Cymbeline (25 page)

Lines 398–478:
Caius Lucius enters with a Soothsayer, who predicts Roman success in the wars. They see Innogen upon the body, and rouse her. She tells them it is the body of her master, Richard du Champ, killed “by mountaineers.” Lucius, impressed with Innogen/Fidele’s loyalty, takes her into his service, ordering his men to bury Cloten’s body properly.

Cymbeline anguishes over Innogen’s flight and the dangerous illness of the Queen caused by her son’s disappearance. Pisanio comforts Cymbeline and offers to serve him, and though Cymbeline still suspects him, a Lord avouches that Pisanio was at court when Innogen went missing, and must be innocent. The Lord also advises Cymbeline to prepare his armies against the advancing Romans. Pisanio, in an aside, wonders why he has not heard from either Posthumus or Innogen, and vows to fight bravely for Cymbeline in the ensuing wars.

Belarius sees the Roman armies on the move, and urges Guiderius and Arviragus to run, saying that they have enemies on both sides; they cannot join the Britons as they will be captured and executed for Cloten’s death. The boys refuse, however, sensing their time finally to taste battle and prove their valor. Belarius agrees to join them.

Posthumus enters alone, carrying the bloody cloth sent to him by Pisanio, and in a long, tortured soliloquy, expresses deep repentance for what he has done to Innogen. He has been brought back to Britain to fight with the Romans, but resolves to doff his “Italian weeds” and dress as a British peasant to fight for his country.

Iachimo fights Posthumus in his peasant’s disguise, and is beaten. Posthumus leaves Iachimo on the ground, who says that guilt at slandering Innogen “enfeebles” him. In the continuing battle, some Britons beat a retreat and Cymbeline is captured, but Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus, seconded by Posthumus, come to his rescue. Lucius, with the Romans facing defeat, tells Innogen/Fidele to run.

Lines 1–102:
Posthumus tells a British Lord, one of the deserters from the front line, about the battle. He describes how in a narrow lane, as the Romans chased the fleeing Britons, an old man and his two sons took a stand, fighting so bravely that they restored the British army’s courage. He then berates the Lord for cowardice, who leaves him. Posthumus, wanting to be captured, has changed back into his Italian garments. Having partly atoned for Innogen’s death by helping Britain win the battle, he now seeks to atone fully through self-destruction. Two British Captains enter and tell of Lucius’ capture. Seeing Posthumus, and thinking him a Roman, they take him also.

Lines 103–306:
In a British stockade, taunted by his Jailers, Posthumus speaks of his desire for death and falls asleep. While sleeping he is visited by the ghosts of his father, mother, and two brothers, who plead with the gods to intercede on the young man’s behalf. Jupiter descends amid thunder and lightning and berates the spirits for their impertinence. Nonetheless, he agrees to help Posthumus, leaving him a tablet inscribed with a prophecy telling of Jupiter’s will in the events to come. The spirits thank Jupiter, and all vanish. Posthumus awakes and sees the tablet, but is not able to interpret its meaning. A Jailer comes to fetch Posthumus to the gallows, but a Messenger intervenes, saying the prisoner has been summoned before the king.

Lines 1–306:
Cymbeline knights Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus for their valor and service in battle, wishing that the “poor soldier” who helped them (Posthumus) could be found and likewise rewarded. Cornelius, the doctor, enters to tell Cymbeline that the Queen is dead, and that she confessed before dying that she hated Innogen, that she never loved Cymbeline, and was plotting to kill him slowly with poisons so that Cloten could become king. Cymbeline says that he was utterly deceived by her, and that her beauty
was the cause. Innogen (as Fidele), Caius Lucius, the Soothsayer, Iachimo, and Posthumus (disguised as a Roman) are brought in as prisoners. Lucius begs only that his page (Innogen) be freed, to which Cymbeline agrees, taking the “boy” into his service, and offering Fidele any “boon” he can give. Innogen has seen Iachimo wearing her ring, and talks aside with Cymbeline, during which time Belarius and the two boys express amazement to each other that Fidele is alive again. Innogen questions Iachimo about the ring, and he confesses at length everything that he has done. Posthumus, revealing his own identity, comes forward to attack Iachimo, and admits remorsefully to being the cause of Innogen’s death. Innogen rushes to him but he spurns her, thinking her to be an insolent page boy intruding on his grief. Pisanio then steps forward to tell everyone that the page is in fact Innogen in disguise, and Innogen curses Pisanio for trying to poison her. Cornelius remembers that the Queen had also confessed to giving Pisanio what she thought was poison, hoping to kill him, and that Pisanio was innocent of what the compound really was, thinking it medicinal. Reunited at last, Posthumus and Innogen embrace.

