We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
In Ireland in June 1904 the Abbey players are in rehearsal. Buck Mulligan and Haines, with whom Stephen is sharing the Martello Tower, have been along to see them:
We went over to their playbox Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the public sweat of monks.
(U 215)Theatricality is in the air and Mulligan provides an egregious example of it. His first act, and the book's opening gesture, is to impersonate a priest celebrating Holy Communion. Mulligan likes to organize his friends and his preferred role is that of impresario or master of ceremonies rather than simple mummer. From a generation that has ‘grown out of Wilde and paradoxes’ (U 24) he craves recognition as the latest and most outrageous of the Irish wits. In mockery of the new national theatre (and especially, one suspects, of J. M. Synge) he has ‘conceived a play for the mummers’, a ‘national immorality in three orgasms’ (U 216). He is provocative and patronizing towards Stephen, whom he addresses as ‘Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all’ (U 11).
Stephen is like someone who has agreed to take part in a serious play and is disgusted to see it turn into farce. A year after being summoned back from Paris to his mother's deathbed, he has fallen in with Mulligan's proposal to set up house in the tower.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
