Cymbeline (3 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Much recent criticism, however, has focused on the play’s politics in the widest sense, on the play’s treatment of Rome as well as its evocation of British nationhood. J. P. Brockbank adjudged the accounts of Holinshed to be “consonant” with the adventures of Brute, founder of the British nation according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and noted that Shakespeare’s dovetailing of sources creates a magical, principally theatrical, yet brilliantly researched historical narrative:
Shakespeare’s reading offers a paradigm for an action which makes the reconciliation with Rome a high event in the magical movement of British history from the vision of Brute to the golden prospect of the vision of Cadwallader … but he had scope still to exercise his imagination on other elements in the chronicle. In pursuit of that “odd and distinctive music” he chose to modulate from the Brutan into the Roman key and from the Roman into the Renaissance Italian.
16
Earlier in the twentieth century, G. Wilson Knight had seen the play as dramatizing the passing of the baton from Rome to what would become England, which could be read in terms of the neoclassical world of the Renaissance taking up—in no small part through Shakespeare’s art—the torch of the classical world:
Certainly we are to feel the Roman power vanishing into the golden skies of a Britain destined to prove worthy of her Roman tutelage. Jupiter’s blessing on Posthumus’ marriage and the soothsayer’s vision thus make similar statements. Both symbolise a certain transference of virtue from Rome to Britain. Shakespeare’s two national faiths are here married; his creative faith in ancient Rome, felt in the dramas from
Titus Andronicus
to
Coriolanus
, and his faith in England.
17
Other critics felt the union between the two nations, based on mutual respect, rather than the supersession of one over the other, was key:
I find it difficult to accept [G. Wilson] Knight’s idea of Britain taking over from Rome. Iachimo is a corrupt Roman and he repents. Cloten is a villainous Briton and he is killed. Although there can be no doubt that some in the Jacobean audience would indeed see themselves as the successors of Rome, the play is not talking about the succession of empires but about the only true form of empire, which is when vassalage is removed, and union is a contract freely entered into.
18
Gendering has also been identified as central to the Roman thread of the play, leading to the banishment of the Queen—who stands in defiant vocal opposition to Rome—from the final act: “powerful and rebellious females in native historiography threatened the establishment of a stable, masculine identity for the early modern state.”
19
This gendering of nations has had a powerful hold on recent interpretations, including application of a “parthenogenesis” theory, which argued for
Cymbeline
’s desire to expunge the female from his world; not only his wife, the wicked Queen, but also the memory of the mother of his sons, and ultimately find union with the male world of Rome (also used to explain the play’s perceived structural problems):
In
Cymbeline
, a plot ostensibly about the recovery of trust in woman and the renewal of marriage is circumscribed by a plot in which distrust of women is the great lesson to be learned and in which male autonomy depends upon the dissolution of marriage. Moreover, the effect of the Imogen-Posthumus plot is everywhere qualified by the effect of the Cymbeline plot, and the two plots seem to be emotionally at cross-purposes: if one moves toward the resumption of heterosexual bonds in marriage, the other moves toward the renewed formation of male bonds as Cymbeline regains both his sons and his earlier alliance with an all-male Rome, the alliance functionally disrupted by his wife. Hence the emotional incoherence of the last scene: the resolution of each plot interrupts the other, leaving neither satisfactorily resolved.
20
The scholar Robert S. Miola has argued that the play’s treatment of Rome veers in and out of, and ultimately rejects, the social and behavioral codes Shakespeare had worked so carefully to delineate in his previous, less fantastical, Roman plays:
Cymbeline
’s loose aggregation of miniatures combines to portray a Rome that gradually yields to Britain. The chaste Roman matron Lucrece finally gives way to Imogen, the British maiden for whom honour and reputation are idle impositions, oft lost without deserving. Comic flexibility, evident in Posthumus as well as in Imogen, succeeds tragic constancy as austere
Romanitas
dissolves into historical-pastoral romance.
21
Politically self-conscious critic Terence Hawkes, meanwhile, focuses on the significance of Wales in the play’s various articulations of nationhood:
After all, any future “mixing” of Roman and British ways of life is surely implicitly to be modelled on and judged by the success or otherwise of the prior mixing of the cultures of Wales and England. This, evidently, is the point the Welsh setting seeks to affirm. And that raises a major difficulty in
Cymbeline
. Assertions of an achieved Britishness certainly abound … But where are the Welsh? Even though two-thirds of the play is set in Wales, we meet no native-born Welsh people there—unless we count the two “beggars” of whom Innogen asks directions [3.6.8–9]. Their status may be significant.
