Of all Joyce’s predecessors, Shakespeare was the greatest and most complicated, serving as an artistic father, guide and literary ideal. In his masterpiece Ulysses, Joyce quotes from and refers to Shakespeare, but also paraphrases and emulates him, creating a vibrant relationship between one age of creativity and another.

This unique exhibition places pages from Joyce’s manuscript side-by-side with the plays and poems that inspired it. Setting the stage with visuals of Shakespearean scenes like those from Hamlet, where the ghost of King Hamlet silently directs the action of the play, it invites visitors to discover Shakespeare’s presence in the text of Ulysses , and reveals how the living Joyce was haunted by Elizabethan literary history.