SOURCE: “James,” in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 106-159.

[In the following excerpt, Marcus contends that a close reading of Cymbeline will support an interpretation of the play as a political allegory that is deeply reflective of contemporary Jacobean politics.]

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare can be seen as operating according to Jonsonian precept in the construction of a political allegory which presents “one entire bodie, or figure” devoted to a “present office” of the king. There have been fragmentary topical readings of the play, but none has pursued the “Jacobean line” with anything approaching the thoroughness that contemporary evidence permits. The play is by no means easy. But if allowances are made for the difference in form between a Jacobean pageant or court masque and a play in the public theater, Cymbeline will support a remarkably subtle, detailed reading as political allegory. Following the “Jacobean line” in Cymbeline will require us to perform some of the integrative and harmonizing functions dear to the project of traditional historicism—we can account for some notorious cruxes and arrive at a new perception of unity. The play's gathering of topical connections creates something of the same quality of concentration and distillation that classically minded writers in the Renaissance sought to achieve by adhering to the unities of time and place. But the local Shakespeare created by such reading may prove almost as distasteful to universalizers as the warmongering chauvinist of 1 Henry VI. Cymbeline's Shakespeare is at least more civilized and gentlemanly, but looks rather too much like an elitist who traffics in Stuart ideology and iconography out of a misguided belief that such a narrow, particularized vision can somehow be made compatible with exalted universals like the Ideal of Human Betterment.

The name of Shakespeare cannot be kept utterly separate from the world of emblem and impresa—not unless we suppress contemporary records. In 1613 we find a Shakespeare—the same Shakespeare—collecting forty-four shillings in gold for his work, along with Richard Burbage, on the earl of Rutland's impresa for the anniversary of James's accession. The dramatist named Shakespeare also took considerable care over his own family coat of arms.¹ But Cymbeline is not, by Jacobean standards at least, a collection of arcana. It would have been (or should have been, if viewers ever came up to authors' expectations) at least partially politically “legible” to a reasonable segment of the public acquainted with the dominant symbols of the reign—more legible, probably, than James's coronation pageant or the usual Jonsonian masque. The Shakespeare of Cymbeline is at least in part a King's Man—an author who subsumes his own orderly creation under the Authorship of James I. As in the coronation pageants, so in Cymbeline, the search for artistic “unity” leads the spectator directly to a vision of political concord under the reigning monarch.

And yet, for all our efforts to follow the play's “Jacobean line,” there are ways in which the play itself resists it. Shakespeare seems to evade the Authorized Version of Cymbeline with almost the same energy that he promotes it. In part, of course, we find such resistance because we want to find it—pursuing différance is usually more congenial for new historicists and other postmodernist critics than constructing idealized visions of harmony. And yet, there is reason to suppose that contemporary audiences might have felt a similar discomfort with the play's call for unity. Along with an array of relatively commonplace Stuart motifs, Cymbeline displays a number of specific mechanisms which work against the communication of its Stuart message, engendering an unease with topicality which is specific to this play. We might call it an unease with Jacobean textuality. Inevitably, our sense of the relative strength of the play's Stuart message as opposed to its modes of evasion will depend on our own critical (and political) stance. And yet, in the interpretation of Cymbeline, as very frequently in the decipherment of the Stuart masque, we have to follow the “authorized” line of political allegory in order to discover the gaps, the devices by which (to repeat King James's own language) the clear text is “rent asunder in contrary sences like the old Oracles of the Pagan gods.” It is not enough (and is never enough in terms of our project for localization) to say that the play deconstructs its own dominant mode of signification. That can be said of every play we call Shakespeare. Instead, we need to look for the “local” meanings of the deconstruction, its particular cultural and political resonances, the specific moments in the dramatic action at which its energies burst forth. To do topical reading of Cymbeline, we must begin by playing the pedant along with James I, explicating political allegory in a rather straightforward, linear fashion—according to principles of unity like those articulated by Ben Jonson.

I use the term reading quite deliberately. At least initially, we will be interpreting the play according to methods more closely associated with earlier humanist moralities or sermons or court entertainments than with seventeenth-century plays in the public theater. After we have “read” Cymbeline we will consider the tricky business of the play's contemporary performance. There are interesting problems raised by Simon Forman's description of Cymbeline as he saw it staged in 1610 or 1611. The text of Cymbeline we will read is the 1623 folio text—the only early text we have. It is close enough to the play as described by Forman that our local reading will not be built upon impossibly shifting sand, although all of our earlier caveats about variability in performance will continue to apply. Yet even considered as theater, Cymbeline asks to be interpreted, given the fixity of a written text. It is through the very conventions of authorship which the play appears to countenance that Cymbeline reveals signs of uneasiness with the Jacobean line.

TELLING RIDDLES

In the third year of his reign, James I more than once descended upon Parliament like Jove with his “thunderbolts” to chide its members for their sluggishness with a pet project of his, the creation of Great Britain through the union of England and Scotland. He had expected his coronation in England and the Union of the Kingdoms to “grow up together” as a matter of course; instead, he had encountered “many crossings, long disputations, strange questions, and nothing done.” The image of James as Jove swooping down with his thunder became a leitmotif of the parliamentary session. If the king were at a distance from that legislative body, they would be safe from his blasts: “Procull a Iove, procul a Fulmine.” But the king was at hand, attending closely to the debates, threatening to loose his blasts against the lawmakers if his project were not expedited.²

Court entertainment followed the governing line. In the most important masque of the same year, Ben Jonson's Hymenaei, the Union of the Kingdoms was effected symbolically through the marriage of two young aristocrats from very different backgrounds. At least some contemporaries took note of the political allegory: they were able to “read” its essential elements. Juno presided over the masque's marriage ritual, her name iuno anagrammatized as unio to represent the union of England and Scotland. Far above in the heavens stood Jove, her spouse, with his thunderbolts, again a representation of James, who liked to describe himself as a Jove figure and as a loving husband to the nation, with unio, a united Britain, as his wife.³ Here, however, Jove appeared in milder aspect, his menacing thunder silenced, because in the masque at least, the “marriage” of the kingdoms had finally taken place.

In Shakespeare's Cymbeline, written and performed perhaps two years later, at the very latest in 1610, Jove appears yet again in connection with the theme of the Union of the Kingdoms.⁴ Jupiter descends straddling an eagle, spouting fire, hurling his bolts, to castigate the mourning ghosts who “Accuse the Thunderer” of faithlessness toward the sleeping prisoner Posthumus. The god proclaims his continuing favor, promises to “vplift” the unfortunate man, and leaves upon his chest a riddling tablet that, when interpreted at the end of the play, turns out to presage the Union of the Kingdoms.⁵ In terms of the play's contemporary context, Jove is clearly to be identified with King James I, the creator of Great Britain, who had a similar habit of intruding upon his subjects to lecture them when his plans for the nation went unheeded or misunderstood. And yet, paradoxically, to take Jupiter for James weakens the “governing line” of political interpretation.

Cymbeline seductively courts topical reading by presenting its audience with a series of riddles and emblems which arouse a desire for explication. Some of them are interpreted within the play; others are not. The effect is to make the unsolved puzzles all the more teasingly enticing.⁶ Many of the play's riddles are clustered in its final scenes. The soothsayer twice recounts his vision of the eagle winging its way westward to vanish in the beams of the sun. First he misinterprets it to forecast Roman defeat of Cymbeline and the Britons, then he reinterprets it correctly as a sign of new Roman-British amity,

which fore-shew'd our Princely Eagle
Th'Imperiall Caesar, should againe vnite
His Fauour, with the Radiant Cymbeline,
Which shines heere in the West.

(tln 3805-8)

The cryptic tablet placed upon Posthumus's breast by Jupiter is another important riddle. It is read twice during the action—the only text so privileged in all of Shakespeare's plays—and in the folio it is printed exactly the same way both times like a properly “authored” document.⁷ At the end of the play, it is finally deciphered as linking the reunion of Posthumus and Imogen to the discovery of Cymbeline's long-lost sons and the regeneration of Britain.

Even out in remote Wales, far from the world of the court, there are emblematic “texts” to be interpreted, natural lessons in morality imprinted upon the landscape. According to the teachings of Belarius, tutor to the king's exiled sons, a hill signifies dangerous eminence like that won and lost in the courts of princes; the low mouth of their cave teaches the virtue of humble devotion. When Imogen begins breathing the mountain air of Wales, she too starts creating emblems. Her assumed name Fidele is recognized by the end of the play as a sign of her abiding faith in Posthumus despite his rejection of her. When she awakens after her deathlike sleep, she reads the flowers beside her as signifying the false pleasures of the world; the body of Cloten signifies its cares (tln 2618-19).

Shakespeare calls attention to some of the play's riddles through the device of repetition: appearing more than once, they become insistent, demand interpretation. Along with the riddles and emblems deciphered within the play, there are other repeated motifs carrying an aura of hidden significance. “Blessed Milford” Haven is a Welsh port named many times by many different characters in the course of the action; it attracts them from widely scattered places as though by magnetic force. But the almost incantatory power of “Milford” is never satisfactorily explained by any of the characters. The victory of Guiderius, Arviragus, and Belarius over the Roman forces in the narrow lane is another insistent motif which is never quite unraveled. The episode is first enacted on stage, then recounted no fewer than four times, the last in a derisive rhyme by Posthumus that casts scorn upon people who attend overmuch to riddles:

Nay, do not wonder at it: you are made
Rather to wonder at the things you heare,
Then to worke any. Will you Rime vpon't,
And vent it for a Mock'rie? Heere is one:
“Two Boyes, an Oldman (twice a Boy) a Lane,
“Preseru'd the Britaines, was the Romanes bane.

