Joyce and Heraldry

30:2, Reviews weakness. For Yeats, however, the Noh was a permanent find, providing him with just the right form of antinomy to his Westem cast of thought and stimulating him to write some of his finest verse plays. Two items deserve mention: T. Sturge Moore's hitherto unpublished essay on Yeats, "Do We or Do We Not Know It?" (a curious title) and A. D. Hope's witty and spirited "Coming to Grips with Proteus." The first reveals Moore at his prickliest: impatient with Yeats, pedantic and appreciative in tum. It adds little to our knowledge of the relationship, but it tells us more about Moore's mind—not very flattering, I think. Hope's piece, which includes several poems (one amusing diatribe directed at Robert Graves) is a wonderful example of an acknowledged "anxiety of influence." With this essay Hope believes he has exorcised such anxiety. Perhaps not, but it makes fun reading. All in all, Yeats Annual No. 4 is a serviceable volume. Not everything in it is centrally related to Yeats, but that will become increasingly the case. Although a certain extension of interest is valuable, as it is inevitable, all Annuals must guard against overextending or trivializing. Neither Yeats Annual is in danger of succumbing to any such extremes. Edward Engelberg Brandeis University JOYCE AND HERALDRY Michael J. O'Shea. James Joyce and Heraldry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Cloth $39.50 Paper $12.95 Let me begin by admitting that this book tells me more about heraldry than I care to know. In fairness, however, James Joyce himself—in his obsessively encyclopedic and arcane way—cared to know about almost everything, so that Joyce scholarship has spawned studies about Joyce and everything from alchemy to Aquinas to children's lore to Ibsen and, now, to heraldry. Many of these studies are useful contributions toward understanding Joyce's multitudinous mind; Michael J. O'Shea's handsome, well-organized, and helpfully illustrated volume may now be added to such studies in our bookshelves and libraries. This study includes an extensive Bibliography, a useful Appendix of heraldic/Joycean terms and references, Notes, and Index. The main text resides in six chapters of exposition. Chapter One is a primer on heraldry, in which we learn to identify and distinguish such things as coat of arms, crest, shields, fields, ordinaries, subordinarles, and heraldic symbols such as bend sinister. In attempting to spice up such arcana, O'Shea's humor is at times obtrusively self-conscious and at others delightfully droll (as when, in a 251 30:2, Reviews discussion of the ways shields are partitioned, he notes on page 17 that "A circular field partitioned gyronny is a pizza"). Discussing the use of "blazon" (the formulaic language of heraldry) and of central heraldic devices such as "canting arms" (arms that refer by a visual pun— a "rebus"—to one's name, such as the spear in the Shakespeare coat of arms), as well as of the elaborate visual codes in heraldic patterns and symbols, O'Shea illustrates that "heraldry as a semiotic code has graphic intricacy (and an elaborate jargon to match) sufficient to make a semiotician dizzy" (7). Chapter Two follows with a short history of the use of heraldry in English literature, focusing on Dante, Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Steme, Thackeray, and Hardy. Chapter Three, the section which seems least focused and cohesive, discusses, through Stephen Dedalus's references in Ulysses to Shakespeare's arms, how Joyce's use of heraldry is related to its use by Shakespeare and by Steme. Chapters Four through Six are the ones of real interest to the student of Joyce. O'Shea has shown that in Joyce's work heraldic bearings have an active symbolic significance within the text, and that "like Steme and Shakespeare, Joyce was interested in canting devices" (52)—such as the "House of Keys" in Ulysses, the earwig as a rebus for Earwicker, or the emblematic use of birds in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter Four, on heraldry in Ulysses, O'Shea argues that "Such an equation of the visual and verbal [as occurs in blazon] is...