Queer Shakespeare

In some ways, Cymbeline might seem like an obvious choice for a queer analysis: its status as relatively obscure and lesser – or even bad – Shakespeare (even in relation to the other romances, now, with the exception of this play, increasingly popular – even Pericles!), its focus on disguise, on fractured families, on disobedience at various levels, its frequently tortuous language and its almost crazily elaborate narrative might all seem to make the play inescapably queer. In one of the best essays on this play, Amanda Berry – referring to Dr Johnson’s notorious critique of the play – comments that ‘Cymbeline is a staggeringly excessive play’.1 This excess can be understood as queer (as can the dramatic adverb ‘staggeringly’). My interest in this paper is in narrative excess rather than in the play’s linguistic excess, although this is remarkable too. As Ros King points out in her book on the play, Cymbeline ‘has a plot of such complexity that there are some thirty denouements in the final scene, except that they are not revelations to the audience, who know all but one of them already.’2 Thus – and crucially – it is not merely the case that the narrative is very complex, but that Shakespeare emphasizes it and in the play’s final scene gives us a complexity that is no longer necessary so that it can only appear like complexity for its own sake. Both this narrative excess itself and the remarkable and drawn-out emphasis on this excess in the entirely excessive final scene are things that we have learnt to recognize as queer.

On the other hand, the play contains no homoeroticism and remarkably little homosociality, at least by the standards of Renaissance drama. The most promising potential site of homosociality is the relationship between Posthumus and Iachimo. Still, even in this case the implications of their relationship remain latent and they get very little time together on stage. The frequent comparison between Iachimo and Iago is instructive here: Iago is present throughout the play and has deep homosocial bonds with Othello and with others, while Iachimo’s role, although crucial to the narrative, is brief: he has very little more time on stage than is needed for his narrative function. Perhaps a more promising source of homoeroticism is suggested by King: ‘Belarius and the boys, aided by the disguised Posthumus, win victory over the invading Romans in a “narrow lane” by effectively threatening the rape and effeminization of their fellow Britons.’3 In this persuasive reading, the spectre of male-male sexuality plays an important part in the British triumph and produces an all too familiar image of British masculinity and continental effeminacy. Nevertheless, this spectre is no sooner invoked than put aside: the image is not taken up in the rest of the play, nor is it echoed by the other events of the narrative, and I think it is altogether forgotten in the play’s final presentation of the conflict between Britain and Rome.

What is more, I would argue that Cymbeline ultimately reaffirms marriage, the family and the naturalness of the social hierarchy; or, at least, I would argue that the idea that the play is socially orthodox is a reading of the play’s conclusion that is easy to defend. The marriage between Imogen and Posthumus becomes a regular union after having a somewhat uncertain status throughout the play, primogeniture is re-established and the inherent nobility of the two princes who have been brought up as mountaineers demonstrates that social rank is natural (a point also made in The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, of course). From this point of view, then, it could be argued that the play ranks as one of Shakespeare’s more conventional plays. My purpose here is not to settle the questions I have raised in this and the preceding paragraphs: that is, I do not intend to pronounce that Cymbeline either is or is not queer Shakespeare (or, at least, queerer than any other of his plays). Instead, I want to use the play to think about the ways in which we define queerness: subject matter, which, as I have shown, does not really apply here, is the most obvious of these, but we should also include the use of language and narrative and the relationship among these and other factors. I want to consider the extent to which what we think of as queerness and what we think of as normativity can coexist.

I’ll begin with the issue of identity. In Lee Edelman’s influential formulation, queerness is not to be seen as an identity, but rather as something that troubles identities of all sorts.4 And indeed, identity is arguably the most important issue in Cymbeline and is usually troubled. Nancy Simpson-Younger has pointed out that ‘Cymbeline is a play about the construction of identity, but it never seems to have a stable identity itself.’5 Identities of all sorts are troubled in the play, including the generic identity of the play itself (although this will not be my concern here), so I want now to look at some of the ways in which the play puts identity in question. We could say that the primary source of identity – especially in a patrilineal society and especially at the royal level – is the family, but families in Cymbeline are noticeably odd and incomplete. Cymbeline himself, for instance, has only a daughter to inherit his kingdom; his wife is dead and his sons are missing and presumed dead. On the other hand, his wife has a son from her previous marriage. Cloten’s existence complicates the royal family and the question of succession; it also puts him and Imogen in a very queer relationship indeed: he and Imogen are siblings, more or less, but this bond apparently does not rule out the possibility of their marriage: the only objections to their marriage raised in the play are that Imogen is already married and that Cloten is unworthy of her. The fact that they are step-siblings does not seem to bother anyone in the play.