(tln 2982-87)

Posthumus distrusts such marveling, his facile rhyme appearing to parody the play's heavy-handed way with prophetic language. But he himself is the play's most interesting riddle. Not only does he, at the end, bear upon his breast a tablet that demands and receives interpretation, but the other characters refer to him as though he were a text in need of explication, the “Catalogue of his endowments … tabled by his side” and he, to be perused “by Items” (tln 320-21). Posthumus is Shakespeare's creation. He does not occur in the historical sources.⁸ His past contains some mystery. One bystander acknowledges, “I cannot delue him to the roote” (tln 37). He is praised for his “fair Outward” and for virtuous “stuffe” within; he comes of noble stock and—apparently—prosperous estate, yet appears impoverished, without the power or influence he might be expected to have to combat his sudden banishment.

In the artistic economy of Cymbeline, riddles exist to be interpreted—interpreted, as riddles conventionally are, through the finding of a single answer which dissolves their ambiguity into clarity. In fact, all of the play's riddles can be interpreted by reference to the play's contemporary Stuart milieu—even the cryptic “text” that is Posthumus himself. It is a marvelous device for arresting the free proliferation of topical meaning and focusing interpretation upon a single set of motifs. What is accomplished by such revelation of meaning “without cloud or obscuritie” is another matter, however.

It is, by now, pretty generally accepted by Shakespeareans willing to consider a Stuart Cymbeline at all that the play's emphasis on the ideal of a united Britain and its vision of empire—the Roman eagle winging its way westward to vanish into the British sun—can be interpreted in terms of James I's cherished project for creating a new “empire” called Great Britain, a revival of the ancient kingdom of Britain which had, according to popular legend, been founded by Brute, son of Aeneas.⁹ Almost as soon as James had arrived from Scotland to claim the English throne in 1603, he had issued his “Proclamation for the uniting of England and Scotland,” which called upon the “Subjects of both the Realmes” to consider themselves “one people, brethren and members of one body”; the next year, by proclamation, he assumed the “Stile, of King of Great Britaine.” His subjects were blanketed with propaganda for the Union. The royal project was lauded in poetry and public pageantry, an organizing motif of his coronation pageant in 1604 and the Lord Mayor's shows for 1605 and 1609 and of courtly entertainments like Jonson's Hymenaei; it was also publicized through treatises and pamphlets, even through the coin of the realm. One of the new gold pieces issued by James I bore the inscription Faciamus eos in gentem unam.¹⁰

However, his subjects on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border were less than enthusiastic about the proposal, muttering patriotic slogans about their nation's safety in isolation, much like Cloten and the wicked queen in the play, displaying distrust, even open hatred toward their “brethren” across the border, or (on a higher level of discourse) stating serious reservations, on grounds of legal and religious principle, about James I's strong identification with Roman ideals and institutions. A visiting foreign dignitary observed, “The little sympathy between the two nations, the difference of their laws, the jealousy of their privileges, the regard of the succession, are the reasons they will never … join with another, as the King wishes.”¹¹ But James persisted nonetheless. The political plot of Cymbeline, in marked contrast to the prevailing spirit of nationalism in Shakespeare's earlier history plays, culminates in a vision of harmonious internationalism and accommodation that mirrors James's own policy. The British and Roman ensigns wave “Friendly together,” the fragmented kingdom of Britain is reunited, and the nation embarks on a new and fertile era of peace.

The romantic plot of Cymbeline can be related to the same set of goals. James was an indefatigable matchmaker among his individual subjects, as among nations and peoples. He took particular pride in state marriages which bridged political and religious differences like Hymenaei's union between Lady Frances Howard, from a pro-Catholic, pro-Spanish family, and the earl of Essex, from a line of staunch Calvinists. From Hymenaei in 1606 to the masques for the palsgrave Frederick and the king's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1613, nearly every court marriage important enough to be celebrated with a wedding masque at all was celebrated as a particular instance of the king's wider project for uniting England and Scotland. One of the new coins he issued in honor of Great Britain even bore an inscription from the marriage service: Quae Deus conjunxit nemo separet, “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” A prefatory poem to one of the wedding masques asked, “Who can wonder then / If he, that marries kingdomes, marries men?”¹² The ruptured, then revitalized marriage of Imogen and Posthumus in Cymbeline, like the actual marriages engineered by James, can be linked to his higher policy of creating a united Britain out of nations in discord.

So can the barriers to union: the play's constant quibbling with matters of law and ceremony echoes the same milieu of controversy. Attending to some of the fine points of the debate will aid us in reading the “text” of Posthumus. When James I left Edinburgh for London in 1603, he left his original subjects without a resident monarch. An integral part of his project for the creation of Great Britain through the union of England and Scotland was the naturalization of the Scots. His motto for the project was Unus Rex, unus Grex, & una Lex, “one king, one flock, one law.” But that last phrase posed unexpected difficulties, since England and Scotland operated under very different legal systems. England had its venerable common law and Scotland, the civil law, essentially a Roman code. Despite his disclaimers, it seems clear that James I preferred Scots law over the English system and hoped to mold Britain's “one law” in accordance with the Roman model, which he considered clearer, more succinct, and more hospitable to his views on royal absolutism. But that hope was dashed by English parliamentarians and common lawyers, who viewed the import of aliens and the imposition of an alien legal system as tantamount to national extinction. When James descended upon them like Jove with his thunderbolts, the immediate question at hand was the naturalization of the Scots. Despite the attempts of James's supporters to argue for the honor and reasonableness of their brethren to the north, members of Parliament conjured up horrific visions of beggarly Scotsmen swarming across the border and devouring England's prosperity. Parliament refused to naturalize the king's Scottish subjects until the question of law was settled, preferably by bringing Scotland into accordance with England.¹³

Meanwhile, the Scots had their own fears about the Union: like the English, Scottish parliamentarians were adamant about preserving their “ancient rights” and liberties. But the Scots were even more adamant about preserving their own reformed Kirk. James's Project for Union called for the creation of a single British church, a ceremonial church upon the Anglican model. When it came to this aspect of the Union, it was the Scots who were anti-Roman, worried that their pure Kirk would be corrupted by a union with “popish” Anglicanism and enforced conformity with English canon law, a system also based upon Roman civil law. In Jonson's Hymenaei, Anglican ritual is celebrated as a comely descendant of Roman ceremonial and Roman civil law; it is attacked by “untempered humors” and “affections,” but successfully defended by Reason and Order.¹⁴ In actuality, the “humors” of the Scots were less easily overcome. By 1607, James's project for Great Britain was foundering on the rocks of English and Scottish prejudice. He was willing to modify his original proposal for “one law” and create a union which preserved the distinctness of the two legal systems. But both Parliaments balked. In England the Scots were scorned as aliens, mercilessly pilloried in plays and satires. Numerous duels were fought between Englishmen and Scotsmen. Scots were barred from holding public office and denied the precedence of rank: on ceremonial occasions, English parvenus would elbow out Scots of the old nobility. Since Parliament refused to remedy the situation, James I went to the courts. Through the famous case of the Post Nati, decided in 1608, he sought to settle the question of the naturalization of the Scots and thereby clear the way for his beloved Project for Union. Never, his advisers warned the nation, would there be a real unity of kingdoms until the “mark of the stranger” had been removed from the Scots.¹⁵

The Post Nati were all those Scotsmen born after James had ascended the English throne, theoretically uniting the kingdoms. James had proclaimed them citizens of Britain and according to the Roman code they were already citizens, yet in England they were deprived of any recourse at law. The case of the Post Nati concerned a dispute over land titles and hinged on whether a Scotsman born since the proclamation of union had the right to defend his ownership of property held in England in a court of English law. But despite the narrowness of the immediate problem it posed, it was perhaps the most important case of the reign, argued at the King's Bench, then moved on account of its momentous implications into the Exchequer, pondered by every one of England's highest justices. The case established principles about the rights of alien peoples which became fundamental to all later treatments of the same issues, such as the constitutional arguments of the American colonists before 1776. The case of the Post Nati was widely publicized, a matter of alehouse conversation; several of its most important documents were published. By nearly unanimous decision of the judges involved, the Post Nati were declared citizens, entitled to recourse at English law despite their continuing ties to the alien Roman system.¹⁶

We cannot be sure whether Shakespeare's play was written before or after the case of the Post Nati was settled in 1608; Cymbeline is usually dated 1608 or 1609. In any event, the probable outcome of the case was well known in advance. But in the character of Posthumus, the one “born after,” a man theoretically married to Imogen in the Temple of Jupiter and therefore “wedded” to her kingdom yet kept in isolation and suspension, deprived of his natural rights, Shakespeare creates a dramatic figure whose alienation and restoration symbolically parallel the fortunes of James's subjects “born after,” the Post Nati. Cymbeline recasts the faltering national union as a beleaguered marriage between two individuals, Imogen and Posthumus, and thereby invests the legal and political issues bound up with the project for Great Britain with a troubling immediacy, an urgency that seems to quicken toward a concrete political goal—James I's goal of relieving the agony of exile and creating a genuine union.

A PARABLE OF EXILE

The divided Britain of Cymbeline is not to be equated with the wrangling Britain of James I. Rather, it is a partial analogue and prefiguration. In the Britain ruled by Cymbeline, as in the Britain of James I, a “marriage” has produced dislocation. The situation of Posthumus at the beginning of the play is in many ways like that of the Scots after 1603. His surname Leonatus—born of or under the lion—suggests James's well-known device of the Stuart lion; the king was fond of comparing the Scots to his own heraldic animal.¹⁷ Posthumus is a nobly born beggar, like many of the Scottish aristocrats, at least as they appeared to the more prosperous English. To his humiliation, he cannot reciprocate Imogen's gift of the diamond with a love token of equal value (tln 132-42). He is an altogether proper gentleman yet held in low esteem. He has until the marriage held the office of gentleman of the bedchamber, a position monopolized by Scotsmen even in James I's court at Whitehall during the early years of the reign. But through the marriage, Posthumus is deprived and exiled, just as the citizens of Scotland were distanced from their king and from the center of government when James assumed the English crown.

