future usurper boasts: Shakespeare also names one of the main characters of his play The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus. Inconsistent with his affections, his deceptions have unraveled at the finale of the play as he is brought face-to-face with his friend Valentine and original love Julia: In 1807, William Wordsworth finished his sonnet on the theme of a modernity deadened to Nature, which opens "The world is too much with us", with a sense of nostalgia for the lost richness of a world numinous with deities: James Joyce's Ulysses uses Protean transformations of matter in time for self-exploration. "Proteus" is the title provided for the third chapter in the Linati schema for Ulysses. The protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano is an engineer named Paul Proteus. Proteus is the name of the submarine in the original story by Otto Klement and Jay Lewis Bixby, which became the basis for the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage and Isaac Asimov's novelization. John Barth's novelette "Menelaiad" in Lost in the Funhouse is built around a battle between Proteus and Menelaus. It is told as a multiply-nested frame tale, and the narrators bleed into each other as the battle undermines their identities. "Proteus: The City" is the title of Book Four of Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel Of Time and the River. In cinema The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers, depicts the event of two lighthouse keepers stranded on an island while progressively going mad. One of the characters is modeled on Proteus, a "prophecy-telling ocean god who serves Poseidon", and is even shown with tentacles and sea creatures stuck to his body. Biology The protist Amoeba proteus is named for the Greek god, as it has no fixed shape and constantly changes form. Other usage In medicine, Proteus syndrome refers to a rare genetic condition characterized by symmetric overgrowth of the bones, skin, and other tissues. Organs and tissues affected by the disease grow out of proportion to the rest of the body. This condition is associated with mutations of the PTEN gene. Proteus also refers to a genus of Gram-negative Proteobacteria, some of which are opportunistic human pathogens known to cause urinary tract infections, most notably. Proteus mirabilis is one of these and is most referenced in its tendency to produce "stag-horn" calculi composed of struvite (magnesium ammonium phosphate) that fill the human renal pelvis. In July 2019 the British professional