"'Put but money in thy purse': Shakespeare, Dedalus and Money in Joyce's Ulysses

The essay aims at illustrating the role played by money in the de-construction and re-construction of the Shakespearean myth in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the Bard features as the very emblem of the artist, serving as a privileged, though inevitably frustrating, term of comparison for the young Irish poet, Stephen Dedalus. The complex intertextual web of quotations, allusions, and biographical information drawn both from Shakespeare’s works and from several Shakespearean biographies, is here explored to better pinpoint the dramatist’s relationship with money and business, which, Joyce overtly suggests, variously affects his artistic profile and production. Moreover, the bitter parody conveyed through Stephen’s “portrait of the Bard as an English businessman” also highlights crucial political issues connected with Ireland’s cultural and literary subordination to England at the beginning of the 20th century.