Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 53
suggest how his extension of individual psychology to social theory
enacts the sublimation of parricidal anxieties clustered around and
within Julius Caesar.
I
Julius Caesar, written the year before Hamlet, rehearses some of the
attitudes familiar from the more notably Oedipal play. Killing the
king is structurally the equivalent of killing the father, and Caesar,
traditionally identified as Rome’s pater patriae (Miola 85), carries a
special historical importance to his role of victim. Brutus, the dramatic
hero cast as symbolic son, 2 understands his part in the assassination as
an act of personal betrayal, yet consents nevertheless. The first two acts
of the play turn largely upon Brutus’ decision to join the conspiracy.
At the moment of his death, Caesar binds Brutus’ crisis with his own
in a causative relation: “Et tu, Brute?—Then fall Caesar!” (3.1.77). 3 In
terms of the plot, the play’s final two acts concern the political aftermath
of the assassination, but considered in psychological terms they
illustrate “the return of the repressed” (Garber 62). Caesar’s influence
seems inescapable; as many critics have noted, his power increases
with his death. His “spirit walks abroad, and turns [the conspirators’]
swords / In [their] own proper entrails” (5.3. 95–96). Brutus
and Cassius kill themselves with his name upon their lips. Moreover,
Caesar is reincarnated in several forms: politically in the figure of
Octavius Caesar, whose pomp and peremptoriness recall the former
Caesar; and emotionally in Brutus, whose, evident resemblance to
Caesar grows as the play progresses.
Critics have frequently commented on similarities between the
two heroes, 4 not only in terms of their “ideals” (MacCallum 241) but
with regard to specific behaviors. So James Siemon, for instance, notes
how Brutus’ rigidity and “aloofness” in the quarrel with Cassius (4.3)
betray his likeness to Caesar. “Even the power of hearing seems to
begin to abandon Brutus in this exchange,” Siemon writes, for Brutus
“has gone more than a little way toward being, as Caesar is, deaf to
the empirical evidence contradicting his postures and figures” (175).
Norman Rabkin sees an inherent and continual similarity between
the two, with the parallel construction of 2.1 and 2.2 designed specifically
to call attention to a kind of doubling of character. The similarity
between the two characters, at whatever point it is perceived,