 33 of the 35 plays and Shakespeare is a constant presence, both in this novel and in the later Finnegans Wake. This should come as no surprise, not least because Joyce studied Shakespeare very closely throughout his adult life. In 1912, he gave a series of twelve lectures (now lost) on Hamlet while living in Trieste, Italy and it is clear from his surviving notes that he spent a lot of time both reading and analysing the plays as well as much of the critical and biographical literature on Shakespeare available to him at the time.