I wrote this piece for Volume 3 of Players of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1993) at the invitation of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, who had initiated and developed a connection between the actors currently playing at the theatre and their academic students. Our production of Cymbeline in the RSC’s 1987–8 season was directed by Bill Alexander. We started off at The Other Place (the original building, which was little more than a tin shack and a thrillingly close-up venue for actors and audience alike).
Princess/Wife
I once heard a joke about an actor in King Lear being asked what the play was about; he replied, ‘Oh, it’s about this doctor who has to tend a sick demented old man who thinks he’s King of Britain.’ He, of course, was playing the doctor. From the moment we are invited to play a part, a mental process gets under way, intended to bridge the gap between ‘me’ and the character. Subjectivity begins to set in, and for a while our character becomes the centre of our universe. Consequently there is a sense in which for me Cymbeline is about Imogen. As work is beginning, however, we fight to keep our objectivity, to keep doors open, to allow the not-yet-too-subjective insights of fellow actors to throw light on the whole play and our part in it, because, of course, the meaning of the play is revealed through all the characters.
In the early stages of rehearsal, we focused on identifying the main themes of Cymbeline. We had ambitious talks about politics and world peace, animated discussions about love and sexual jealousy, and so on. Before I became too obsessed with Imogen, I hoped to root my work firmly in the common ground discovered with the company. If I succeeded, then anything I now say about the journey of Imogen might help uncover more of the meaning of the play.
Imogen is a coveted role. It is her range that chiefly appeals. In one evening an actress can play a bit of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Rosalind and Cleopatra. In reading up about Imogen, I came across many descriptive adjectives: ‘divine’, ‘enchanting’, ‘virtuous’, all of which are observations and judgments not terribly helpful to the player.
As I see it, my preparatory task is to read and read and read the text and not make too many decisions about the character. I let the rhythm of her words work on me. I hoped this would help me retrace Shakespeare’s steps from the word, to the thought, to the motivation, to the heart of Imogen. I must understand her choices, temporarily inhabit the mind that makes them, say her words and perform her actions, and hope thereby to make her ‘live’. In performance, I will inevitably expose her to the audience’s judgment, but I myself must approach her without prejudice. Luckily, Cymbeline not being a much-performed play, Imogen is not well known.
What are the given facts? She is the only daughter of the King of Britain. Her two brothers were stolen in infancy. Her mother is dead. Her father has remarried a scheming woman who plans to marry off her son Cloten to Imogen, now the sole heir to the British crown. Imogen has in fact secretly married Posthumus, an orphan whom her father adopted at birth and reared as Imogen’s childhood companion. The opening scene of the play establishes what at court is commonly thought of all these people. Imogen and Posthumus are goodies, and reflect one another’s worth:
To his mistress…
…her own price
Proclaims how she esteem’d him; and his virtue
By her election may be truly read
What kind of man he is.
Cloten and the Queen are baddies, and King Cymbeline is a potential goody who has lost his way.
Imogen is no ordinary obedient virgin, though she is assumed by everyone at court to be both. The audience knows that Imogen is secretly married.
We learn from Posthumus (Act II, Scene 5) that
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d,
And pray’d me oft forbearance.
We decided that the marriage was consummated, but she sometimes had a headache.
The ‘pudency so rosy’ that Posthumus describes when she occasionally turns him down could demonstrate an acceptably modest appetite or, more likely, a practical mind. Imogen must not get pregnant and blow their cover prematurely.
So Imogen has dared go against her father’s wishes by marrying Posthumus, which is tantamount to rebelling against her King. I decided she had married impulsively with no great plan in mind, but somehow was instinctively defending herself with a fait accompli in order to put a stop to the projected marriage with Cloten. When the shit finally hits the fan she’ll think again.
The clue to this characteristic impetuosity I found in her later lines (Act III, Scene 2):
She seems to have a defiantly independent version of what is right and she sticks to it. Call it integrity or call it arrogance, her strength and her chief fault are two sides of the same coin. She starts off the play with a strong sense of her own importance, both as lawful wife to Posthumus and as Princess of Britain. Her sense of self is intricately bound up in those two titles, and the events of the play unsettle her faith in both.
