The smells wafting out of Rourke's bakery elicit three
clichés, and a stuffy gloss on the first one, from the
narrator of Eumaeus: "our daily bread, of all
commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable.
Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread." Then, drawing even
closer to the consciousness of Bloom––perhaps even entering
his interior monologue for a moment––the narrative spins out a
jaunty little ditty reminisicent of nursery rhymes and
advertising jingles: "O tell me where is fancy bread, at
Rourke's the baker's it is said." Not the least of this
sentence's delights is a terrible pun produced by misreading
Shakespeare.
In act 3 scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice Bassanio
stands before three caskets of gold, silver, and lead trying
to decide which one will win him the hand of Portia. A song is
sung while he deliberates:
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
A chorus replies,
It is engend'red in the eyes,
With gazing fed, and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies. (63-69)
Fancy, a variant of "fantasy," is an old name for love.
(People still say "Does she strike your fancy?" or "Do you
fancy her?") The song offers Bassanio a hint about how to
obtain his love, since "bred," "head," "nourishèd," and "fed"
all rhyme with "lead," the casket in which Portia's portrait
is housed. But instead of wondering where fantasy is bred
Bloom thinks of stores that sell "fancy bread." One can
imagine Joyce doubling over in laughter
at this pun that would only occur to a man like Bloom.
No doubt he savored the way it turns a noun into an adjective,
and a participle into a noun.
Bloom does like to go see the occasional Shakespeare play,
but he might easily have heard the song in a concert hall,
music hall, or parlor. Most of Shakespeare's songs have been
set to music countless times for purposes of dramatic
performance, and many of the better versions have been
published as stand-alone songs for non-dramatic performance.
Zack Bowen notes that "Tell me where is fancy bred" was set to
music by Thomas Arne (oddly, he calls him T. Augustine Arne),
the eminent theater composer who gave the world Rule,
Britannia. This beautiful setting, first
performed in 1741, is very well known, but there are many
others. A webpage on The LiederNet Archive (www.lieder.net)
lists 29 different settings of the poem in the 19th and 20th
centuries, many of them by famous composers, and the list is
not complete.
Someone who had only heard the song performed as a set piece,
rather than seeing its relevance to Bassanio's pursuit of a
wife, might well lose track of the words after a few bars and
remember it only by its title. For Bloom, those poorly
understood words suggest a great ad for a bakery.
