SPLITTING SHAKESPEARE CHARACTERS. Treating characters in comics as projections of the protagonist reminds me of some approaches to Shakespeare’s plays. Marjorie Garber in SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL says that Freud used Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “case studies for ‘disunited parts of a single psychical individuality'” In her commentary on the play Hamlet, Professor Garber quotes Freud’s expression of his theory that Hamlet’s delay in attacking Claudius for the killing of Hamlet’s father resulted from “the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother…” She points out that Freud recognized that there are several father figures in the play—the ghost, Claudius and Polonius. She calls “the technique of ‘splitting,’ producing several versions of a character type split into component aspects….one of the effective devices of Hamlet.”
Garber then advances an interpretation that the characters in the play are imagined by Hamlet, saying that the technique of splitting “will culminate in Hamlet’s dying recognition that all his rivals and friends (Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, the First Player) are in some ways aspects of himself.” (I have looked and I don’t see the dying recognition in the text.) Professor Garber also says that the players of the play within the play appear “as if on cue. They have been conjured out of Hamlet’s own imagination.”