Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage **

In James Joyce's vision, an artist is the god and creator of his own worlds—“After God, Shakespeare has created most” (U 212), as John Eglinton asserts (quoting Dumas père)—while God is but a very major artist, “the playwright who wrote the folio of this world” (“and wrote it badly,” Stephen Dedalus adds; U 213). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce confirms and restates this notion, referring to Shakespeare as “Great Shapesphere” (295.4). To Joyce, artist and god were equivalent—the quintessential artist was the greatest bard of all, the lord of language at his Globe. ¹