Joyce makes sly comedy out of Deasy's longwinded letter,
which takes its dilatory, desultory time to get to the point.
The schoolmaster says that "I have put the matter into a
nutshell," but Stephen has to wade through a paragraph or two
of unrelated concerns before reading, "To come to the point at
issue." After such an opening, Deasy's pride in his epistolary
economy is amusing: "I don't mince words, do I?" The word
"nutshell" makes it tempting to hear an allusion to
Shakespeare's Polonius in this passage.
In Hamlet 2.2 the prince says, "O God, I could be
bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite
space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Earlier in the
same scene, Shakespeare makes comedy much like Joyce's out of
the desire of Claudius and Gertrude to learn what Polonius has
discovered, a desire frustrated by the old man's euphuistic
wordsmithing: ""to expostulate / What majesty should be, what
duty is, / Why day is day, night night, and time is time, /
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time . . . Your
noble son is mad: / Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
/ What is't but to be nothing else but mad? . . . That he's
mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity, / And pity 'tis tis true
. . ." (2.2.86-98). In the midst of all this verbiage,
Gertrude mutters, "More matter with less art." Polonius
objects, "Madam, I swear I use no art at all," and then
proceeds to use still more. In this context his often-quoted
line, "Brevity is the soul of wit" (2.2.90), has the same
effect as Deasy's "I don't mince words, do I?"
After his earlier quotation
of Shakespeare, it is tempting to view old Deasy here as
a reincarnation of Polonius, the old counselor who thinks he
has discovered the cause of Hamlet's madness but requires two
hundred words to "come to the point at issue."