Lines 307–571:
Cymbeline and Innogen lovingly reunite, and Cymbeline questions Cloten’s disappearance. Pisanio tells of Cloten’s leaving for Milford Haven in pursuit of Innogen and Posthumus, and Guiderius finishes the story. Cymbeline, filled with regret because he still admires the young warrior, has no choice but to sentence him to death for killing a prince. Belarius intercedes, telling Cymbeline that the young man is “better than the man he slew,” confessing that he is the banished Belarius, disguised as Morgan, and that the young men with him are Cymbeline’s sons, whom he raised these twenty years. Cymbeline is at first incredulous, but upon seeing the star-shaped birthmark he remembers upon Guiderius’ neck, all doubt is removed, and, overcome with joy, he pardons Belarius and is tearfully reunited with his sons. The boys and Innogen now realize why they felt such a natural bond with each other. Innogen has Caius Lucius freed, and Posthumus, after forgiving Iachimo, calls upon the Soothsayer to interpret the strange tablet he found in his jail cell. The prophecy relates to what has just taken place; to Posthumus finding
Innogen again, and to Cymbeline’s sons being “jointed” back onto the royal family tree, ensuring the continued stability of the realm. “Pardon’s the word to all,” Cymbeline declares, and even promises to continue paying the tribute to Rome as a sign of mutual respect. All go in together to celebrate and to make offerings to the gods who have ensured that everything has ended in “peace.”

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can occur only when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

Shakespeare had dealt with overt fantasy onstage before
Cymbeline
, but with this play he seems to ask a different sort of imaginative
engagement from his audiences. Like
Pericles
and
The Winter’s Tale
before it,
Cymbeline
has long been seen as what Ben Jonson described as “some mouldy tale,”
²⁴
piling coincidence, misrecognition, revelation, and confusion one on top of the other until the effect seems almost farcical, and has thus been largely neglected in the theater. There has, however, been a long-running parallel tradition of practitioners and audiences deriving bounteous rewards from the play in performance, taking the effort to see past what at first glance seem shortcomings, and to revel both in the comic opportunities the play’s structure affords, and in its truly tender emotional core.
Cymbeline
is a virtuoso piece of dramatic management, and while it introduces more plot threads than a five-act narrative seems designed to bear, and while we are openly invited to laugh at the absurdity of so many threads reconvening at the end, we are simultaneously invited to marvel silently at the skill of the authorial puppet master and to succumb to the unfeigned tenderness of the dramatic conclusion.

The earliest account we have of
Cymbeline
onstage—in fact, the earliest writing we have on the play at all—comes in the form of a private memorandum of 1611 by the astrologer Simon Forman, jotted into one of his eclectic notebooks. Forman died on September 8 that year, and this entry comes after accounts of having seen
Macbeth
and
The Winter’s Tale
at the Globe in April and May, making it highly probable that he also saw
Cymbeline
there that summer. He provides little in the way of performance detail, being more concerned with cataloging the play’s plot intrigues one after another:

Forman jumbles the plot order, mentioning these events before the wager plot, which, some have argued, merely illustrates the play’s difficulty, while others have felt he deliberately rearranged things in order to afford a primacy to the Roman and British dynastic plot (the play has often been seen as a Jacobean panegyric). The other significant detail is that Forman calls the heroine Innogen, against the Folio’s Imogen, suggesting strongly that this reflects what he heard onstage that day. The rest of the play’s early public performance history is obscure, though we do know that it was performed at Whitehall on January 1, 1634, before Charles I, and, according to the Master of the Revels, was “well liked by the King.”
²⁶

Shakespeare’s plays came to be performed mainly in heavily adapted versions from the Restoration into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
Cymbeline
was no different, being reworked into Thomas D’Urfey’s
The Injured Princess, or The Fatal Wager
in 1682, performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and revived in 1720 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A rare production of Shakespeare’s text was undertaken at the Haymarket Theatre in 1744 by Theophilus Cibber, which was revived two years later at Covent Garden, starring Lacy Ryan as Posthumus and the great actor-manager David Garrick’s longtime stage partner Hannah Pritchard as Innogen.

Next came William Hawkins’ adaptation, which retained the play’s title but largely gutted the text to make way for Hawkins’ own verse and a cast of renamed characters. Perhaps most significant of all was the rearrangement of the plot to bring it into line with neoclassical sensibilities about dramatic unity, somewhat missing the point of Shakespeare’s sophisticated and experimental narrative structuring.

The most significant and influential of the eighteenth-century adaptations, however, was Garrick’s. Fittingly, the text Garrick produced for his 1761 production was remarkably actor friendly, as well as being very faithful to the Shakespearean original. The more substantial alterations he made were to conflate or omit many prose passages, especially in the early Cloten scenes, and to transpose certain scenes for the sake of continuity of action, as well as entirely omitting the scene of Posthumus’ imprisonment in Act 4, including the
vision episode. Still, critical judgments of the time lasting into the twentieth century commented on the efficacy and stageworthiness of Garrick’s version. Garrick himself took the role of Posthumus to great acclaim alongside Miss Bride as Innogen, Thomas Davies as Cymbeline, and Charles Holland as Iachimo. Contemporary reviews of the production reflect heavily upon the particular aesthetic sensibilities of the age, with one anonymous reviewer sniping at the “great deal of Shakespear’s [sic] irregularity”
²⁷
on display in
Cymbeline
, choosing to fix on the verse-speaking abilities of the cast rather than anything the production might have yielded as an interpretation of the text. A review from the following year though speaks out in defense of the play, attributing its oddities to Shakespeare’s native genius, and praising both Garrick’s performance as Posthumus and Shakespeare’s writing of the part: