--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, his journey of life
ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is
ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet PERE and Hamlet FILS. A king and a
prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered
and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner,
sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be
divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero,
the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie,
the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers
go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his
world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: IF SOCRATES LEAVE HIS HOUSE
TODAY HE WILL FIND THE SAGE SEATED ON HIS DOORSTEP. IF JUDAS GO FORTH
TONIGHT IT IS TO JUDAS HIS STEPS WILL TEND. Every life is many days,
day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants,
old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting
ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it
badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of
things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call DIO BOIA,
hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher,
and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven,
foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an
androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
|