The Father, Son and the Ghost

JOURNEY #22: TO THE THEATRE

"Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit ... 

To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live forever."

                -- James Joyce's Ulysses

Stephen's theory about Shakespeare's grief 

I’ve always liked a good ghost story. Not the haunted-house kind, but the emotional one you find in the movie Ghost, with Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg. So when I went to see the movie Hamnet, I thought I’d be spending the night focusing on the life of Shakespeare. But, to my surprise, I found myself thinking about James Joyce, who first proposed a famous and radical theory about Shakespeare.

In Ulysses, Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus argues that Shakespeare channeled his grief for his dead son, Hamnet, through the Ghost in Hamlet.

Stephen presents his theory to a group of scholars in the Irish National Library in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter, building up the argument brick by brick, like a courtroom lawyer making his closing arguments.

He points out that when Hamlet first premiered at the Globe Theatre in London, Shakespeare was the actor who portrayed the role of Ghost on stage.

He explains how the names Hamlet and Hamnet are almost interchangeable, and he proposes that Shakespeare could only have chosen the name of the play to keep the memory of his son alive forever.

He shares how Shakespeare, the grief stricken father, had to dress as a ghost for every performance of Hamlet and cry out the name of his dead son night after night:

"Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit ...”

Yet the play switches the sides: in real life, Shakespeare  calls out to his dead son  — while in Hamlet, the dead father speaks to the living son from the other side. 

Wow, talk about emotional resonance! I get chills just thinking about it.

** If you don’t know the story of Hamnet … Spoiler Alert **

Maggie O'Farrell, who wrote the story Hamnet, takes Stephen’s theory and breathes life into it.  

The movie arrives at this same emotional truth without ever naming it. It doesn’t mention Joyce. It doesn’t pursue theory. It simply shows a family marked by loss, and then lets Hamlet form in the background as the natural artistic shape that sorrow naturally takes. The shift into the play makes emotional sense when you hear the grieving father speaking to his son from beyond. 

And because the Joyce connection felt so strong, I checked. After the film, I Googled to see whether anyone else had linked O'Farrell's story to Joyce or Stephen's library-scene theory. Nothing. Not a single reference. Which made the resonance feel even clearer: two entirely different works tracing the same outline. 

So I wrote this post in the hope that someone searching for the link between Ulysses and Hamnet might find a supportive article.

All in all, Hamnet is a remarkable work. But the insight that Shakespeare’s grief speaks through the Ghost — that the emotional centre of Hamlet lies with the father, not the son — was Joyce's first. He saw it with clarity long before the film, and he deserves to be mentioned. 

A Note for Maggie O'Farrell

I wouldn't be surprised if Hamnet wins a few Oscars; it's that strong a film. If Maggie O'Farrell ever comes across this post, I'd be curious to know whether Joyce's theory was anywhere in her thinking.  She was born in Northern Ireland, studied English literature and it's hard to imagine Ulysses wasn't on her radar screen. If she had Stephen Dedalus in mind, it would be interesting to hear. And if she arrived at the idea completely independently, the coincidence would be even more striking.  

I doubt that Maggie O'Farrell will ever read this blog, but there's always a ghost of a chance.  And if she does happen to find it, a comment below would be welcome.

James Joyce, AI & Behavioural Economics

JOURNEY #21: TO THE FIRST CHATGPT AND THE FIRST NUDGE

"Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

― James Joyce's Ulysses

It's been a dozen years since my last post here.  In that time I steered my work toward a field that had been calling to me for a long while. I'm now a behavioural economist -- a role that Joyce might never have imagined, though I suspect he would recognized the work instantly.  

Re-reading Ulysses, I'm struck by how much of our modern world Joyce foresaw.  In Ithaca, the penultimate episode, the style becomes a pure exchange of questions and answers: precise, procedural, stripped of sentiment.  

"What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?" 

"Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford Place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy Square, west: then, south, circularly, by Temple street, Gardiner's place, Eccles street."

Prompt. Response. Logic without emotion. Joyce anticipated the rhythm of AI long before it existed. The "AI" responds with an over-detailed list of routes, commas standing in for coordinates. Exact, mechanical and free of judgement.  The answer could have been generated by Google Maps. 

Joyce captured the cadence of machine intelligence describing 1904 Dublin with the precision of 2025 AI.

And then there's the excerpt from Ithaca that seems to anticipate behavioural economics: 

"What system had proved more effective?" 

"Indirect suggestion implicating self-interest."   

"Example?" 

"She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat."

This isn’t a literary flourish.  It’s the first recorded nudge.  Long before behavioural economics gave it a name, Joyce captured the principle itself: behaviour changes more easily when desire is redirected than when it’s resisted.  Bloom doesn’t argue or coerce; he reshapes context so that someone else’s choice becomes her own idea.

That small exchange contains everything the modern discipline would later exemplify: choice architecture, incentive alignment, gentle influence.  It’s as if Joyce foresaw the behavioural map of the next century and tucked it into a domestic metaphor.

So my journey with James Joyce continues—between data and desire, between the first chatbot and the first nudge.  Joyce got there first.  The rest of us are still catching up.