Finnegans Wake instance of literary work
Allusions to other works
Finnegans Wake incorporates a high number of intertextual allusions and references to other texts; Parrinder refers to it as "a remarkable example of intertextuality" containing a "wealth of literary reference." Among the most prominent are the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" from which the book takes its name, Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico's La Scienza Nuova, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the plays of Shakespeare, and religious texts such as the Bible and Qur'an.: 166–167  These allusions, rather than directly quoting or referencing a source, normally enter the text in a contorted fashion, often through humorous plays on words. For example, Hamlet Prince of Denmark becomes "Camelot, prince of dinmurk" and the Epistle to the Hebrews becomes a "farced epistol to the hibruws".The book begins with one such allusion to Vico's New Science: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs".
"Commodius vicus" refers to Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his work La Scienza Nuova (The New Science). Vico argued that the world was coming to the end of the last of three ages, these being the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans. These ideas recur throughout Finnegans Wake, informing the book's four-part structure. Vico's name appears a number of times throughout the Wake, indicating the work's debt to his theories, such as "The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin". That a reference to Vico's cyclical theory of history is to be found in the opening sentence which is a continuation of the book's closing sentence – thus making the work cyclical in itself – creates the relevance of such an allusion.
One of the sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations. Bishop asserts that "it is impossible to overlook the vital presence of the Book of the Dead in Finnegans Wake, which refers to ancient Egypt in countless tags and allusions." Joyce uses the Book of the Dead in Finnegans Wake, "because it is a collection of the incantations for the resurrection and rebirth of the dead on the burial". At one of their final meetings, Joyce suggested to Frank Budgen that he write an article about Finnegans Wake, entitling it "James Joyce's Book of the Dead". Budgen followed Joyce's advice with his paper "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day", highlighting many of the allusions to Egyptian mythology in the book.The Tristan and Iseult legend – a tragic love triangle between the Irish princess Iseult, the Cornish knight Tristan and his uncle King Mark – is also oft alluded to in the work, particularly in II.4. Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that "various themes and motifs throughout Finnegans Wake, such as the cuckoldry of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a King Mark figure) and Shaun's attempts at seducing Issy, relate directly to Tristan and Isolde [...] other motifs relating to Earwicker's loss of authority, such as the forces usurping his parental status, are also based on Tristan and Isolde."The book also alludes heavily to Irish mythology, with HCE sometimes corresponding to Fionn mac Cumhaill, Issy and ALP to Gráinne, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). Not only Irish mythology, but also notable real-life Irish figures are alluded to throughout the text. For example, HCE is often identified with Charles Stewart Parnell, and Shem's attack on his father in this way mirrors the attempt of forger Richard Pigott to incriminate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882 by means of false letters. But, given the flexibility of allusion in Finnegans Wake HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.
Finnegans Wake also makes a great number of allusions to religious texts. When HCE is first introduced in chapter I.2, the narrator relates how "in the beginning" he was a "grand old gardener", thus equating him with Adam in the Garden of Eden. Spinks further highlights this allusion by highlighting that like HCE's unspecified crime in the park, Adam also "commits a crime in a garden".: 130
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