Cymbeline
Authors: William Shakespeare
The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal
CYMBELINE
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Will Sharpe
Introduction: Jonathan Bate and Will Sharpe
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Will Sharpe and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Will Sharpe
In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings)
and Will Sharpe (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Will Sharpe and Kevin Wright):
Dominic Cooke and Emma Rice
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK
2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
and the T
ORCHBEARER
Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The version of
Cymbeline
and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in
William Shakespeare: Complete Works
, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-889-8
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images
v3.1
The Dynastic Plot and the Pastoral Mode
Cymbeline
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of
Cymbeline:
An Overview
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Dominic Cooke and Emma Rice
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology
The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
“AND VIEWED HER IN HER BED”
Many commentators have observed how fitting it is that
The Tempest
is printed at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Its reflections on art, together with the resemblance of Prospero to a dramatist and his island to a theater, where a play is staged within the play by actors who are spirits, make it seem like a Shakespearean showpiece, a summation of his art. Far fewer commentators have considered how equally appropriate it is that
Cymbeline
is printed at the end of the First Folio. Though entitled
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
, it ends not with multiple deaths but with family reunion and political reconciliation. “Pardon’s the word to all” as revelations pile in upon one another, each of them “a mark of wonder,” while a nation is restored to peace: the play could equally well have been classed as a comedy or a British history. The stylistic experimentation almost serves as an ironic epilogue to the Folio’s tripartite division into comedies, histories, and tragedies: tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,
Cymbeline
would have been Polonius’ favorite work in the canon. Furthermore, in a manner analogous to the wittily extreme variations on classical motifs in Baroque art, both the narrative arc and the characterization revisit and revise, in a highly self-conscious manner, an array of favorite Shakespearean motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.
For Shakespeare, the material provided the opportunity to reach back to some of his earliest work. As in
Titus Andronicus
, a copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
is brought onstage as a prop. It is Innogen’s bedtime reading: “She hath been reading late, / The tale of Tereus. Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up.” The allusion marks the moment at which Innogen is betrayed. An eyewitness account of a performance of the play in 1611 makes much of this scene, in which the machiavellian Iachimo emerges from a trunk. Watching for the plot, what Dr. Simon Forman seems to have remembered most vividly was Innogen’s bedchamber:
Remember also the story of Cymbeline king of England, in Lucius’ time, how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlaws, of the which 2 of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but 2 years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons 20 years with him in a cave. And how [one] of them slew Cloten, that was the queen’s son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Innogen the king’s daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter, and how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others, to be presented to the king. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep, he opened the chest, and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, etc. And in the end how he came with the Romans into England and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Innogen, who had turned herself into man’s apparel and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven, and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her 2 brothers were, and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love’s apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, etc.
“
Viewed
her in her bed … and after accused her”: whereas in
Titus
Lavinia’s quoting of Philomel’s tragic tale is the means to the revelation of her own rape, Iachimo can destroy Innogen’s reputation simply by looking at her. His removal of the bracelet from her arm is a symbolic violation of her chastity. In Shakespeare’s other rape story, the poem of
Lucrece
, Tarquin presses violently down on his victim’s breasts, but here Iachimo merely watches and reports, noting in particular an identifying mole on her left breast. It is the eyes of a spectator that do the undressing here, not the tearing hands of a Tarquin. When Iachimo himself alludes to the rapacious emperor—“Our” Tarquin, a fellow Roman—he rewrites the night scene of
Lucrece
in a lyrical mode: “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” The sibilance seems tender rather than sinister: “Softly press” suggests not only stealth, but also a lover’s touch. And “wounded” grossly understates the severity of Tarquin’s deed. This has the effect of sublimating the image of rape—Philomel gives up as in a dream, not in brutal reality as on the stage of
Titus
, thus making it easier for the audience to put itself in the position of Iachimo. To note and to wonder at the beauty of the sleeping Innogen does not seem to do any harm. Yet “yellow Iachimo” does work harm, and it takes all the play’s twists and turns, including an apparent death and an actual physical violation when Posthumus strikes Fidele/Innogen, to undo that harm.
The audience, then, is forced to confront its own complicity in Iachimo’s deed. His gaze is ours. Shakespeare makes the point by means of the chimneypiece in the bedroom. While in the room, Iachimo records “the contents o’th’story.” In his subsequent narration to Posthumus he reveals them:
The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves; the cutter
Was as another nature dumb, outwent her,
Motion and breath left out.
The gaze is fixed on the naked Diana bathing: Iachimo and with him the audience stand in the position occupied in Ovidian mythology by the hunter Actaeon, who is metamorphosed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds as punishment for his desiring gaze upon the goddess of chastity. Shakespeare uses this reference to introduce the motif of auto-destructive sexual desire. The poetry almost makes us forget that we never saw the chimneypiece: what we witnessed was the sleeping figure of Innogen, as mediated through the language of Iachimo’s gorgeous but prurient soliloquy.
The art of the chimneypiece, like that of Hermione’s statue in
The Winter’s Tale
, is said to have outdone nature. A few lines earlier, Iachimo has reported that the tapestry in the chamber told the story of Mark Antony meeting Cleopatra at Cydnus; here Shakespeare echoes back his own recent play in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra at Cydnus as being so desirable that “but for vacancy” the air would have joined the people of the city in going to gaze on her. The fictive chimneypiece recapitulates and goes beyond this: the artist’s figures seem on the verge of speech and movement, they are “likely to report themselves,” and though they are “dumb” they seem to make nature seem dumber. The air has vacated nature and entered the artwork. When we associate Diana with Innogen, the goddess seems to step down from the chimneypiece and become embodied on stage in the form of a lovely boy actor. The image effects in the audience’s mind what
The Winter’s Tale
feigns to deliver in performance: the metamorphosis of art into life. This is late Shakespeare at his most sophisticated and self-consciously inventive.
