[In the following essay, Simonds studies Shakespeare's variations on the familiar Renaissance marriage theme in Cymbeline, and examines the significance of those variations in terms of contemporary politics and Protestant theology.]

Perhaps the most emotionally satisfying stage image in Shakespeare's Cymbeline occurs in Act 5, scene 5, where it elicits from Posthumus the best poetry in the entire play: “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” (5.5.263-64).¹ This is, of course, the moment when a joyful Imogen flings her arms about the neck of her long-lost husband, who at last returns her loving embrace. Although such reunions occur elsewhere in Shakespeare's canon, this one is unusual for the haunting beauty of Posthumus' words, which are often quoted but—to my knowledge—have never been fully explained.

The matrimonial embrace is also visually unusual, since Imogen is still dressed as the boy Fidele. What we see on the stage is the rather shocking spectacle, for the early seventeenth century, of two young men (or at least of a man and a boy in masculine attire) passionately hugging one another, a sight Shakespeare was careful to avoid in his earlier plays. For example, in the finale of As You Like It, the disguised Rosalind—although played by a boy—is recostumed in female clothing before she is led onstage by Hymen to rejoin her father and her bridegroom Orlando. With a similar regard for decorum and the social sensibilities of his audience, Shakespeare does not even allow Viola in Twelfth Night to embrace her twin brother Sebastian until she has relinquished her “usurp'd attire” and regained her proper “maiden weeds.” We may well ask, therefore, why in Cymbeline the playwright suddenly changes his habitual practice to a variation of costuming that must suggest a specific meaning associated with Posthumus' resonant lines.

A related problem I wish to consider in this essay is the significance of Arviragus' speech in Act 4, scene 2: “Grow patience! / And let the stinking-elder, untwine / His perishing root, with the increasing vine!” (ll. 58-60). This, too, is a memorable example of vegetation imagery, which needs explanation and which appears to be in some way related to Posthumus' reference to himself as a dying tree and to his wife as the fruit adorning his branches. A study of a popular iconographic convention of the Jacobean period and earlier may help us to answer all of these questions, for, as Dieter Mehl has rightly pointed out, “an important form of the emblematic in drama is the insertion of allegorical scenes or tableaux providing a pictorial commentary on the action of the play, thus creating that mutually illuminating combination of word and picture which is central to the emblematic method.”²

Thomas Combe makes a similar comment in the epistle “To the Reader” of his 1593(?) translation of Guillaume de la Perriere's Le Theatre des bons engins: “where words, though neuer so sensible, do pass the Reader without due consideration, pictures that are especially discerned by the sense, are such helps to the weaknes of common understandings, that they make words as it were deedes, and set the whole substance of that which is offered before the sight and conceipt of the Reader.”³ The reverse can also be true, when spoken words remind us of pictures we have seen.

But while Shakespeare's audience knew symbolic pictures well through the emblem books they studied and meticulously reproduced in their embroidery, on the carved and painted wood panels in their homes, and on their decorative ceilings,⁴ today we must laboriously reconstruct those once ordinary Renaissance mental associations between the wisdom of the ancients, biblical allusions, and everyday Jacobean life. I am convinced, with others, that the emblem books so treasured by Shakespeare's audience are today among the most reliable dictionaries for deciphering much of the visual and verbal imagery of the period, especially since words alone have multiple meanings and individual emblems do not. For this reason, I shall refer to a number of emblems in this discussion, which will therefore be primarily contextual rather than textual in focus. My purpose is to demonstrate not only the presence of a familiar marriage topos in Cymbeline but to explore as well the significance of the several ways in which Shakespeare varies its use and its meanings in respect to matrimony, politics, and Protestant theology.

II

Most seventeenth century readers of Greek and Roman poetry, or of Renaissance emblems based on classical sources, would have recognized that Posthumus' affecting words, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die,” derive from the ancient marriage topos of the elm and the vine. These plants were wedded in antiquity by farmers for the survival and fecundity of the vine. Such once conventional agricultural lore, however, is no longer generally known to modern theater-goers or readers, who are left to contemplate only the aesthetic quality of a sentence that used to have profound meaning. According to the Arden edition of Cymbeline, Tennyson described Posthumus' speech as “among the tenderest lines in Shakespeare,” while Carolyn Spurgeon called it, “Ten words which do more than anything else in the play to bring [Posthumus] in weight and value a little nearer to Imogen” (p. 177 n.). Neither commentator recognized the previously familiar image of a fruitful marriage which is embedded both in Posthumus' words and in the sight of Imogen with her arms entwined about her husband's neck. Since Cymbeline is a play intrinsically concerned with marriage—or with the union between man and woman, between nations, and between heaven and earth—the dramatist really ought to provide some popular and emphatic image of matrimony in the last act to crystalize this pervasive conjugal concept. Shakespeare's visual and verbal reference to the elm and the vine topos does just that.

Peter Demetz' illuminating essay on “The Elm and the Vine: Notes Toward the History of a Marriage Topos”⁵ still remains the most important source of information on this image, and I shall make considerable use of it in this essay, while also offering a few additions and corrections. Unfortunately Demetz is in error when he tells us that “the intimate union of marital elm and bridal vine as a poetic image of blissful marriage” derives from the “Greek epithalamium or Carmen 62 by Catullus, who may have learned it from a lost poem by Sappho” (pp. 521-22). I believe that the most probable original source of the topos is a still extant epigram in the Greek Anthology (IX, 231) by Antipater of Thessalonica: “I am a dry plane-tree covered by the vine that climbs over me; and I, who once fed clusters from my own branches, and was no less leafy than this vine, now am clothed in the glory of foliage not my own. Such a mistress let a man cherish who, unlike her kind, knows how to requite him even when he is dead.”⁶ Although Antipater's poem suggests that the original Greek agricultural practice was to wed the grapevine to a plane tree rather than to the elm, which was the preferred support in Italy (Demetz, pp. 522-23), the idea of the fruitful female giving new life to the dying male is identical to the image in Carmen 62 by Catullus.

