[In the following essay, Jones compares the character and foreign policy of James I with those of Cymbeline and his court.]

Johnson had this to say about Cymbeline:

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 imbecillity, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

The editor of the New Cambridge Cymbeline, Mr. J. C. Maxwell, after quoting this passage, is willing to concede something to Johnson:

Is it enough to say that most of these ‘faults’ are of the essence of romance and that Johnson did not understand romance? That would be too easy a way out: it is hard to deny an ‘incongruity’ that goes beyond the mere factual anachronisms and confusions that Johnson refers to; and it is perfectly possible to combine an enthusiastic admiration for others among the Last Plays with strong misgivings about Cymbeline.

And he proceeds, in his Introduction, to justify the play in terms of its theatrical effectiveness and to draw upon Granville-Barker's analysis of its tragi-comic mode, its ‘sophisticated artlessness’. But Johnson's common-sense objections are not disposed of; they are left hanging in the air, a worrying reminder that present-day scholarship is far from having got Cymbeline in focus. The play seems to lack a context which would explain away its wilder incongruities and apparent absurdities, and which would help to place modern readers in the position of its first audiences for whom, presumably, Johnson's strictures would not have carried so much weight. Cymbeline has, after all, a stage-history: it seems to have been written between 1608 and 1610; it was still being played in 1634, when it was acted at Court before Charles: it was ‘well likte by the kinge’.

The most impressive attempt to make sense of the play is Professor Wilson Knight's chapter in The Crown of Life: one of his boldest and most original essays. Its main argument is summarised by Mr. J. M. Nosworthy in his New Arden edition of Cymbeline, which it will be convenient to quote here:

Cymbeline is, in the main, a historical play in which the dramatist blends his two primary historical interests, those of Britain and Rome. Interwoven with national issues is the conflict between Posthumus, who symbolises what is best in English manhood, and Iachimo, the representative not of Rome but of the corrupt Italy of the Renaissance. National and sexual degeneration are concurrent, but Imogen and the Princes are regenerative forces and the circumstances of the play yield a massive union. The final acceptance of Posthumus's marriage with Imogen typifies the matrimonial peace of the individual, the social integrity of the nation and the union of Britain's best manhood with the essence of royalty, while the Britain-Rome union, which Wilson Knight regards as central, transfers to Cymbeline's kingdom the virtues of Augustus's empire.

Mr. Maxwell mentions this study here only to class it as a ‘failure’: for him Cymbeline is characterised by ‘the neutralisation of strong effects by means of comedy’, and he finds it consequently impossible to take the play's ‘historical and political side’ with anything like Professor Knight's solemnity, although in another context he sides with him over the question of the integrity of the masque of Jupiter. It may be true that Professor Knight treats the play with more moral seriousness than it warrants. He certainly leaves one wishing it were richer than it is. But his essay remains the most painstaking attempt to explain why everything in the play is where it is, and despite what seem to be certain interpretative errors, it deserves to be sifted with a serious regard to what is and what is not valuable in it. The attitude of the New Cambridge editor seems to be: ‘Knight's approach is “transcendental”, therefore unsound. It's safer to stick to common sense, even if it entails finding Cymbeline nearly as unintelligible as Johnson did.’

I think, however, that it is possible to accept a good deal of what Professor Knight has to say about Cymbeline without forsaking common sense and an empirical historical approach. Indeed, it is the historical approach that I want to insist on. Professor Knight himself, however, is in my opinion guilty of a certain obscurantism which has had the effect of making his study of Cymbeline less complete than it might have been. He makes a clear statement of principle in his first Shakespearian publication, Myth and Miracle (1929):

My method is to regard the plays as they stand in the order to which modern scholarship has assigned them; to refuse to regard ‘sources’ as exerting any limit to the significance of the completed work of art; to avoid the side-issues of Elizabethan and Jacobean manners, politics, patronage, audiences, revolutions and explorations; to fix attention solely on the poetic quality and human interest of the plays concerned.

He refers later to, among others, critics using an ‘historical’ approach:

… whenever they find some literary or historical tangent to the fiery circle of poetry, they think, by following its direction into the cold night of the actual, to expose the content of that burning star.

Professor Knight's interpretative work on Shakespeare has been remarkably consistent; and there is no sign of his having modified the principles here outlined. He has, in fact, re-issued Myth and Miracle as part of The Crown of Life. The following remarks will certainly by his standards lead us into ‘the cold night of the actual’, but they will also, I hope, allow us a better view of that rather dim luminary, the play of Cymbeline.

