Shakespeare’s presence in Joyce’s work is tentacular, extending throughout his career on many different levels: cultural, structural, lexical, and psychological; yet a surprisingly long time has passed since the last monograph on this literary nexus was published. Joyce/Shakespeare brings together fresh work by internationally recognized Joyce scholars on these two icons, reinvigorating our understanding of Joyce at play with the Bard. One way these essays revitalize the discussion is by moving well beyond the traditional Joycean challenge of “thinking Shakespearean” by “thinking Hamletian,” redefining the field to include works like Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and The Tempest. This collection also transforms our understanding of how Hamlet works in and for Joyce. In compelling essays that introduce new variables to the equation such as Trieste, Goethe, and Futurism, Hamlet’s role in Joyce gains fresh mobility. The Danish prince’s shadow, we learn, can still cast itself in unpredictable shapes, making Joyce/Shakespeare as rewarding in its analyses of this well-studied pairing as it is when it considers fresh Shakespearean matches.

After God, Shakespeare created most, James Joyce wrote in Ulysses. The importance of Shakespeare in Ulysses has been often discussed and documented; that this royal bard is as central and omnipresent in Finnegans Wake has been roundly agreed upon by Joyce scholars, yet no printed volume has exhaustively investigated the topic. This study arrives, therefore, as a welcome and timely look into the assertion, as on critic put it, that "Finnegans Wake is about Shakespeare." "Throughout his life," Dr. Cheng writes, "Joyce was in the habit of comparing himself to England's national poet." In the Wake, Shakespeare--his life, his plays and his characters--forms a "dense and extensive matrix of allusion." Part I of this book provides a critical and interpretative view of how Shakespearean influences and allusions illuminate the themes and meanings of the Wake; the chapters are arranged to follow general patterns of allusion and motif. Part II comprises explications of a thousand Shakespearean allusions in Finnegans Wake, recorded by page and line of the novel. Finally, Part III is a set of appendixes which list the Shakespearean allusions by play, act, scene, and line for easy reference.

Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters. This collection reveals Beach's charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in The Dial; her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Odéon the heart of modernist Paris.

James Joyce's aesthetic theories, as explicated by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, have generally been assumed to be grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas. Indeed, Stephen mentions those thinkers especially in Portrait, at the same time as he rejects Romantic notions. This book investigates the extent to which Joyce's theories as well as his practice, beginning with his critical writings and Stephen Hero, are indebted to early German Romanticism. The allusions, affinities, and analogies, as well as differential relationships between the Joycean oeuvre and texts of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiegel, and Novalis are often palpable, sometimes tentative, but clearly present in most of his works, including Finnegans Wake.

Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and visiting writers of the Lost Generation, a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, D. H. Lawrence, and others already famous or soon to be. In his introduction to this new edition, James Laughlin recalls his friendship with Sylvia Beach. Like her bookstore, his publishing house, New Directions, is considered a cultural touchstone.

Shakespeare and Ireland examines the complex relationship between the most celebrated icon of the British establishment and Irish literary and cultural traditions. Addressing Shakespearean representations of Ireland as well as Irish writers' responses to the dramatist, it ranges widely across theatrical performances, pedagogical practices, editorial undertakings and political developments. The writings of Joyce, Heaney and Yeats are considered, in addition to recent nationalist discourses. In so doing, the collection establishes the multiple 'Shakespeares' and competing 'Irelands' that inform the Irish imagination.