As Demetz rightly points out, however, the first Latin version of the topos occurs in Catullus' so-called “Greek epithalamium” when a group of youths argue the case for marriage against a group of maidens who prefer the preservation of virginity (p. 521). They employ the following analogy to the cultivation of the grape:

As an unwedded vine which grows up in a bare field never raises itself aloft, never brings forth a mellow grape, but bending its tender form with downward weight, even now touches the root with topmost shoot; no farmers, no oxen tend it: but if it chance to be joined in marriage to the elm, many farmers, many oxen tend it: so a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she aging untended; but when in ripe season she is matched in equal wedlock, she is more dear to her husband and less distasteful to her father.⁷

The youths take a one-sided masculine viewpoint when they insist that the elm uplifts and makes the vine fertile, while Ovid, as we shall later see, emphasizes the mutual benefit of the marriage to both parties. Further echoes of this same marital image may be found in such Augustan poets as Horace, Vergil, and Quintilian (Demetz, p. 523).

The elm and vine topos was also employed by the early Christians as a “theological type.” According to Demetz, “In the centuries before the advent of Christianity, the vine and the grape symbolized fertility, and with fertility an afterlife sustained by vegetative permanence; early Christian art and literature made grape and vine refer to a transcendental and spiritual kind of immortality” (p. 524). This notion was legitimized by Psalm 128:3 (“Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house”) in the Old Testament, and by verse 1 of John 15 in the New Testament: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.” Therefore, Christ was often pictured as a fruitful vine hanging from the cross, and the recurring image of the vine “wedded” to a tree in early Christian sepulchral art is usually understood as a reference to the mystical marriage of Christ and the Church.

The relevance of such traditional Christian symbols to our understanding of Cymbeline has been amply demonstrated by much recent scholarship on the theological subtext of the tragicomedy.⁸ First, the reign of Cymbeline was important to the Renaissance British historians Raphael Holinshed and John Speed primarily because it coincided with the Pax Romana which preceded the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. In addition, the main plot of the tragicomedy follows the typical morality pattern; it includes the fall of Posthumus to jealousy, his sinful order for his wife's death, his subsequent formal repentance, and his final reunion with his innocent bride, who has assumed the name of Fidele or “faithfulness” as she searches for her lost spouse in the wilderness.⁹ Even the spectacular descent of Jupiter to Posthumus in 5.4—with a promise of an ultimate reunion with Imogen—is a stage analogue to the nativity of Christ, since the name of Jove was an accepted euphemism for the Christian God in a theater forbidden by law to dramatize theology.¹⁰ And finally, the marriage between man and woman was and still is regarded by the Church of England as a symbolic reflection of Christ's spiritual marriage to his congregation or the Church (Ephesians 5).¹¹ Thus the allusion to the marriage topos of the elm and the vine in Posthumus' speech must include spiritual as well as physical associations, particularly since the hero refers to his bride as “my soul.”

In his brief but illuminating “History,” Demetz traces the rediscovery of the classical elm and vine motif in the Renaissance by such humanist writers as Jovannus Pontanus, who used it in his De Amore Coniugali, and by the Dutch Neo-Latin writer Joannes Secundus (pp. 526-27), but surprisingly he overlooks the even more obvious and influential example of Desiderius Erasmus, who employed the same marriage topos in his colloquy “Proci et Puellae.” This charming courtship dialogue was translated into English in 1568 as A Modest Meane to Marriage by N. L., thought to be Nicholas Leigh, and is at least an analogue, if not a direct source, of Shakespeare's dialogue on virginity between Helena and Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well (1.1.106-86).¹² Erasmus' young lover in A Modest Meane to Marriage attempts to possess his sweetheart by asking “whether it is a better sight for a vine to lye vppon the grounde and rot, or the same to embrace a poale, or an elme, and lode it full with purple grapes.”¹³ Since the vine must indeed be supported in some way if it is to produce a healthy crop of fruit, by analogy the human husband offers similar support to his bride and becomes in turn the trunk of the family tree.

As Demetz observes, the topos later became a familiar symbol of an ideal marriage among the English poets of the Renaissance, including Milton, who has the still innocent Adam and Eve “marry” the elm and the vine in Book 5 of his Paradise Lost (p. 527):

                                                                                they led the Vine
To wed her Elm; she spous'd about him twines
Her marriagable arms, and with her brings
Her dow'r th' adopted Clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves.

(ll. 215-19)

The image also appears in Spenser's Faerie Queene I.1.8 as “the vine propt elme,” in Sidney's Arcadia (Dicus: Epithalamium, stanza 2), and in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, this time in conjunction with its opposite form—the tree and the parasitical ivy—which symbolizes lust (Demetz, pp. 527-29). Meeting the wrong Antipholus in the streets of Ephesus, Adriana believes he is her husband and addresses him as follows:

Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine:
Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness, married to a stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate:
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss;
All for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion.