II

Few of the critics who have written about Cymbeline seem to have thought about the impression it made on its audiences when, in 1608, 1609, or 1610, it was a new play. One important question that seems not to have been raised concerns the choice of the play's subject: the historical character who gives the play its title. Why did Shakespeare choose that particular king? What interest would King Cymbeline have had for Shakespeare's audiences? I should like to quote Mr. Nosworthy again, this time for his account of Shakespeare's handling of the historical material afforded him by Holinshed. (It is perhaps a criticism of the New Cambridge Cymbeline that it seeks to complement rather than to provide a complete alternative to the New Arden edition. One is compelled to resort to the older edition for a fuller discussion of certain matters; as here for the Holinshed material.) Mr. Nosworthy's account is as follows:

Holinshed supplied Shakespeare with what is, at best, a confused account of a reign so uneventful that it had defeated the inventive powers of generations of quite imaginative chroniclers. Cymbeline, son of Theomantius, became king in 33 b.c., and died after reigning for thirty-five years, leaving two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. He was brought up in Rome and was absolved, by Augustus Caesar, of obligation to pay tribute. Subsequently tribute was demanded and refused, but Holinshed comments: ‘I know not whether Cymbeline or some other British prince refused tribute.’ Like the earlier chroniclers, he eventually makes the refusal come from Guiderius, and tells of Caesar's consequent attempts to invade Britain. Still uncertain, he relates how, according to British chroniclers, the Romans were twice defeated in pitched battles, but remarks that Latin sources claimed ultimate victory for the Romans. This generally disjunctive report bristles with glaring inconsistencies of time and circumstance which Holinshed makes no attempt to reconcile.

Mr. Nosworthy leaves it at that, and his tone in doing so recalls Johnson's attack on the play's ‘unresisting imbecillity’, for he goes out of his way to suggest that the reign of Cymbeline had no intrinsic interest at all. But it is scarcely wilful perversity that caused Shakespeare to take it as his subject. And even on the basis of Mr. Nosworthy's account, one question demands to be raised. In Holinshed it is Guiderius who refuses to pay tribute to Augustus, not Cymbeline. Shakespeare transfers the events of Guiderius's reign to Cymbeline's. Cymbeline's reign was otherwise uneventful.

The main, if not the only, attraction of Cymbeline's reign was its dating. He became king, says Holinshed, in 33 b.c., and died after reigning for 35 years. His only importance is that while he was king of Britain, Christ was born. Spenser's account of Cymbeline in his ‘chronicle of Briton kings’ (Faerie Queene, II.10.50-51) brings out his significance unambiguously:

Next him Tenantius raignd, then Kimbeline,
What time th' eternall Lord in fleshly slime
Enwombed was …

(This has already been noted by Mr. J. P. Brockbank in an illuminating article, History and Histrionics, in Shakespeare Survey, 11.) Shakespeare wanted an action happening concurrently with this event, so he had to stick to Cymbeline's reign even though it was uneventful. It was in fact a time of peace. In his short account of Cymbeline Holinshed twice mentions the universal peace of the time: the pax Romana in which Christ was born.

But whether for this respect or for that it pleased the almightie God so to dispose the minds of men at that present, not onlie the Britains, but in manner all other nations were contented to be obedient to the Romane empire …

A little later:

About the same time also there came unto Kimbaline king of the Britains an ambassador from Augustus the emperor, with thanks, for that entring into the governement of the British state, he had kept his allegiance toward the Romane empire: exhorting him to keepe his subiects in peace with all their neighbors, sith the whole world, through meanes of the same Augustus, was now in quiet, without all warres or troublesome tumults.

A note of transcendental peace is the one on which Cymbeline ends; though previously to that there has been no lack of strife. Shakespeare transferred the violent events of Guiderius's reign to his father Cymbeline's because his play needed plot-material of this nature: the action of Cymbeline shows division and war giving way to harmony and peace. With the word ‘peace’ the play ends:

Laud we the gods,
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars. Publish we this peace
To all our subjects. Set we forward; let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together; so through Lud's town march,
And in the temple of great Jupiter
Our peace we'll ratify; seal it with feasts.
Set on there. Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.

This in turn may be compared with a speech of Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra:

The time of universal peace is near:
Prove this a prosp'rous day, the three-nooked world
Shall bear the olive freely.

