SOURCE: Schwartz, Murray M. “Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline.” In Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, edited by Frederick Crews, pp. 219-83. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1970.

[In the following excerpt, Schwartz undertakes a Freudian psychoanalysis of the principal characters in Cymbeline.]

Virtutis est domare quae cuncti pavent.

—Seneca

In his introduction to the Arden edition, J. M. Nosworthy observes that “Cymbeline has evoked relatively little critical comment, and no completely satisfactory account of the play's quality and significance can be said to exist.”¹ Although this statement comes as no surprise to students of this uneven and perplexing play, it does point up the fact that Cymbeline reveals few obvious clues to those who would derive its meaning from intrinsic relationships. Existing criticism simply leaves too much out of account in its attempts to find a “way in” capable of coordinating the play's pervasive indirection, its lack of coherent atmosphere, its manifold strategies for controlling and directing an audience's energies. Nosworthy's own introduction demonstrates the inadequacy of measuring the play against traditional romance categories, since he is first forced to conclude that Cymbeline will not conform to the mold and then ends up evoking transcendental visions beyond the range of his measuring rods. On the other hand, appeals to Shakespeare's apparent external interests in a new theater or in new public demands diminish the significance of Cymbeline's frequently violent verse and its obsession with sexuality, chastity, and family bonds.²

Most critics (not content, as Johnson was, to dismiss the play as “unresisting imbecility”³) agree that the play experiments in some sense with conventional romance and tragicomic forms. But this approach often reduces Cymbeline's specific preoccupations to Shakespeare's relations with available dramatic modes of communication and expression. The Jacobean theater was a public institution through which Shakespeare transformed intensely individual obsessions into culturally accessible modes of questioning and resolution. He never experiments for superficial or abstract reasons, and he always experiments within traditional forms, not only with them. A play as unevenly committed to the high evaluation of its central characters, as uneven in tone, and as structurally complex as Cymbeline calls for criticism psychologically sophisticated enough to disclose precise relationships among its parts and to account for the particularity of its imagery and metaphors. The nature of the experiment is inseparable from the play's manifest events and their unconscious as well as conscious significance.

What kinds of events does Cymbeline involve? Shakespeare activates a range of characteristic threats to sexual, familial, and national integrity in an attempt to resecure these corresponding orders. These levels of ordered relationships mirror one another, sexual and familial integrity being essential to British self-esteem in the play. The play releases dangers in order to pattern them; it self-consciously affirms the hierarchic boundaries designed to master threats which traditional roles generate.

At the end of Act II, scene i, after Iachimo has made his way into the court and Cloten has publicly displayed his licensed egotism, the anonymous Second Lord stands alone on the stage and shares this choral comment with the audience:

                                                                                Alas poor princess,
Thou divine Imogen, what thou endur'st,
Betwixt a father by thy step-dame govern'd,
A mother hourly coining plots, a wooer
More hateful than the foul expulsion is
Of thy dear husband, than that horrid act
Of the divorce, he'ld make. The heavens hold firm
The walls of thy dear honour, keep unshak'd
That temple, thy fair mind, that thou mayst stand,
T' enjoy thy banish'd lord and this great land!

(II.i. 58-67)⁴

The speech moves from lament to prayer, from threats directed at Imogen's sacred virtue to the wish for secure defense against pervasive enemies. From the top of its hierarchic structure the court jeopardizes the sacramental status of Imogen's identity. The action of Cymbeline validates this microcosmic description. In this paranoiac world the Senecan (and Biblical) metaphor of the besieged temple crystallizes Imogen's symbolic position. Cymbeline is largely about a dissociated world brought back to rooted stability by the elimination of threatening forces.

The Second Lord's speech gives one sign of this dissociation, not only in its content but also in the fact that a minor character provides one of the play's few summary statements. No Enobarbus reflects normative response in Cymbeline. The play tends to resolve itself into its elements, like a dream in the process of what Freud called secondary elaboration. That is to say, we feel that latent ideas shape manifest events, but our sense of the relationship between manifest event and thematic continuity becomes hazy and precarious. It is as if we were perceiving the action through the ego of Leontes in the first acts of The Winter's Tale. Cymbeline projects a paranoiac vision of events almost completely from within, whereas The Winter's Tale recreates paranoia from within and from without by containing the disease almost completely in the character of Leontes. One thing which makes the play so difficult, if not impossible, to read coherently is that the preoccupations of the individual characters spread throughout the imagery without undergoing that transformation into meaningful statements that usually characterizes Shakespeare's iterative imagery. The play itself suffers from the dislocations it is about.

Cymbeline is structured by a web of confusions between inner and outer reality, as Shakespeare shuffles relationships to bring psychological and social defenses into traditional order. The most directly corrosive threats to the moral continuity of the fragmented court and to Imogen's personal integrity emanate from the designs Cloten is permitted to fabricate. His role gathers to a head perverse insistence on individual right based on the power of birth and social standing. As a focal point of deranged values he can be seen as a touchstone for the play's sexual and social anxieties.

Cloten's first appearance signals his sacrificial role:

FIRST Lord.
Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice …

(I.iii. 1-2)

G. Wilson Knight says, “Cloten is a boastful fool: his name suggests clot-pole.”⁵ But Cloten is more than a conventional fool; he is also cast as a prince, granted access to courtly models of action, made to distort royal decorum to the shape of his special preoccupations in ways more inflatedly dangerous than those of previous Shakespearean fools. His wishes are violent: “Would there had been some hurt done!” (I.iii. 33). He represents in blunt and unabashed form the deepest hypocrisy, the bold and totally unexamined assertion of social privilege. Snobbish and boorish, he advertises moral vacuity and imaginative emptiness: “When a gentleman is dispos'd to swear, it is not for any standers-by to curtail his oaths” (II.i. 11-12). He attempts to solicit the cooperation of others on the assumption that they share his deep perversion.

“Separation of feeling from function,” writes C. L. Barber, “is at the root of perversity and lust.”⁶ In Cloten we feel absolutely no residual reality: he is his roles. He provides the play with a parody of aristocratic decorum, a slashing critique of aristocratic degeneracy, a revelation of sexual rawness and narcissistic libido, a palpable sense of rottenness. He literally smells. He is unadulterable phallic aggression: “… I must go up and down like a cock, that nobody can match” (II.i. 23-24). The unconscious motives by which a degenerate aristocracy defines itself are brought to the surface in him: “it is fit I should commit offence to my inferiors” (II.i. 30-31). For him Imogen is pure acquisition, a thing to be possessed, an object for the release of phallic libido.

Cloten's imagery reduces sexuality to its bodily effects by lowering metaphors to their physical origins. The rhetorical technique is called meiosis, “whereby one makes a thing appear less than it is by putting a less thing for a greater.”⁷ In Act II, scene iii he is made deliberately disgusting, too crudely obvious to be comic. To the musicians he says, “if you can penetrate her with your fingering, so: we'll try with tongue too …” (14-15). Nor is this barely clothed sexual drive confined to absurd attempts on Imogen's body; the same scene announces the arrival of Caius Lucius, and III.i finds him using the same sexual fixations to justify political circumscription and defiance of Caesar's authority. “Britain's a world by itself, and we will nothing pay for wearing our own noses” (III.i. 13-14). In these two lines he brings together the play's dominant images of economics and clothing. The nose obviously here assumes a phallic significance, displaced upward, and Cloten imagines it as detachable.⁸ It can display a reality independent of its current owner. In the archaic logic of the unconscious, Cloten represents isolated, detached, and uncontrolled phallic wishes that seek their objects relentlessly and without the least regard for otherness. These drives toward sexual gratification resist any inhibition of their aims and view the procedures of courtship merely as roadblocks on the way to release. “I will pursue her,” he says, “even to Augustus' throne” (III.v. 101-102).