Posthumus has gained the respect of most of Cymbeline's courtiers. But like the Scots, he is divided between Britain and Rome and, as a result, held in suspicion, particularly after the outbreak of Cymbeline's war against Rome. His birth under a “Jovial star,” his Latinate name, his close ancestral ties with the Continent, especially Rome and France, place him in an enemy camp. But in the Britain of the play, unlike the Britain of James I, he has no king to take his part against the local chauvinists. The similarities between James and Cymbeline have often been noted in topical readings of the play: both kings have two sons and a daughter; like James, Cymbeline is associated by the final scenes with a vision of the rebirth of empire. Unlike James, however, and unlike the Cymbeline of Shakespeare's historical sources, who was noted for unfaltering devotion to Rome, the Cymbeline of the play has abandoned his earlier allegiance to Augustus Caesar and is as stubbornly anti-Roman for most of the action as any of his subjects. He lends a sympathetic ear to the patriotic sloganeering of the wicked queen and Cloten, who, like members of the English House of Commons, plead against Roman influence and the “Roman yoke” on grounds of their ancient British liberties. Cloten, in particular, is a fanatic about law. His speech is peppered with idle legalisms: even his wooing of Imogen is a “case” in which her woman will be enlisted as his “Lawyer” (tln 1040-41). King Cymbeline himself, like his wife and doltish stepson, is a fervent advocate of native British law—the law of Mulmutius mangled by Caesar's sword. Mulmutius and the “ancient liberties of the House” were similarly prominent in contemporary parliamentary speeches against James I and his notions of empire and royal prerogative.¹⁸

But Posthumus is not only a victim of such prejudice—he nurtures prejudices of his own. He is almost as devoted to legalistic language as Cloten.¹⁹ A much more devastating flaw is his susceptibility to the insinuations of Iachimo, an Italian, who convinces him all too easily that Imogen, his wife, is unchaste. Shakespeare ingeniously (albeit anachronistically) separates two levels of Roman influence in the play—that of the ancient Rome of Caesar Augustus, associated with the ideals of James I, with peace and a benevolent code of law, and that of the Renaissance Rome of the degenerate Italians, associated rather with perversion, bawdry, and amorality. It is probably not mere happenstance that Shakespeare modeled the romantic plot in accordance with a tale out of the bawdy Italian Boccaccio. Posthumus's easily aroused distrust of the virtuous Imogen recasts into personal terms the Scottish prejudice against the Church of England, that sluttish “Whore of Babylon.” He displays a paranoid willingness to doubt Imogen even before the bargain with Iachimo is concluded—a trait which the wily Italian attributes to “some Religion” in him (tln 452).

Imogen is far too full and complete a character to be reduced to the level of allegory, but she is associated with images of ceremonial worship throughout the play. Her chamber is likened to a chapel and resembles an elaborately decorated sanctuary, its roof “fretted” with “golden Cherubins” (tln 1254). She is several times referred to as a “temple”: by a lord of the court (“That Temple thy faire mind” tln 900), by Arviragus (“so diuine a Temple” tln 2316), and, finally, by the repentant Posthumus (“The Temple / Of Vertue was she; yea, and she her selfe” tln 3502-3). She is also associated with the enactment of due ceremony. It is Imogen who observes in Wales that the “breach of Custome, / Is breach of all” (tln 2257-58) and Guiderius reiterates her attention to decorum when he hears his brother's “Solemn Musick” in lament of her seeming death: “All solemne things / Should answer solemne Accidents” (tln 2490-91). In the First Folio dedicatory epistle, as we have seen, just such attention to ceremony is diverted out of its courtly Stuart context and made independent of the monarch. In the play, it is much more closely bound up with members of the royal family, whether or not they are aware of its intrinsic connection with their birth and heritage.

In Wales, Imogen does not recognize her long-lost brothers, nor they her; yet there is an immediate bond of sympathy among them which is given outward expression through acts of religious propriety. The two princes in exile are, in fact, remarkably liturgically minded for a couple of untutored savages. Their pagan ceremonies curiously resemble the ceremonial Anglicanism advocated by James I and Archbishop Bancroft but distrusted by Puritan elements in the church. They greet the sun with a “mornings holy office,” like matins; their dirge over the “dead” Imogen, her body laid toward the east, is spoken antiphonally to music, much like an Anglican liturgy. They have, of course, been guided by Belarius, but he comments on their “inuisible instinct” for civility as for valor (tln 2470-75). Their innate respect for ritual and due ceremony is charged with political significance. It suggests, as James I and his churchmen often argued in defense of the Anglican church against English Puritans and Scotch Presbyterians, that liturgical worship is not some popish import but a native cultural form, as natural to the British as their valor. Their ceremonialism is pagan, to be sure, but a precursor of Anglican worship, like Cymbeline's thankful feasts and rituals in the Temple of Jove at the end of the play or like the Roman rituals of Hymenaei. It would be easy to make too much of the play's frequent allusions to questions of law and ceremony: such passages can be interpreted on many different levels. But taken in the aggregate, they shape a subtle pattern of reference which links the various factions in the Britain of King Cymbeline to analogues in the renascent Britain of King James I, the “parliamentary” xenophobia of Cloten and his mother balanced against Posthumus's hysterical willingness to heed rumors of “popish” Italian defilement.

In terms of the play's “Jacobean line,” the wicked queen—who dominates her husband and other men, who operates politically through the possession of dark secrets, who speaks for the continuing insularity of Britain and incites the advocates of “ancient” law against the ideal of empire—can be seen as a demonized version of Queen Elizabeth I. More precisely, perhaps, the wicked queen is a dark rendering of the image of Elizabeth as it functioned in Stuart England as a symbol for civic and parliamentary opponents of James's absolutism. The queen's impassioned speech before the ambassadors and court dignitaries, with its arguments against the “shame” of invasion and conquest by sea, has even been taken by some readers as an echo of the political rhetoric surrounding the Armada victory.²⁰ Through the wicked queen, Shakespeare marginalizes the image of Elizabeth and its association with the valorization of England's “virginal” isolate intactness, in favor of the Stuart vision of internationalism and political accommodation.

The one central character who is always true to the Union is Imogen herself. She, too, is a kind of Elizabeth figure, carrying some of the former queen's attributes split off from their association with dangerous female dominance: she is heir presumptive to the throne; she is associated with the emblem of the phoenix, the “Arabian Bird”; like the heroines of the high comedies, she adopts “a Princes Courage”—male attire and identity—as part of her quest for her mate.²¹ But for Imogen, being “male” is never more than a painful necessity, an exterior disguise with which she is markedly uncomfortable. She, unlike the earlier heroines, is already married and dedicated to wifely submission, despite her titular supremacy. She would relinquish her kingdom if she could in order to be Posthumus's equal, and in fact, she never does become queen. Her devotion to her husband always comes first. It does not falter even in the face of compelling evidence that he has “forgot Britain.”

Imogen is not responsible for her enforced separation from Posthumus or for his neglect of her, yet even she is subject to error and has something to learn about the nature of prejudice. At the beginning of the play, she scornfully rejects Cloten on the grounds that he and Posthumus have nothing at all in common: “I chose an Eagle, / And did auoyd a Puttocke” (tln 169-70). Cloten is not worth her husband's “mean'st garment.” Even her scornful term “Puttocke” may appear too kind to Cloten, that dreadful “mass of unhingement.” Yet Posthumus is also less than perfect. He and Cloten undergo parallel experiences, like a man and his distorted shadow. Both are step or foster sons to the king, both woo Imogen, they fight one another, both gamble with Iachimo and lose. As Cloten sets off to rape Imogen, he assumes Posthumus's garments. By act 4, both men have literally or figuratively “lost their heads.”²² When Imogen mistakes the decapitated body of one for the other, their identities are temporarily superimposed. She weeps over the puttock, thinking him an eagle; clothes become the man.

The scene of Imogen's desolate but misguided grief over Cloten is difficult to read without an uncomfortable admixture of levity; it is also difficult to stage effectively. Stephen Booth's suggestion that the two roles be played by a single actor removes the most obvious incongruity.²³ But there remain awkward moments, perilously close to low comedy, like Imogen's reaching out toward what she takes to be Posthumus's “Ioviall face” only to find the head unfortunately missing. And yet the scene makes excellent sense as illustration of the “Jacobean line.” Imogen's error demonstrates the interchangeability of the two men, considered only in terms of their outward endowments, and therefore serves as a forceful argument against blind prejudice of either the English or the Scottish variety. The political fragmentation of a divided Britain deprived of its Jove-like or “Ioviall” head is associated with bizarre images of physical and psychic dissolution.

Throughout the play, prejudice is associated with extinction and dismemberment—a vision of a part, not the whole. When Posthumus is convinced of Imogen's falseness, he vows to “teare her Limb-meale”; yet without her, he is “speechless,” his name at “last gasp”; he has “forgot himself” and his identity becomes increasingly problematic. Imogen unknowingly echoes her husband's wish to destroy her when she discovers his failed trust: “I must be ript. To peeces with me” (tln 1724); “I am nothing,” she declares as she embraces the dismembered body of her “Master” (tln 2696). Cloten's actual mutilation parallels Posthumus's loss of identity as a result of his own and others' prejudice. When the seemingly lifeless body of Imogen is laid beside the headless corpse, both partners to the union appear to have become the “nothing” each is without the other. Of course, the extinction is apparent, not real: Posthumus is still alive. But Imogen does not known that. She awakens, mourns her slain “Master,” and embraces him, only to swoon again like one dead upon the lifeless body as on a “bloody pillow.”