(4.6.5-8)

The question remains: What has this to do with theatre-audiences of about 1610, whether at Court, or at the Blackfriars, or at the Globe? A great deal, I suggest: it centres on the character and foreign policy of James I. A reading of a history of James's reign or a recent biography such as D. H. Willson's makes it seem likely that the peace-tableau with which Cymbeline ends must have a dual reference: it presents dramatically the stillness of the world awaiting the appearance of the Christ-child, but it also pays tribute to James's strenuous peace-making policy (to which I shall return later). The topical elements of Cymbeline have received no scholarly attention, yet they must have contributed to its theatrical success. Relevant here are the works of two scholars in the period: Edwin Greenlaw's Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (1932) and Miss R. F. Brinkley's Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (1932). Both assemble material that has direct bearing on Cymbeline, although neither mentions it explicitly. Miss Brinkley has much to say about the political use made by James of the Tudor-British myth: ‘… that in James is to be found the consummation of the prophecy of Merlin and Aquila of Shaftesbury to the effect that “the British Empire after the Saxons and Normans, shall return againe to her auncient Stocke and Name”’. That is to say, England and Scotland will revert to their ancient status of ‘Britain’ under a single ‘British’ monarch. In response to the occasion, poets and pamphleteers, the devisers of masques and pageants, as well as dramatists, gave mythological support to James's accession to the English throne. They demonstrated that, far from being a break with the past, the arrival of James in London was the fulfilment of the oldest prophecies of the British people; it was a consummation rather than a violation of England's oldest traditions. The Arthurian matter which Henry VII had used to strengthen the authority of the Tudors was not, as might have been expected, discarded at Elizabeth's death. It was used more intensively than ever during the early years of James's reign. James I claimed that he inherited Henry VII's symbolic rôle: he too was the second Arthur, called out of the West to restore the nation's fortunes. James was also the second Brute: he was the first since the death of Brute (the legendary eponymous founder of Britain) to unite the whole island under a single monarch. (And in fact James attempted to put a stop to the use of the terms ‘English’ and ‘Scottish’ in favour of the comprehensive and—in theory—more ancient term ‘British’.) But quite as important as the James/Arthur or James/Brute association was James's favourite self-appointed rôle of Peacemaker. Beati pacifici was his motto; and he loved to be called, and poets duly obliged him, the second Augustus: the pacific emperor under whom Christ was born. In his biography of James, Mr. D. H. Willson says of him, in a chapter called The Peacemaker (for James had published a tract called The Peacemaker or Great Brittaines Blessing):

Peace had come to England with James king, inherent in some mystic fashion in his royal presence. When, in addressing his first English Parliament, he counted ‘the blessings which God hath in my person bestowed upon you’, the first of these blessings was peace. ‘I have ever, I praise God, kept peace and amity with all, which hath been so far tied to my person, as at my coming here you are witnesses I found the State embarked in a great and tedious war, and only my arrival here, and by the peace in my person, is now amity kept where war was before’. Proud was the king of his peaceful attributes. ‘I know not,’ he wrote, ‘by what fortune the diction of Pacificus was added to my title at my coming to England, that of the lion, expressing true fortitude, having been my dicton before. But I am not ashamed of this addition. For King Solomon was a figure of Christ in that he was a king of peace. The greatest gift that our Saviour gave His apostles immediately before His ascension was that He left His peace with them.’

Mr. Willson adds: ‘And Christ was born under Augustus Caesar, also a king of peace.’ It is worth quoting one more paragraph from Mr. Willson's biography:

Flowing from James's dominions, peace was going to become universal. He spoke as though he could bestow it where he would, boasting in 1617 that he had established a settled repose in all neighbouring lands. Nations who quarrelled should bring their disputes before him for settlement. ‘Come they not hither,’ asks The Peacemaker, ‘as to the fountain from whence peace springs? Here sits Solomon and hither come the tribes for judgment. O happy moderator, blessed Father, not Father of thy country alone, but Father of all thy neighbour countries about thee.’

In an essay on James as a political writer (in Seventeenth-Century Studies presented to Sir Herbert Grierson), Professor C. J. Sisson, discussing his pamphlet-war with the Pope, remarks: ‘… he is haunted by thoughts of the unity of the Christian world under one faith’. For James had written: ‘I would with all my heart give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first Seat: I being a Western King would go with the Patriarch of the West.’