The character of Posthumus troubles identity even further. For one thing, his family is even more incomplete than the British royal family: not only does he, like Imogen, have two dead brothers (of course, it turns out that his brothers really are dead), but both his parents are dead as well. In fact, his father died before he was born and his mother died at the moment of his birth. In other words, Posthumus has as little family as it is possible for a person to have. While Imogen seems to illustrate the ways in which royal succession can become complicated (certainly a common enough theme throughout Shakespeare’s career), Posthumus seems to be situated at the very limits of biological possibility. Furthermore, although marriage is presumed to create a socially legible and meaningful relationship, his own marriage to Imogen fails to do this. While the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus will ultimately be celebrated and reaffirmed by the play’s conclusion, its status throughout the play – especially since it has not been consummated – makes it difficult to know exactly what and how it means. Even the possible political importance of the marriage between a British princess and a Roman patrician never emerges as an important issue in the play despite the war between these powers. Finally, for most of the play what we learn about his character is not encouraging, so his emergence as a suitable husband is arguably problematic.

For most of the play, then, marriage seems to be rather a queer thing instead of the epitome and guarantee of normalcy. Berry’s persuasive analysis focuses on precisely this fact, and specifically on the oddness of what she calls ‘marriage time’ in the play. Pointing out that Posthumus remains in Britain for some time after his banishment by Cymbeline and that Imogen is not punished for this, Berry argues that ‘the gap between the past act of banishment and the present not-consequences of it characterize the work of marriage time throughout Cymbeline, a temporality produced between performative utterance and the state of being that utterance presumably confers’.6 This is emphasized in the gap between the representation of the couple on stage and the summary we are given in the opening exposition. As Heather Love suggests in her essay on Macbeth (published, like Berry’s, in Shakesqueer), ‘Given the fact that the time of the family and the time of the couple define time itself, we might understand deviations from normative time – rather than any specifically sexual form of transgression – as queer’.7 The queerness of the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, who are, after all, the play’s central couple, queers the whole world of the play. The shifting meaning of their marriage bond, the difficulty involved in figuring out its weight in the world of the play, makes the play’s meaning as a whole difficult to determine. The marriage of a princess, especially of one who is the heir to the kingdom as Imogen is at the beginning of the play, should be firmly a part of dynastic time, but this appears to be impossible in Cymbeline.

Identity does not only inhere in the descent and pedigree enabled by marriage, however. In a society like Shakespeare’s, with its sumptuary laws, clothing also marks – and may even establish – the rank that is a basic part of Renaissance identity.8 Cymbeline has an unusual focus on clothes and accessories, particularly in relation to Cloten and Imogen. In Imogen’s case, the primary accessories are the bracelet Posthumus gives her as a token of his love and the ring he wagers on her chastity – both, in their perfect circularity, attesting to the untouched vagina that Imogen, the wife who is still a virgin, must simultaneously embody and represent in order to keep Posthumus’ favour. This dual function is, I think, precisely the problem in Cymbeline. The point is that embodiment is not enough in the world of the play (and perhaps not in any world): as the play demonstrates numerous times, that which is true in the body must also be represented so that it is apparent to sight. To some extent, it is in the turn to representation made so frequently throughout the play that Cymbeline is queerest. The action of the play serves (however temporarily) to separate embodiment and representation and to substitute (again, temporarily) a queer world of ever-shifting relationships, statuses and genders for the patrilineal descent on which the world of the play depends.

The representation is seen in clothes as well as in jewellery, of course. The most obvious example is Imogen’s disguise as a boy, but more interesting to me in the context of this paper is her insult to Cloten and its consequences. Fairly early on, Imogen, at the end of her patience after Cloten’s attempts at courtship, compares him unfavourably to her husband:

His mean’st garment,

That ever hath but clipp’d his body, is dearer

In my respect, than all the hairs above thee,

(2.3.134–6)9

The insult rankles, as we see when Cloten repeats it after she leaves. Later on, when he goes in pursuit of her he actually wears Posthumus’ garments; and when he faces Guiderius, whom he takes to be a peasant, he attempts to overawe him with these borrowed clothes:

	Thou villain base,
	Know’st me not by my clothes?
guiderius	No, nor thy tailor, rascal,
	Who is thy grandfather: he made those clothes,
	Which (as it seems) makes thee.

