SOURCE: “Cymbeline and the ‘Blameless Hero,’” in English Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 3, September, 1964, pp. 259-70.

[In the following essay, Swander claims that Cymbeline is, in one sense, a modern and revolutionary text since it questions conventional Renaissance morality.]

The first audience for Cymbeline would have been more aware than we are likely to be of certain social and literary conventions with which Shakespeare was working, and one must therefore be grateful to William Witherle Lawrence, who has insisted that we read the play not in a shadow cast by modern or personal prejudices but in the light shed by a knowledge of the conventions established in the medieval and renaissance analogues, all those plays, ballads, and romances that compose the cycle of stories about a woman falsely accused of infidelity.¹ If we do so, we discover, as Professor Lawrence said we would, that the broad outline of Posthumus' actions—his boasting about his wife, his wager on her fidelity, his belief in false proofs of her guilt, and his order for her murder—is exactly that of the virtuous hero of a popular literature which, whether tragic or comic, never condemns the gullible lover of a slandered woman.² In tragedy he dies like Othello, our sympathy still his; and in comedy, as in Much Ado About Nothing, he blandly returns to the woman, who accepts and loves him as if nothing had happened. For a husband in such literature, Posthumus' boasting is a virtue; for a courtly lover and a knight, his response to the offered wager meets perfectly the demands of the chivalric code; and for a hero of romance, his credulity is proper and his murderous rage impeccably ethical. In the light of such facts, Lawrence's conclusion is apparently inescapable: Shakespeare “meant [Posthumus] to be a blameless hero.”³

But I should like to suggest that if while following Lawrence's advice we look more closely than he at the details instead of the outline of Posthumus' actions, a conclusion of a different kind slowly forces itself upon us, and we discover beneath the conventional surface of Cymbeline an interestingly unconventional play. What first becomes clear is that Shakespeare's hero, in spite of the orthodox exterior to which Lawrence rightly points, is in certain critical details unlike the hero of any other version of the story; and what I shall be concerned to demonstrate here is that whenever in the first four acts Shakespeare alters the traditional content of his story he does so to expose, beneath Posthumus' apparently perfect gestures, an essential meanness in the man himself and in the conventional virtue that he embodies. Such an exposure steadily implies that he is not worthy of his marriage with Imogen, and he does not overcome this implication until in the final act he rises above the courtly excellence for which the First Gentleman profusely praises him in Act One (I.i.17-54). I mean to say, then, that the progress of Shakespeare's wager story is in one sense Posthumus' progress toward an excellence defined largely by a rejection of conventional attitudes, and that the play, through deceptively small alterations of the stock responses in the analogues, comments ironically on the inadequacy of conventional heroics and virtues.

The alterations begin very quietly in the wager scene itself, where Shakespeare at once distinguishes Posthumus from the husbands in the analogues: he alone has had a previous quarrel about his wife, and only the kindness of a nameless Frenchman has saved him from a possibly fatal duel (I.iv.36-66). We understand from such an innovation that the argument with Iachimo that results in the wager is not an isolated incident. Posthumus is apparently the tourist of the joke book, loudly insisting that his wife is “more fair, virtuous, wise, chaste, constant, qualified, and less attemptable” than any lady in whatever land he visits. As I have said, in an orthodox romance such boasting is only the virtuous conduct of a proper hero; but here Posthumus' own words suggest a different judgment. Although continuing to believe that his quarrel in France was not “altogether slight,” he nevertheless thanks the Frenchman for extricating him from it and admits, “[I] was then a young traveller; rather shunn'd to go even with what I heard than in my every action to be guided by others' experiences.” Irony naturally develops, then, when he plunges into a situation so similar to the other as to imply that while his judgment may, as he says, be “mended,” he is not yet capable of being guided even by his own experiences. Thus he is already a slightly exaggerated, slightly foolish version of the virtuously boastful husband.

The second alteration is equally unobtrusive. An exchange of farewell gifts takes place in the first scene, Imogen gives Posthumus a ring and he gives her a bracelet. Both gifts figure in subsequent action: the ring as Posthumus' stake in the wager, the bracelet as part of Iachimo's false evidence against Imogen. This theft by the villain of something important to the husband is common in the analogues, but a love token from the wife as the husband's part of the wager is unique with Shakespeare. While the purpose of the innovation was certainly various, part of its effect is to create some concern over the wisdom of Posthumus accepting a wager that requires him voluntarily to part with a ring he has so recently sworn so fervently to wear till death (I.i.111-118). Imogen, we are entitled to feel, would never have done so.

More serious, however, is the letter that Posthumus writes. No other husband in the cycle of stories enters so far into the attempted seduction as to send a letter of “commendation” along with the villain. In the thirteenth century Von zwein koufmannen the husband sends word to his wife that he is going to be away for awhile,⁴ and in Westward for Smelts (1620) he promises not to warn her of the villain's purpose.⁵ This is as far as the analogues go. Shakespeare, however, makes Iachimo twice emphasize a letter as a condition of the wager, the second time with a double entendre one of the terms of which suggests that Posthumus is morally involved in the crime; for Iachimo will seal the wager only “provided I have your commendation for my more free entertainment” (I.iv.166-167). Furthermore, no reason exists two scenes later for Shakespeare to make Imogen read this commendation aloud except to emphasize Posthumus' complicity and to reveal the magnitude of his lie: “Imo. (Reads.) ‘—He is one of the noblest note, to whose kindness I am most infinitely tied. Reflect upon him accordingly, as you value your trust—Leonatus’” (I.vi.22-25). Such a letter—sent, as is again true only of Cymbeline, to a wife already subject to daily attacks from other quarters upon her chastity and her life—can only increase our suspicions about Posthumus' wisdom and worth. By pushing the cooperation of the husband to such a degree, Shakespeare hints that beneath the virtuous confidence ordinarily implied in such wife-testing lies a corrupting insensitivity to love's demands.

Yet Posthumus' actions do not decisively condemn him until the deception scene (II.iv). Once Iachimo has spied upon the sleeping Imogen, he is able to present three kinds of evidence against her: the description of her room, the bracelet he has stolen, and his knowledge of the mole under her breast. In this Shakespeare agrees with The Decameron (II.ix)—one of his sources—and disagrees with all other significant analogues, for ordinarily the villain possesses only one or two of these false proofs. He may have only a token—in Westward for Smelts it is a crucifix. He may—as in the thirteenth-century romance Dou Roi Flore et de la Bielle Jehane⁶—have, what is obviously more convincing, the knowledge of a secret birthmark. Or he may—as in the German tale Frederick of Jennen⁷ (Shakespeare's other probable source)—have both. But V. Frederic Koenig has noticed that when both kinds of evidence exist “the tokens appear to be superfluous, for the birthmark by itself provides complete and conclusive evidence for the traducer's purpose.”⁸ Thus when Boccaccio includes the even more superfluous description of the wife's room, he does not do so to strengthen the villain's case but to emphasize the confidence of the husband, who readily agrees that the description is accurate and that the tokens belong to his wife but insists that this proves nothing: the villain, he says, might easily “have learned from one of the servants of the house the fashion of the chamber and have gotten the things in like manner.”⁹ Only the birthmark, the climactic evidence, is for him conclusive. What is interesting in Cymbeline is that at the very moment when, by retaining all three kinds of evidence, Shakespeare appears to have relied most exclusively upon Boccaccio, his purpose is precisely the opposite. For Posthumus' faith in Imogen survives only the description of the room, he succumbs to the token. In Cymbeline it is thus the truly impressive knowledge of the birthmark that proves superfluous. On the basis of only part of the evidence, and that the weakest part, Posthumus calls Imogen a whore and brutally visualizes the imagined act: “She hath been colted by him” (II.iv.133).

It is clearly of the greatest possible significance that among all the versions of the cycle that include more than one kind of evidence, Shakespeare's hero alone capitulates to the relatively weak force of the token. But we must remember also that whenever a birthmark is entirely absent from the story a token alone suffices to justify the husband's belief; and with such conventionally sufficient evidence Shakespeare here combines both the description of the room and a relatively clever villain. The final effect of the episode is therefore complex. We do not conclude simply that Posthumus' reaction would have been uncensurable had he been traditional enough to resist all evidence short of the birthmark. Instead, his unconventional failure in the midst of a basically orthodox, expected credulity ends by destroying the whole naive logic of the context. And this is to destroy exactly what allows us, in traditional versions, to accept the ethics of the convention as anything but mean and ridiculous. Thus when two of the adapters of Cymbeline—William Hawkins (1759) and Henry Brooke (1789)—reconstruct that logic by making Iachimo succeed only through his knowledge of the mole, the result is to rescue for their purposes not only the blamelessness of Posthumus but the validity of the convention as well.¹⁰

Shakespeare's other innovations in the traditional deception scene continue the destruction. The cycle nowhere else offers, for example, a commentary of simple commonsense like Philario's. It is he who checks the hysteria with the theory that the bracelet has been lost or stolen, but after a moment Posthumus cries

                              Her attendants are
All sworn and honourable. They induc'd to steal it?
And by a stranger? No, he hath enjoy'd her.

(II.iv.124-126)

This is almost aggressively different from all other versions of the story. Most of them—including both of Shakespeare's probable sources, and even Hawkins' adaptation of Cymbeline—contain a trusted servant who betrays her mistress and helps the villain steal the tokens or see the secret mark. One's knowledge of such a convention adds to a feeling, strong in any event, that Posthumus should know better than to trust the servants ahead of Imogen. He might more reasonably have reacted as does the husband in The Decameron, who thinks immediately of the servants as the most likely source of the tokens. When Shakespeare denies Posthumus such a reaction, and then emphasizes the denial by giving the suggestion to someone else—to Philario, who has never even met Imogen—he makes his hero's credulity appear increasingly absurd and contemptible.

Actually, of course, Posthumus is right about the servants, wrong only about Imogen; and even this deepens the irony. For Shakespeare is not satisfied simply to omit the villain's accomplice. Both by Philario's plausible but mistaken suggestion that an accomplice may exist and by Cloten's unsuccessful attempt to bribe one of Imogen's servants in the scene immediately preceding (II.iii.71-90), he specifically reminds us of the unconventional loyalty that Imogen receives from those who serve her; and such loyalty functions as a contrast to the faithlessness of Posthumus.

Philario's role as commentator reaches its climax when—immediately after Posthumus gives in completely to the evidence of the bracelet—he says explicitly what has all along been implied:

                                                                                          Sir, be patient.
This is not strong enough to be believ'd
Of one persuaded well of—

(II.iv.130-132)

But Posthumus wildly interrupts him, and we complete the thought ourselves. That Philario finally accepts Iachimo's victory is remarkable only because he remains unconvinced until he has heard all the evidence, including Iachimo's knowledge of the mole.

After the deception scene we can be in no doubt about Posthumus' unworthiness. Shakespeare reminds us of it, however, in Pisanio's immediate, unqualified refusal to believe the slander when Posthumus writes him of Imogen's supposed crime. The refusal is unique among those versions of the wager cycle in which the husband confides in a servant and orders him to murder the wife. Conventionally—as, say, in Westward for Smelts—the servant believes his master, sets out to obey, and only at the last moment gives in to pity. The additional suspense and melodramatic excitement here are obvious and tempting for ordinary mortals: Hawkins, Brook, and Thomas D'Urfey (1682), three of the adapters, each return to the convention. The effect Shakespeare achieves in Pisanio's refusal is to impress us with the uniqueness of Imogen, who again inspires unconventional loyalty, and to increase our sense of the inadequacy of Posthumus, who is less aware than his servant of her perfection.

In still another important alteration Imogen herself provides the contrast to Posthumus. The scene after Iachimo's easy triumph in deception is simply a soliloquy by Posthumus in which he condemns all women because of the supposed defect in one. For thirty-five furiously rhetorical lines he attributes “All faults that may be nam'd, nay, that hell knows” to women—and to women alone: “For there's no motion / That tends to vice in man, but I affirm / It is the woman's part” (II.v.1-35). Nothing could be more conventional, for his wild generalization is the almost automatic reaction of any betrayed lover in medieval or renaissance literature. In Cymbeline, however, we soon judge the soliloquy in the light of Imogen's unconventional response when she learns that Posthumus has ordered Pisanio to kill her:

True honest men, being heard like false Aeneas,
Were in his time thought false, and Sinon's weeping
Did scandal many a holy tear, took pity
From most true wretchedness; so thou, Posthumus
Wilt lay the leaven on all proper men;
Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjur'd
From thy great fail.

(III.iv.60-66)

According to conventional ethics she would have been perfectly justified to react like Posthumus—or like Sophia in Massinger's The Picture, who, because her husband has apparently sinned, doubts even the holiness of the saints. The strength of the convention is suggested by the fact that both D'Urfey and George Bernard Shaw (1946) accept it in their adaptations of the play, creating heroines more like Sophia than Imogen. D'Urfey makes her ask: “Then is there nothing in Mankind but Vice? / No Faith, no Honour.” And Shaw's Imogen laments: “All is lost. / Shame, husband, happiness, and faith in Man.” But to accuse all women or all men of dishonesty is of course to accuse life itself; and Shakespeare's Imogen, while retaining the full force of the basic hyperbole, cleanses it of nonsense and cynicism. In spite of her husband's actions, she retains her faith in “true honest men” and thus—unlike the conventional hero or heroine—in life. The contrast operates to condemn even more deeply both Posthumus and the conventional attitude in a way quite foreign to the analogues.

The extent to which Shakespeare develops the condemnation in the first four acts makes impossible, of course, the traditionally easy reunion of husband and wife in Act V. Thus one purpose of that act is to convince us that Posthumus experiences a conversion sufficiently profound to make him worthy of Imogen. All the details of the conversion—which takes the form of an intense search for anonymity and death—are in a sense relevant here, for in none of the analogues does the penitence of the hero achieve a similar absoluteness. More narrowly, however, what matters is whether Posthumus repudiates specifically the conventional morality of which he has until now been an excellent, though exaggerated, representative. The answer lies in the first words of the act, in a soliloquy by Posthumus. Still thinking Imogen dead and Iachimo's slander true, he says in part:

                                                                                                    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!
.....                                                                                          Gods! if you
Should have ta'en vengeance on my faults, I never
Had liv'd to put on this; so had you sav'd
The noble Imogen to repent, and struck
Me, wretch, more worth your vengeance.

(V.i.2-11)

Until now Posthumus has been basically conventional in thought and action, holding to an orthodoxy that Shakespeare has violated only to emphasize, by exaggeration, its own meanness. But this soliloquy destroys the whole conventional pattern. In none of the important analogues or possible sources is there any similar penitence at any time, much less at a time when the hero still believes the slander.¹¹ Traditionally, forces outside the romantic hero himself prevent him from carrying out his murderous intentions. Chance, fate or the gods first save the heroine and then prove that she is chaste—prove, that is, that she deserves to live, for as Professor Lawrence has pointed out, these stories never question the right of the lover or the husband or the relatives to kill a woman actually unchaste.¹² The right remains unchallenged until Cymbeline.

The heroes of orthodox versions of the woman-falsely-accused learn from their experiences only that they have erred in believing the slander. Claudio, in Much Ado About Nothing, is typical when, after discovering that Hero is innocent but still thinking her dead because of his actions, he says, “yet sinn'd I not / But in mistaking” (V.i.284-85). Such heroes do not learn, as Posthumus does, that they have mistaken the nature of love, that love cannot include the desire for revenge, for whatever reason, and remain itself. Although they may be the heroes of comedy and romance, they never repudiate, as Posthumus does in this soliloquy, the morality that, barring kind fortune or benevolent gods, ends in tragedy.

The force of the conventional attitude appears again in its seduction of three of the adapters. When D'Urfey's hero, for example, is asked if his wife is dead, he replies: “Why didst thou think I was so tame a Fool, / To let her live after her horrid Crime?” As long as he believes her guilty he believes she is rightly dead, and in neither Hawkins nor Brooks do we find a Posthumus any closer to Shakespeare's hero. No such confusion exists, however, in Shaw's version. He violates Cymbeline on other levels but sees this point clearly and praises it in his introduction. “Certainly, after being theatrically conventional to the extent of ordering his wife to be murdered, [Posthumus] begins to criticise, quite on the lines of Mrs. Alving in Ghosts, the slavery to an inhuman ideal of marital fidelity which led him to this villainous extremity.”¹³ No one else has come so close to expressing the central issue of Shakespeare's wager story. Posthumus—upon the evidence of the analogues and as he himself comes to recognize—is very far from Professor Lawrence's “blameless hero.” Yet neither is he, in the end, unworthy of Imogen.

The fact of her sin, so far as he knows at the beginning of Act V, remains; she is still a woman that convention gives him every right to kill. But her essential virtue, now remembered, shatters his traditionally all-consuming dread of living an unavenged cuckold. Thus a Shakespearean prophecy from Much Ado About Nothing, never fulfilled by Claudio, springs vividly to life:

When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th' idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she liv'd indeed. Then shall he mourn,
If ever love had interest in his liver,
And wish he had not so accused her,
No, though he thought his accusation true.

(IV.i.225-235)

Such an action in “his study of imagination” forces Posthumus to understand the enormity of his own crime and, for the first time in his life, his own unworthiness. No longer holding, therefore, to the self-destructive accusation of life implied in his wild slandering of Imogen and her sex, he has turned inward upon his own sins, bitterly accusing himself to the thus-far silent gods. The revelation, at the beginning of Act V, of his passion for atonement and of his new ability to separate reality from appearance, constitutes, for him, the decisive break from a conventionally tragic frame of mind dominated by violence and shaped, ultimately, by the conviction that life is somehow at fault; and the play thus moves to assert through Posthumus in the rest of the last act the triumph of those comic (or romantic) values until now represented most vividly in the life of the woman he has tried to kill.

Cymbeline is, then, in the wager and its consequences, Shakespeare's dramatic embodiment of a criticism of generally accepted ideas about the kind of insight that love demands and provides. Beginning with a traditional story and traditional moral attitudes, he works from within to expose and destroy their rationale. We have seen that he works in three ways: 1) by introducing small but revealing alterations into the broadly conventional responses of the “blameless” husband, in this way creating a steady ironic comment on the conventions themselves; 2) by introducing unconventional responses for the stock characters of the story—the friend (Philario), the servant, and the wife—these responses establishing standards by which we judge both the hero and the conventional standards; and 3) by transforming the hero at the beginning of the last act in terms that openly explode the social and literary mores that allow heroes like Claudio to go unchanged to their comic reward. We must therefore conclude that while, as Professor Lawrence demonstrated, we cannot understand Cymbeline adequately from the viewpoint of modern or personal notions of human behavior, we go equally wrong if, along with him, we think that Shakespeare has succumbed to the conventional morality of his medieval and renaissance material. In fact, Shakespeare turns to such material only to attack it; and his play is in this respect revolutionary and modern.

Notes

1. Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), pp. 174-205. Versions of the story are innumerable (over 40 in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama alone) and come from all ages and places; I have no room for even a partial list. Lawrence is reacting against a long line of critics who, consulting only their own notions of polite conduct, have condemned Posthumus largely because they think a gentleman should never cause a lady so much trouble or because he is unable to see what they can see so clearly: Imogen's purity.

2. Lawrence may have overlooked an exception or two—some Scandinavian ballads and an early English poem called The Erl of Tolous in which a gullible husband must stand the contrast of an incredulous champion. But the very rare exceptions in no way alter his point about the operative conventions throughout the medieval and renaissance periods and especially in Shakespeare's England.

3. P. 203.

4. Gesammtabenteuer: Hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen, ed. Friedrich H. von der Hagen (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1850), III, 350-382.

5. Cymbeline Variorum, pp. 462-469.

6. Nouvelles françoises en prose du XIII^e siècle, eds. L. Moland and E. D'Hericault (Paris, 1856), pp. 83-157.

7. Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London, 1955), pp. 198-211.

8. “A New Perspective on the Wager Cycle,” MP, XLIV (Nov. 1946), 76-83.

9. Cymbeline Variorum, p. 458.

10. There are five adaptations: Thomas D'Urfey, The Injured Princess, or the Fatal Wager (London, 1682); Charles Marsh, Cymbeline: King of Britain (London, 1759); William Hawkins, Cymbeline. A Tragedy Altered from Shakespeare (London, 1759); Henry Brooke, Poems and Plays, 2nd ed. (London, 1789), III, 169-256; G. B. Shaw (fifth act only), Geneva, Cymbeline Refinished, and Good King Charles (London, 1946). The adaptations are useful, for each turns at important points away from Cymbeline back toward the orthodoxy of the analogues, thus demonstrating the persistent power of the conventions and the uniqueness of Shakespeare.

11. In only two other versions—Frederick of Jennen and a story in the Tours Ms. (see W. H. Hulme, “A Middle English Addition to the Wager Cycle,” MLN, XXXIV, 1909, 218-222)—have I found sorrow before the slander is disproved, and the similarities to Cymbeline are superficial. The hero of Frederick is sorry not because, like Posthumus, he cherishes his wife in spite of her guilt nor because he questions the morality of killing even a guilty wife but merely because he begins to wonder if the villain may not have tricked him, if his wife may not actually be guiltless and therefore undeserving of the punishment which if she be guilty he will not regret. In the Tours Ms. providential punishment (miserable poverty) stimulates the penitence, and the meaning in Posthumus' explicit, self-inspired repudiation of the supposed murder therefore never appears. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso includes a knight who seems to forgive his accused lady while still thinking her guilty, for he becomes her champion in a trial by combat; but there are definitive differences: he has not tried to kill her, so does not have her supposed death to repent; he does not actually forgive her, though he will, because of what she once was, champion her, perhaps even love her but never marry her; he praises only what she was, not what she is even if the slander be true; he thinks himself better than she, and fights for her partly to demonstrate this superiority.

12. P. 197. He notes The Maid's Tragedy (IV.i); see also Greene's Orlando Furioso (IV.i) and Much Ado About Nothing (IV.i192-193). That Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) appears even to modern critics (see Lawrence, p. 197) a humanitarian innovation illustrates the force of the convention; for Mrs. Frankford is, after all, murdered by her husband—the “kindness” being, as he knows, as deadly as a knife (see IV.v.118-121). Yet she praises him for it, and her brother believes Mr. Frankford “show'd too mild a spirit / In the revenge of such a loathed crime.”

13. P. 135.