For a reading of Cymbeline it is, I think, desirable to familiarise oneself with the panegyrical imagery which was frequently applied to James in the early years of his reign. Jonson's Panegyre (1603), written for James's first entry into Parliament, announces:

Again, the Glory of our Western World
Unfolds himself …

(3-4)

In similar terms a speaker in Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment (1603) addresses James:

Great Monarch of the West, whose glorious Stem,
Doth now support a triple Diadem,
Weying more than that of thy grand Grandsire Brute …

(849 ff., ed Bowers)

This prompts a comparison with a passage towards the end of Cymbeline in which Cymbeline's status as a western king is similarly stressed; the Roman soothsayer is speaking:

… which foreshadowed our princely eagle,
Th' imperial Caesar, should again unite
His favour with the radiant Cymbeline,
Which shines here in the west.

In panegyrical writing of the time much is made of the fact that Henry VII was James I's great-grandfather. In The Italians Pageant, which formed part of Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment, the relationship was visually represented in a triumphal arch:

… ouer the Gate, in golden Caracters, these verses (in a long square) were inscribed:
Tu Regere Imperio populos Iacobe memento,
Hae tibi erunt Artes, Pacique imponere morem,
Parcere Subiectis, et debellare Superbos.

And directly aboue this, was aduanc'd the Arms of the kingdome, the Supporters fairely cut out to the life: ouer the Lyon (some prety distance from it) was written: IACOBO REGI MAGN.

And aboue the head of the Vnicorne, at the like distance, this: HENRICI VII. ABNEP.

In a large Square, erected aboue all these, King Henry the seuenth was royally seated in his Imperiall Robes, to whome king Iames (mounted on horsebacke) approaches, and receyues a Scepter, ouer both their heads these words being written: HIC VIR, HIC EST.

(292 ff., ed. Bowers)

III

It is in the context of the political use made by James of the Tudor-British myth that the relevance of Milford Haven to Cymbeline is to be understood.

Several important scenes in the middle Acts of Cymbeline take place at or near Milford Haven. The place-name is insistently stressed, yet it does not occur in any of the known sources of the play. (The name Milford occurs seven times, Milford Haven nine times; the only other British place-name mentioned is Lud's town, which occurs four times.) Editors and critics have failed to see the existence of a problem.

I suggest that at the time Cymbeline was written Milford Haven was chiefly associated with the landing there in 1485 of Henry Earl of Richmond; with, that is, the accession of Henry VII to the throne. Shakespeare only once elsewhere mentions Milford: this is in Richard III (4.4.534) where a messenger announces

… the Earl of Richmond
Is with a mighty power landed at Milford.

This is supported by two passages in Drayton's Polyolbion (First Part published in 1612) and by the notes written for the poem by Selden. In Song V the following passage occurs:

A branch sprung out of Brute, th' imperiall top shall get,
Which grafted in the stock of great Plantaginet,
The Stem shall strongly wax, as still the Trunk doth wither:
That power which bare it thence, againe shall bringe it thither
By Tudor, with faire windes from little Britaine driven,
To whom the goodlie Bay of Milford shall be given;
As thy wise Prophets, Wales, fore-told his wisht arrive,
And how Lewellins Line in him should doubly thrive.

(49 ff.)

Another passage conerning Milford occurs at line 273 ff. in the same Song:

You goodlie sister Floods, how happy is your state!
Or should I more commend your features, or your Fate;
That Milford, which this Ile her greatest Port doth call
Before your equall Floods is lotted to your Fall!
Where was saile ever seene, or wind hath ever blowne,
Whence Penbrooke yet hath heard of Haven like her owne?

In his note to the first of these passages Selden characterises Milford as follows:

At Milford haven arrived Henry Earle of Richmont, aided with some forces and summes of money by the French Charles VIII. but so entertained and strengthned by divers of his friends, groaning under the tyrannicall yoake of Rich. III. that, beyond expectation, at Bosworth in Leicester, the day and Crowne was soone his.

Every Chronicle tels you more largely.

This association of Milford with the Tudors—and, by extension, with the Stuarts—lends support to Professor Knight's interpretation of Cymbeline, with its emphasis on the national theme. Professor Knight himself refers in general terms to the Tudor element in the Welsh scenes: ‘probably an Elizabethan would feel a Tudor reference in the royal boys' Welsh upbringing’; but he adds: ‘such enquiries into secondary meanings are dangerous and of slight value’. I would object that the audience is no longer Elizabethan: it is important to the play that James is on the throne. I would also contend that the transcendentally national (which is what Professor Knight is concerned with) and the topical are here indivisibly one; the transcendental (as in Macbeth, or indeed the Christian interpretation of history generally) is grounded in the particular, and loses by being divorced from it.

