Episode 9 — Scylla and Charybdis

Two p.m., the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. Stephen Dedalus, broke and tired and slightly drunk on the wine he had at lunch, is holding forth to a small audience of Dublin literary men on a theory of Shakespeare. The audience: the librarian Lyster, the poet AE (George Russell, mystic and editor), the journalist John Eglinton, the Quaker assistant librarian Best. Stephen's argument is dazzling and forensic. Hamlet, he says, is autobiography. Shakespeare is not the prince but the ghost of King Hamlet, the betrayed older man. Hamnet, Shakespeare's real eleven-year-old son who died, is the prince. Anne Hathaway is Gertrude — unfaithful, Stephen claims, with Shakespeare's brothers Edmund and Richard.

He spins the argument out for an hour. He weaves in Aristotle, Plato, the will, the second-best bed, the dates of the plays. He is both brilliant and showing off; the men listen with admiration mixed with irritation; Eglinton resists. Buck Mulligan bursts in halfway through and undercuts Stephen with bawdy mockery — coining the phrase "Everyman his own wife" for a play on Shakespearean fatherhood, drawing laughs at Stephen's expense.

Bloom passes briefly through the library to check the back issues of the Kilkenny People for the Keyes ad. He is there for less than a minute; nobody really notices him. They are in the same building for the second time today and do not yet meet. At the end Eglinton asks Stephen whether he believes his own theory. Stephen smiles. "No," he says. The chapter's correspondence is to the strait between Scylla (Aristotle, dogma) and Charybdis (Plato, mysticism); Stephen is steering between them. He walks out with Mulligan into the afternoon. Bloom passes them on the steps. Mulligan notices. Stephen does not.