(2.2.174-81)

The adulterous nature of Titania's embrace of Bottom, a mortal, in A Midsummer Night's Dream is indicated by the moon goddess's comparison of herself not with the vine but with “the female ivy [which] so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm” (4.1.43-44). Obviously, Shakespeare knew the topos well, as did Ben Jonson, who made this image the center of a battle between the allegorical figures of Truth and Opinion in his 1606 court masque Hymenaei, or, the Solemnities of Masque and Barriers at a Marriage (Demetz, p. 527).

III

Jonson's masque is of particular importance because it celebrated the marriage of Sir John Hay, a Scottish favorite of Shakespeare's royal patron James I, with Honora, daughter of the English Lord Denny. Glynne Wickham reminds us that in Cymbeline Shakespeare also honored the Hay family by retelling the famous story of Hay's ancestors, the old man and the two boys who held a narrow lane against the invading Danes, as narrated in Holinshed's The Description & History of Scotland.¹⁴ Furthermore, Jonson's personification of Truth in Hymenaei makes a comment similar to Arviragus' later contrast between the “perishing root” and the “increasing vine” in Cymbeline:

For as a lone vine, in a naked field,
Never extols her branches, never bears
Ripe grapes, but with a headlong heaviness wears
Her tender body, and her highest sprout
Is quickly levell'd with her fading root;
By whom no husbandman, no youths will dwell;
But if by fortune, she be married well
To the elm her husband, many husbandmen
And many youths inhabit by her, then.(15)

Jonson's “Fading root” and Arviragus' reference to a “perishing root” (4.2.60) seem very close indeed, unless one agrees with J. M. Nosworthy that Shakespeare used the word “perishing” in the sense of the third definition of “perish” in the OED to mean “destructive” (Arden ed., p. 121n.). But such a reading would, I believe, spoil the antithesis between “perishing” as “dying” and “increasing” as “growing” or “multiplying”—that is, the poetic antithesis between death and life.

I wish to suggest, therefore, that in Act 4, scene 2 of Cymbeline, Arviragus' wish for a divorce of the elder tree from the vine should be understood as an original Shakespearean counter-topos to the elm and the vine. The scene begins with Imogen's complaint of sickness. However, the savage boys see her as a physician who has kept them well through her knowledge of the medicinal qualities of plants or pot-herbs:

Guid.
But his neat cookery! he cuts our roots in characters,
And sauced our broths, as Juno had been sick,
And he her dieter.
Arv.
Nobly he yokes [or marries]
A smiling with a sigh; as if the sigh
Was that it was, for not being such a smile;
The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly
From so divine a temple, to commix
With winds that sailors rail at.

(4.2.49-56)

There is a sharply drawn antithesis here between sighing and smiling, which will then be transformed by Guiderius into the two basic qualities of human life, grief and patience, and finally by Arviragus into the emblematic form of these qualities, the elder tree (death) and the vine (life). In fact, we are warned to look for an emblematic meaning in the passage when Guiderius says “he cut our roots in characters,” since the word “characters” can mean both letters and visual images or emblems.¹⁶

Guiderius continues the contrast between sighs and smiles as follows:

Guid.
I do note
That grief and patience, rooted in them both,
Mingle their spurs together.
Arv.
Grow patience!
And let the stinking-elder, grief, untwine
His perishing root, with the increasing vine!

(4.2.56-60)

At this point the villain Cloten, who has caused much of Imogen's grief, enters in search of her and is beheaded by Guiderius in what we may interpret as an act of pruning at least one of the lateral roots (spurs) of grief.

Indeed Cloten's headless corpse soon becomes the central image in a theatrical Shakespearean emblem in Act 4, scene 2. Awakening from her counterfeit sleep of death, Imogen shrinks back from the flower-strewn body next to her. But instead of screaming, she interprets what she sees in the form of a subscriptio to an emblem: “These flowers are like the pleasures of the world; / This bloody man, the care on't” (296-97), or human grief. The audience sees Imogen herself still next to the supine corpse but presumably sitting up, or alive and growing—the stage image of “increasing” patience confronting death and grief.

But to return to the earlier lines of the marriage of patience with the elder tree (4.2.56-60), we should note that Shakespeare is not only referring here to a personification of forbearance and long-suffering endurance such as Viola envisions with her famous description in Twelfth Night, “She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (2.4.114-15), and such as Imogen acts out in Act 4, scene 2. Guiderius and Arviragus are also speaking of a plant, for in Cymbeline, patience seems to mean two different things at the same time: forbearance and an edible plant or docke (rhubarb) called Rumex patientia. The bark and roots of patience and of the elder were used both as purgatives and as healing poultices, although the herbalist John Gerarde warns that the elder purges “not without trouble and hurt to the stomacke.”¹⁷ Of patience, he tells us that “The Monkes Rubarbe is called in Latine Rumex satiuus, and Patientia, or Patience, which word is borrowed of the French, who call this herbe Pacience: after whom the Dutch men name this pot herbe also Patientie: of some Rhabarbarum Monachorum, or Monkes Rubarbe: bicause as it should seeme some Monke or other haue vsed the roote heereof instead of Rubarbe” (p. 314). If powdered and added to wine, patience may also be used to ease internal illnesses. According to Gerarde: “The decoction of Monkes Rubarbe is drunke against the bloudie flixe, the laske, the wambling of the stomacke which commeth of choler: and also against the stinging of serpents as Dioscorides writes” (p. 314). The plant patience can therefore be the exact opposite from a purge, acting instead like a soothing dose of Pepto-Bismol, so to speak, and an efficacious remedy as well against the sting of a serpent or against evil itself.

The “stinking-elder,” on the other hand, is associated with the betrayal and subsequent suicide of Judas, as Edward Dowden notes in his 1903 edition of Cymbeline. Dowden also points out that “Pliny names elder props as suitable for vines, but does not name the elder as a living tree for vine-support” and that “Gerarde mentions ‘stinking’ in his description of the elder.”¹⁸ Indeed, Gerarde does state that “the leaues consist of fiue or sixe particular ones fastened to one rib, like those of the Walnut tree, but euery particular one is lesser, nicked in the edges, and of a ranke and stinking smell” (p. 1233). But even more interesting for this discussion is Gerarde's later description of the jagged elder, which is identical to the common elder tree except for the leaves, “which doth so much disguise the tree and put it out of knowledge, that no man would take it for a kinde of Elder, vntil he had smelt thereunto, which will quickly shew from whence he is descended” (p. 1234). We may remember that the lustful Cloten also gave forth a bad odor, a fact that the courtiers mention twice in Cymbeline. In 1.3, the First Lord advises Cloten to change his shirt after his swordplay with Posthumus, since “the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice: where air comes out, air comes in: there's none abroad so wholesome as that you vent” (ll. 1-4). The Second Lord comments later in 2.1 that Cloten, who desires to marry his stepsister Imogen, smells “like a fool” (l. 16), and thus further associates the wicked Queen's son with a traitorous “stinking-elder” which must be untwined from the roots of the fruitful vine or Imogen.

We know, of course, that Shakespeare was aware of the tradition that Judas had hanged himself on an elder tree, since he punned on this very bit of arcane information in the early comedy Love's Labor's Lost. Holofernes tells Berowne to “Begin, sir, you are my elder,” to which Berowne replies, “Well follow'd: Judas was hang'd on an elder” (5.2.605-06). In Cymbeline, therefore, the reference to the elder is another of many carefully sown allusions to the approaching birth and sacrifice of Christ, whose resurrection will overcome the grief of believers and will serve as a promise of the life to come. Yet perhaps we should note as well that the scholarly Gerarde did his best to dispel this popular myth of the elder tree in his entry for the Arbor Iuda, which he said “may be called in English Iudas tree, whereon Iudas did hang him selfe, and not vpon the Elder tree, as it is saide” (p. 1240).¹⁹

Unfortunately, none of these herbal metaphors is of any use to the love-sick Imogen, whose illness increases to the point where she finally decides to take some of the queen's medicine which Pisanio has given her. Although Imogen then appears to die from what her stepmother had intended to be a deadly poison, soon afterwards the heroine revives once the drug wears off, in imitation both of Christ and of the pruned grapevine.

IV

In Cymbeline the false marriage described by Arviragus between smiles and sighs, the vine and the elder tree, is ultimately superseded by the true marriage of the elm and the vine in 5.5. When Posthumus and Imogen embrace, the husband invites his bride to “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” (263-64). Thus Shakespeare is probably the first dramatic poet to literalize the metaphor through a stage embrace, although Demetz mistakenly credits the German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist in The Prince of Homburg with being the first to use this emblematic stage image:

the topos is transformed by the instincts of the playwright into pure theatrical effect and leads up to what early nineteenth-century stage technique considers a tableau. On the wooden quadrangle of the stage the Prince is transformed, as it were, into an elm by putting one of his arms around the Princess' body like a supporting branch … ; and Natalie, for her part, fully aware of this essentially connubial gesture, clings like the vine to his breast. … At this intense moment, the literary topos has abruptly been changed into pure pantomime, which speaks through ritual gestures rather than with mere words.

(p. 531)

I would have to argue that von Kleist—probably, like most German Romantics, an admiring reader of Shakespeare—could have discovered his theatrical literalization of the elm and vine topos in the English playwright's Cymbeline. For here Posthumus is self-consciously the supporting elm, and says so in “mere words,” while Imogen is the fruitful vine who, at this point, rather fiercely clings to him.

We still must deal, however, with the problem of Imogen's masculine disguise, which gives a strange cast to this Jacobean stage literalization of the marriage topos. Here Shakespeare may have arranged his visual image very deliberately in order to say something new about marriage itself. The emblem he gives us onstage is no longer that of woman as a clinging vine, no matter how fruitful, but of woman as an equal who has the strength and fortitude to sustain the elm after it dies, even as the tree now supports the vine. Indeed the sight of two men embracing onstage would normally suggest to a Renaissance audience not marriage but friendship.

The source for this transvaluation of the marriage topos into a symbol of friendship was the widely read Emblemata by Andrea Alciati, a book first published in Augsburg in 1531 (Demetz, p. 525). Alciati's emblem, … which is based on the motto “Amicitia etiam post mortem durans,” or “Friendship outlasting death,” depicts a fruitful vine supported by the branches of a dying elm.²⁰ The Latin verse reads as follows in a recent English translation:

The elm withering because of old age and bare of leaves,
the shady foliage of the green grape-vine has embraced.
It acknowledges the changes of nature, and grateful to its parent
renders the mutual rights of service, and by its own
example it advises us to seek such friends,
as the last day, death would not separate from the pact of friendship.(21)

The German Protestant emblematist Joachim Camerarius, correctly observing that Alciati had borrowed his idea from both the Greek Anthology and Catullus, included a similar emblem … in his own Symbolorum et Emblematum ex re Herbaria Desumtorum Centuria una Collecta of 1559 (with many later editions) under the motto “Amicus Post Mortem.”²² His subscriptio reads “Quamlibet arenti vitis tamen haeret in ulmo: / Sic quoque post mortem verus amicus amat,” which Henry Green translates, “Yet as it pleases the vine clings to the withered elm, / So also after death the true friend loves.”²³

