SAMUEL JOHNSON dismissed Cymbeline in a sentence:1
To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecillity, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.
Harley Granville-Barker did not go as far as Johnson in his condemnation, yet even he spoke of Shakespeare as a wearied artist.2 A study of the poet’s manipulation of his sources shows, however, that he was not too wearied to take considerable pains. He was looking, we may suppose, for a plot through which he could express the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. Realizing the weakness of Pericles, in which the hero and his family suffer undeserved trials at the hands of fortune, he wanted a story in which the disasters were caused more directly by human agency. Perhaps the popularity of Mucedorus, a feeble old play revived in 1607, led Shakespeare, or his company, to search for similar old romantic plays worth revival or adaptation, or for similar ‘mouldy’ plots which could be dramatized. Shakespeare had been reading Plutarch’s Lives while he was writing the Graeco-Roman plays, and in the last of these, Timon of Athens, the hero, after his selfimposed banishment, lives in a cave. A cave also figures in The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, then nearly thirty years old, written and published while the poet was still at school.3 In this play, which opens with a debate between Jupiter and the other gods and goddesses, the Princess Fidelia is in love with Hermione, a supposed orphan who had been brought up at court by his father, King Phizantius. Fidelia’s boorish brother, Armenio, discovering their love, fights a duel with Hermione, which is interrupted by the King. Hermione is banished. The name of the princess was adapted by Shakespeare for that assumed by Imogen (Fidele); Hermione, which Shakespeare well knew was properly a woman’s name, served as the heroine of his next play; the position of Posthumus Leonatus is not unlike that of Hermione in the old play; and Cloten’s pursuit of Imogen may be roughly compared with Armenio’s pursuit of Fidelia. In Act III we meet Hermione’s father, the exiled Bomelio, who resembles Belarius in some ways and, since he practises magic, Prospero in others. At the end of the play, by the intervention of Jupiter, the lovers are reunited and the King is reconciled with Bomelio. One may compare the vision of Jupiter in Cymbeline and the reconciliation of the King with Belarius. Of course, as J. M. Nosworthy says,4
It would be unwise to attach too much weight to such parallel features as a banished lover, a banished duke, a cave, and a sleeping potion, for these are part of the stock-in-trade of every writer of romance.
What is more significant is that both plays
present the banished lover as a pauper brought up at Court, both include a boorish brother, and both introduce Jupiter and use him, flagrantly as a deus ex machina. Just as Belarius recognizes Cloten though he has not seen him for many years, so Bomelio recognizes Armenio, and just as Imogen offers her breast for the mortal stroke, so does Fidelia.
The old play, therefore, provided Shakespeare with hints for his initial situation, for his pastoral scenes, and for his last act. But clearly it would not do as it stood. The plot was inorganic and arbitrary, with too little complication and not enough dramatic tension. It lacked also solidity of background. This Shakespeare provided by setting his scene in the early legendary period of British history, known to Elizabethans from Holinshed’s Chronicles, The Faerie Queene, Albion’s England, The Mirror for Magistrates, and from numerous plays from Gorboduc to King Leir, including the popular Locrine and Mucedorus. Shakespeare, as we have seen, had consulted some of these works a few years before, while he was writing King Lear.
There were considerable differences between the various accounts of Cymbeline. In The Mirror for Magistrates there is a fanciful tale of how Guiderius defeated a Roman army, thirty thousand strong, and of his challenge to meet Claudius in single combat. Holinshed tells how Cymbeline became king in 33 B.C. and that he reigned for thirty-five years; and that Christ was born during his reign is the only fact recorded by Spenser. As Cymbeline had been brought up in Rome, he was excused by Augustus from paying tribute. At some later date the tribute was again demanded and refused; but Holinshed, after some hesitation, ascribes this refusal to Guiderius. Holinshed mentions that British chroniclers claimed that the Romans were twice defeated, but that Latin historians claimed that the Romans were ultimately victorious. Spenser makes Arviragus the brother of Cymbeline. Shakespeare follows Holinshed in making Cymbeline the father of both Guiderius and Arviragus, though he makes him, and not Guiderius, refuse to pay the tribute.
