Cymbeline (2 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Simon Forman’s report reveals how much detail an attentive spectator could grasp in a complex Shakespearean drama—though he does seem to have momentarily muddled Cloten and Posthumus, just as Innogen/Fidele does. The account also suggests that Shakespearean playgoers worried little about the plot’s dependence on frequent coincidences. Strikingly, though, this spectator’s enthusiasm peters out toward the end: the closing reunions and the descent of Jupiter in Posthumus’ dream do not merit a mention. The long and outlandish final scene is extremely difficult to stage effectively: it has sometimes been played as parody, is often heavily cut, and has even been comprehensively rewritten (by George Bernard Shaw).
In the movement of the action from court to country,
Cymbeline
has a structure similar to the more popular and better-known
Winter’s Tale
. The two plays were probably written within a year of each other. The similarities are abundant. A man is falsely led to believe in his wife’s infidelity, with the result that his powers of reasoning are distorted and his language collapses into crabbed, dense invective against female wiles:
Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,
And that most venerable man, which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit …
…
… for there’s no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it,
The woman’s: flattering, hers: deceiving, hers:
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers:
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all …
In fact, throughout Shakespeare’s works, most of these vices and faults are to be found in the men’s parts, not the women’s. It is the woman—Marina, Perdita, Innogen—who restores harmony.
In
Cymbeline
, as in
The Winter’s Tale
, she does so in combination with the forces of nature. The febrile air of court intrigue is cleared when we move outdoors and encounter princes disguised as shepherds. It is perhaps in
Cymbeline
that Shakespeare’s art of natural observation is at its most acute. The supposedly dead Fidele is apostrophized with the phrase “The azured harebell, like thy veins.” The color and structure of the harebell does precisely resemble those of human veins. Then there is Belarius speaking of how his two adopted sons show princely natures even as they are dressed as shepherds:
O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature, thou thyself thou blazon’st
In these two princely boys! They are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing below the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,
That by the top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to th’vale …
The wind has the capacity not to move a violet but to flatten a mountain pine: Shakespeare likes that paradox.
The association of Innogen with nature goes back to the bedroom scene. The key token of recognition, the mole on her breast, is “cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops / I’th’bottom of a cowslip.” Is there any other English poet save the country laborer John Clare who could have created such a simile, who has such an eye as acute as Shakespeare’s for the intricacies of natural history and the apt metaphorical application of them to human encounters?
Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play,
Cymbeline
has polarized critics and audiences in their judgments on its quality as a work of art. Yet despite an uneven critical heritage, the twentieth century going into the early twenty-first has seen a massive resurgence in its popularity on both page and stage, and recent criticism now widely accepts it as a masterwork that no longer needs to be explained away or apologized for.
Historically, critics have been divided over the play’s mixed genre, improbable plot, characterization, moral texture, difficult language, bifurcated political position, and contrived ending. Dr. Johnson’s view, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare, is typical:
This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.
1
George Bernard Shaw was even more dismissive:
I do not defend
Cymbeline
. It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.
2
But the play has always had its defenders. The early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt thought that:
Cymbeline
is one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s [sic] historical plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance … The reading of this play is like going on a journey with some uncertain object at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and heightened by the long intervals between each action. Though the events are scattered over such an extent of surface, and relate to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete development of the catastrophe. The ease and conscious unconcern with which this is effected only makes the skill more wonderful.
3
The last act, in which all the plot threads reconvene in a series of almost comically improbable revelations, has, like the play as a whole, been for a long time the object of critical scorn before more recently finding a reacceptance, especially in performance. Critics are now in fairly unanimous agreement on its dizzying, strange brilliance: “The finale is an intricate, beautiful machine in which an astonishing number of disguises are removed, misunderstandings swept away and reunions accomplished.”
4
Traditionally, the play’s three main plots have been identified as the marriage/wager plot (involving Innogen’s marriage to Posthumus, his resultant banishment, Cloten’s attempted “revenge,” and the wager Posthumus makes with Iachimo over Innogen’s fidelity), the dynastic plot (involving the return of Guiderius and Arviragus, Cymbeline’s long-lost sons, and, unbeknownst to them, the future rulers of Britain), and the nations plot (involving the Roman invasion of Britain over Cymbeline’s refusal to pay the required tribute, and the eventual reunion of the two powers). Critical concerns have recently engaged with each of these elements and debated the politics of the play in terms of gender and state and the interplay between them.
The wager story had its roots in popular folklore, narrated many times in the medieval period, though Shakespeare seems to have based his plot on a version in Boccaccio’s
Decameron
(Day 2, Novella 9), in which:
The villain, Ambrogiuolo, gets into Ginevra’s bedchamber in a chest and steals a ring, a purse, a girdle and a gown. Bernabò, the husband, is convinced, not by these, but by the description of a mole with golden hairs under his wife’s left breast. He orders a servant to kill Ginevra, but the servant helps her to escape in male clothes.