(4.2.80–3)

Both men are right: Cloten’s borrowed clothes do accurately show his noble rank, but as Guiderius points out, Cloten’s nobility inheres only in the clothes. For Imogen, while Cloten is of high status, he is not Posthumus and can never replace him. For Guiderius, Cloten’s high status is both inauthentic and beside the point.

Of course, Guiderius does not know Posthumus at this point, but he accurately estimates – or diagnoses – the difference between what Cloten represents and what he embodies. In one of the oddest moments in this very odd play, Imogen shows less discernment, however. When she wakes out of the trance into which the drugs have put her, she sees Cloten’s headless body and makes a mistake that is very nearly fatal:

A headless man? The garments of Posthumus?

I know the shape of’s leg: this is his hand:

His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh:

The brawns of Hercules.

(4.2.308–11)

Imogen slips from representation, in accurately recognizing her husband’s clothes, to embodiment, insofar as she infers that it is her husband’s headless body that she sees.10 It is a queer error, and one that threatens to undermine the union of representation and embodiment that Shakespeare must bring about if the play is to end happily. Cloten is in many ways the crucial character from this point of view, as the contrast between his high status and his extraordinarily low-grade nature would appear to indicate a serious problem with Cymbeline’s social hierarchy. This problem is solved both by the fact that he is only the king’s stepson and by his death. That it is Guiderius who kills him is itself significant, as the split between representation and embodiment is enacted in this scene by the difference between Cloten, who enjoys the rank of prince without deserving it, and Guiderius, who is inherently princely but enjoys none of the benefits of that rank.

Representation is a problem elsewhere in Cymbeline, as well. The best example of these problems (or, at least, the example that sets the greater part of the play’s plot in motion) undoubtedly arises in Iachimo’s visit to the chamber of the sleeping Imogen, or rather in his representation of this visit to Posthumus. First he describes her jewels, which he employs as testimony to Posthumus that he really was in her chamber. As Katherine Gillen has pointed out, however, Iachimo’s sense of what representation means is mistaken: ‘Iachimo has misrepresented the proper relationship between Innogen’s chastity and her jewels. He reconfigures what should be a relationship of signification, with the jewelry representing but not replacing Innogen’s value, as a commercial relationship of exchange, with Innogen’s chastity presented as a fungible commodity’.11 Like Imogen in the scene in which she discovers the headless corpse, Iachimo is mistaken not in what he sees but in the conclusion he draws from what he sees. His theory of representation is that it forms part of a general and economic system of exchange, which leads him to regard women’s sexuality as only an element in this system. In contrast, Imogen jumps to the wrong conclusion based on evidence that should not be regarded as conclusive. These two errors can be seen as paradigmatic for the way in which Shakespeare presents representation in Cymbeline. The process of looking at something and making a judgement based on it, something that is obviously essential for theatre audiences, is queered in the play.

The most important example of embodiment for Iachimo and for Posthumus (and, indeed, for the play as a whole) is Imogen’s birthmark, which Iachimo sees when he has himself entered her bedchamber while she sleeps:

On her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops

I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip. Here’s a voucher,

Stronger than ever law could make.

(2.2.37–40)

Throughout this scene we see Iachimo carefully making mental note of everything he sees in the chamber, but it is the birthmark that he sees as decisive. And it turns out that he is right. When Iachimo returns to Italy and describes the chamber and Imogen’s jewellery in considerable detail, Posthumus continues to doubt his word, but the mention of the birthmark changes everything:

	You do remember
	This stain upon her?
posthumus	Ay, and it doth confirm
	Another stain, as big as hell can hold,
	Were there no more but it.

(2.4.138–41)

For Posthumus, the body is a kind of evidence that cannot lie.

