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. [41] Freud, _l. c._, pp. 215, 216. The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shakespeare. This other side of his childish impulse leads for example to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. Once more I let Brandes express it: "The object of Shakespeare's desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social advance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material fortune and official respect. He held passionately from his youth up to the purpose to reëstablish the name and the position of his family.... His father had not dared to go along the streets, fearing to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as