At the beginning of her story I discovered a quality in Imogen that I could never clearly describe. It was a kind of self-dramatisation. It is as though in order to bear her misery, she casts herself in a noble role, and, in playing that to the hilt, she cannot be seen to give in or let herself down. She starts by choosing her own roles, but as the play goes on, fate and other people will force her into many disguises. These have a narrative justification and function, but on a deeper level they have the quality of metamorphoses. They are in some way like a series of small deaths and rebirths in another form, and involve giving up some outer trapping of her identity the better to find her true self.
Through all these outward changes she retains the core of her Imogen-ness. I hoped that if I didn’t define that Imogenness in advance but played each situation and role for what it was, the Imogen-ness would take care of itself. It would reveal itself not in spite of, but because of, the disguise. I found it helpful to signpost her journey in terms of these metamorphoses, which could be labelled: Princess to Princess-Wife/Princess-Wife to Rebel/Rebel to Franklin’s Housewife/Franklin’s Housewife to Boy/Boy to Roman Page/Roman Page to Princess-Wife.
First Metamorphosis: Princess-Wife to Rebel
A wedded lady, that hath her husband banish’d.
Cymbeline has discovered that Imogen and Posthumus are married. Posthumus is banished, and Imogen is under house-arrest. What with Posthumus’s banishment, her father’s rejection, Cloten’s assaults, and the scheming of the Queen, she has a lot to cope with. In Act I, Scene 1, she yearns to be a ‘neat-herd’s daughter’, but, sensible of her royal status, she draws strength from a knowledge that she isn’t just anyone going through a personal tragedy, but that there are subjects out there relying on her to survive with all the values of the Old Britain intact.
This sureness of her role gives her the courage to tell her father,
I am senseless of your wrath.
He is like the ‘tyrannous breathing of the north’ that ‘shakes all our buds from growing’.
Both David Bradley (playing Cymbeline) and I wanted to show that theirs was the rage that comes from betrayal of what had been great love between them. This endows Cymbeline with the humanity he will need in the final scene and helps our reconciliation at the end. This was not an intellectual imposition on our part but arose from both of our instinctive responses to the scene as soon as we put it on its feet. There seemed to be something so immediate and intimate in the confrontation between them; a suggested matching of temperaments. It reminded me of other father/daughter conflicts—Cordelia and Lear, Juliet and Capulet— that, despite the hostility of the moment, show quite uncluttered channels of communication, open to great love as well as great antagonism.
Apart from the loyal Pisanio, whom Posthumus has left her as a kind of parting gift, Imogen has no ally. For most of the run in Stratford we emphasised the friendship between Pisanio and Imogen. Actors are often both tactile and insecure (maybe the former because of the latter), so I found myself accompanying every ‘good Pisanio’ and ‘true Pisanio’ with a clutch of Jim Hooper’s wrist or an arm round his shoulder. Wrong: he is a servant and she a princess, and when we came to re-rehearse the play for Newcastle, Bill Alexander encouraged me to be more regally distant with Pisanio. Stressing this gulf in status pays off later when Imogen must somehow believe Pisanio capable of murdering Posthumus. She has not been reared in an atmosphere of great trust, if Belarius’s descriptions of the court are accurate, but because of Pisanio’s connection to Posthumus she trusts him with all her plans.
Our production was simply staged at The Other Place, with the audience sitting very close to the action, in a rough circle of random wooden chairs. The first scene between Pisanio and Imogen (Act I, Scene 3) took place in what we imagined to be almost a hidey-hole, lit only by one candle, which seemed to symbolise the memory of Posthumus that we were conspiratorially keeping alive. We could talk almost in a whisper. Cries of ‘Imogen’ from the Queen down a corridor somewhere added to the dangerous atmosphere.
Imogen feels almost competitive with Pisanio in her devotion to Posthumus. As Pisanio describes watching Posthumus’s departure from the shore, Imogen interrupts and tops him every time:
Thou shouldst have made him
As little as a crow…
I would have broke mine eye-strings…
Nay, follow’d him, till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air, and then
Have turn’d mine eye and wept.
Because she and Posthumus have been brought up together, I imagine their relationship not unlike that of Cathy and Heathcliff. Childhood companions, twin souls sharing secrets, brother and sister suddenly become man and wife. Sexual knowledge opens the Pandora’s box of jealousy, fear of loss, mistrust and ignorance of the opposite sex. They are parted at a vulnerable stage in their development together. Sex has the power to make them strangers to one another, and it is that power that Iachimo exploits when he meets the exiled Posthumus in Rome.
Imogen betrays early on her suspicions of the ‘shes of Italy’ (of course in this case it is not just her mistrust of other women, but of Italy in general she is showing) and on parting with Posthumus she (again slightly self-dramatisingly) suggests that Posthumus might
woo another wife
When Imogen is dead.
One of the play’s themes is ‘too ready hearing’. Belarius tells how, with little resistance, Cymbeline believed him to be ‘confederate with the Romans’ through ‘two villains, whose false oaths prevail’d / Before my perfect honour’.
Posthumus (admittedly with quite tangible ‘proof’ contrived by Iachimo) believes Imogen to be unfaithful, and Imogen succumbs to Iachimo’s suggestions of Posthumus’s infidelity with what I found in the playing to be disconcerting speed. She soon realises what she’s done and blames herself with:
I do condemn mine ears that have
So long attended thee,
and, feeling guilty at her momentary lapse of faith, she proceeds to overcompensate Iachimo with her trust, to the point where the next morning, missing her bracelet, and through all the trials that follow, she never once suspects him.
I found Act I, Scene 6, when Iachimo first visits Imogen, one of the most exciting to play. Interacting with Donald Sumpter as Iachimo, the balance of the scene minutely and importantly altered every night. I had to negotiate subtly, delicately, how much to believe when, and how quickly. Both of us enjoy being unpredictable, but there are rules even to unpredictability. One has to guard against being different for its own sake and thereby destroying the credibility for one’s fellow actor.
For instance, if Don were to make Iachimo too smarmy, with Imogen’s already strong prejudice against Italians would she not see through him too early on? Likewise I had to give Don/Iachimo just the right ambiguity on ‘How should I be revenged?’ for him to be able to interpret it as a possible lead for his lascivious suggestion. I had to mean ‘What would you know?…You cannot understand the enormity of this betrayal… revenge is so inappropriate’, but say the line in such a way that Iachimo would be able to hear it as ‘I’m at a loss to think of a suitable revenge to match this crime. Have you any ideas?’
On nights when Don/Iachimo exaggerated his account of Posthumus, the Briton reveller, creasing up at the sighing French lover—crying:
O can my sides hold, to think that man, who knows… what woman is… will his free hours languish for assured bondage?
—I would deliver my line: ‘Will my lord say so?’ in an ‘Oh yeah?’ kind of way. If Don played it more delicately, I’d say it with a shadow crossing my face, but an attempt at lightheartedness in my voice.
In playing Imogen in most of her other scenes, I had the sensation of driving through like a steamroller, raging at her father, overriding Pisanio, letting off volleys of insults at Cloten and the Queen. There was an element of the boxing-ring as I entered the horseshoe-shaped arena at The Other Place, or later The Pit in the Barbican, for a two-hander, head-on contest with Cloten or the King and usually come off best, if only verbally. Here with Iachimo, on the other hand, Imogen is off-footed from the start. She begins with outrage at the intrusion of a stranger, and, instantly, on learning that he comes from Italy and from Posthumus, she is thrown into the opposite mood of ecstatic excitement. ‘Change you, madam?’ is Iachimo’s knowing understatement and Shakespeare’s stage direction, all in one.
This volatility of Imogen’s mood where Posthumus is concerned is the key both to her credulity and her over-quick forgiveness of Iachimo. From this point, the unconditional warmth and charm she extends to Iachimo as a fellow adorer of Posthumus is misinterpreted by Iachimo.
As in The Winter’s Tale and Othello, a woman showing open friendship for a man other than her spouse is misunderstood by a misogynist onlooker or a frightened husband through his ignorance of the complex range of a woman’s feelings.
Iachimo can undermine Imogen’s and Posthumus’s faith in one another by the same means that Iago can manipulate Othello. The thing you most prize you most fear losing. Living with that fear, in a world where propaganda perpetuates suspicion between the sexes, can become so unbearable that you break under the strain. You begin to want to believe the worst, in order to alleviate the pressure. I am sure this is why Posthumus is driven to say to Iachimo in Act II, Scene 4:
No swearing:
If you will swear you have not done’t, you lie,
And I will kill thee if thou dost deny
Thou’st made me cuckold.
Loss of faith in Imogen leads Posthumus to his famous diatribe against her entire gender (Act V, Scene 4). It is significant that Imogen’s reaction to the same emotion earlier on, in Act III, Scene 4, is not an equivalent railing against Posthumus and all men, but an echo of the prevailing misogyny of the world, placing the blame firmly in the female camp:
…some jay of Italy
Whose mother was her painting, hath betray’d him.
Our incidental score consisted of wind-chimes, suspended oil drums, the inside of a piano, stamping feet and human calls, all arranged expertly by Ilona Sekacz. It provided atmospheric percussion throughout the play. In the bedroom scene (Act II, Scene 2) a couple of delicate strokes on a wind-chime instantly conjured up a hot night cooled by a breeze and evoked (for me anyway) the cricket-singing that Iachimo speaks of.
Imogen is reading in bed. A sudden kick of an oil drum makes her jump out of her skin: ‘Who’s there?’ Her woman Helen enters and Imogen asks, ‘What hour is it?’
And Helen’s answer, ‘Almost midnight, madam’, was delivered in such a way as to suggest this is unusually late for Imogen still to be reading. When Helen settles Imogen down for a sleep and is about to blow out the candle, I played up Imogen’s nervousness by sudden fitful rhythms on:
Take not away the taper, leave it burning
and
if thou canst awake by four o’th’ clock, I prithee call me.
This is followed by Imogen’s prayer for protection against the ‘tempters of the night’, and, as if for added security, I kissed Posthumus’s bracelet, so soon to be slipped from my arm by Iachimo, just as she describes herself as having done next day in Act II, Scene 3. All of this signals a certain disquiet in Imogen that could spring from a deep-down unease about her earlier behaviour with Iachimo.
Iachimo has crept into Imogen’s chamber and is hovering over her sleeping form. Taking my cue from Iachimo’s speech, ‘one kiss! Rubies unparagon’d, / How dearly they do’t’, and tempted to play on the fine line separating seeming-guilt and innocence, I returned Iachimo’s kiss in my sleep. I justified the kiss by thinking of her later admission that she dreams of Posthumus every night. Neither Iachimo nor the audience are to know for sure at this point whether it’s the kiss of the actual Iachimo or the dreamed-of Posthumus that she is returning so sweetly. Again the proximity of the audience in this studio production gave the scene an almost voyeuristic edge, and for this reason I found the scene to be the ultimate in passive vulnerability.
If there are hints of Imogen’s unease in the bedroom scene, they grow to full-blown dread in the following scene with Cloten (Act II, Scene 2). We know she has both the guts and the wit to stick up for herself and make mincemeat of Cloten any day of the week, but this time she goes a bit too far with her insults and tips Cloten over into a maddened vengeful rage. Cloten can be dismissed as a fool, and I laughed at his ‘I’ll be revenged ’, but it was a laugh tinged with fear of a more dangerous man beneath. The loss of her bracelet has unnerved her.
Is she possibly nagged by some unformed notion of having done something wrong? Whatever she has done doesn’t deserve Posthumus’s order to Pisanio to kill her.
Second Metamorphosis: The Franklin’s Housewife
I am almost a man already.
At last comes a release, both for Imogen and for the actress playing her. In Act III, Scene 2, she receives a letter from Posthumus inviting her to meet him at Milford Haven. I sat on the bottom step in the aisle six inches away from the nearest member of the audience, who could read the letter over my shoulder. I didn’t sit there for long. As soon as I understood that Posthumus would be arriving imminently at Milford Haven, I leapt up—‘O, for a horse with wings!’—and almost took flight. This speech provides an all-too-rare opportunity for vein-bursting joy. The danger for me is that exhilaration runs away with me and my tongue runs away with the words—though it is important that Pisanio gets no chance to stem the tide and interrupt. To avoid detection in her escape from the palace to Milford Haven, Imogen dresses as a ‘franklin’s housewife’ (a franklin was a landholder of free, but not noble, birth). It is an impulsive solution intended
for the gap
Which we shall make in time, from our hence-going
And our return, to excuse.
But after the events on her arrival in Wales, that return becomes out of the question. She won’t go back. She speaks of ‘the perturb’d court… whereunto I never purpose return’, and when Pisanio suggests, ‘If you’ll back to the court…’, she jumps in on him with ‘No court, no father, nor no more ado…’
Maybe subconsciously she knew from the beginning that she was initiating a final break. Here on a Welsh hillside, humbly dressed, she learns of Posthumus’s intent to kill her for her supposed adultery. The news itself as good as kills her at first. She begs Pisanio to obey Posthumus’s orders as without Posthumus in her heart there’s no point to her life.
She doesn’t believe that Posthumus actually thinks she’s false. Her honour is beyond question: ‘I false? Thy conscience witness.’
As she constructs it, he has fallen for someone else and falsely accuses her just to get her out of the way. She not only confronts literal death by Pisanio’s sword, but a death of faith:
All good seeming,
By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought
Put on for villainy.
But Imogen doesn’t feel suicidal for long. The confrontation brings out the fight in her. At this point, things tended to get dangerous. The advantages of the small space here became disadvantages. I found it hard to contain the size of Imogen’s emotions within that little wooden ‘O’. I wanted to yell from the Welsh mountain tops. When Jim as Pisanio threw his sword away and when I cast Posthumus’s love-letters aside, quite often they landed at the audience’s feet. Both had to be retrieved during the action, and it’s hard to conjure up in one’s imagination the loneliness of a clearing in a wood near Milford Haven while grovelling among Hush Puppies and handbags! From this point of view things improved in the larger Pit when we transferred to London.
Until this point, Imogen has identified herself with Britain to such an extent that when Iachimo (in Act I, Scene 7) plants doubts in her mind as to Posthumus’s fidelity, she says, ‘My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.’
The word ‘Britain’ also encapsulates a set of values for her. Values that she has learnt from childhood and which she also sees in Posthumus. In her book, Cymbeline has also ‘forgot Britain’ by banishing Posthumus:
It is your fault that I have lov’d Posthumus:
You bred him as my play-fellow.
With those words it seems she is saying, ‘You taught me my values and now you’re reneging on them. It’s up to me and Posthumus to carry the flag for all that is good about Britain until you come to your senses and see through that wicked Queen who has led you up the garden path.’
Now through the trauma of Act III, Scene 4, Imogen manages to extricate her belief in Posthumus from her belief in herself, and both from her belief in Britain:
Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day? Night?
Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume
Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t:
In a great pool, a swan’s nest: prithee think
There’s livers out of Britain.
In that moment, the ‘strain of rareness’ she had earlier rather chest-thumpingly declared in herself becomes real. She becomes larger.
Having given up her royal identity, she next gives up her sexual identity. Unlike Rosalind and Portia, Imogen does not volunteer to disguise as a boy. It is Pisanio who advises, ‘You must forget to be a woman’, and unusually, in Imogen’s case, maleness does not bring with it authority, but rather it means she must ‘change command into obedience’, as Pisanio puts it.
She is already well along the road to forgiving Posthumus, not a little thanks to Pisanio’s constancy. Pisanio’s proposal is that she travel to Italy in the service of the Roman general Caius Lucius, where she can at least be near Posthumus, and who knows what might happen then? The Princess who has barely stepped outside her castle bedroom jumps at his suggestion:
O, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on’t,
I would adventure.
The musical movement of this scene is so clearly indicated by Shakespeare that we just had to surrender to his ‘stage directions’ and, provided we didn’t dodge the full force of the emotions, we could then ride it out, so to speak. To begin with, each character describes how the other should be behaving:
Wherefore breaks that sigh
From th’ inward of thee?
and
Put thyself into a ’haviour of less fear [etc.].
Imogen says nothing after reading Posthumus’s letter, and Shakespeare gives Pisanio eight lines aside to cover her silence, beginning with:
What shall I need to draw my sword? the paper
Hath cut her throat already.
Then Imogen’s white-hot anger takes over the scene, leaving Pisanio winded and gasping, until, exhausted, she allows him to speak. He begins tentatively, and she still manages to rush in and contradict him until, after insisting that ‘some Roman courtesan’ has caused Posthumus’s treachery, Jim/Pisanio forgot his servant status, grabbed me by the shoulders and fairly shook me on the line ‘No, on my life.’ This shocked me first into bewilderment—‘Why, good fellow, what shall I do the while?’—then determination, rejecting all idea of returning to court, and then giving Pisanio the cue, ‘I am most glad you think of other place…’
In a quieter, more compliant, frame of mind Imogen takes on his plan. The scene ended with Pisanio handing me back Posthumus’s bundle of letters and a quiet, serious ‘I thank thee’ from a finally lucid Imogen.
I am baffled and disappointed that Shakespeare doesn’t reward Pisanio for what I feel to be the most virtuous conduct of all. In his final acts, Shakespeare often leaves the odd end untied so I think he just forgot about Pisanio in the tangle of other plots.
I felt for Pisanio who, as a servant, risks great punishment in disobeying orders. He knows Imogen is true without needing proof. He has been ordered by his master to kill her. He refuses. He thinks on his feet and formulates a plan to save the situation. He was given the power to kill and he didn’t use it. Compare his lines in Act III, Scene 2—
If it be so to do good service, never
Let me be counted serviceable
—with a war criminal’s ‘I was only carrying out orders.’ Surely the woman who went against her King/father’s orders when she thought him corrupt would approve of Pisanio’s attitude. I felt this so strongly I even changed a line in the final scene in Act V since no one acknowledges Pisanio’s role in the happy outcome of events. I addressed ‘And you relieved me to see this gracious season’ to Pisanio rather than to Belarius.
Pisanio’s virtue comes from his sense of honour—
—just as Iachimo’s capacity for evil comes from his lack of self-love. To a great extent we judge others according to what we know of ourselves. Iachimo refuses to believe in love and fidelity between Posthumus and Imogen because he feels incapable of such feelings himself. This is why Imogen’s belief in herself is so important. It feeds her belief in others, which involves faith and hope. To hope requires the courage to face the risk of loss, and courage is a quality that Imogen is constantly called on to demonstrate.
Third Metamorphosis: Boy to Housewife
Cook to honest creatures…
I’ll love him as my brother.
In her new masculine disguise, determined to bear her trials with ‘a prince’s courage’, Imogen is forced to reach a more quintessential definition of herself. She has had to slough off ‘Imogen’ like an old skin, and underneath she finds ‘Fidele’, the faithful one. In this state, Shakespeare has prepared her to meet her brothers, who have been exiled since birth and have been reared in the wild by the kindly Belarius. The meeting is geographically an outrageous coincidence, but it is spiritually timely. She is alone and ravenous in the forest near Belarius’s cave and she is very aware of the limitations of her physical courage (Act III, Scene 6):
If mine enemy
But fear the sword like me, he’ll scarcely look on’t.
But she also knows her best source of strength: ‘I should be sick, / But that my resolution helps me.’
In Act I, Scene 7, she had said
As my two brothers, happy… blessed be those,
How mean so e’er, that have their honest wills.
Now, she’s testing these ideal sentiments for real, and on meeting her brothers and finding them to be ‘kind creatures’, she can confirm
what lies I have heard.
Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court;
Experience, O, thou disprov’st report.
The costumes for this production were all drawn from stock, and within an agreed basic framework we were free to choose the clothes we felt best fitted our image of the character. My image of Imogen was something of Boudicca and something of Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast—the smutty rebel child grown into wilful adult with amazon potential. I chose a rough, simple velvet dress to begin with, and on becoming a boy I wore a costume based on the standard ‘look’ of the other men: velvet jerkin, white shirt, belt, braces, and brown trousers tucked into mid-calf boots. My thick, not-too-groomed red mane (a wig) got plaited, and my gold headband was replaced by a brown one giving me a faintly Viking look. I most decidedly didn’t want to wear my own short hair at this point, as that was my image for the more gamine Viola (who I was still playing in repertoire), and I needed to differentiate between them.
With her boy disguise the pressure is somehow off Imogen and off the player of Imogen. The emotional drive relaxes, and there is more opportunity for comedy and lyricism. Shakespeare even takes her to the very edge of acceptable irony with ‘would… they had been my father’s sons’, at which point I willingly gave in to audience titters, though my character was in earnest. I learnt to dare to give a pause after such a line—I say ‘dare’ because one risks a laugh-less silence and egg on the face. The pause should be just long enough to let the audience know that they can laugh—that the actor intends the joke, though the character is innocent of it—an enjoyable knife-edge to tread.
From the confrontation with Pisanio’s sword (which incidentally she forgot to fear at the time) to the first meeting with the cave-dwellers—‘if you kill me for my fault, I should / Have died had I not made it’—Imogen has felt herself dangerously close to death, and this has led her to philosophise:
Clay and clay differs in dignity
Whose dust is both alike
and
falsehood is worse in kings than beggars.
Not wildly original maybe, but quite a leap for a Princess reared in a palace as heir to the throne.
In her state of ‘sad-sickness’ she is prompted to swallow the drug Pisanio gave her from the Queen, and we next see her lifeless form carried on by Cadwal and lain on the ground.
This is the second occasion where I had to play drugged or asleep and was able to listen to the most beautiful passages of poetry in the play. First when Iachimo breaks into Imogen’s bedroom, and then when the two cave-boys speak ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ over Imogen’s ‘dead’ body. Incidentally, it is not only the cave-dwellers who believe Imogen is dead. Many of the audience were convinced of it too, if they happened to have nodded off when the doctor told them that his drug was harmless and capable merely of
locking up the spirits a time
To be more fresh, reviving.
I often heard a gasp or even a vocalised ‘Oh, no!’ at the point when I swallowed the drug. This is one of the advantages of being in a little-known play. Everyone knows about Juliet!
Lying there prone on the floor with my eyes closed, I tried to allow the words to inspire me, in preparation for my most difficult acting task ahead: the scene when I wake up next to a beheaded corpse that I believe is my husband’s. I knew I would have to trust the inspiration of the moment, and I lay there with my eyes closed wondering, ‘Will I make it? And what will come out of me this time?’, and I was rarely, if ever, satisfied with the result.
The scene is a minefield of the most fundamental acting problems. First I had to try to imagine a situation way outside my experience and which I hope will remain so. Shakespeare had already imagined the reactions of a woman in such a situation, and he had given her the words to express them. I had to bring my imagination into line with his. Secondly, there are two major traps in delivering a highly charged Shakespearean soliloquy: on the one hand, there is the temptation to impose a generalised emotion, to wash the stage with genuine tears, and drown out the words that would move the audience far more effectively; and at the other extreme there is the danger that you will have no feelings at all that night and will overcompensate by overacting. The golden rule is to trust Shakespeare and allow his words and rhythms to do their work. You are an instrument through which his music should flow. All much easier said than done.
The audience is never going to share your grief because they know the corpse belongs to Cloten. They are ahead of you and are now focusing on how you/Imogen will react, how you will deal with your grief, whether you will recover, and how you will move on. In that sense it is a bit of a public acting test, and Shakespeare is not at his most helpful when he asks Imogen to weep over Posthumus’s ‘martial thigh’ and ‘brawns of Hercules’ with only a headless stuffed dummy to help me! I’m comforted by the knowledge that both Ellen Terry and Peggy Ashcroft also found this speech fearfully difficult.
I tried to make my reactions as unpredictable as possible and deliver up just enough weeping and wailing to give the spectators a bit of fun as they watched Imogen trying to come to terms with the unacceptable from a few feet away.
Still semi-drugged, Imogen gropes about on the ground to ascertain where on earth she is. It is like the classic movie scene when the lover has stealthily crept out of the bed leaving only a dented pillow behind. When Imogen sees (as she supposes) the headless corpse of Posthumus, she begins with a wonderfully internal and naturalistic ‘I hope I dream’. Then, when she begins to process reality: ‘How should this be?’
Shakespeare often expresses the extreme with simple, monosyllabic words. The speech builds as Imogen tries to keep a grip on her sanity. She comes up with the not altogether sane idea that Pisanio is Posthumus’s murderer. She converts grief into rage. Still seeing herself as the heroine of her own story or ‘the madded Hecuba’ of a Greek tragedy, she rails at the gods. She has hitherto believed herself to have a special relationship with them, and that her destiny mattered to them. She feared them but she felt their protection. Now, ‘murder in heaven’ has been committed and the gods have turned against her.
From such a viewpoint she can believe even Pisanio is her enemy. She covers her face with Posthumus’s blood, and lies beside him united again with him. There is a feeling of ‘it’s us against the world’ in her speech, ‘that we the horrider may seem to those / That chance to find us’.
Desperation is about to lead her to a new disguise. The woman who had railed against ‘drug-damned Italy’ and the ‘Romish stew’ is about to switch to the Roman side.
When I slump in tears over the ‘corpse’, awaiting the arrival of General Lucius, I truly feel ‘thou thy acting task hast done’. I can hand over the stage to Posthumus. Again, another part of Imogen has ‘died’. She has shed her royalty, her femininity, and now she will surrender her national identity.
‘I am nothing,’ she tells the general, but still she answers to the name of Fidele.
Fourth Metamorphosis: The Roman Page
I am nothing.
Having washed my face and donned my Roman jacket for my fleeting, silent appearance in the battle scene, I then joined the rest of the company to lend musical aid (the studio production having more or less eschewed visual aids) to the descent of Jupiter in Posthumus’s dream. Bashing piano wires was the one point of relaxation I had in the evening, and I could listen to Nick Farrell as Posthumus repenting for having murdered Imogen—‘O Pisanio, every good servant does not all commands’—and wishing he was dead. He had wanted Imogen dead, but confronted with the bloody cloth that proves his wish has been fulfilled, he can’t bear a world without her, and his moral rigidity bends (Act V, Scene 1):
You married ones,
If each of you should take this course, how many
Must murder wives much better than themselves
For wrying but a little?
In battle he is then given the chance to kill Iachimo and doesn’t. Iachimo looks death in the face and is saved. The wild brothers are at last testing their princely blood in battle, and all the characters are being prepared for Act V, Scene 5, and the unravelling of their interwoven themes.
If we had planted the right seeds, Act V worked a treat. The play’s characters have to go through some almost impossible suspensions of disbelief—not recognising people two feet away, spotting rings and birthmarks they never noticed before—as for the next thirty minutes they learn what the audience already knows. In that sense the audience are like the gods and can look on with benign amusement (and often outright laughter). But in addition, if the play has worked, they will have undergone a journey alongside the players and had a mirror held up to them, just as the characters have.
Imogen looks at Posthumus, Posthumus looks at Iachimo, Cymbeline looks at Belarius and Lucius, and all see some reflection of their own errors. There is a feeling of ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’ We have seen good Italians and bad; good Britons and bad; good women and bad. The barriers of sex, birth and nation have been broken down. We begin to honour the bonds instead of perpetuating the divisions. Forgiveness is within our range—‘Pardon’s the word to all,’ says Cymbeline. On refinding his family, Cymbeline describes himself as the ‘mother to the birth of three’. A society has been purged (admittedly with the help of the gods and the scapegoat Queen) and reborn. Glasnost is given a chance. Restored to her final role as Princess/Wife (with the help of a blow from Posthumus which provides her final reawakening), Imogen the individual recedes and merges with the whole as, in the final image of the play, we all kneel in a circle to praise the gods.