\u201cAn Old Thing \u2018Twas, But It Express\u2019d Her Fortune\u201d. Joyce\u2019s \u201cEveline\u201d And Shakespeare\u2019s Othello

This article takes on Joyce\u2019s \u201ctechnique\u201d with regard to Shakespeare and points to the difficulties faced by the critic trying to keep pace with the voracity of Joyce\u2019s ingestion of Shakespeare\u2019s life and work in his own novels. Seeking to draw the sting out of Harold Bloom\u2019s always antagonistic, antithetical approach to literary influence, and drawing on Eliot\u2019s \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent\u201d, 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 \u201ca situation in which any literary output, in becoming part of a structure, alters the whole structure\u201d. I do so by narrowing the focus and looking at the textual relationship between Joyce\u2019s \u201cEveline\u201d and Shakespeare\u2019s Othello. Read together, each work illuminates the other and latent common elements are shown to emerge with Frank in Joyce\u2019s short story becoming \u201ca turn-of-the-century working class Dublin Othello\u201d