In England this distinctly humanistic emblem of friendship first appeared in the 1586 edition of Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes, a book almost certainly known to Shakespeare. Whitney's inscriptio, or motto, is “Amicitia etiam post mortem durans.” The pictura … illustrates a fruitful vine embracing a leafless elm, while the subscriptio reads as follows:

A Withered Elme, whose boughes weare bare of leaues
          And sappe, was sunke with age into the roote:
A fruictefull vine, vnto her bodie cleues,
Whose grapes did hange, from toppe vnto her foote:
          And when the Elme, was rotten, drie, and dead,
          His braunches still, the vine abowt it spread.
Which showes, wee shoulde be linck'de with such a frende,
That might reuive, and helpe when wee bee oulde:
And when wee stoope, and drawe vnto our ende,
Our staggering state, to helpe for to vphoulde:
          Yea, when wee shall be like a sencelesse block,
          That for our sakes, will still imbrace our stock.(24)

Whitney's emblem reverses the sexes of the elm and the vine, making the elm female and the vine male, probably to emphasize the friendship aspect of his version and to dissociate the vine from the idea of a fruitful wife. This new masculine vine could be a faithful human friend, Christ as a spiritual friend, or both. The reader makes his own associations.

Shakespeare's image onstage of two males embracing takes Whitney's sexual reversal into account but still fundamentally retains the elm as the husband and the vine as the wife. At the same time gender becomes curiously inconsequential. The audience knows that the true Imogen is not a man, although the actor playing the role of Imogen is indeed male. Through such multiplied ambiguities, Shakespeare forces his audience to see through his provocative image onstage in order to interpret it for themselves, just as the Protestant emblematists expected their often borrowed mottos and picturas to be translated in the light of their newly written verses or subscriptios. As Huston Diehl cogently argues,

English emblem books … reinforce the Protestant belief in the necessity of interpretation and speak to the new concern for the epistemological process. They force their readers to confront the disparity between signifier and signified and at the same time to pursue the analogous relationship between disparate things, between image and the invisible thing it signifies. The emblematic image stimulates the reader to seek what is absent and invisible; it thus serves as an intermediary between the physical and the spiritual worlds. The enigmatic quality of the emblem enhances its function as a sign. … The emblematic image insists on being translated and transformed.²⁵

Even as Shakespeare calls our attention to a new Protestant marital relationship with the stage embrace of Posthumus and Imogen, his ambiguities of gender in the theatrical image also remind his audience of the analogy between marriage itself and the spousal union of Christ with His Church. Indeed the entire play, as others have pointed out, demands that we see through its words and action to the invisible event of the Nativity which is soon to occur.

Transformations of the elm and the vine image continue within the emblem tradition as well. Cesare Ripa, for example, includes a different variation of “Amicitia” in his enormously popular Iconologia. The pictura in the 1603 edition shows the wedded elm and vine further embraced by a lady in white. Ripa's explanation of what is now a personification rather than a visual symbol of friendship, recalls the conventional marriage of the dead elm and the living vine, and then summarizes commonplace attitudes of the Renaissance toward friendship. Since there is no English edition of Ripa easily available, I will quote a translation of the passage in full:

A lady dressed in white, but roughly, so as to show the shoulder and bare breast, pointing with the right hand to the heart, on which will be a motto in golden letters, thus: LONGE, ET PROPE [Far and Near]; and on the hem of the dress will be written, MORS, ET VITA [Death and Life]. She will be rumpled, and on her head there will be a garland of myrtle and of pomegranate blossoms intertwined; on her forehead will be written: HEIMS, AESTAS (Winter, Summer).

She will be rumpled, and with the left arm she will hold a dead elm tree, which will be encircled by a living vine. Friendship, according to Aristotle, is a mutual, express and reciprocal benevolence guided by virtue and by reason among men who have similar backgrounds and characters. The white and rough vestment is the simple candidness of spirit, by which true love is seen to be far removed from any sort of deceit or artful smoothness.

She shows the left shoulder and bare breast, attaching to the heart the motto, Longe & prope, because the true friend, whether near by or far from the beloved person, is never separated in his heart; and in spite of the passage of time and fortune, he is always ready to live and die for the sake of friendship, and this is what the mottos on the hem of the dress and the forehead signify. But if it [friendship] is feigned, then, at the slightest change of fortune, you will see it vanish like the morning dew. Being rumpled, and having the garland of myrtle with the pomegranate blossoms, shows that the fruit of love and of the inner union reconciles and spreads abroad the sweet odor of its example of honorable actions, and this without vanity of pompous show, under which very often adulation is born [italics added], the enemy of this virtue.

She is depicted barefoot, likewise, to show readiness, or speed, and that in the service of the friend one should not prize comforts: as Ovid says on the art of love: Si rota defuerit, tu pede carpe viam [If wheels are lacking, make your way on foot]. Finally, she embraces a dead elm encircled by a living vine, in order to make it known that friendship begun in prosperity ought to endure always, and that the greater need should be friendship more than ever, if one remembers that there is no friend so useless that he does not know how to find some way or other to pay the obligations of friendship.²⁶

All this sounds like a description of Imogen herself. And Ripa's contrast between friendship and “adulation” or adoration is equally significant in the light of both Posthumus' and Imogen's early insistence in Cymbeline that they adore one another as divinities rather than knowing, trusting, and loving one another as friends.

Since the word “friend” when applied to a woman meant “mistress” to the Jacobeans, Posthumus pompously informs his companions in Rome—then considered by Protestants to be the center of religious idolatry—that “I profess myself her / adorer, not her friend” (1.5.65-66). This worshipful attitude would seem to be a shaky foundation for a happy marriage. Imogen is similarly foolish when she believes Iachimo's flattering description of Posthumus in 1.7: “He sits ’mongst men like a descended god; / He hath a kind of honour sets him off, / More than mortal seeming” (ll. 169-71). Moreover, she later becomes grotesquely absurd when she compares the corpse of Cloten, which she mistakes for that of Posthumus, to Mercury, Mars, Hercules, and even to Jove. The shrewd Italian tempter Iachimo was quite right in suspecting that Posthumus and Imogen did not yet have a mature understanding of one another or of marriage itself: “I have spoke this,” says Iachimo, “to know if your affiance / Were deeply rooted” (1.7.163-64; italics added), which it clearly was not. During the course of the play, therefore, the idolatrous lovers must die to one another and to their own immature selves before they can be reborn into the true matrimony symbolized by the embrace of the elm and vine.

Echoing the beautiful “love is strong as death” passage in The Song of Songs 7:6, Shakespeare's contemporary, the Dutch emblematist Otto van Veen also includes a version of Alciati's emblem on friendship in his multi-lingual Amorvum Emblemata or Emblemes of Love published in 1608. Van Veen's motto is “Loue after death,” while his subscriptio or verse assures us that

          The vyne doth still embrace the elm by age ore-past,
Which did in former tyme those feeble stalks vphold,
And constantly remaynes with it now being old.
Loue is not kild by death, that after death doth last.(27)

The pictura … of the emblem shows a dying man at the base of the withered elm, an arrow in his heart; but—he is tenderly supported by the divine archer himself: Amor. Although the notion of a supportive friendship up to and after death should certainly be understood on the literal level, van Veen's emblem again reminds us that the topos extends to the realm of theology as well. In this sense the true friend referred to in all the Amicitia emblems is both an earthly friend who will care for our children after we have died and a spiritual friend, Christ or the Love God Himself, who will uplift our souls in the life to come.

Shakespeare seems to combine all of these meanings in his verbal allusion to the elm and the vine topos in Cymbeline and in his visual literalization of the image onstage. The fact that Imogen, or the bride, is still dressed as a boy when the spouses embrace serves to emphasize the need for a faithful Platonic friendship between man and wife, in addition to the conventional feelings of romantic love and sexual desire. It suggests as well that marriage is a coupling between social equals who pledge mutual support up to and after death, although the husband, of course, always remained “head” of the Christian household.

Jeanne Addison Roberts has recently expressed a similar interpretation of Shakespeare's enlightened view of matrimony in her analysis of The Taming of the Shrew as a work very probably indebted to the image of another popular Renaissance marriage topos, the hermaphrodite, which derives from Ovid's Metamorphoses.²⁸ There is in fact a Protestant emblem by Mathias Holzwart (emblem 35 under the motto “Amor coniugalis”) which combines the elm and the vine image with a matrimonial couple depicted as an hermaphrodite … and praises the wife as “partner in joy and sorrow.”²⁹ At any rate, in Act 5 Posthumus consciously relinquishes his former role in the play—that of idolater and jealous husband. Even though he still believes Imogen has been unfaithful to him, he generously forgives her “For wrying but a little” (5.1.5). To be sure, magnanimity toward a friend is emotionally less difficult than magnanimity toward a straying sexual partner, and it was one of the virtues commonly taught to men of honor. But Posthumus is more than magnanimous here; he offers all of himself as a sacrifice to love, in imitation of the Savior soon to be born and in imitation of the dying elm which still supports the vine: “I'll die / For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life / Is, every breath, a death” (5.1.25-27).

The original inspiration for Shakespeare's variation of the marriage topos to include mutuality and friendship may have come, like so much else in the canon, from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Like Catullus, Ovid also mentions the marriage of the elm and the vine. In the story of Pomona and the love-sick viticulturist Vertumnus, the poet writes,

There was an elm tree opposite, a lovely sight to see, with its bunches of shining grapes, and this the god praised, and its companion vine no less. “But,” he said, “if this tree trunk stood by itself, and was not wedded to the vine, it would be of no interest to anybody, except for its leaves. Moreover, the vine is supported by the elm to which it has been united, whereas if it had not been so married, it would lie trailing on the ground.”³⁰

In answer to the self-serving youths of Catullus' “Greek Epithalamium,” Ovid reminds us here of the entire equation—that, if the unsupported vine is of no interest to anyone, neither is the unadorned elm. The freedom of bachelorhood is as sterile and useless as perpetual virginity. Marriage is the natural and fruitful state for mature men and women in the garden of the world, as Protestant clerics never tired of pointing out during Shakespeare's lifetime.³¹

Furthermore, friendship as the basis for a good marriage was an equally important sixteenth-century Protestant theme which Shakespeare appears to emphasize in Cymbeline. Despite all their subsequent troubles, Posthumus and Imogen, friends since childhood, have freely chosen one another in defiance of the king and have entered into a marriage of mutual love. According to Robert Cleaver, writing in 1598, “Mutuall loue hauing his beginnning of godlinesse and true vertue, maketh the husband and wife not to be too sharpe sighted in spying into one anothers faults: but that many things either they marke not, or if they marke them, they couer them with loue.”³² Although Posthumus ignores the first part of Cleaver's advice and does spy on Imogen, an amazing quality of love ultimately saves the marriage of Shakespeare's young couple, who mature before our eyes from idolatrous lovers of the Petrarchan mode into ideal, patient, and forgiving Protestant spouses.³³

Imogen herself reveals no precise turning point in her understanding of marital love, as does Posthumus in his repentance scene. Nevertheless, by the end of Cymbeline, she is as magnanimous toward the husband who ordered her death as he has finally been toward her imagined infidelity. She recognizes Posthumus dressed as an invading Roman soldier and forgives this obvious political betrayal. She forgives as well his earlier personal betrayal of marital trust and friendship, treacheries which are analogous to the archetypal betrayal of Christ by Judas. Indeed it is very doubtful that in real life any woman could be so forgiving. In a similar manner, although Posthumus at first does not recognize his bride at all in her masculine disguise, he does at last see her as both his physical wife and as his forgiving spiritual friend, who will adorn his trunk with greenery and fruit for the rest of his life and beyond.

Dressed in male clothing, Imogen is no longer merely a clinging female vine supported by her “lord” (or husband-farmer), who has self-righteously—and correctly, according to the usual agricultural metaphor of marriage—assumed life and death rights over her. She is finally accepted in public as a human and living symbol of divine friendship and of Posthumus' own immortal soul. Thus with the help of Ovid, Alciati, and the Protestant theologians of his time, Shakespeare seems to have arrived here at a poetic criticism of the hidden agricultural metaphor in the term “husband” itself as applied to human life and has substituted the notion of mutually supportive friendship as a superior ideal for matrimony. Only God has the rights of a gardener or husbandman over human affairs.

And since marriage was itself a popular metaphor of the relationship between the king and his country, the political ramifications of this subtle metamorphosis in Cymbeline of the old agricultural metaphor, with its insinuation of dependency and of life and death rights of the husband over the wife for the sake of fruitfulness, to a metaphor of mutually supportive friendship in the political life of the nation, are breathtaking. Indeed vegetation symbolism in general was widely used to signify rebirth and reform, according to Gerhart B. Ladner.³⁴ And there can be no doubt that the poet Shakespeare was fully aware of the political aspects of the elm and the vine topos. He had already used the motif in his previous Jacobean play Macbeth (c. 1606) to contrast the tentative relationship between Duncan and the newcomer Macbeth with the enduring relationship between Duncan and his true heir, Banquo, the ancestor of James I of England. In Act 1, Duncan receives Macbeth's homage formally and without embracing him: “Welcome hither! / I have begun to plant thee, and will labor to make thee full of growing.” To his kinsman, however, the royal husbandman is considerably more effusive: “Noble Banquo,” he says, “That hast no less deserv'd, nor must be known / No less to have done so, let me infold thee / And hold thee to my heart.” Accepting his role as the fruitful vine supported by the elm, Banquo gracefully replies, “There if I grow, / The harvest is your own” (1.4.27-33).³⁵ In the tragedy of Macbeth the subject must accept the submissive role of a wife to the royal husbandman.

But in Cymbeline the embrace of Posthumus and Imogen, now symbolizing, as I have suggested, mutual support and the friendship of equals, is the last we hear or see of the elm and the vine in this play. Reconciled in Act 5 with his two wrongly banished courtiers, Cymbeline first substitutes a greeting of human equality for the agricultural metaphor in his reinstatement of Belarius: “Thou art my brother; so we'll hold thee ever” (5.5.400; italics added). The king then accepts the previously despised Posthumus into the royal family with the words, “We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law: / Pardon's the word to all” (5.5.422-23). “Freeness” here means generosity in forgiveness, which is quite different from either pruning or harvesting and suggests the possibility of a new kind of political rule corresponding to the Protestant ideal of a good Christian marriage. Tracts of the period exhort the husband to be a leader and a teacher, rather than a tyrant, while the wife is now considered to be a willing “Helper” in the formation of a well-governed household (Cleaver, p. 159). Well-governed households, in turn, were understood to be analogous with well-governed kingdoms.

Cymbeline ends with a royal proclamation of peaceful union between man and wife, peace between the king and those he has exiled, peace between Britain and Rome, and peace between heaven and earth. As the king himself announces, “Never was a war did cease / (Ere bloody hands were wash'd) with such a peace” (5.5.485-86).³⁶

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy, Arden Edition (London, 1955; rpt. 1979). All references will be noted parenthetically in the text.

2. “Emblems in English Renaissance Drama,” Renaissance Drama 2 (1962), 46.

3. The Theater of Fine Devices (1614), sigs, A5 and A5v. Italics added.

4. See, for example, the embroidered bed hangings and cushion covers by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick; the wood panelling with beautifully carved versions of Alciati's emblems now in the Summer Room at University College in Oxford (panelling removed from a sixteenth-century Oxford house); the plaster ceiling decorated with emblems by Henry Peacham in the long gallery at Blickling Hall, Norfolk; and Lady Drury's elaborate Painted Closet now at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich. Samuel Daniel published a note from one N. W. in his 1585 English translation of Paolo Giovio's treatise on how emblems were often used in interior decoration for personal statements during the Elizabethan period:

   A friend of mine whom you know, M. P. climing for an Egles nest, but defeated by the mallalent of fortune, limned in his studie a Pine tree striken with lightning, carying this mot. Il mio sperar, which was borowed also from Petrarch. Allor che fulminato e morto giaacque il mio sperar che tropp' alto mintana. Yet in despight of fortune he deuised also a Pinnace or small Barke, tossed with tempestious stormes, and in the sail was written expectanda dies, hoping as I think for one sunne shine day to recompence so many glomy and winter months

   (no sig.).

5. “The Elm and the Vine: Notes Toward the History of a Marriage Topos,” PMLA 73 (1958), 521-32; hereafter referred to parenthetically.

6. The Greek Anthology, Vol. III, trans. W. R. Paton, The Loeb Classical Library (London, 1917), pp. 121-23.

7. The Poems of Catullus, trans. F. W. Cornish, The Loeb Classical Library (New York, 1918), p. 89.

8. See J. P. Brockbank, “History and Histrionics in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey II (1958), 42-44; Robin Moffet, “Cymbeline and the Nativity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962), 207-18; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, N. J., 1972), p. 181; Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965); and Homer D. Swander, “Cymbeline: Religious Idea and Dramatic Design,” Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Ore., 1966), pp. 256-57.

9. Robert Grams Hunter summarizes Cymbeline's structure as follows: “The play belongs to that type of romantic comedy in which love is tested, in which, temporarily, one of the lovers fails the test, in which the lovers must undergo an ordeal as a result of that failure, and in which, finally, the ordeal is survived and the lovers—one penitent, one forgiving—are reunited.” See Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, p. 144.

10. See Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Jupiter, His Eagle, and BBC-TV.” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter (December 1985), p. 3. Even Dante and Petrarch used Jupiter as a symbol of the Christian deity, who is still often evoked euphemistically as “Jove” in upperclass English speech.

11. See Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 10, 145.

12. The relationship is briefly footnoted by G. K. Hunter in the Arden edition of All's Well. See p. 9n; p. 10n; and p. 12n.

13. Desiderius Erasmus, A Modest Meane to Marriage, trans. N. L., 1568, sig. B 8.

14. “Riddle and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline,” in English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th Birthday (Oxford, 1980), pp. 94-113.

15. The Works of Ben Jonson, Vol 7, ed. W. Gifford (1816), 8; italics added.

16. See Arden edition of Cymbeline, p. 120n.

17. John Gerarde, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), p. 1235; hereafter referred to parenthetically.

18. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Edward Dowden (London, 1903), p. 130, n. 59 and n. 58.

19. Robert Graves notes in The White Goddess the importance of the elder to the Celtic tree alphabet and its associations with witchcraft, evil, and bad luck:

    The thirteenth tree is the elder, a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December. It is an old British superstition that a child laid in an elderwood cradle will pine away or be pinched black and blue by the fairies—the traditional wood for cradles is the birch, the tree of inception, which drives away evil spirits. And in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease. So unlucky is the elder that in Langland's Piers Plowman, Judas is made to hang himself on an elder tree. Spencer couples the elder with the funereal cypress, and T. Scot writes in his Philomythie

    (1616):

    The cursed elder and the fatal yew
    With witch [rowan] and nightshade in their shadows grew.

    King William Rufus was killed by an archer posted under an elder. The elder is also said to have been the Crucifixion tree, and the elder leaf shape of the funerary flints in megalithic long-barrows suggests that its association with death is long-standing. In English folklore to burn logs of elder “brings the Devil into the house.”

    See The White Goddess, amended and enlarged edition (New York, 1966), p. 185.

20. Andrea Alciati, Emblemata (Padua, 1621), pp. 676-79.

21. See Peter Daly, Virginia W. Callahan, and Simon Cuttler, eds., Andreas Alciatus: Index Emblematicus I (Toronto, 1985), emblem 161.

22. Bk. l, p. 34 (Nuremburg, 1590).

23. Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London, 1870), p. 308.

24. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586), p. 62.

25. Huston Diehl, “Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in England,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986), 6l.

26. Cesare Ripa. Iconologia (Rome, 1603), p. 16. Translated by Roger T. Simonds

27. Otto van Veen, Amorvm Emblemata or Emblemes of Love (Antwerp, 1608), p. 244.

28. “Horses and Hermaphrodites: Metamorphoses in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), 159-80.

29. Emblematum Tyrocinia: sive Picta Poesis latinogermanica (Strassburg, 1581) sig. s3.

30. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans, Mary Innes (Baltimore, 1955), Bk. 14, p. 329.

31. See Henry Smith, ‘A Preparative to Marriage,” The Sermons of Maister Henrie Smith (1593), pp. 1-3; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (New York, 1977), pp. 135-36; and Mary Beth Rose, “Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy,” Renaissance Drama 15 (1984), 16-19.

32. A Godly Forme of Householde Government. … (1598), p. 160; hereafter referred to parenthetically.

33. In respect to what Posthumus calls “the woman's part” in marriage, Robert Cleaver says that “‘she was ordeined as a Helper, and not a hinderer” (p. 159). He then argues “that women are as men are, reasonable creatures and haue flexible wittes, both to good and euill, the which with vse, discretion, and good counsell, may be altered and turned. And although there be some euill and lewde women, yet that doth no more prooue the malice of their nature, then of men, and therefore the more ridiculous and foolish are they, that haue inveighed against the whole sexe for a few euill: and haue not with like furie vituperated and dispraised all mankind, because part of them are theeues, murtherers, and such like wicked liuers” (p. 160).

34. “Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance,” Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, I, ed. Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), 303-22.

35. I quote from the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974). I also wish to express my appreciation to Ann Pasternak Slater for calling my attention to the presence of the elm and vine motif in Macbeth, to Margaret Mikesell for a bibliography of marriage manuals, and to Virginia W. Callahan for information on Alciati's version of the elm and the vine topos.

36. An early version of this paper was presented to the World Shakespeare Congress in West Berlin, April, 1986. A revised short version was read at the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in Seattle, April, 1987.