By failing to understand the precise symbolic value of Milford Haven, critics can see the play in vague terms only. They rob it of its particularity, which is one kind of strength. Mr. D. A. Traversi (in Shakespeare: the Last Phase) notices the important part played by Milford in the central action—similar to that of Dover in King Lear—but fails, among other things, to explain why the Roman ambassador, returning to Rome from Lud's town, should travel via Milford Haven—not, on the face of it, the directest route. It is to be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's geography in this play is not a literal but a symbolic one. Mr. Traversi comments:

The central part of Cymbeline involving the integration of the various symbolic themes is mostly concerned with the events that lead up to the meeting of Imogen, Cloten, and the lost sons of the king at Milford Haven.

But a little later, his failure to see the particular relevance of Milford to the national theme of the play leads him to observe:

… the expression of emotion is reduced … to something very like a literary quibble in—

Tell me why Wales was made so happy as
To inherit such a haven

when the clearly implied fusion of the ideas of ‘heaven’ and ‘haven’ is scarcely justified in terms of intensity of feeling.

Shakespeare, however, is alluding to the same ‘haven’ as that celebrated by Drayton—

Where was saile ever seene, or wind hath ever blowne,
Whence Penbrooke yet hath heard of Haven like her owne?

—and it seems probable that Imogen's reference to this ‘this same blessed Milford’ would have been readily interpreted by Shakespeare's audience.

IV

It is not my intention to claim that Cymbeline is better than most current critical opinion holds. Dr. Leavis is clearly right when he relegates the play to an order distinctly below that of The Winter's Tale. What I am concerned with is seeing the play in its historical setting, and attempting to locate, in a necessarily imperfect way, the impulses which led to its being written, acted, and applauded. What an historical approach can show, I think, is that Cymbeline possesses many of the elements that we usually associate with the Jacobean masque (I do not refer solely to the descent of Jupiter in Act Five) and that it is precisely these elements which contribute most decisively to the play's weakness as a whole. It seems to me likely that the character of Cymbeline—at any rate, in the final scene, with its powerful peace-tableau—has a direct reference to James I, before whom it was, presumably, acted. I would also, more tentatively, adduce one or two more facts which may be relevant. Cymbeline (in Shakespeare, though not in Holinshed) has one daughter and two sons; so did James I. James's elder son, Henry, was created Prince of Wales in 1610, and some editors point to 1610 as a likely date for Cymbeline; and in connection with the stress on peace with which the play closes, it is perhaps of interest that 1610 was the only year, of this period, in which all the European states were at peace. Lastly, Cymbeline's final submission to Rome, even after he has won the war against the Romans (which Professor Knight emphasised), might have had some topical value in view of James's efforts to enter into friendly negotiations with Papal Rome. When, towards the end of the play, therefore, Cymbeline emphatically announces: ‘Well, my peace we will begin …,’ the audience must have made a complex identification: the peace is both the peace of the world at the time of Christ's birth, in which Britain participates, and also its attempted re-creation at the very time of the play's performance, with Jacobus Pacificus—who was a ‘figure’ of Augustus—on the throne.

Such allusions to the dramatist's royal patron were not necessarily harmful to the artistic integrity of a drama: Macbeth, for instance, does not suffer unduly from them, pervasive though they are. But the reason there is that the compliments are, artistically, at the perimeter of the work, while the centre is occupied by one who was, so to speak, James's personal enemy. Macbeth was the man who had tried to avert the Merlin prophecies and, by trying to avert them, fulfilled them. For Fleance, having fled to Wales, married Princess Nesta, and so ensured one of James's two claims to the English throne. The character of Macbeth can therefore be treated by Shakespeare in a satisfyingly complex way: James can take no offence. But not so with Cymbeline, less serious as a work of art for this reason: here evil is quite inadequately treated. Several critics have noticed this: Dr. Leavis, for instance, comments: ‘Cloten and the Queen are the wicked characters, stepmother and son, of the fairy-tale: they don't strike us as the expression of an adult intuition of evil.’ I would add, if we are to take the play as a serious drama, the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of Cymbeline himself. He is largely neutral and passive while the Queen is alive but comes to no harm, for the author officiously protects him from the consequences of his weak nature and ill-judged actions. The Queen and Cloten are used as scapegoats: they take most of the blame, and are killed off. The Winter's Tale is a different matter: Leontes realises to the full the wickedness of his actions in their lasting consequences. In Cymbeline, one may conjecture, the need to avoid giving offence, while simultaneously making extensive use of topical allusion, issues in the mixture of styles in the characterisation. It would have been undesirable for Cymbeline's wicked Queen to be approximated, in the minds of the audience, with James's virtuous consort, Anne of Denmark. So the Queen is made conventionally grotesque after a fairytale fashion in order to counteract the temptation to find a real-life analogue. At the end of the play, Cymbeline is reinstated; but there is no hint of criticism. He is simply the great Western King, at the centre of things, restored to all his children and, to close all, magnanimously radiating Peace. The whole play suffers, as Macbeth does not, from being too close to its royal audience, and despite some brilliant things there is, imaginatively, a central fumbling, a betrayal of logic.

V

Much of the last paragraph is obviously speculative and, if correct, must await corroboration. Even so, the play remains obscure in places; largely because one is uncertain how far an allegorical reading is pertinent. What seems probable is that Cymbeline set Shakespeare's audience no special problem. The dramatist has evoked a body of knowledge, shared by the audience, which doubtless provided a kind of interpretative key to events on the stage which, without such a key, appear insufficiently motivated, almost incoherent. Miss Lilian Winstanley has something similar in mind when she says of Shakespeare: ‘… he is dealing with the events of most immediate interest to his audience and he is working to a pre-existent unity in the minds of that audience. Events which may not seem connected to us were connected to him and his audience because they were all vividly alive in their minds at the same moment’ (Hamlet and the Scottish Succession). The play was no doubt felt to be right; and no objection would be raised to the apparently illogical position of James I's somehow participating in two rôles at once: Cymbeline and Augustus.

‘The Tragedie of Cymbeline’ is the last play in the First Folio. Its designation as a tragedy has always been puzzling; and on this point Mr. Maxwell makes a useful comment:

Heminge and Condell had denied themselves the convenient category of ‘tragi-comedy’ and, though Cymbeline seems to us to fall naturally into the same class as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, it contains weightier public and historical matter, so that it is not inconceivable that the placing of it among the tragedies was the deliberate choice of what seemed the lesser evil.

In one point he departs from editorial tradition: in spelling ‘Iachimo’ as ‘Jachimo’. The innovation seems warranted, since ‘Jachimo’ (for Italian ‘Giacomo’) is in accordance with the metre. He might well have made a further departure in spelling ‘Cloten’ as ‘Clotten’, which would indicate the correct pronunciation (as in ‘clotpoll’). He does in fact point out that the Folio has ‘Clotten’ up to the Fourth Act. Brute's wife was Innogen; and Mr. Maxwell suggests that the Folio ‘Imogen’ is probably ‘wrong’: ‘but it would scarcely be tolerable to dislodge the familiar form for anything less than a certainty’. He adduces two facts to support this: ‘“Innogen” is the name of the (mute) wife of Leonato’ in Much Ado, and the pair of names is closely approximated in Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus; and Simon Forman, who saw an early performance of Cymbeline, mentions ‘Innogen’ in his report. Although such a mistake on the part of the printer is hard to account for (the name ‘Imogen’ occurs over twenty times), Mr. Maxwell's suggestion is interesting; I almost wish he had boldly emended to ‘Innogen’. But he is undoubtedly right to play safe. Still, ‘Innogen’ should be entertained as a possibility, for something positive is added to Cymbeline if we recognise that Shakespeare's heroine shares her name with the legendary first queen of Britain. The name ‘Innogen’ helps to signalise her rôle in the play. Professor Knight has remarked that it might be associated with ‘innocence’. He has also suggested that she is ‘not merely a single lady, but Britain's soul-integrity’; she is an ‘essence’ of royalty; and with a fine intuition he says of her journey to Milford Haven: ‘She is, one feels, magnetized to this, enchanted, spot. …’ She is indeed ‘magnetized’ to Milford Haven. Without knowing it, she is helping to fulfil a ‘prophecy’. But the compelling force is ultimately nothing other than the facts of history:

                                                                                                    the Earl of Richmond
Is with a mighty power landed at Milford.