James Joyce his debt and deference to Shakespeare

Paola Pugliatti asserts that Jans Joyce too,  by scavenging words, ideas, structures, and themes, from Shakespeare, does not in any way deplete him but instead renews and re- plenishes his works, finding forms of engagement that renew Shakespeare’s relevance for readers in Joyce’s times and in our own. This is a token of Joyce’s recognition of the sheer greatness of the Bard if not of his deference towards him

The relationship between Shakespeare and Joyce is vast and unending. And it is not as one-sided as might be imagined. Shakespeare is far more than a mere source for Joyce but also it would seem a sort of collaborator,

 At first it might seem that the two writers could hardly have been more different, belonging, as they did, to different times, spaces, nationalities. 

Shakespeare,  a poet and playwright working in a nation in formation, living in what is often referred to as the Golden Age of the English Renaissance, during which the country was beginning to make its weight felt across the globe; the latter, James Joyce minor poet, an underwhelming playwright, and a master of the novel, a genre not yet in existence in Shakespeare’s time, struggling to be published in a country moving uncertainly towards independence but enjoying, on its own terms, a  powerful and empowering cultural revival or renaissance. Both wrote at crucial moments in the formation of their respective nations, albeit  

 at a distance of three hundred years. Shakespeare was writing when the English language as we know it was consolidating and his works  played a key role in that process; Joyce wrote from outside the main-stream, described “writing in the English language” as “the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives” 

Joyce  did much to both destabilize and enrich both the English language and the traditions of literature in English, firstly from Ireland and subsequently from his various perches in continental Europe. If Shakespeare gave indelible shape and resounding voice to the centre that is England, Joyce, in putting Ireland on the page and hence on the European and, ultimately, on the global literary map, symbolically gave equally vibrant voice to the rest of the world that had come under English influence or English colonization and whose native voice had, as a result, often been largely reduced to silence.

If only the US Democrats could interact with those with different views in such a respecful manner - but this is highly unlikely as the Democrats claim to be the  'educated' ones and the opposition the 'ignorant'.