We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the love, every child in the period of innocence wants to “marry” the former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little five year old daughter. She began, “I want to get married.”—“To whom?”—“To you, Papa.”—“I already have a wife.”—“Then you would have two wives.”—“That won't do.”—“Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you.” And Freud relates (p. 219), “An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. ‘Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,’ and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, … says outright: ‘Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.’”
We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of sexual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from him. Her sexuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen,[39] in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest. The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the glowing intensity of her sexual wishes.
With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan. “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't.” This physical likeness signifies identity of individuals, as we know from many analogous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic.
Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death:
“Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content;
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”
Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the rôle of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!” and bade her go to bed.
Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the murder of the king as he does in the history? I believe that we must here go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shakespeare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes “cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself; we can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become as black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phantasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately reëchoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices.”
This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Essex and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned to death because of treason against the life of the king. According to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later, made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it recalled. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all revolve about a father murder. In “Julius Cæsar,” Brutus murders his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved (“And thou too, my son Brutus?”). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as Freud explains in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” had at bottom done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last analysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful dramas.
Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this point, will stop here indignant: “How could any one maintain that a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, even if only in the phantasies of childhood?” I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to “marry” the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. “If the little boy,” says Freud in the “Interpretation of Dreams,”[40] “is allowed to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's experience has taught him that ‘dead’ folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return.”
Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to wish his parents dead? We may answer “that the childish idea of ‘being dead’ has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing.… Fear of death is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word.… Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as ‘being gone,’ not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by traveling, estrangement or death.… If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die.”[41] It may be conjectured, if we apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as well as of their later reappearances in the great dramas.