ABSTRACT
Freud’s attempts to link the sequence of Shakespeare’s plays to events in the dramatist’s own life — particularly the deaths of his father and young son suggestively called Hamnet — depended heavily on a book on Shakespeare by the Danish critic Georg Brandes (1847-1931), whose German version was published in 1896. What The Interpretation of Dreams sees as signs of Shakespeare’s increasing revulsion from sexuality, from Hamlet to Timon of Athens,1 relies heavily on Brandes’s chronology; and Brandes’s account of the deaths of Shakespeare’s father and young son enters materially into Freud’s determination to use Shakespeare’s plays to look into ‘the deepest impulses in the creative poet’s soul’. But he also issues a warning:
Brandes’s book alerted Freud to the work of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries. This had some curious consequences. Freud was haunted for years by a phrase that mirrored his own response to the helplessness of the newborn: ‘O inch of nature!’ He attributed it to Shakespeare, but never managed to track it to its source. Years after Freud’s death Norman Holland, in his perennially useful book Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, traced the phrase, via Brandes, to one of the sources of Shakespeare’s Pericles: George Wilkins’s The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre.