Discovering this grisly mockery of the ideal of union, Lucius comments on its unnaturalness: “For Nature doth abhorre to make his bed / With the defunct, or sleepe vpon the dead” (tln 2684-85). As a sequence of events, Cymbeline's grotesque tableaux of dismemberment are improbable, even ludicrous. But they can be read as emblems of the political effects of prejudice. Genuine union is organic: one part of it cannot exist without the other. Cloten is a body without a head; so Posthumus has been a subject unnaturally deprived of his “head” the king. In his published speeches and proclamations, James I frequently used similar images of dismemberment—a body without a head—to convince his English and Scotch subjects of the bizarre indecorousness of continuing to thwart the Union of the Kingdoms, a “marriage” suspended as a result of needless exile and alienation like the marriage of Posthumus and Imogen.²⁴

Imogen clings faithfully to the ideal of union, achieving a certain pathos despite the horror of her symbiotic attachment to the mutilated body. But that lowest point in her fortunes is soon transcended. The Roman soothsayer and Lucius, the Roman commander, encounter Imogen and the corpse just as the soothsayer has interpreted his vision of the eagle winging its way westward into the sun. On stage, the visual image of a union in extinction is counterpoised against the soothsayer's words of prophecy, promising vigor and prosperity to come. Imogen quickly returns to consciousness. It is almost as though she is roused by the soothsayer's vision from the “nothing” she has felt herself to be in symbiotic identification with the corpse. She buries the body and attaches herself as a page to Lucius, the honorable Roman: the heiress to Britain's crown adopts the cause of its opposite in war.

As Imogen and the other characters gradually converge upon “blessed” Milford Haven the dismembered and alienated fragments of the kingdom are slowly gathered back together and the riddles gradually resolved. Milford Haven, as numerous commentators have noted, was the Welsh port where James I's ancestor Henry VII had landed when he came to claim the kingdom in the name of the Tudors. James's descent from Henry gave him his right to the English throne; his identification with the first Tudor was so intense that when he died he was, at his own wish, buried in Henry VII's tomb.²⁵ As Henry's claim formed the basis of James I's project for a reunited Britain, so Henry's landing place becomes the locus for the reunion of the lovers and a healing of the fragmentary vision that has kept the two apart. All of the play's tangled lines converge upon the point at which the “Jacobean line” originated. Imogen is more right than she knows when she exclaims, “Accessible is none but Milford way” (tln 1552).

Imogen and Posthumus become unknowing precursors of a new era of peace and accommodation between the warring Rome and Britain when each of them changes sides. As Imogen becomes “Roman,” so Posthumus, who has been living in Rome and arrives back in Britain among the “Italian Gentry,” assumes instead the guise of a British peasant to fight alongside another group of exiles, Belarius and the king's long-lost sons. The riddle of the man and two boys in the narrow lane who save the Britons from the Romans is taken from Scots history and was an exploit actually performed by three Scotsmen named Hay—the ancestors of James I's favorite Lord Hay, one of the Scots who, like Posthumus in the play, had to contend with insular British prejudice.²⁶ The three heroes in the lane, like Posthumus himself, are associated with the heraldic animal of James: they “grin like Lyons” as they repel the attack. The joining of the two lines of “Lyons” to uphold Britain is a common motif in contemporary materials supporting the idea of Great Britain. The emblem of James I in Henry Peacham's popular collection Minerva Britanna: Or, A Garden of Heroical Devices (London, 1612), for example, is addressed “To the High and mightie IAMES, King of greate Britaine” …, and depicts the English and Scottish lions uniting (as they did in the royal person of the king) to hold up the crown of “famous Britaine.”

Through the battle in the narrow lane, Posthumus proves himself the equal of the sons of Cymbeline. Even the most narrow-minded of James I's English subjects admitted that the Scots were excellent fighters. By his valorous part in the action Posthumus demonstrates his possession of the proverbial “strength o' th' Leonati” and its value to Cymbeline's side. His association with things Roman and French is no barrier to his ability to act for the good of Britain. But no one recognizes that yet because no one knows who he is. Indeed, he is practically invisible, effaced from accounts of the glorious victory in the lane. Just as James I and his advisers had claimed that there could be no act of union until the “mark of the stranger” had been removed from the Scots, so the vision of a united Britain that concludes the play depends on the discovery and reading of the “text” of Posthumus.

Even without a disguise, Posthumus has been an unsolved enigma for others and “to himselfe vnknown.” He shifts his garments and allegiance with protean speed—he is Italian, then British, then Roman. Ironically, he makes the final shift out of a suicidal wish to “spend his breath” to aid the cause of his dead Imogen, unaware that she is still alive and has also changed sides. His frantic oscillation between the two warring nations must give way to the recognition that his marriage is still intact. Through it, the two nations have already begun to dissolve into a new composite entity. To rediscover who he is and what his experiences mean, Posthumus must go through a symbolic union-in-death with Imogen just as Imogen had earlier with him. In the British prison he hopes only for reunion beyond the grave; he falls asleep communing silently with the wife he believes he has destroyed. But as in Imogen's encounter with Lucius and the soothsayer, Posthumus's embracing of death is lifted and transformed by a vision of renewed life. His seeming extinction is like the political extinction feared by English and Scottish patriots who opposed the Project for Union—more apparent than real. His noble ancestors appear “as in an Apparation” to offer him back his identity and plead for his restoration to the esteem, prosperity, and marriage befitting his noble worth. His mother demands,

With Marriage wherefore was he mockt to be exil'd, and throwne
From Leonati Seate, and cast from her, his deerest one:
Sweete Imogen?

(tln 3099-103)

In pleading for Posthumus, his forebears plead for a restoration of the Union of the Kingdoms. Posthumus's continuing deprivation is a “harsh and potent” injury upon a “valiant Race,” the race of the Leonati, or the Scots. But Posthumus is not only an analogue of the exiled Scots; he is a more generalized figure whose exile, trial, and restoration take on theological dimensions and assume the pattern of spiritual rejuvenation. Jove descends and announces, in answer to the prayer of the Leonati,

Whom best I loue, I crosse; to make my guift,
The more delay'd, delighted. Be content,
Your low-laide Sonne, our Godhead will vplift:
His Comforts thriue, his Trials well are spent.

(tln 3137-40)

Exaltavit humiles: as Britain has been saved and ennobled by the valorous deeds of its “low-laide” exiles, so Jove will “vplift” the exiles themselves. The god assents to the prayers of the Leonati, leaving upon Posthumus's breast the riddling tablet that ties the restoration of the kingdom of Britain to the end of his “miseries” and banishment.

The new era of empire, of peace, harmony, and fertility, commences, appropriately enough, with the public reading of Posthumus's “rare” book:

When as a Lyons whelpe, shall to himselfe vnknown, without seeking finde, and bee embrac'd by a peece of tender Ayre: And when from a stately Cedar shall be lopt branches, which being dead many yeares, shall after reuiue, bee ioynted to the old Stocke, and freshly grow, then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britaine be fortunate, and flourish in Peace and Plentie.

(tln 3766-72)

No sooner is the text explicated by the soothsayer, now called Philarmonus, than Cymbeline announces, “My Peace we will begin.” And reading the text of Posthumus provides the necessary keys for the correct interpretation of the vision of the soothsayer. The eagle of empire will pass from the Rome of Augustus Caesar to a reunited Britain. As King Cymbeline's reconciliation with Posthumus, the “Lyons whelpe” presages English acceptance of union with the “alien” Scots, so the king's recovery of his long-lost sons restores another lost limb of his kingdom, the alien territory of Wales. The explication of the riddle of the tablet might almost serve as a model for the reading of the play's “Stuart line.”

In the Britain of Cymbeline, unlike the Britain of James I, Wales, or Cambria, is a separate country. The Roman ambassador to the court of Cymbeline is escorted only as far as its border at the river Severn; British law is not applicable beyond that point. Belarius, like Posthumus, is a man unfairly cast into exile, accused of overfriendliness toward Rome, reacting to his disentitlement by developing prejudices of his own. But the renewal of peace with Rome rejoins Wales to Britain in the persons of Cymbeline's sons. Shakespeare may have intended a reference to Prince Henry, whose creation as Prince of Wales was imminent and would symbolically reaffirm Wales's part in Great Britain. Entertainments written for the investiture like Samuel Daniel's Tethys' Festival include references to Milford Haven and the Tudor conquest—some of the same political material evoked in Cymbeline.²⁷

Through the discovery of the lost children, the ancient kingdom of Brute is finally reunited: England and Scotland at last all under one head, branches of a single tree, as Cymbeline, Posthumus, Imogen, Arviragus, and Guiderius all constitute one line. Imogen has lost her title to the kingdom, but gained “two worlds” in exchange. With the exposure of Iachimo, the last vestiges of Posthumus's suspicion of Imogen are dispelled and the corruption of Italianate Rome is clearly separated from the virtue of its Augustan antecedent. Earlier on, Posthumus's war-weary jailor had exclaimed, “I would we were all of one minde, and one minde good” (tln 2242-43). That wish is answered in the play's long final scene of polyanagnorisis when all the characters gather to disentangle the remaining riddles, piece together a common history, and forge one nation out of a heterogeneous mass of individual “liberties” and customs, Roman and British laws.²⁸ Similar resolutions of the conflicts impeding the creation of Britain were common in contemporary pageants. Peacham's emblem of James also provides a striking analogue: according to the ideal of the Union of the Kingdoms, England and Scotland both uphold the crown of Britain,

And one their Prince, their sea, their land and lawes;
Their loue, their league: whereby they still agree,
In concord firme, and friendly amitie.…

The most important action occurring in Cymbeline as the peace of Augustus descends upon Britain may well be what happens offstage and unmentioned within the play: the birth of Christ, which took place during the reigns of Cymbeline and Augustus Caesar, bringing a new “gracious season” of love and reconciliation among humankind. But another event associated with the golden reign of Augustus was the redescent of Astraea, Goddess of Justice, and the birth of the Roman law. Cymbeline freely offers Augustus Caesar the disputed Roman tribute which earlier he had scornfully refused—a sign of amity between nations which demonstrates his new receptivity to the Roman law, the jus gentium that governs the relations among nations, a branch of the same law by which the Post Nati would have been granted automatic citizenship in Britain.²⁹ In the new alliance, the “justice” of Roman tribute and the mercy of peace and reconciliation are not opposed to one another, but work together for harmony, just as James I envisioned an Empire of Great Britain in which tolerance and respect for the “alien” Roman law would cement, not cancel, union. At the end of the play, legal niceties about whose law and what kind drop out of sight along with the factional interests that had given them such spurious importance. The play ends as James I's reign had begun, with a proclamation of union.

