Stephen starts his Shakespeare talk by painting a scene. "It
is this hour of a day in mid June," he says, but the year is
1601, and the scene is not Dublin but the south bank of the
River Thames. Several concrete features of the scene around
the Globe theater follow, after which Stephen thinks, "Local
colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices." He has
lifted this expression, and some of his details, from Georg
Brandes' William Shakespeare: A Critical Study. The
phrase is useful for thinking not only about Shakespeare, but
also about Joyce.
The 1898 English edition of Brandes' book, translated from
the Danish by three collaborators and revised by the author,
uses the phrase "local colour" several times to suggest that
literary art becomes more believable when it represents a
particular place and culture in concrete detail. In Book I,
chapter 16 Brandes speculates that Shakespeare may have
visited northern Italy at some point, because some of the
plays he sets there contain "definite local colour, with
such an abundance of details pointing to actual vision
that it is hard to account for them otherwise." In Book I,
chapter 12 he finds evidence of this kind of scene-painting in
Hamlet: "when, in the first and fifth acts, he makes
trumpet-blasts and the firing of cannon accompany the healths
which are drunk, he must have known that this was a specially
Danish custom, and have tried to give his play local
colour by introducing it."
Stephen's Southwark scene begins as follows: "The flag is
up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson
growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who
sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings."
Brandes is the most likely source of these details. Book I,
chapter 15 mentions the flag and the bear-pit: "The days of
performance at these theatres were announced by the hoisting
of a flag on the roof. The time of beginning was three
o'clock punctually....Close to the Globe Theatre lay the
Bear Garden, the rank smell from which greeted the
nostrils, even before it came in sight. The famous bear
Sackerson, who is mentioned in The Merry Wives of
Windsor, now and then broke his chain and put female
theatre-goers shrieking to flight." Sir Francis Drake's naval
expeditions are mentioned in Book I, chapter 22 and Book II,
chapter 2. The groundlings are mentioned at various points. In
Book III, chapter 11 they have sausages: "They were called
'nutcrackers' from their habit of everlastingly cracking nuts
and throwing the shells upon the stage. Tossing about
apple-peel, corks, sausage ends, and small pebbles was
another of their amusements."
(Historical note: all the London-area theaters in
Shakespeare's time flew flags to announce that there would be
a show in the afternoon. It was the best way of getting the
word out quickly and drew crowds to the site quite
effectively. Brandes' observation that the plays started
promptly at 3:00 PM is also worth noting, as Stephen has said
that "It is this hour of a day in mid June." Scylla and
Charybdis takes place between 2:00 and 3:00 PM, just the
time when people would have been making their way to the
theater, as Shakespeare is at the beginning of Stephen's
talk.)
Stephen, then, has taken Brandes' idea of Shakespearean
scene-painting and used some of Brandes' own details to color
his fanciful account of Shakespeare's life and work. The
results may not be very impressive as literary criticism, but
the phrase he borrows from William Shakespeare: A Critical
Study has a broader application. In Scylla and
Charybdis Stephen is not only exploring the actions and
psychological forces that produced one of humanity's greatest
bodies of literary work. He is also trying out the literary
skills that may enable him to become such a writer, just as he
did at the end of Aeolus. These two chapters represent
his self-conscious determination to become the kind of writer
who might produce Ulysses.
And what is Ulysses but a towering example of "local
colour"? Joyce did not so much create the novel as compose it
from thousands of already existing bits of life. (For a time
in Joyce criticism, it was fashionable to speak of the author
as "the Arranger.") The book teems with local streets,
buildings, people, speech idioms, religious beliefs, history,
newspaper stories, poems, songs, sights, sounds, smells, food,
drink, topography, weather. To become the magpie of genius
that he was destined to be, Joyce had to observe his Dublin
with the kind of eye for detail that Brandes detects in
Shakespeare. Stephen is apprenticing himself to that craft.
