Daily Inspiration Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line is a pub-room theory of literature delivered with a wink and a shiv. He sets up Shakespeare as the totalizing myth - the writer who supposedly mapped the whole human condition - then immediately punctures the piety by recruiting Joyce as the unruly completion. The joke isn’t just that Joyce “put in” what Shakespeare “left out.” It’s that Behan is slyly arguing for a different canon: one that includes the obscene, the petty, the bodily, the local, the politically bruised - everything respectable culture tends to edit out when it embalms Shakespeare into “timeless genius.”

The phrase “with a judge from meself” does a lot of work. It’s comic self-deprecation, but also a refusal of academic gatekeeping. Behan, an Irish dramatist with prison time and a taste for provocation, is claiming the right to adjudicate greatness from the street level. It’s a nationalist jab, too: Joyce as Ireland’s answer to England’s Shakespeare, not by imitating the Bard but by breaking the frame - turning consciousness, language, and the city into the main stage.

There’s also an implicit defense of modernism’s mess. Joyce didn’t “add” politely; he overloaded the system. Behan treats that excess as necessary: if Shakespeare is the grand repertoire of motives, Joyce supplies the noise, the sex, the trivia, the private mind. The subtext is clear: culture isn’t complete until it admits what it’s been trained to pretend isn’t there.