_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._
Are you condemned to do this?
—They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth
his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
—What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
—Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the
father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another
poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not
the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and
felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own
grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token,
never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors
perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
—Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play’s the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
—As for his family, Stephen said, his mother’s name lives in the forest
of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
_Coriolanus._ His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
_King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter’s Tale_ are we know.
Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may
guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.
—The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.