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Julius Caesar 71
NOTES
1. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud expresses a commitment to
preserving the stages of composition in his text, comparing
“the distortion of a text” to “a murder,” because the evidence
is difficult to erase. “Accordingly, in many instances of textual
distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has
been suppressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else,
though changed and torn from its context. Only it will not
always be easy to recognize it” (43). The text takes on a ghostly
existence of its own: in the prefatory note to Part 11 of Chapter
III, Freud apologizes for the amount of repetition in the chapter,
but professes himself “unable to wipe out the traces of the
history of the work’s origin.” He continues, “actually, it has been
written twice. . . . I determined to give it up; but it tormented
me like an unlaid ghost. . . .” (103). See also the analogy between
textual distortion and psychic defense mechanisms in “Analysis
Terminable and Interminable” (236–37).
2. And rumored to be Caesar’s biological son: Plutarch reports
that Caesar “persuaded himself that he begat” Brutus (114).
As evidence of Shakespeare’s familiarity with the story, Robert
Miola (85n) cites 2 Henry VI, 4.4.136–37, Ernest Jones believes
that Shakespeare “suppressed the fact that Brutus was the actual,
though illegitimate, son of Caesar” (Hamlet 124)—confirming,
in Jones’s estimate, the parricidal wish fueling the play.
3. As T.S. Dorsch notes, “The actual words, Et tu, Brute, are
not found in any classical writer,” but had by the time of
Shakespeare’s play already “become something of a stage
commonplace” (67n). Garber calls the phrase “a quotation of a
quotation . . . [but] ultimately a quotation of nothing” (55), an
example of the idealized, constructed character of Shakespeare’s
“idea of Rome” (52).
4. See, e.g., Clayton 246, Miola 102, and for a review of comments
on resemblances between the two characters, Rabkin 146–47n.
5. Adrien Bonjour, who calls Julius Caesar “the drama of divided
sympathies” (3), sees ambivalence as the salient trait shared by
Brutus and Caesar.
6. See Lynn de Gerenday’s discussion of Brutus’ use of ritual
“as defense against ambivalence” (32). Although she includes