Posthumus is wrong, as are Iachimo and Imogen, but it is easy to be wrong in Cymbeline, a play that queers our sense of what dramatic representation means. I have already mentioned Berry’s point about the discrepancy between what we learn from the (unusually long) exposition at the beginning of the play and what we actually see on stage; other examples can be found throughout the play. Nor are these discrepancies restricted to the audience. For instance, Bruce Smith notes that at one point ‘The onstage spectators see Posthumus strike to the ground a man he takes to be a traitor; the onstage audience hears a different story from Posthumus’s servant Pisanio’.12 This split between what we see and what we hear – the two modes of dramatic representation – is crucial to the play. In fact, Smith suggests that ‘the real issue in the final scene of Cymbeline’ is ‘seeing versus speaking’.13 Given that there is no real suspense left in the plot (at least for us; the characters are still in the dark), he has a point. For me, the implications of this point are highly significant. In so often and so decisively divorcing what we see and what we hear, Shakespeare prevents us from seeing dramatic representation as something that is relatively unproblematic for the audience and forces us to consider representation separated from what it represents.

In making the two modes of dramatic representation non-self-identical, Shakespeare queers representation in Cymbeline and makes it the focus in much of the play. Jeremy Lopez has argued that this focus on representation is to some extent typical of Renaissance drama: he writes that ‘language, character, action become, rather than the subject of representation, sites for admiring the act of representation itself’.14 But while it is certainly the case that representation in Renaissance plays often appears to be doing much more than simply conveying facts or emotions, representation emerges as the subject of Cymbeline to an extent that is unusual and, I think, unprecedented.15 In this play, we are certainly invited to admire the act of representation, but we are also reminded again and again that we cannot be sure either of exactly what is represented or of whether the visual or the verbal mode of representation is to be regarded as more trustworthy. A useful comparison is with the Dover cliff scene in King Lear. There is an obvious difference between what Edgar describes and what we see, but we are never in doubt that what we see can be trusted. In contrast, Cymbeline returns obsessively, over and over, to doubt. The queerness of representation is not something that the play can ever overcome.

Furthermore, although we all know that Posthumus is wrong in his reaction to Iachimo’s speech, the play does endorse the idea of the body as a voucher – or, to put the point in the terms I have been using in this essay, it endorses the idea that embodiment trumps representation. A particularly good example is provided by the identification of the two lost sons of Cymbeline in the last scene. Belarius, whenever possible, has tirelessly pointed out that these young men act like princes and not like the mountaineers they appear to be: that is, they embody their royal status instead of, or to a greater extent than, their humble upbringing. Confirmation of their status is also found in the immediate emotional connection (highly stressed in the play) between the princes and the boy who will turn out to be not only a woman but also their sister. But in order to be accepted as princes, their embodiment must be represented to Cymbeline himself. Belarius begins with the younger son:

he, sir, was lapped

In a must curious mantle, wrought by th’ hand

Of his queen mother, which for more probation

I can with ease produce.

(5.5.361–4)

The proof that the supposed Cadwal is actually Arviragus, second in line to the throne, can be established by a piece of representation, a garment like those that deceived Imogen. The turn from false to true representation is a hopeful sign in Cymbeline.

For Guiderius, who will after all be the next king, the burden of proof is higher, however. Immediately after the lines I quoted above, and without responding to them, Cymbeline refers to this proof:

cymbeline	Guiderius had
	Upon his neck a mole,
	a sanguine star;
	It was a mark of wonder.
belarius	This is he,
	Who hath upon him still that natural stamp:
	It was wise Nature’s end in the donation
	To be his evidence now.

(5.5.365–9)

When Imogen mistook Cloten’s headless corpse for her husband, she let embodiment depend on representation. Now, in this final scene, at the political climax of the play (if not the emotional one) we pass from representation to embodiment once again, but this time not logically – if this corpse wears my husband’s clothes, it is my husband – but sequentially – first, the less important son can have his status proved by representation and then the more important son can have his proved by embodiment. What’s true of this passage is true of the play’s conclusion as a whole: an embodiment that is ultimately heteronormative is paramount, but the queer power of representation is not completely excised.