Cymbeline orders that his peace be “published” to all his subjects. But in his Britain, unlike the Britain of 1608, the prejudice and malice which have hindered the Project for Union have either consumed themselves, like the wicked queen who “concluded / Most cruell to her selfe,” or been conquered through inward transformation. Posthumus and King Cymbeline have undergone a “conversion” to the cause of union. In terms of standard humanist theory and James's own cherished belief about the relationship between texts and actions, reading and “application,” Shakespeare can be interpreted as calling for a similar self-searching and self-transformation on the part of his audience. Everyone who kept abreast of Jacobean politics in 1608 and 1609 was aware of the king's Project for Union, acquainted with its proposed benefits for the nation. By coming to know themselves and their own prejudice, the audience would learn to grow beyond the xenophobia of disreputable characters like the queen and Cloten, for whom “defect of iudgment” is the “cause of Feare” (tln 2392-93). They would overcome their partial vision and learn to “read” Posthumus aright as the essentially noble figure he is beneath his own equivalent prejudice. One of the chief barriers to the Project for Union would thereby be removed. The play ends in an openness to the winds of change, a zest for expansion and renewal, as though to intimate that such a transformation is possible. Whether the space between texts and action is so readily negotiable is another matter, however. And so, finally, we return to the vision of Jupiter, which is curiously absent from the one contemporary description we have of the play in performance.

THEATRICAL DECONSTRUCTION AND CRYPTONYMY

Cymbeline demands political interpretation. It displays various characters in the act of finding political meaning in cryptic emblems; it offers its audience an expanded set of verbal texts and symbolic visions that cry out for similar explication. But our reading thus far has left one “text” uninterpreted, the image of descending Jupiter. For anyone immersed in the contemporary milieu, an initial identification would be obvious and almost unavoidable: Jupiter is James, who had swooped down upon his Parliament in similar fashion to announce his continuing protection of his despised countrymen the Scots, who was frequently depicted as Jove with his thunderbolts in connection with the Project for Union (“Procull a Iove, procul a Fulmine”), or as Jove with his emblematic animal the Roman eagle. In the coronation pageant, for example, James and his “empire” appeared as a Roman eagle who had flown westward to London.³⁰ The dreamlike interlude over which Jupiter presides in Cymbeline—rather as the figure of Jupiter had presided over Ben Jonson's Hymenaei a little earlier—has some of the quasi-liturgical patterning to “Solemne Musicke” of a masque at court. And like a Stuart masque or pageant, Cymbeline's Vision of Jupiter shows forth the royal will “clear” and “without obscuritie.” The Leonati beg Jove to open his “Christall window” upon them in much the same way that James I himself had volunteered to open the transparent crystal of his heart to his subjects in several of his published speeches and in his admonitions to the 1606-7 Parliament. According to the folio stage directions, “Iupiter descends in Thunder and Lightning, sitting vppon an Eagle. hee throwes a Thunder-bolt. The Ghostes fall on their knees” (tln 3126-28). Perhaps the members of Parliament upon whom James had descended with his “thunder” in 1606 and 1607 had reacted with a similar shocked obeisance.

After chiding the Leonati for their lack of trust, Jupiter reveals his plan, foreordained all along, for relieving the sufferings of the deprived Leonati. Posthumus's birthright and marriage will be restored. Like James as he portrayed himself before the 1606-7 Parliament, Jove will allow no impediment to come between his will and its execution: “I will not say anything which I will not promise, nor promise any thing which I will not sweare; What I sweare I will signe, and what I signe, I shall with gods grace euer performe.”³¹ Jupiter departs, leaving behind him, almost exactly as the bustling pedant-king James I might have done, a written text for his thunderstruck subjects to ponder until they achieve enlightenment. It is a rather stupendous set of images, or at least it can be with the right staging, as several twentieth-century productions have demonstrated. But the Descent of Jupiter can also be awkward, intrusive, like James I's sudden, “divine” visitations upon Parliament—as much fulmination as fulmen. Either way the vision is performed, it is hard to imagine how it could have been missed by anyone in a contemporary audience who was paying even minimal attention to what was happening on stage.

Simon Forman's 1610 or 1611 summary of Cymbeline shows considerable attention to intricacies of plot but lamentably little interest in political motifs that “might, without cloud, or obscuritie, declare themselves to the sharpe and learned.” Both what Forman includes and what he omits are interesting in light of the play's “local” meaning. He picked up some of the incantatory power of “Milford,” repeating the name several times, but conflated Posthumus and Cloten for part of the action, or so his confusion of pronouns seems to indicate. It is perhaps evidence that the two roles were performed by a single actor, but also evidence that the play's bizarre emblems of prejudice could easily be misread. In his account, Forman failed to include minor bits like the queen's attempted poisoning, but also major episodes like the Vision of Jupiter, unless we are to imagine such a potentially stunning coup de théâtre as subsumed under his final “&c.” Here is the Cymbeline Forman recorded:

Remember also the storri of Cymbalin king of England, in Lucius tyme, howe Lucius Cam from Octauus Cesar for Tribut, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a greate Arme of Souldiars who landed at Milford hauen, and Affter wer vanquished by Cimbalin, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlawes, of the which 2 of them were the sonns of Cimbalim, stolen from him when they were but 2 yers old by an old man whom Cymbalin banished, and he kept them as his own sonns 20 yers with him in A cave. And howe [one] of them slewe Clotan, that was the quens sonn, going to Milford hauen to seek the loue of Innogen, the kinges daughter, whom he had banished also for louinge his daughter, and how the Italian that cam from her loue conveied him selfe into A Cheste, and said yt was a chest of plate sent from her loue & others, to be presented to the kinge. And in the depest of the night, she being aslepe, he opened the cheste, & cam forth of yt, And vewed her in her bed, and the markes of her body, & toke awai her braselet, & after Accused her of adultery to her loue, &c. And in thend howe he came with the Romains into England & was taken prisoner, and after Reueled to Innogen, Who had turned her self into mans apparrell & fled to mete her loue at Milford hauen, & chanchsed to fall on the Caue in the wodes wher her 2 brothers were, & howe by eating a sleping Dram they thought she had bin deed, & laid her in the wodes, & the body of Cloten by her, in her loues apparrell that he left behind him, & howe she was found by Lucius, &c.³²

Beyond his repeated mention of the insistent name Milford Haven, Forman shows no evidence that he grasped the play's Jacobean “line.” It would perhaps be utopian to expect to find such evidence. Forman took his notes for purposes connected with his medical and magical practice as a London cunning man. The explication of political allegory was not, perhaps, germane to his professional needs, whatever those might have been. To the extent that contemporaries did understand topical materials in masques or plays or pamphlets as conveying some specific political message, they tended to note it only fleetingly and in passing, in conversational or epistolary gossip.

Yet there may have been other factors contributing to Forman's seeming oblivion. It is altogether possible that the Descent of Jupiter was not performed in the version he saw, or that it was so massively deemphasized that it became less than memorable.³³ Jupiter could have walked on, for example, instead of descending by means of a machine, and the lines describing his descent could have been cut. Or the descent could have been staged in such a problematic way that it was easier to “forget” than to assimilate into a summary of the action. If, to take only one possibility, Jupiter sat awkwardly on his emblematic bird—hardly the usual mount for a being of human form—the grandeur of his visitation could have been massively undercut. Like the episode of Imogen's misguided grief over Cloten's headless body, the Descent of Jupiter is perilously balanced between the compelling and the ludicrous. It is “double written” or overwritten in a way that calls special attention to it and invites political decipherment but also provides a mechanism by which the “authorized” political reading can be dispersed or ridiculed. To use James I's own complaining language for such abuse of the clear royal intent, the Descent of Jupiter is contrived in such a way that it can easily be “throwne” or “rent asunder in contrary sences like the old Oracles of the Pagan gods.” In London, 1610, before an audience for whom the play's political meaning was at least potentially legible, how and whether the episode got “read” according to the Jacobean line would depend in large part on how it was brought to life in the theater.

The same is true of the play as a whole. By embedding Cymbeline's “Jacobean line” within various structures which at least potentially call it into question, Shakespeare partially separates the play from the realm of authorship and “Authority,” reinfuses its topicality with some of the evanescence and protean, shifting referentiality that were still characteristic of the Renaissance theater as opposed to authored collections of printed Workes. If King James I made a practice of beating off the subversive proliferation of meaning in order to communicate his “clear” political intent, Shakespeare in Cymbeline can be seen as one of those jangling subjects who scatter language and signification, dispersing the king's painstaking crafting of a unified whole nearly as fast as the royal author can put it together.

