Georg Brandes

Prominent Danish scholar, known as a pioneer of the "Modern Breakthrough" in Scandinavian literature at the end of the nineteenth century. JJ admired Brandes's Björnson och Ibsen (1882) and William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (new ed., 1911), a copy of which JJ had in his library and which inspired Stephen's theory of Hamlet in Ulysses. As Joyce writes in "Scylla and Charybdis", "Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing period". Dirk Van Hulle / William Brockman