Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: The Making and Un-Making of the Fathers

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, like countless other narratives both before and after Freud, bears many similarities to the psychoanalytic situation: a troubled narrator recounts the details of his condition, regressing in course to the original scenes, thereby confronting and perhaps exorcising his demons. The play's structure as a double time-scheme is also particularly suggestive of analysis, allowing for a “present” from which the “past” is observed, narrated, re-lived. The analysand, Salieri, re-enacts the crucial scenes contributing to his psychic state. The interweaving of the two “times” of the play dramatizes the unconscious, essentially obliterating chronology as a relevant factor and allowing the audience (the analyst) to receive its information irrespective of historical sequence.

But it is not only in his extrapolation of the analytic scene that Shaffer encourages an analytic reading of Amadeus. In his selection of character traits, in his imagery, in the stress he places on such classic themes as oedipality and on such classic maneuvers as adaptation and defense, Shaffer embraces the post-Freudian Zeitgeist and encourages the audience and, even more, the reader of his play to bring the full panoply of psychoanalytic theory to its interpretation. Three aspects of the play seem especially designed for productive interpretation by the reader-analyst: (1) the oral-anal polarity by which Shaffer establishes, at least preliminarily, the antithetical positions of his antagonists; (2) the theme of the father, presented and represented in kaleidoscopic multiplicity and variation; and (3) what we may call the Amadeus-icon, a repeated image (or, in the theatre, a repeated stage-picture) which functions as an almost palpable encapsulation of the unconscious.