5
Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics chose to take sides over the wager plot, and to make moral judgments upon the action. For a long time Innogen was seen as an ideal portrait of womanhood and wifely virtue:
in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest possible characteristics of womanhood—untainted health of soul, unshaken fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inexhaustible forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never wavers, and unquenchable radiance of spirit.
6
Unsurprisingly, many critics denounced Posthumus:
The wrong of Posthumus is the commonest of moral perversions, the false sense of honour that dares not refuse a challenge, whatever the moral cost implied in its acceptance, it is the perversion which is the product of social narrowness and artificiality; the duellist dreads the sentiment immediately surrounding him in the coterie that has dubbed itself “men of honour,” and forgets the great world with its balanced judgements and eternal principles of right.
7
More recently, masculine anxieties and a male-driven culture of commodity have also been seen as driving the wager. Twentieth-century feminist criticism was especially interested in the socially constructed “virgin/whore” binary that women are fetishistically bracketed into by men, and the wager plot can be seen as a literal playing out of this, with the two men betting over Innogen’s chastity. Her sexual purity has been interpreted as prudery, and, paradoxically, the very thing that makes her an object of sexual desire. Rather than the moral touchstone or untouchable object of desire that towers above the other characters in the play, Innogen has also been seen as marginal to the male relationships in the play, subjugated by a domineering, insecure, and oppressive patriarchy: “Innogen begins the play as its primary defining figure, defining herself, her husband, and the dramatic focus of the audience; by the end, she has learnt her place.”
8
In psychoanalytic critic Janet Adelman’s formulation, the play’s “happy ending” is seen as “radically contingent” on Innogen’s “self-loss, on the ascendancy of male authority and the circumscription of the female … the unmaking of female authority, the curtailing of female pride, as much for Imogen as for the wicked queen.”
9
Although we know Iachimo is lying about sleeping with Innogen, critics have argued for a kind of sexual conquest in the “trunk” scene, and this violation has also been seen as a metaphorical playing out of one of the play’s other plots:
In this context, Giacomo’s [modernized spelling of
Iachimo’s
] intrusion into Innogen’s bedroom becomes itself a tale of a British “haven” infiltrated by scurrilous foreign forces. His secret incursion becomes an enemy “voyage upon her,” its invasive metaphors speak of assaulting the “walls” of Innogen’s honour, the “temples” of her mind.
10
Although the figures of Cymbeline’s sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, came from Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, Shakespeare’s source for the play’s quasi-historical narrative, the Wales plot has its roots in romances and folk stories. This part of the drama has frequently been seen to share in the conventions of pastoral: “In common with a number of his other plays from
As You Like It
, via
King Lear
to
The Tempest
, Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline
uses an excursion to a wilderness setting so that characters can return to their normal lives and roles, refreshed and, to an extent, sorted.”
11
The pastoral environment has been seen as shaping the princes and providing them with an earthy, simple model of morality they can apply to courtly life on their return:
The fine young men, schooled to endurance by their teacher and their habitat, take their places among the other courtiers naturally enough, their youthful discipline offering the promise that Cymbeline’s kingdom will be reorganized on new and different moral lines. Nature has raised these boys so that they can return to a birthright compromised in their absence and purify it by the simple strengths of their natural characters.
12
A more recent critic has argued conversely that:
Cymbeline
is innovative because it dares to follow the characters home and suggests that their moral transformation may not last … What marks the boys’ nobility out as far as Belarius is concerned is their ability to imagine themselves into his heroic stories, to occupy another world that they have never personally known. Ironically, however, this imaginative understanding of the “other” is merely a restitution of the unexamined heroic but also brutal values that caused Belarius to flee in the first place.
13
The culmination of the fictitious pastoral and the play’s move back into history, where the princes can become kings, as well as the mixing of plots and genres, has been brilliantly described by the critic Robert Henke:
Belarius recognizes that the arrival and killing of Cloten spell the beginning and the end of his protected, pastoral theatre and initiates the move back into history … The killing of Cloten initiates a more active interplay between pastoral and history than that effected by Belarius’s cave stories. Violence inappropriate to the pastoral decorum invades its boundaries—although the displacement of violence offstage adjusts the levels of violence in a manner appropriate to a tragicomic decorum. And Belarius realizes that as an uncanny messenger, Cloten is an earnest of further negotiations with the court. As “pastoral-historical,”
Cymbeline
aims to join the “lopp’d branches” to the “old stock” of the “stately cedar”: to graft the pastoral denizens Guiderius and Belarius back onto the British dynastic tree.
14
A number of critics have emphasized the play’s roots in fairy tale. Northrop Frye, one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century, saw the play as unhistorical, and its fairy-tale elements as defining:
Cymbeline
is not, to put it mildly, a historical play: it is pure folk tale, featuring a cruel stepmother with her loutish son, a calumniated maiden, lost princes brought up in a cave by a foster father, a ring of recognition that works in reverse, villains displaying false trophies of adultery and faithful servants displaying equally false trophies of murder, along with a great firework display of dreams, prophecies, signs, portents, and wonders.
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