Cymbeline’s reign coincided with the peace of Augustus; and it has been argued5 that the peace with which the play ends, and Cymbeline’s decision, despite the British victory, to pay the neglected tribute, may reflect James I’s rôle as peace-maker. Indeed, the play contains a number of references to more recent events. The significance of Milford Haven, not mentioned in the play’s sources, is that it was the place where Henry Tudor had landed to defeat Richard III and so found the Tudor dynasty. Daniel and Drayton, among others, referred to Milford in contexts which show that their readers, and Shakespeare’s original audience, would appreciate the significance. It has been suggested,6 moreover, that
With Imogen and the two boys out of Wales, audiences are expected to associate the Princess Elizabeth, Prince Henry and Prince Charles: Shakespeare signposts this message clearly in his repeated references to Milford Haven.
The legendary history of Brute, the son (or grandson) of Aeneas, described by the chroniclers, and touched on by poets and preachers, was linked in people’s minds with ‘the apocalyptic destiny of Britain’ and the aims of James I’s foreign policy.7
Professor Harold F. Brooks has shown8 conclusively that Shakespeare made extensive use of The Mirror for Magistrates in his dramatization of the refusal to pay tribute – not merely of Blenerhasset’s ‘Guidericus’, but also of four tragedies by Higgins in the 1587 edition. The lines (III. i. 46–7) –
Till the injurious Romans did extort
This tribute from us, we were free –
echo Higgins’s lines:
I sayd I would not pay them tribute, I,
They did extort the same by force, perdy …
Hee should not beare our freedom so away.
Earlier in the same scene the Queen speaks of Britain, fenced
With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats
… A kind of conquest
Caesar made here; but made not here his brag
Of ‘came, and saw, and overcame’. With shame –
The first that ever touch’d him – he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping –
Poor ignorant baubles! – on our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells mov’d upon their surges, crack’d
As easily ’gainst our rocks.
(21–9)
Higgins’s Caesar speaks of ‘our shatter’d ships … that else had bulg’d themselues in sand’; and he admits:
I haue no cause of Britayne conquest for to boast
Of all the Regions first and last with whome I werd.
Nennius speaks of how Caesar
for all his bragges and boste:
Flew backe to shippes …
The Monarche Caesar might haue bene ashamde
From such an Islande with his shippes recoyle.
Irenglas makes the same point in similar wards:9
When Caesar so, with shamefull flight recoylde,
And left our Britayne land vnconquerde first.
The killing of Cloten and Posthumus’ fighting in disguise may both have been suggested by Higgins’s story of Hamo, a Roman who puts on British garments so as to have the opportunity of killing Guiderius. He is afterwards slain and
Which downe the cleeues they did into the waters cast.
Holinshed mentions that Arviragus slew Hamo near a haven (and that Southampton was named after him) but he omits the hewing in pieces. Cloten’s head is thrown into ‘the creek behind our rock’, but his headless body has to be preserved so as to delude Imogen.
For the battle Shakespeare went to the Scottish section of Holinshed’s Chronicles, to the story of how a peasant named Hay with his two sons helped to defeat the Danes at the battle of Luncarty in A.D. 976. This story Shakespeare would have read at the time he was collecting materials for Macbeth, as it is sandwiched between the accounts of Donwald and Duncan. Perhaps the episode was intended as a tribute to Sir James Hay who ‘became Knight of the Bath on 4 June 1610, at the installation of the Prince of Wales’.10
Shakespeare still needed a plot to combine with those he had already, one which would dramatically postpone the reunion of the lovers and make it a reconciliation as well as a reunion. The obvious resource was a story of jealousy, and he looked for one like Othello or Much Ado about Nothing in which a husband is made to believe that his wife has been unfaithful by the slander of an Italianate villain. Boccaccio’s Decameron was available to Shakespeare in a French translation, though he could as easily have read the original. Here, in the ninth tale of the second day, Shakespeare found the popular tale of a wager on a wife’s chastity. Some Italian merchants at an inn in Paris deride the idea of a female chastity and Bernabo of Genoa is provoked by Ambrogiuolo to bet on the chastity of his wife, Ginevra. On going to Genoa, Ambrogiuolo realizes that he cannot seduce Ginevra. Concealed in a chest, he is able to observe the pictures of her bedroom, to steal a ring and other belongings, and to observe a mole on the lady’s breast. Bernabo is convinced that he has lost the wager and he orders his servant to murder Ginevra. The servant, convinced of her innocence, spares her. She dresses in his clothes and takes service with the Soldan. One day she sees her purse and girdle in a stall in the market-place. When the truth comes to light, Ginevra reveals herself to her husband and forgives him. The villain is tortured to death:11
the verie same day that hee was impaled on the stake, annointed with honey, and fixed in the place appointed, to his no meane torment: he not onely died, but likewise was deuoured to the bare bones, by Flies, Waspes, and Hornets, whereof the Countrey notoriously aboundeth.
As Iachimo is forgiven, this torture is not used in Cymbeline; but in The Winter’s Tale Autolycus tells the Clown:
He has a son – who shall be flay’d alive; then ’nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest; then stand till he be three quarters and a dram dead; then recover’d again with aquavitae or some other hot infusion; then, raw as he is, and in the hottest day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown to death. (IV. iv. 772 ff.)
There is no doubt, from this single parallel, that Shakespeare had read the Boccaccio tale; and there are, in fact, many resemblances between the wager plot in Cymbeline and the story of Ginevra – the circumstances of the wager, the realization by the seducer that he cannot win it, the concealment in a chest, the description of the pictures and furniture, the mole on Ginevra’s left breast, the stealing of a jewel, the plot to kill the heroine, the relenting of the servant, the disguise of Ginevra as a man, and the final exposure of the slanderer are to be found in Shakespeare as in Boccaccio. But just as the poet went to Blenerhasset and Higgins as well as to Spenser and Holinshed for the historical material in Cymbeline, so it is now established that he went to an English version of the wager story. This was entitled Frederyke of Jennen, published originally in 1518, but reprinted in 1560. The story in its essentials is the same as Boccaccio’s, but it differs in a number of details. In the Decameron all the merchants present at the wager are Italian: in Frederyke of Jennen there are four merchants from different countries – Spain, France, and Italy. This may explain why in the corresponding scene in Cymbeline there are a Frenchman, an Italian, a Dutchman, and a Spaniard, the last two without speaking parts. In Frederyke of Jennen, as in Cymbeline, the wager is first suggested by the villain, and the odds are even, not five to one as in Boccaccio. The villain declares that he has lost the wager as soon as he sees the heroine; she is told that the chest contains jewels and plate, and agrees to keep it in her own chamber; the villain, on seeing the mark on her body, realizes that this ‘privy token’ will be convincing evidence; on his return he claims to have won his wager in the presence only of the holder of the stakes; the servant sends a bloody cloth soaked in the blood of a lamb as a proof of his murder of Ambrose’s wife; and Ambrose repents before he knows of her innocence. In all these details Shakespeare follows the English tale instead of the Decameron. There is no doubt that Shakespeare used both versions.
The joining of the wager story with The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, in which the heroine is a princess, and the linking of both with the historical material from various sources, meant that the atmosphere of the wager story was completely changed; but it has been argued12 that the bourgeois setting of the wager story led to the iterative imagery of the play – buying selling, jewels etc. If so, it is clear that Shakespeare uses the imagery for the purpose of defining spiritual and moral, as well as material, values.
In Shakespeare’s manipulation of these heterogeneous materials there is no sign of the wearied artist of Granville-Barker’s imagination. One might, indeed, complain of the dramatist’s sheer virtuosity as being too clever to be good. He displays extraordinary ingenuity throughout the play, as for example in the way in which Imogen is made to awaken beside the body of a headless corpse dressed in her husband’s garments. We are asked to accept the drug, like Juliet’s, which counterfeits death, Cloten’s desire to rape Imogen in her husband’s clothes, the curious funeral customs prevailing in the Welsh mountains, the juxtaposition of the loved and hated bodies, and Imogen’s delusion about the identity of the corpse. It is a measure of Shakespeare’s skill that we do accept these improbabilities, at least when Peggy Ashcroft or Vanessa Redgrave is playing Imogen. The acceptance is made easier by Imogen’s insult to Cloten in the phrase which rankles so deeply – ‘his meanest garment’. Equally cunning is the wager-scene, so written that a refusal by Posthumus to bet on Imogen would seem to be a lack of faith in her. A third example is the extraordinary final scene in which more than a score of knots are unravelled. Bernard Shaw complained that the surprises surprise nobody; but, of course, they are not meant to surprise the audience. The gradual unravelling is the performance of a ritual of reconciliation and forgiveness.
The theatrical virtuosity has been ascribed to ‘coterie dramaturgy’ with its deliberate self-consciousness,13 and in particular to the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher’s work. Certainly, as Thorndike pointed out long ago,14 there are many resemblances between Philaster and Cymbeline. In both plays there is a princess who is destined by her father to marry a boor, and there is the same contrast between Posthumus and Cloten as there is between Philaster and Pharamond. Both heroes are driven from Court and both denounce the female sex. Imogen is lost in the wilds like Arethusa, and dresses as a boy like Bellario, a name similar to Shakespeare’s Belarius, and to Bellaria, the heroine of Greene’s Pandosto who was rechristened by Shakespeare as Hermione. Both plays contain pastoral scenes and both were performed by Shakespeare’s company. The resemblance between the two plays extends to individual speeches, although it is not so great as some critics have pretended. The most striking verbal parallel is, in fact, between Philaster and The Winter’s Tale.15 But it is by no means certain that Philaster preceded Cymbeline. Shakespeare had already turned his back on tragedy in Pericles; and though Philaster may have been written as early as 1608, it may have been as late as 1610. As Shakespeare later collaborated with Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio, it would be unreasonable to deny a reciprocal influence. It is quite possible that they saw each other’s work during the process of composition.16
It may be said, however, that even if the technique of Cymbeline was not greatly influenced by Fletcher, there are signs that Shakespeare was exhausted as a poet. The play is full of echoes of his own earlier work and the style is sometimes strangely contorted. The echoes, however, may be explained as due to the poet’s ‘desire to gather up the strands of all his work and knit them together in the pattern of his new vision’.17 There are echoes of Lucrece, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare was treating afresh several of the themes he had dealt with during his career, and considering them again in the light not merely of his new intuitions, but also of the demands of the genre of tragi-comedy.
Of course the play is an odd mixture. The material taken from British legendary history is vastly different in kind from the Decameron; the masque-like vision contrasts violently with the scenes of the Roman invasion; classical Rome is mingled with Renaissance Italy; and there are other extraordinary disparities. The play is, in one sense, a bridge between the English Histories and the Roman plays;18 in another sense it is a link between pastoral romance and tragedy. Shakespeare’s task was rendered easier by the calculated anachronism in Renaissance painting and Elizabethan literature, as well as by a certain historical innocence. But it seems probable that the confusion of genres was designed to assist the creation of an imaginary world in which the poet’s new symbolic method could have unrestricted scope. The interpenetration of opposites gave a moral significance to the romantic material and set free the poet and his audience from the restrictions of realism.19