-- Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeen woman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay lakin, Mistress Fitten, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, Lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours-la-Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Minette? Tu veux?
-- The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford's mother with her cup of canary for every cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
-- Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
-- And Harry of six wives' daughter and other lady friends from neighbour seats, as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind the diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter Lane of Gerard, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
-- Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
-- Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
-- As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
-- It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet Ann I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
-- The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said, frowning. If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy, tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poordear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was greatOur judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave outThe presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,For his sister, for his old cronies in StratfordAnd in London. And therefore when he was urged,As I believe, to name her
He left her his Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
-- Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
-- He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
-- It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.
-- Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled on.
-- Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling. Let me think.
-- Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
-- Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
-- He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
-- What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...