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56
William Shakespeare
Freud’s early childhood, when the two had been “inseparable.” Freud
recalls his youthful hostility toward John, who was a year older than
he, and remarks that “There must have been times when he treated me
very badly and I must have shown courage in the face of my tyrant.”
The ghost of this “tyrant” exerted “a determining influence on all my
subsequent relations with contemporaries” (460), or as Freud later
puts it “All my friends have in a certain sense been reincarnations of
this first figure . . . they have been revenants” (520–21). Or revenants
of a revenant, since John’s presence was ghostly in the initially cited
episode of playing Caesar.
Freud essentially compounds Schiller’s play with Shakespeare’s: after
quoting Brutus’ speech in Julius Caesar, he identifies “playing the part
of Brutus” with the episode in Die Räuber. 8 While I will for the most
part follow his lead in considering Shakespeare’s version of the story, it
is interesting to note the pronounced Oedipal antagonism in “the part
of Brutus” that Freud actually played. 9 The story of Julius Caesar figures
in Die Räuber as the inspiration to achieve greatness—and sacrificing
the father is the explicit price of such achievement in the play’s plot.
Boyhood reading of “the adventures of Julius Caesar” 10 (143) is touted
as an early indication that Charles von Moor will neglect his duty to
his father. Charles recites the lyric between Brutus and Caesar in the
hope that “my slumbering genius may wake up again” (244). Although
purportedly his father’s rescuer from the destructive intentions of his
evil brother, Charles himself “kills” his father with the news of what he
has become, captain of a robber band. He is, the robbers say at the end,
“infected with the great-man-mania” (277)—the result, in the play’s
terms, of identifying himself with Brutus.
Moreover, while the character of Shakespeare’s Caesar enfolds
a ghost, who is released after the assassination, in the passage from
Schiller Caesar is simply a ghost, an “unblest shade” returned to
haunt Brutus. So Freud’s nephew John returns “as a revenant” to play
a revenant, whose reality is supposedly secondary to that of the more
potent Brutus. The brief lyric expresses Brutus’ ambivalence toward
the dead Caesar: he first scorns the ghost (“Hence to thy Stygian
Flood!”), then pleads with him to remain (“Stay, father, stay!”), and
resolves the relationship as a purely oppositional one (“Where Brutus
lives, must Caesar die!”). Whereas Shakespeare hints at a parricidal
theme, Schiller makes it explicit: