Shakespeare was a Woman [by Leopold Bloom]

William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Who did? While it is fruitless to speculate or seek an individual who is but a name on a weathered gravestone, I doubt she was Emilia Bassano. Consider the envy of Iago, the female spite that takes over his characater. Or contrarily think of the male initiaive animating  Lady Macbeth:  “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.”

Moreover, we know that the difference between the sexes is obscured by the very fact that all the players, including the women, are men in the plays that were played when they played them back then.

The play itself was the thing that, in an age devoid of photocopy machines, had only one copy and no one handling it thought to treat it as an archival treasure. Who knew what when, or who among the players wrote in the margin, are open questions, and if the women are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their intelligence as cross-dressing lawyers in stilleto heels, who get to punish the unfortunate but eloquent merchant and exonerate the poor improvident  Venetian loser, that would be dismissed in court as cirumstantial evidence, for justice is blond and the real killer is unmasked only in the fifth act.

Nevertheless, the apotheosis is Cleopatra, top cat of an empire, or failing that, with her name changed to Gertrude, marrying  the king or the brother who succeeds him on the throne, becuase love equals death or the sublime, and murder is just a name for overcoming rthe influence of anxiety.

Shakespeare was a woman. For surely the sublime. And the absence that precedes it, the belatedness of all action, the play having been composed before the chief actor could have come up with a prologue. Well, just imagine Marlon Brando as Hamlet in a production with songs written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Shakespeare is God, I have long maintained, in the face of resistance from multiculturalists, nudists, feminists, poltically correct imbeciles, undersexed leftwing lunatics, bullshit artists, theorists, Dead-heads, pinball wizards, Marxists, neoconservatives and other non-traditionalists who resent the rich and sublimate their guilt into an identification with people who do what they cannot, such as kitchen patrol in boot camp, and working as a plumber.

You see, we only see what we see as Blake would say not with but through the eyes that reveal the arras behind which the pompous Prufrock is vanquished by the young hero. And the ayes have it. The phenomenon of what I have elsewhere called kenosis, an emptying of the vessel like that of a candidate for higher office. But only a woman could have done it -- inviisibly, of  course, because it had to be a secret. Only a woman could have channeled the fire and air of masculinity into the earth and water of pre-Socratic femininity.

Who was she? We may wonder. For the sublime, which can kill us but disdains to do so, exists as a thrill, which you can feel in Milton and Goethe. But Shakespeare, who hits you with it hard in King Lear, also gave birth to the human, as only a woman can.

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[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

Leopold Bloom is a Woman

Ineluctable modality of the feminine. Bloom's odyssey through Dublin's labyrinthine streets, a Penelope in pantaloons, yesing her way through the masculine facade. For is not Bloom's journey one of the interior, the domestic, the cyclic?

Consider: the kidney. Bloom's fascination with offal, with the inner workings of the body. Is this not the realm of the midwife, the nurse, the mother? Gerty MacDowell's allure on Sandymount strand—a mirror, not a desire. Bloom sees herself reflected, distorted, in the young girl's form.

And what of Molly? The wife, the other, the bed-bound Penelope. But is she not Bloom's alter ego, the unrestrained id to Bloom's cautious ego? Two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the feminine divine.

Joyce's stream of consciousness—is it not the flow of menstrual blood, the rush of maternal milk? Bloom's thoughts meander, circle back, embrace the cyclical nature of the feminine. Linear plot? Pah! This is the story of woman, of life, of the endless return.
"Bloomsday"—a flowering, a blossoming. The passive-yet-powerful transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly. Bloom moves through Dublin, observing, absorbing, nurturing. The acts of a mother, not a father.

Ulysses, they say. But wherefore Ulysses when we have before us a Circe, a Calypso, a Nausicaa? Bloom: enchantress, nymph, princess. Woman.

In the nighttown episode, does not Bloom transform, reveal her true self? Bella/Bello Cohen sees through the masquerade, forces Bloom to confront her womanhood. And in that moment of surrender, of acceptance, we see Bloom as she truly is.

Yes, Bloom is a woman. Yes, Joyce knew. Yes, the evidence is there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

[Dave Read]

Dear Dave, Since being treated so roughly by Harold Bloom, why would you ever admit another Bloom into your secret garden of greatness?

p.s. R.I.P. Lewis Turco

[Molly Arden]

Bloom Knew: Joyce was a woman, too.