Cymbeline repeatedly invites its audience to “reading” and decipherment. If they follow its Jacobean line, they are invited to “apply” the play's message to their personal lives in much the same way that characters within the play repeatedly read moral maxims out of the landscape and events around them. And yet, the play's most important texts never operate according to such an orderly, rational agenda for interpretation. Reading in Cymbeline may be enticing, but it is also directly and repeatedly thematized as fraught with dangers, almost inevitably “misreading.” Posthumus has to be “read,” yet in the play character is seldom legible. “Who is't can reade a Woman?” Cymbeline complains (tln 3308), and Imogen and the others experience similar difficulties. Since the “Scriptures” of Posthumus have “turn'd to Heresie,” she declares all reading suspect: “To write, and read, / Be henceforth treacherous” (tln 2638-39); all interpretation is hopelessly “perplex'd.” By the end, of course, such misreadings are disentangled and “unperplexed,” but not before reading itself—the very integrative process by which the play's Stuart meaning can be collected by its audience—has been shown to be highly fallible.³⁴

Cymbeline appears to posit a causal connection between the correct “reading” of its cryptic Stuart riddles and inner and outward transformation. Yet the translation of interpretation into action is not once effected within the play itself. Symbolic visions are often followed by salutary and revitalizing events. After the soothsayer's speech, Imogen awakens and attaches herself to the Romans; after Posthumus's dream, the prisoner is freed; after the interpretation of the riddling tablet, King Cymbeline proclaims the Pax Britannica. But in each case the relationship between the emblematic visions which demand reading and the acts which follow them is indecipherable. It is not clear whether or not Imogen is moved to action by the soothsayer. If so, she is inspired by false divining, since his interpretation is partially mistaken. Posthumus's dream is followed by his release from prison, but there is no clear causal relationship between one thing and the other beyond Jupiter's declaration that he has been controlling events all along. Posthumus himself has understood neither his vision nor the mysterious tablet. As often as not in Cymbeline, the riddling follows upon events instead of inspiring them, as in the maxim about the man, two boys, and the lane, and in Cymbeline's declaration of peace, which does not arise out of the reading and interpretation of the “text” of Posthumus, but has already been effected through the British military victory and the restoration of the exiles. Even as Cymbeline seems to argue for political action—the effacing of the “mark of the stranger” from the exiled Scots—the play calls into question the relationship between texts and action and therefore renders problematic its own status as a text which can be “read” according to the Jacobean line as a call for political unity and national renewal.

If Cymbeline's riddling texts fail as pragmatic agents for change through acts of interpretation, the play leaves open the possibility that they may still serve, almost sacramentally, as vehicles for irresistible power, like the soothsayer's vision of the eagle of empire winging its way steadily westward—on high, remote, serenely indifferent to the human unraveling of riddles. That is the way Jupiter portrays himself as operating upon the world of human events. Everything has happened according to his master plan for Britain. He has allowed the “divorce” of Imogen and Posthumus in order to test and renew them both (“Whom best I loue, I crosse”); he also claims credit for the sudden reversal of fortune which reinstates the Union. The fact that characters in the play so frequently evoke “Jove” or “Jupiter” in their oaths and supplications adds to the sense of the deity's overriding presence in Britain.

Cymbeline's politics is embedded in a form which is less than hospitable to the potential for rational human action. In this play, as in Renaissance tragicomedy generally, human agency regularly dissolves; human beings are swept along by forces apparently incalculable. The dramatic form is, however, quite hospitable to the claims of Stuart absolutism, in that the wondrous energies which secretly govern the action can be identified with the “sacred” power of the monarch in his “body politic.” Tragicomedy as a distinct, defined dramatic genre in England appeared shortly before the accession of James, and King James associated himself closely with it. He used the generic term himself to describe his marvelous deliverance (as a result of his own astute “reading” of an enigmatic plot) after the Gunpowder Treason in 1605. One of the purposes of that conspiracy had been, according to a chief perpetrator, to destroy the Union of the Kingdoms and blow the Scots back across the border. The deliverance of the nation was, in the king's own formulation, a “Tragedie” for the plotters, a “Tragicomedie” for himself and his “Trew Subiects.”³⁵ Stuart court masques often celebrate a similar overriding destiny which grows out of the royal will and the king's special prescience. In the masque, royal proclamations were often portrayed as transforming the nation as though effortlessly, through the irresistible, divine power of James I—in much the same way that Jupiter claims hidden but absolute “Authority” over all the turnings of Cymbeline.

In Cymbeline, Stuart texts do sometimes evoke wonder among at least some of the characters. Reading, if it works at all in the play, works by inspiring the reader to marvel at the truth he or she has managed, with difficulty, to decipher. And yet, here again, discomfort with the interpretive process is overtly thematized. Posthumus ridicules the inane gawking of those who stand marveling at riddles and symbolic visions: “Nay, do not wonder at it: you are made / Rather to wonder at the things you heare, / Then to worke any” (tln 2982-84). His taunt sounds very much like contemporary complaints against King James himself that he devoted himself too completely to the marvels of the book when he could accomplish far more by the sword. Yet Posthumus is describing a structural mechanism of the play he inhabits. Cymbeline plants seeds of impatience with the very riddles out of which it is constructed, an irritation like that expressed by Posthumus as he mockingly dissolves his own heroism into doggerel after his defeat of the Romans.

A prime example is the text offered by the great god Jupiter himself: it is written in very colorless prose (by Shakespearean standards at least)—only slightly more compelling than the doggerel produced by Posthumus. It is so inferior as a text to the marvel Jupiter seemed to promise that many editors have been convinced that it cannot be Shakespeare. And its Neoscholastic interpretation by the soothsayer is heavy-handed in the extreme. Asked, like an oracle, to “Read, and declare the meaning,” the soothsayer infelicitously interprets “The peece of tender Ayre, thy vertuous Daughter, / Which we call Mollis Aer, and Mollis Aer / We term it Mulier; which Mulier I diuine / Is this most constant Wife” (tln 3776-79). This niggling, labored mode of interpretation sounds rather too much like the pedant-king James himself, and can easily be understood as mockery of the play's own process of “wondering” decipherment of riddles and emblems of state. The play's major texts are awkward, apart—they produce disjunction, resist assimilation into the flow of events. Again we may be reminded of King James. Like Jupiter in the play, James was forever disconcerting his subjects by producing oracular documents, long speeches or proclamations which he liked to think of as Books, divine, arbitrary texts that heralded magnificent transformations for the nation, but were too often relied on by the scholar-king as though they could substitute for the painstaking political maneuvering that actually got things done. Jupiter's texts in Cymbeline are equally magical, or purposeless—perhaps evoking wonder, perhaps exposing the ineptitude of their “Author.” If Jupiter is indeed, as he claims, all-powerful, why does he need texts at all? Similar questions could be asked about James I and his vast claims for his own prerogative.

If Cymbeline follows the Jacobean line, it also reproduces some of the incongruities in the actual working of Stuart policy that undermined royal claims about the mystical organic “union” of all James's subjects—like members of a single animate body—under his authority as head. In fact, James's political doctrine of essences was one of the major points of contention in the parliamentary debates over the Project for Union. Contemporaries “sharpe and learned” enough to read Cymbeline's Jacobean message at all were perhaps also capable of reading its portrayal of disjunctions between James's theory and his political practice. Upon such a contemporary audience, Cymbeline might well have produced dissatisfaction with the “Jacobean line.” Or at least, through its critique of the wonders of the almighty Authored text, it may have intensified existing dissatisfaction with James, his clerkish political blundering, and his odd notions of kingship.

Much would depend on how the play was staged. To fall back time and again upon the range of political meaning which could have been elicited through different modes of staging is, perhaps, to abrogate the Duty of the Critic to determine the Author's Intent. But I would argue that it was part of Shakespeare's intent in Cymbeline to be able to sidestep the “self-sameness” and internal coherence growing out of emerging conventions of authorship. There was no way that he could “author” the play and its political message himself, even if he had wished to (and we have no particular evidence that he did). Following the play's invitation to linear interpretation would lead inevitably to the Jacobean line, to the Jacobean vision of organic political unity, and to James as “Author”—“Accessible is none but Milford way.” By interweaving the play's “authorized reading” with a subtle critique of ideas about textual authority, Shakespeare gave the play back to the institution of the theater, created a potential for multiplicity and diversity in performance that the Stuart Cymbeline did not—by definition, could not—have.

The play may well have taken markedly different forms at different times and in different places. If it was performed at court, it could well have communicated the “Jacobean line” with almost the same stupendous glorification of James in his “immortal body” as monarch that was characteristic of the Stuart masque. In such a setting or in a theater capable of sophisticated theatrical effects, the play's overlay of uncertainties and questioning could have been overcome through spectacular staging of scenes like the Descent of Jupiter—through the creation of visual and auditory wonders marvelous enough to silence all but the most intransigent distrust of theatrical “magic.” On the other hand, in a different setting or even in the same setting (since we should not be overly wooden and formulaic about the predictability of performance) the play could have been staged in ways that subtly highlighted its own deconstruction of reading and royal Authorship. Forman perhaps saw such a Cymbeline in the public theater—a Cymbeline in which the play's political symbols were muted or problematized to the point that they became indecipherable.