The importance of this queer representation to Cymbeline (despite its triumphant re-establishment of patrilineal descent) can be seen in two aspects of the conclusion. The first of these is the story of Posthumus. It is important to remember that one of Shakespeare’s tasks in the conclusion of the play is to make Posthumus a more estimable character after what has been a very shaky start. Part of this task is done through his success at fighting and part through his resignation in the face of death. But what is most important in this connection, I think, is the masque in the penultimate scene. This masque features Posthumus’ entire family (i.e. people he has never known and to whom the audience has no connection) and the god Jupiter himself, who puts what he calls a ‘tablet’ (5.4.109) on Posthumus’ chest, after which they all vanish. When Posthumus awakes, he remembers the masque as a dream; the only tangible sign of it is the tablet, which he calls a ‘book’ (5.4.133). Significantly, he hopes that the tablet or book will not be ‘as is our fangled world, a garment / Nobler than that it covers’ (5.4.134–5). Everything leads us to see the text as something that embodies the truth, but the shifting terms used for it – as well as the fact that Posthumus is unable to understand it – should be enough to let us know that this text – potentially, as his language suggests, a garment that anyone could wear – is yet another example of queer representation.

The text, now called a ‘label’ (5.5.431) – or, in other words, either a small part of a garment or an addition to a text (both meanings would have been available to Shakespeare) – is interpreted in the next and final scene by Philarmonus, the court soothsayer, so the meaning is ultimately fixed even if the name is not.16 The lack of fixity here is significant. As the audience would of course be able to see the text, the use of multiple synonyms, not all of whose connotations can easily be reconciled, would have the effect of keeping the gap between embodiment and representation (literally) front and centre. The main importance of this text is that it ties Posthumus and his marriage to Imogen directly to the restoration of the princes and the prosperity of the realm. On the other hand, that’s not saying much. As everyone has recognized, the final scene of Cymbeline is crowded with revelations – indeed, far too many and done in far too much detail. The interpretation of the text would not have been missed and really contributes nothing to the play’s ending. Sarah Wall-Randell has argued ‘The last scene of the play underscores the sense that Posthumus’s book represented a false or empty interpretive crux’.17 Indeed, I would argue that its unimportance is stressed by the fact that it is the final revelation in this crowded scene, coming just before Cymbeline’s final speeches. This position might seem like the place of honour, but I think instead that it is anticlimactic and is experienced primarily as yet another delay before the conclusion that has seemed both inevitable and imminent for some time.

The role of Jupiter’s text in this concluding scene is part of the second way in which the queerness of representation remains important to Cymbeline despite the re-establishment of a patriarchal order that had often seemed to be in jeopardy through the play. Here, I refer to what I see as Shakespeare’s foregrounding of telling (rather than showing). This foregrounding begins at the beginning of Cymbeline, which features a lengthy scene of exposition. At this late stage in his career, Shakespeare was obviously capable of conveying the information necessary for the spectator more briefly and efficiently, so I think we must see the long and clumsy exposition as a deliberate choice. At the end of the play, telling has gotten entirely out of hand. First, there is the elaborate masque I mentioned above. While masques were undeniably very popular at this point and the inclusion of a masque could arguably be seen as a crowd-pleasing strategy, a comparison with The Tempest, written quite soon after Cymbeline, is instructive. The masque in that play is part of the marriage ceremony and thus functions as a way to heighten the importance of the scene: it makes perfect dramatic sense. In this case, however, as I have already pointed out, the information is not especially important and the masque feels more like an interruption towards the end of what is already (by Shakespeare’s standards) quite a long play.

As should be clear to everyone, the final scene carries the idea of telling to an extreme that could be considered ridiculous.18 It is generally the case that a play’s final scene solves narrative complications, but in the last scene of Cymbeline more narrative complications are solved than is strictly necessary and they are solved in much greater detail. At this point, we could speak of a split between the narrative and the way in which it is conveyed. If we paraphrased Cymbeline’s narrative, we would have a story about how a family – and not just any family, but the central family of the world of the play – is re-established and both social and political order are safeguarded; if we described the way in which the story is presented, explicated and resolved, we would be obliged to speak of baroque complexity, delay, and what Renaissance people would have called ‘ambages’. From my point of view here, I would characterize the narrative as heteronormative and the method of conveying it as queer. Returning to the choice I mentioned in the first paragraph, I would say that the play is thus at once queer and not queer. But perhaps the important choice is not whether we see the Cymbeline as queer or not, but rather whether we see the play as an example of how heteronormativity can use queerness for its own purposes, or as an example of how queerness always underpins (and possibly subverts) its other.