ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way in which Jorge Luis Borges and Joyce blended an impressive corpus of Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, and contemporary readings of Shakespeare in order to foster their own versions or 'afterlives' of the Bard. Borges's predilection for 'Scylla' is well documented throughout his complex relationship with Joyce. One year after the publication of the anthology, he referred to the pleasurable activity of reading and re-reading his favorite episodes from Ulysses, particularly stressing his fondness for 'el dialogo sobre Shakespeare'. Joyce's and Borges's afterlives of Shakespeare are based on the central premise that their revisions of the Bard have been largely constructed by means of an impressive blending of Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, and contemporary interpretations. What Borges deploys as a modern Argentine rewriting of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Joyce transposes into the new historical and the geographical context of twentieth-century Dublin.
