Stephen thinks of Hamlet yet again near the end of
Proteus, in reference to his personal attire: "My
cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon." He is quoting
from the song that Ophelia sings in her mad scene (Hamlet
4.5), lamenting a lover who has proved untrue.
Pilgrims to the shrine of Saint James in Compostela
traditionally carried a long staff, with a knob or hook near
the top, and wore a hat decorated
with a scallop shell. The hat was often called a "cockle
hat" because cockles are
close relatives of scallops, biologically and linguistically.
(The Latin word conchylium meant shellfish, mussel,
or oyster. The French word coquille means shell, and
can refer to scallops.) Beginning with some of the later
troubadours, love poetry often characterized the true lover as
a pilgrim, and this metaphor became a commonplace in
Elizabethan poetry. (Its best-known expression is probably the
shared sonnet in Romeo and Juliet 1.5.) Ophelia's
song draws on all this accumulated cultural capital in
distinguishing loyal from faithless love:
How should I your true-love know,
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.
The song goes on to grieve Polonius' death and to note that
no "true-love showers" bewailed his burial. It concludes with
the story of a young maid who has sex with her true love and
then is abandoned by him. The entire song clearly bears on
Hamlet, who killed Polonius and deserted Ophelia.
Stephen is well-attired to play the part of the Shakespearean
pilgrim. He has a hat ("my Hamlet hat"), a staff
(his ashplant), and what he
called "borrowed sandals" eleven paragraphs earlier (the
perforated "brogues" that he
has borrowed from Mulligan, hence "hismy").
But why should he characterize himself as a true, or false,
lover? He has been wishing, nine paragraphs earlier in the
text, for some woman to rescue him ("Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft
soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon,
now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet
here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me"), a wish that associates
him with Joyce's discovery of
true love. Since he so clearly associates Hamlet with artistic
inspiration, perhaps one can hear in this allusion some
recognition that he must be a lover before he can be a writer.
