Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

54
William Shakespeare
amounts to a kind of family resemblance between them, and adds to
the structural equivalence between king and father in enforcing the
play’s Oedipal theme.
Hamlet is the Shakespearean play most obviously connected with
Freud’s formulation of Oedipal theory, but two other plays besides
Hamlet—Henry IV, pt. 1 and Julius Caesar—receive multiple reference
in The Interpretation of Dreams. Of this trio of Oedipal dramas, Julius
Caesar carries special weight as the dramatization of a historical event
of wide and seemingly unavoidable importance. Moreover, in Julius
Caesar the problematic relation of the individual to history is formally
explored; the play presents the conundrum of two heroes competing
for dramatic priority, each precarious in the position of eminence. The
divided dramatic form reflects historical consensus: the question of the
significance of Caesar’s assassination was by no means settled when
the play was written in 1599. Ernest Schanzer traces the tradition of
contradictory interpretations of the assassination, a tradition he sees
Shakespeare as receiving and transmitting (11–23). Rabkin argues
that Shakespeare’s historical position with regard to the material was
particularly problematic, because of the assassination’s “inescapable
concern to the unstable moment of history in which he composed
his plays” (82). Doubtless, the relative stability of one’s own historical
moment—how perceived, how valued—necessarily influences an
interpretation of Caesar’s assassination, an event in itself ambiguously
barbarous or liberating. Freud’s response to the play reveals how
biographical concerns impinge on interpretation as well.
The complexity of Julius Caesar’s historical material perhaps occasioned
the new depth of introspection Shakespeare represents in the
character of Brutus. As the tragic hero, his character is developed
largely through soliloquy, so that however debatable the morality of
his intentions may be, he offers at least the appearance of a revealed
interior dimension. The contrast with Caesar’s illeistic self-references
is clear. The contradiction within Caesar’s character 5 consists of a gap
between his public reputation, fostered largely by Caesar himself, and
the infirm, gullible figure presented on stage. It is a contrariety of
self-presentation, and not merely in the dramatic sense—a problem
of denoting the self to the exterior world. Brutus’ ambivalence,
however, is seen as more truly experiential, intrinsic to his reflective,
self-examining mind. Brutus, “with himself at war” (1.2.45), questions
the relative demands of personal loyalty and public good (“I would