22
There has also been an interest in seeing the play as a Jacobean panegyric, and many commentators have felt that it is utterly confusing until placed in the context of the historical circumstances of James I’s reign:
Cymbeline (in Shakespeare, though not in Holinshed) has one daughter and two sons; so did James I. James’s elder son, Henry, was created Prince of Wales in 1610, and some editors point to 1610 as a likely date for
Cymbeline;
and in connexion with the stress on peace with which the play closes, it is perhaps of interest that 1610 was the only year, of this period, in which all the European states were at peace. Lastly, Cymbeline’s final submission to Rome, even after he has won the war against the Romans, might have had some topical value in view of James’s efforts to enter into friendly negotiations with Papal Rome … the audience must have made a complex identification: the peace is both the peace of the world at the time of Christ’s birth, in which Britain participates, and also its attempted re-creation at the very time of the play’s performance, with Jacobus Pacificus—who was a figure of Augustus—on the throne.
23
In the politically devolved Britain of the twenty-first century, G. Wilson Knight’s slippage, in the passage quoted earlier, from “England” to “Britain” looks sloppy. And it certainly would not have made sense to Shakespeare and his original audiences, for whom 1603 was a turning point, as Queen Elizabeth of England was succeeded by King James VI of Scotland and I of England, with his project to unite the two nations into a new “Britain.”
In summary, then: as well as being a pastoral fantasy and a fairy story, complete with wicked stepmother and poison (which, thanks to an honest-hearted physician, turns out to be mere sleeping potion),
Cymbeline
is a play about the Romans in Britain, under the auspices of the god Jupiter. The title in the Folio contents list is “Cymbeline King of Britain.” Shakespeare’s other King of Britain was Lear, who made the mistake of dividing his kingdom in three.
Cymbeline
may have been placed among the tragedies by the editors of the Folio because it traverses the same elevated ground of national history and destiny. But whereas the disarray of the divided nation in
Lear
is a negative example, perhaps intended to make the play’s original audience feel relief that King James had recently united the thrones of Scotland and England, the resolution of
Cymbeline
is altogether positive: “Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.”
Cymbeline was supposed to have been king of Britain in the year when Christ was born; at that time, the Roman emperor was Augustus. Shakespeare’s audience would have known that Augustus was the Caesar to whom Cymbeline agrees to pay tribute money, despite the miraculous victory of the British when Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus (otherwise known as Morgan, Polydore, and Cadwal) hold the road against apparently insurmountable odds. The end of the play heralds an “Augustan peace,” in which Britain is imagined as the equal of Rome. Milford Haven in Wales is a vital location and point of reference in the play. The more historically and politically literate members of Shakespeare’s original audience would have recalled that it was the port where Henry Tudor—the Richmond of
Richard III
and the future King Henry VII—landed in 1485, the year that brought the Wars of the Roses to an end and established the Tudor dynasty that turned the tables on modern Rome and began to establish an image of their nation as the divinely chosen Christian successor-empire to that of Augustus.
Imagine King James watching the play: he would have seen himself as a composite version of Cymbeline and Augustus, both a British king and a neo-Roman emperor. From the point of view of characterization, the part of King Cymbeline is astonishingly underwritten. His interior life is never opened to us, as is that of Lear or, in this play, Princess Innogen. All he seems to do in the long closing scene is ask questions, express amazement, and pronounce benediction. This makes sense if he is intended to offer an oblique representation of James, King of Britain. It would not do to inquire too closely into the monarch’s interior life. Instead, Cymbeline is the ideal spectator: during a court performance, the King would have been sitting at the focal point of the hall. In a production that works, his amazement, his questions, and his acceptance are also ours.
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).
Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.
Cymbeline
exists only in a Folio text that is reasonably well printed, with few errors, and showing signs—especially in its heavy punctuation—of being set from copy prepared by a scribe, who was probably Ralph Crane. The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
Cymbeline
, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “
POSTHUMUS
Leonatus, husband to Innogen”).
Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
Cymbeline
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (
“another room in the palace”
). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of
Cymbeline
the action moves between ancient Britain and Rome.
Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.
Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.
