How Shakespeare Was Used: Echoes of John Henry Newman's Idea of Literature in Joyce

Two years before being appointed Rector at the Catholic Uni-versity in Dublin (1854), Cardinal John Henry Newman delivered a series of lectures on education, later to be collected in The Idea of a University (1852-1873), among which one is specifically concerned with literature. Some ideas put forth by Newman in that lecture re-sound in a very distinct way in Joyce’s Drama and Life and in the“Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. In this paper I will pro-ceed to outline such textual “echoes” after a short exposition of New-man’s themes and motifs. Newman’s lecture is one of the many sources employed by Joyce to construct his theory on Hamlet, and a main inspiration for his experimentation with sound in Finnegans Wake. In fact, Joyce drew directly from Newman his famous state-ment about Finnegans Wake, that the book was was to be intended “more for the ear than the eye” (Pindar 2004: 106), a statement curi-ously echoing Newman (1912: 7): “[literature] addresses itself, in its primary idea, to the ear, not to the eye”.