“An Old Thing ‘Twas, But It Express’d Her Fortune”. Joyce’s “Eveline” And Shakespeare’s Othello

This article takes on Joyce’s “technique” with regard to Shakespeare and points to the difficulties faced by the critic trying to keep pace with the voracity of Joyce’s ingestion of Shakespeare’s life and work in his own novels. Seeking to draw the sting out of Harold Bloom’s always antagonistic, antithetical approach to literary influence, and drawing on Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, I argue that it is not always helpful to come at Joyce-Shakespeare chronologically but to see them side by side rather than as before and after, to envisage “a situation in which any literary output, in becoming part of a structure, alters the whole structure”. I do so by narrowing the focus and looking at the textual relationship between Joyce’s “Eveline” and Shakespeare’s Othello. Read together, each work illuminates the other and latent common elements are shown to emerge with Frank in Joyce’s short story becoming “a turn-of-the-century working class Dublin Othello”.