I have headed this section of the argument “Theatrical Deconstruction and Cryptonymy.” Theatrical “deconstruction” of Cymbeline could have fragmented the Jacobean line by placing special emphasis on the play's barriers to reading, by undercutting its “wonders,” and by giving strong credibility to characters like Posthumus who distrust such things. With the right balancing (or, in Stuart terms, the wrong balancing) of energies on stage, the play's perceptual and volitional gaps could easily have been made to appear unbridgeable. But given the play's contemporary milieu, there was also a potential for theatrical “cryptonymy” on the far side of deconstruction—for a mode of performance that read beneath and across the play's seemingly unbridgeable fissures and implanted a sense of underlying unity by uncovering an essence called Union identical with the person and power of the monarch. I am using the term cryptonymy much as it has been used in recent post-Freudian interpretation to describe the process by which a kind of “speech” can be given to gaps and splits which divide one area of the self from other areas and make it unavailable to the same discursive space. The fissures in question are not the same as those created by repression in that materials on both sides of the split are almost equally available to the self, but not at the same time or along the same perceptual continuum. Naming the word or constellation of words and events which underlies the fissure and constitutes it at least potentially allows a structural transformation that permits the two discursive spaces, the split-off areas of self, to flow together.³⁶ The same “healing” process can be invoked for political and artistic discontinuities to the extent that such splits follow a similar morphology, and to the extent that they are perceived as pathological, insufferable, urgently requiring repair.

Cryptonymy can, of course, be deconstructed itself, become part of an endless series of displacements, replacements, new displacements. But cryptonymy can also be invoked as a terminus upon the fragmenting process of deconstruction. A theatrical cryptonymy of Cymbeline would call attention to the play's disjunctions and difficulties in order to beckon beyond them toward an idealized realm of political essence which can be said to have helped create them in the sense that it induces a sense of human inadequacy, but which also heals them by giving access to the very realm of essence from which they are revealed as mere ephemera, surface turbulence upon a political and artistic entity which is indissolubly organic, at one with itself at the level of deep structure. Mutatis mutandis the play would then, for all its surface questioning, reaffirm the royal line not so much through King James as in spite of him; it would disperse the pedantic, orderly rituals of reading in order to “decrypt” the sacred immanence of royal power.

In the Renaissance, the two mutually reversing operations were equally possible and available (under different labels from those I have been using here) as counters in political debate. Legal and parliamentary “deconstructionists” challenged the doctrine of essences in its particular Jacobean form of official state organicism associated with the body of the monarch by pointing toward those elements of the national life which the Jacobean vision of unity had to disallow in order to constitute itself. Cryptonymy—“Platonic Politics” might be a more fitting label for it in its English Renaissance form—was a reading of underlying essences which “healed” social rifts and political fragmentation by pointing toward deeper unities already invisibly in place through the fact of James I's kingship. Part of the fascination of considering James I's Project for Union and Cymbeline's fragile “unity” together is that both the play and the seething political debate mobilize similar strategies for defending and circumventing the Jacobean line.³⁷

In Cymbeline, as in Shakespeare's earlier festive comedies, much of the power of the drive toward idealization is generated from the fact that the idealization comes too late. By the time Cymbeline was staged in 1608 or 1609 or 1610, James's Project for the Union of the Kingdoms and the creation of Great Britain had reached political stalemate. Parliament was no longer willing to consider the matter. The courts had indirectly endorsed the royal project, but without any way of enforcing it. James continued to rant and bluster, but gradually turned his attention to less intractable goals. The mistrust and prejudice continued on both sides of the border. Indeed, on the level of “local” function, Cymbeline's discomfort with its own “governing line” can be seen as a symptom of continuing English and Scottish prejudice, continuing refusal to “read” the alien aright. For there was to be no ratification of the Project for Union during that century.

It is tempting to interpret the First Folio's placement of Cymbeline last among the tragedies and last in the folio volume—like the Golden Age materials which end The Workes of James and of Ben Jonson—as a comment on the failure of the royal project. If so, however, the play's political “tragedy” is extratextual and can be read in several senses. Is Cymbeline's classification as tragedy to be read as a lament for the continuing intransigence of James's subjects to the enlightened project he offers them, or is it to be read instead as a comment on the king's failure, for all his claims of absolute authority, to heal the “divorce” between England and Scotland? Other readings of the generic label are also possible. For critics of James I's ecclesiastical and foreign policy like the First Folio dedicatee the earl of Pembroke, the “tragedy” of Cymbeline could have been the very success of its culminating vision of unity under empire. In the play, the enemies of Rome are all silenced; in England, they were vocal and prominent. In the eyes of such dissidents, the “happy” resolution of the play, which gives the Romans and Roman “superstition” a seemingly permanent foothold in Britain, might well have appeared less than fortunate. By the same token, for an enemy of the Project for Union, the tragedy of Cymbeline could have been the Union's success. All of these heavy-handed explanations of Cymbeline's anomalous labeling are so highly speculative that it is impossible to choose definitively among them, impossible to entirely dismiss them. Even after the publication of the folio in 1623, however, we have circumstantial evidence that Cymbeline continued to be associated, in court circles at least, with the Stuart Project for Union.

Despite James I's victory in the case of the Post Nati, the “marriage” of England and Scotland was still hanging in “unnatural” suspension in 1633-34, when Cymbeline found favor with Charles I in a performance at court. It seems fair to assume that in this performance, the play's “Stuart line” was allowed to shine forth in its full flush of idealism and promise. The revival was almost certainly prompted by Charles I's celebrated progress to Scotland earlier that year to receive the Scottish crown: the head of the Scottish state had been fleetingly restored to his “exiles.” It was his first visit as king of England to the northern kingdom. The public ceremony of his coronation as king of Scotland gave renewed visibility to the idea of the Union of the Kingdoms in the person of Charles, their mutual head. Not only that, but Charles's visit was designed to implement one part of his father's program for Britain, the creation of a unified British church by bringing Scotland into accordance with the Anglican liturgy and Anglican church government.³⁸ Given the immediate context, Cymbeline's promulgation of official Anglican ideology about the indigenous nature of proper “liturgical” reverence and ceremony would have taken on particular prominence. But despite the renewed efforts on the part of crown and church, the stalemating of efforts for the Union continued. Charles I's attempt at matchmaking between kingdoms was even less successful than his father's. It led eventually to a destructive war with the Scots, a conflict that helped to precipitate the civil war and the execution of the king. Such cataclysmic divisions do not heal overnight. Great Britain was finally created only in 1707. And as recurrent, sometimes violent separatist movements since then have borne witness, the Union of the Kingdoms has never quite achieved the luminous harmony presaged in the final moments of Cymbeline.

Notes

1. S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 220; G. E. Bentley, The Professions of Dramatist and Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642, one-volume paperback edition (1971 and 1984; reprinted Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), Player, 63.

2. For particulars of the debate, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), 250-54; David Harris Willson, ed., The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer 1606-1607 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1931), 257n, 269, 282, and 287-88; and for James's views, McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I, 291. Comparison of James to the Thunderer had also come up in earlier Commons debates. In 1604, for example, his answer to a parliamentary petition was received by the solemn and amazed MPs like a “thunderbolt.” See G. B. Harrison, A Jacobean Journal: Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of during the Years 1603-1606 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1941), 131.

3. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 1:105-14; and D. J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (1975; reprinted Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), 173-77.

4. For the purposes of this reading, I am taking the (by now) standard position that the Jupiter scene is as much “Shakespeare” as the rest of the play, and that it was regularly included in the play as performed. Problems with this position will be discussed later on.

5. As in earlier chapters, I cite the play from the First Folio (1623) and indicate “through line numbers” (tln) to that edition in my text.

6. Willobie His Avisa uses a somewhat similar technique, offering an initial group of suitors to Avisa who can readily be identified in terms of the courtships of Elizabeth I, followed by much more opaque composites that refuse to yield similar identifications. See B. N. De Luna, The Queen Declined: An Interpretation of Willobie His Avisa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). There is, however, a key difference between the two texts: Cymbeline's riddles all finally yield unitary messages whereas, in my view at least, those in Willobie His Avisa do not and are not intended to, De Luna's efforts at decipherment notwithstanding. In Avisa, the ease of the initial decodings stimulates burning, endless speculation about the more cryptic and finally “illegible” figures that occur later on.

7. Warren D. Smith, Shakespeare's Playhouse Practice: A Handbook (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1975), 32n. The exactitude was easily achievable in the printing house, since the same block of type could have been used both times. Nevertheless, it is tempting to see the precise repetition as indicative of reverence—or mock reverence—for the text in question.

8. See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans (London: Dent, 1904), 99-104; Shakespeare's Holinshed, ed. Richard Hosley (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1968), 4-8; and Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 258-66. Of course, the story of Posthumus has fictional analogues in novellas by Boccaccio and others. David Bergeron notes that there is a Posthumus among the Roman analogues to Shakespeare's play and that Augustan Rome stands behind the play as a “kind of paradigm.” See his “Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 31-41, especially his note 19. If so, the Roman allusions he cites work against the play's overt idealization of Augustan Rome and contribute to the stalemating I will discuss later on.

9. The present study is particularly indebted to G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life, 129-202; and to the topical interpretations of Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 84-99; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), 188-95; and Glynne Wickham, especially Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969); and his “Riddle and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline,” in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 94-113.

   In Shakespeare's Military World (1956; reprinted Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), Paul A. Jorgenson sees the play as displaying ambivalence about its own denigration of Elizabethan nationalism in favor of the Jacobean “Forrest of Olives,” 202-4. Frances Yates takes a narrower view in Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1975), arguing (28-53) that Shakespeare's play speaks for the strongly Protestant group surrounding Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth; her interpretation underestimates the importance of empire to James I himself. Recent treatments of the play in its Jacobean political context include D. E. Landry, “Dreams as History: The Strange Unity of Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 68-79; the discussion building up to Cymbeline in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 231-41 and 287n; and David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, …. See also Hallett Smith's attempt to reduce all topical approaches to the play to absurdity in Shakespeare's Romances: A Study of Some Ways of the Imagination (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Publications, 1972), which is a good example of the kind of critical overhostility that my book seeks to come to terms with.

10. See the analysis of the coronation pageant in Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42, 1-39; and in the early sections of Jonathan Goldberg's James I and the Politics of Literature, …. See also Wickham, “Riddle and Emblem,” 100-102; and Wickham, Dramatic Heritage, 250-54. For James I's proclamations, see Larkin and Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, Vol. 1, Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603-1625, 18-19 and 94. For the coin, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, …, 247.

