Cymbeline Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal

  CYMBELINE

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Will Sharpe

  Introduction: Jonathan Bate and Will Sharpe

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Will Sharpe and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Will Sharpe

  In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings)

  and Will Sharpe (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Will Sharpe and Kevin Wright):

  Dominic Cooke and Emma Rice

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of Cymbeline and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-889-8

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: © Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  “And Viewed Her in Her Bed”

  The Critics Debate

  The Wager Plot

  The Dynastic Plot and the Pastoral Mode

  King of Britain

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  Cymbeline

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Cymbeline in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Cymbeline: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Dominic Cooke and Emma Rice

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  “AND VIEWED HER IN HER BED”

  Many commentators have observed how fitting it is that The Tempest is printed at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Its reflections on art, together with the resemblance of Prospero to a dramatist and his island to a theater, where a play is staged within the play by actors who are spirits, make it seem like a Shakespearean showpiece, a summation of his art. Far fewer commentators have considered how equally appropriate it is that Cymbeline is printed at the end of the First Folio. Though entitled The Tragedy of Cymbeline, it ends not with multiple deaths but with family reunion and political reconciliation. “Pardon’s the word to all” as revelations pile in upon one another, each of them “a mark of wonder,” while a nation is restored to peace: the play could equally well have been classed as a comedy or a British history. The stylistic experimentation almost serves as an ironic epilogue to the Folio’s tripartite division into comedies, histories, and tragedies: tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, Cymbeline would have been Polonius’ favorite work in the canon. Furthermore, in a manner analogous to the wittily extreme variations on classical motifs in Baroque art, both the narrative arc and the characterization revisit and revise, in a highly self-conscious manner, an array of favorite Shakespearean motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.

  For Shakespeare, the material provided the opportunity to reach back to some of his earliest work. As in Titus Andronicus, a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is brought onstage as a prop. It is Innogen’s bedtime reading: “She hath been reading late, / The tale of Tereus. Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up.” The allusion marks the moment at which Innogen is betrayed. An eyewitness account of a performance of the play in 1611 makes much of this scene, in which the machiavellian Iachimo emerges from a trunk. Watching for the plot, what Dr. Simon Forman seems to have remembered most vividly was Innogen’s bedchamber:

  Remember also the story of Cymbeline king of England, in Lucius’ time, how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlaws, of the which 2 of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but 2 years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons 20 years with him in a cave. And how [one] of them slew Cloten, that was the queen’s son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Innogen the king’s daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter, and how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others, to be presented to the king. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep, he opened the chest, and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, etc. And in the end how he came with the Romans into England and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Innogen, who had turned herself into man’s apparel and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven, and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her 2 brothers were, and how by eating a sleeping dram the
y thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love’s apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, etc.

  “Viewed her in her bed … and after accused her”: whereas in Titus Lavinia’s quoting of Philomel’s tragic tale is the means to the revelation of her own rape, Iachimo can destroy Innogen’s reputation simply by looking at her. His removal of the bracelet from her arm is a symbolic violation of her chastity. In Shakespeare’s other rape story, the poem of Lucrece, Tarquin presses violently down on his victim’s breasts, but here Iachimo merely watches and reports, noting in particular an identifying mole on her left breast. It is the eyes of a spectator that do the undressing here, not the tearing hands of a Tarquin. When Iachimo himself alludes to the rapacious emperor—“Our” Tarquin, a fellow Roman—he rewrites the night scene of Lucrece in a lyrical mode: “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” The sibilance seems tender rather than sinister: “Softly press” suggests not only stealth, but also a lover’s touch. And “wounded” grossly understates the severity of Tarquin’s deed. This has the effect of sublimating the image of rape—Philomel gives up as in a dream, not in brutal reality as on the stage of Titus, thus making it easier for the audience to put itself in the position of Iachimo. To note and to wonder at the beauty of the sleeping Innogen does not seem to do any harm. Yet “yellow Iachimo” does work harm, and it takes all the play’s twists and turns, including an apparent death and an actual physical violation when Posthumus strikes Fidele/Innogen, to undo that harm.

  The audience, then, is forced to confront its own complicity in Iachimo’s deed. His gaze is ours. Shakespeare makes the point by means of the chimneypiece in the bedroom. While in the room, Iachimo records “the contents o’th’story.” In his subsequent narration to Posthumus he reveals them:

  The chimney

  Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece

  Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures

  So likely to report themselves; the cutter

  Was as another nature dumb, outwent her,

  Motion and breath left out.

  The gaze is fixed on the naked Diana bathing: Iachimo and with him the audience stand in the position occupied in Ovidian mythology by the hunter Actaeon, who is metamorphosed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds as punishment for his desiring gaze upon the goddess of chastity. Shakespeare uses this reference to introduce the motif of auto-destructive sexual desire. The poetry almost makes us forget that we never saw the chimneypiece: what we witnessed was the sleeping figure of Innogen, as mediated through the language of Iachimo’s gorgeous but prurient soliloquy.

  The art of the chimneypiece, like that of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale, is said to have outdone nature. A few lines earlier, Iachimo has reported that the tapestry in the chamber told the story of Mark Antony meeting Cleopatra at Cydnus; here Shakespeare echoes back his own recent play in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra at Cydnus as being so desirable that “but for vacancy” the air would have joined the people of the city in going to gaze on her. The fictive chimneypiece recapitulates and goes beyond this: the artist’s figures seem on the verge of speech and movement, they are “likely to report themselves,” and though they are “dumb” they seem to make nature seem dumber. The air has vacated nature and entered the artwork. When we associate Diana with Innogen, the goddess seems to step down from the chimneypiece and become embodied on stage in the form of a lovely boy actor. The image effects in the audience’s mind what The Winter’s Tale feigns to deliver in performance: the metamorphosis of art into life. This is late Shakespeare at his most sophisticated and self-consciously inventive.

  Simon Forman’s report reveals how much detail an attentive spectator could grasp in a complex Shakespearean drama—though he does seem to have momentarily muddled Cloten and Posthumus, just as Innogen/Fidele does. The account also suggests that Shakespearean playgoers worried little about the plot’s dependence on frequent coincidences. Strikingly, though, this spectator’s enthusiasm peters out toward the end: the closing reunions and the descent of Jupiter in Posthumus’ dream do not merit a mention. The long and outlandish final scene is extremely difficult to stage effectively: it has sometimes been played as parody, is often heavily cut, and has even been comprehensively rewritten (by George Bernard Shaw).

  In the movement of the action from court to country, Cymbeline has a structure similar to the more popular and better-known Winter’s Tale. The two plays were probably written within a year of each other. The similarities are abundant. A man is falsely led to believe in his wife’s infidelity, with the result that his powers of reasoning are distorted and his language collapses into crabbed, dense invective against female wiles:

  Is there no way for men to be, but women

  Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,

  And that most venerable man, which I

  Did call my father, was I know not where

  When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools

  Made me a counterfeit …

  …

  … for there’s no motion

  That tends to vice in man, but I affirm

  It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it,

  The woman’s: flattering, hers: deceiving, hers:

  Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers:

  Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,

  Nice longing, slanders, mutability,

  All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,

  Why, hers, in part or all …

  In fact, throughout Shakespeare’s works, most of these vices and faults are to be found in the men’s parts, not the women’s. It is the woman—Marina, Perdita, Innogen—who restores harmony.

  In Cymbeline, as in The Winter’s Tale, she does so in combination with the forces of nature. The febrile air of court intrigue is cleared when we move outdoors and encounter princes disguised as shepherds. It is perhaps in Cymbeline that Shakespeare’s art of natural observation is at its most acute. The supposedly dead Fidele is apostrophized with the phrase “The azured harebell, like thy veins.” The color and structure of the harebell does precisely resemble those of human veins. Then there is Belarius speaking of how his two adopted sons show princely natures even as they are dressed as shepherds:

  O thou goddess,

  Thou divine Nature, thou thyself thou blazon’st

  In these two princely boys! They are as gentle

  As zephyrs blowing below the violet,

  Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,

  Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,

  That by the top doth take the mountain pine,

  And make him stoop to th’vale …

  The wind has the capacity not to move a violet but to flatten a mountain pine: Shakespeare likes that paradox.

  The association of Innogen with nature goes back to the bedroom scene. The key token of recognition, the mole on her breast, is “cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops / I’th’bottom of a cowslip.” Is there any other English poet save the country laborer John Clare who could have created such a simile, who has such an eye as acute as Shakespeare’s for the intricacies of natural history and the apt metaphorical application of them to human encounters?

  THE CRITICS DEBATE

  Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, Cymbeline has polarized critics and audiences in their judgments on its quality as a work of art. Yet despite an uneven critical heritage, the twentieth century going into the early twenty-first has seen a massive resurgence in its popularity on both page and stage, and recent criticism now widely accepts it as a masterwork that no longer needs to be explained away or apologized for.

  Historically, critics have been divided over the play’s mixed genre, improbable plot, characterization, moral texture, difficult language, bifurcated political position, and contrived ending. Dr. Johnson’s view
, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare, is typical:

  This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. 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 imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.1

  George Bernard Shaw was even more dismissive:

  I do not defend Cymbeline. It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.2

  But the play has always had its defenders. The early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt thought that:

  Cymbeline is one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s [sic] historical plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance … The reading of this play is like going on a journey with some uncertain object at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and heightened by the long intervals between each action. Though the events are scattered over such an extent of surface, and relate to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete development of the catastrophe. The ease and conscious unconcern with which this is effected only makes the skill more wonderful.3

  The last act, in which all the plot threads reconvene in a series of almost comically improbable revelations, has, like the play as a whole, been for a long time the object of critical scorn before more recently finding a reacceptance, especially in performance. Critics are now in fairly unanimous agreement on its dizzying, strange brilliance: “The finale is an intricate, beautiful machine in which an astonishing number of disguises are removed, misunderstandings swept away and reunions accomplished.”4