A Portrait of the Scholar

Does biography illuminate the work of an artist? James Joyce slyly poked at this age-old question in his 1922 novel Ulysses. In one of the book’s many meandering scenes, Stephen Dedalus and a group of literary associates banter at the National Library of Ireland. Stephen spins out his theory that various characters in Hamlet stand in for Shakespeare himself. Yet Joyce gives the episode’s best line to another character who regards interest in writers and their lives as an unseemly distraction: “Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.”