    The idea of uniting the kingdoms was not a new one, but had been brought up on several previous occasions. See G. W. T. Omond, The Early History of the Scottish Union Question (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1897), 9-51; and Gordon Donaldson, “Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union,” in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. S. T. Bindoff et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 282-314. As Donaldson notes, during the sixteenth century in particular there had been a gradual linguistic and cultural amalgamation between the two peoples.

11. The comment was made by the French ambassador (quoted in Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 211-12). My discussion is indebted to the general studies of the Project for Union by D. H. Willson, “King James I and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” in Conflict in Stuart England, ed. W. A. Aiken and B. D. Henning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 43-55; Omond, The Early History of the Scottish Union Question, 68-83; and Notestein's detailed account of the parliamentary debates on union, especially 79-80 and 215-54.

12. Thomas Campion, Lord Hay's Masque, dedicatory poem to James I, quoted in Wickham, “Riddle and Emblem,” 112; as Gordon shows (The Renaissance Imagination, 169), contemporaries recognized the political reference. See also the Sibyl's prophecy at the end of Campion's The Lords' Masque, in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 1: 246; Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, 102-6; and for the theme of union in Ben Jonson's Hymenaei, Gordon, 157-84; and the addition to Gordon's argument in my “Masquing Occasions and Masque Structure,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981): 7-16. For the Union-as-marriage motif on coins, see Omond, The Early History of the Scottish Union Question, 68-69.

13. This is, of course, a brief summary of a set of complex issues. See Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 233-35; D. Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 253-56; Willson's “King James I and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” in Aiken's collection Conflict in Stuart England; McIlwain, The Political Works of James I, 292 and Appendix B, pp. lxxxvii-lxxxix; and especially R. C. Munden's corrective to Willson, “James I and ‘the growth of mutual distrust’: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603-1604,” in Kevin Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays in Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 43-72; and Brian P. Levack, “The Proposed Union of English Law and Scots Law in the Seventeenth Century,” Juridical Review n.s. 20 (1975): 97-115. See also Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). I regret that this book appeared too late for me to use in my own discussion.

    More general aspects of the controversy over law are discussed in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957), 20-69; and in the debate over law in Christopher Brooks and Kevin Sharpe, “History, English Law and the Renaissance,” Past and Present 72 (1976): 133-42.

14. On Scottish resistance to James's ecclesiastical reforms, see Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), 1: 303-6; and Willson, “King James I and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” 49. On the Roman law in Jonson's masque, see my reading in “Masquing Occasions and Masque Structure,” 9-11.

15. Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 240. Notestein discounts the claim, made by the French ambassador, that Scots were being denied precedence (212) on grounds that it may have come from the Scots themselves and that James I would not have tolerated such behavior. But as the whole debate over union demonstrates, James did not have all that much control over English attitudes and comportment, particularly when he was not present. The hostile climate in England would tend rather to support the claim. See Willson, King James VI and I, 252-55; and Willson, “King James I and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” 45-48.

16. There is a detailed discussion of the case and the controversy surrounding it in Samuel Gardiner, History of England, 1:301-57. The major documents of the case, including the arguments of Sir Francis Bacon, counsel for Calvin in the Exchequer, the 1608 report of Sir Edward Coke, and the opinion of James's chancellor Sir Thomas Egerton, are reprinted in T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 2 (London: Hansard and Longman, 1816), cols. 559-696. Egerton's arguments were published at the request of James I in 1609. On some of the contradictions surrounding the case and their effects on the arguments which preceded the American Revolution, see Harvey Wheeler, “Calvin's Case (1608) and the McIlwain-Schuyler Debate,” American Historical Review 61 (1956): 587-97.

17. For examples of the many public ways in which James I associated himself and the Scots with the lion, see Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” …, 88-93; Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 80; and Wickham, “Riddle and Emblem,” 95-106. The lion was also associated with Britain and was considered to have been the heraldic animal of King Brute himself.

    Frances Yates's argument in Shakespeare's Last Plays (51-59) that Cymbeline was revived to celebrate the marriage of the palsgrave Frederick and Princess Elizabeth is linked to my own in that Frederick was also an alien, also associated with the heraldic imagery of the lion, his marriage yet another example of James's policy for peace and empire. But otherwise there are few similarities between him and Posthumus. Frederick was not a despised alien, but quite popular in England. His marriage with Elizabeth was eventually torn by strife (the Thirty Years' War) but not until well after the play had been written.

18. See, for example, Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 251.

19. See, in particular, Posthumus's contract with Iachimo (tln 458-72), where his language of “Couenants” and “Articles” seems excessively legalistic for the bargain being concluded. G. Wilson Knight (The Crown of Life, 178) has taken general note of the play's preoccupation with law.

20. G. R. Hibbard, “Politics in the Romances,” Filoloski Pregled 2-3 (1964): 103-16, as summarized in The Garland Shakespeare Bibliographies: Cymbeline, ed. Henry E. Jacobs (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 37.

21. See, in particular, Frances Yates's discussion in Shakespeare's Last Plays; and David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family.

22. See Joan Hartwig, “Cloten, Autolycus, and Caliban: Bearers of Parodic Burdens,” in Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), 91-103; James Edward Siemon, “Noble Virtue in ‘Cymbeline,’” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976): 51-61; and for the characterization of Cloten, H. N. Hudson, Lectures on Shakespeare, 2, 2d ed. (New York: Scribner, 1857), 215-16.

23. Stephen Booth, “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare's Plays,” 1979; reprinted in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), 149-53. Other critics have made the same suggestion.

24. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I, 271-73, 292; Larkin and Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, Vol. 1, 18-19, 94-98. As D. J. Gordon demonstrates (Renaissance Imagination, 162-79), this organic political imagery was not only to be found in the speeches of James; it was endemic to discussions of the Union, and, indeed, to discussions of the body politic, though far from universally accepted in terms of its Jacobean political implications, as we shall note below. For a study of some of the general political implications of the play's imagery of rape and bodily fragmentation, see Ann Thompson's fine study, “Philomel in ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘Cymbeline,’” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 23-32.

25. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, 41 (citing Antonia Fraser's biography of James).

26. Wickham, “Riddle and Emblem,” 111-12.

27. See Glynne Wickham, “Shakespeare's Investiture Play: The Occasion and Subject of ‘The Winter's Tale,’” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 18, 1969: 1456; Wickham, “Romance and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of The Winter's Tale,” in The Elizabethan Theatre, III, ed. David Galloway (London: Macmillan, 1973), 82-99; Robert Speaight, Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement (London: Dent & Sons, 1977), 337; and for Daniel's masque and the investiture symbolism, John Pitcher's essay, “‘In those figures which they seeme’: Samuel Daniel's Tethys' Festival,” in David Lindley, ed., The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), 33-46.

28. The hilariously apt term polyanagnorisis is borrowed from Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 91.

29. On Augustus, the redescent of Astraea, and the birth of Roman law, see Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays, especially p. 42; McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I, 271-73 (James's 1603 speech before Parliament); and for the impact of the birth of Christ, especially Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), 66-67.

    For arguments for the citizenship of the Post Nati on the basis of the jus gentium, see Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 225-27; and Howell, State Trials, 2, cols. 563-696. See also Margaret Atwood Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (1949; reprinted New York: Octagon, 1964), 134-35, 165-66. Matters were complicated by the fact that, as Wheeler points out, the anti-union forces also marshaled arguments from the civil law, no doubt to counter the tactics of the king's supporters. Caesar Augustus was, of course, the reputed founder of Roman civil law.

30. Wickham, “Riddle and Emblem,” 102.

31. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I, 305; for the immediate context, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons 1604-1610, 245.

32. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2:338-39. Forman's note leaves the performance date unclear. Chambers argues for 1611 but conjectures that the play would have been written the previous year.

33. Those who hold that the Descent is theatrical interpolation can argue that it dates from after the performance in 1610 or 1611. Given its particular reverberation with parliamentary affairs in 1606-8, I find that viewpoint implausible.

34. This point has been emphasized in many recent discussions. See in particular David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, 147-57; and Meredith Skura's essay “Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 203-16.

35. See Glynne Wickham, “From Tragedy to Tragi-Comedy: ‘King Lear’ as Prologue,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 33-48. On the gulf between the genre of tragicomedy (or romance) and topicality, I am also indebted to Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, …, 194-96; and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; reprinted Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 148-50.

36. See, in particular, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 37 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), and the foreword by Jacques Derrida, which reincrypts the authors' operation of decrypting. In dealing with the Wolf Man, the authors are not, for obvious reasons, taking on a patient who can be “cured” of the fissures which separate some areas of his experience from others. However, the kinds of vertical splits which Abraham and Torok describe are very much like the narcissistic splits discussed in therapeutic terms in the works of Heinz Kohut. See in particular his The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (1971; reprinted New York: International Universities Press, 1974); and The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1950-1978, ed. Paul H. Ornstein, 2 vols. (1978; reprinted New York: International Universities Press, 1984). I hope to explore these fascinating matters further in a separate study; suffice it to say for the present that Kohut's work allows for the building of many connections between the fissuring of individual psyches and the larger social formations within which such divisions function.

37. On the doctrine of essences as a subject for debate, I am particularly indebted to R. C. Munden, “James I and ‘the growth of mutual distrust,’” …, 64.

38. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 195; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2:352. For a detailed account of Charles's policies toward the Scottish Kirk, see Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 7:274-98; and among many other recent studies of the possible impact of Caroline ecclesiastical policy, Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), especially the Introduction (1-31), and the essays by Michael Hawkins, Nicholas Tyacke, Robin Clifton, and P. W. Thomas.