Cloten operates within a closed system of obsessional thinking; his logic can never wrench free of the underlying aim he symbolizes. Determined by the categories of quantitative loss and gain, he becomes a grotesque parody of the courtly lover's odi et amo, grotesque because of its excessive “rationality” and mechanical logic:

I love, and hate her: for she's fair and royal,
And that she hath all courtly parts more exquisite
Than lady, ladies, woman, from every one
The best she hath, and she of all compounded
Outsells them all. I love her therefore, but
Disdaining me, and throwing favours on
The low Posthumus, slanders so her judgement
That what's else rare is chok'd: and in that point
I will conclude to hate her, nay indeed,
To be reveng'd upon her. For, when fools
Shall—

(III.v. 71-81)

Imogen becomes a collection of attributes, “parts,” a piece of merchandise which is either narcissistically had or paranoiacally rejected, possessed or contaminated. In this view Cloten presents us with the extreme of a condition present in Cymbeline, Posthumus, and even the lost sons. A central issue of the play crystallizes in Cloten: Who shall possess Imogen? To whom does she belong? For Cloten, love denied transmutes itself inexorably into the wish for revenge. Love becomes narcissism when gratification is assimilated to possession.

Cloten moves from “love” to revenge with a closed logic at once laughable and frightening, and only ceases because he is interrupted, cut off in mid-speech. Words themselves represent a manic form of potency for him. Shakespeare projects in Cloten the obsessional, mechanical, unidirectional aspect of sexual drives. Detached from a pattern of civilized defenses, they act like an automatic, autonomous being, gravitating to itself infantile notions of magic and omnipotence and projecting the sanction for its actions outside itself. Cloten appeals to the absolute authority of his mother (IV.i. 22-24) to justify his pursuit of Imogen and attempts to gain the support of Pisanio by assuming that the drive for power over others is universal and psychologically determined. He “thinks” on a level at which all responses are determined by undiluted instincts:

How fit his garments serve me! Why should his mistress who was made by him that made the tailor, not be fit too? The rather (saving reverence of the word) for 'tis said a woman's fitness comes by fits.

(IV.i. 2-7)

Bad puns, and Shakespeare knew it, but Shakespeare also knew that bad puns express a real psychology, as Leontes' jealousy proves. Bad puns form the free associations of the obsessional character; they are the capital in the economy of the lust-ridden demon. Cloten's language capitalizes on the power of words to clothe the confusion of wish and reality. He rides the pun down the stream of his associations to the center of his interest.

Four further aspects of Cloten's nature and function deserve our recognition. First, this “arrogant piece of flesh” (IV.ii. 127) is continually associated with dirt and excretory functions and with their sublimated counterpart, money. Words like “reek,” “rot,” “vent,” “backside,” “ass,” “smell,” “offense,” “coining,” “gold,” “purse” surround him like flies or like the “south-fog” he wishes on the Romans. Gold, for Cloten, retains the magical powers of infantile feces: “what / Can it not do, and undo?” (II.iii. 73-74)⁹ Anal aggression is here in the service of genital functions. Cloten embodies the belief that sexuality defiles its object and drags chastity through the mire. Shakespeare has concentrated in him the usually repressed aspects of the orderly, excessively rational, and clean personality. Second, his defensive stupidity perfectly complements his aggressive arrogance: he simply cannot comprehend any statement which accurately identifies his nature. When Imogen compares him to Posthumus' “mean'st garment” (II.iii. 134) he stands entranced by the suggestion, as if it were beyond imagination. We recall Lucio's reference in Measure for Measure to the “rebellion of a codpiece” (III.ii. 111), an appropriate description of Cloten.¹⁰ Third, Cloten's intimate link with his mother's designs associates his perversions with dependence on a “bad” woman. The infant's feeling of absolute independence is based on the fact of absolute dependence. This psychoanalytic paradox accounts for the fact that Cloten and the Queen function as one unit in the play; with Cloten dead the Queen dies. The lurid connection receives marked emphasis in Guiderius' disposal of Cloten's head:

I have sent Cloten's clotpoll down the stream,
In embassy to his mother …

(IV.ii. 184-185)

It is only after Cloten's power has been cut off that the Queen languishes in disease and the drama turns toward resolution of conflict and submission to authority, divine and human. Finally, this personification of infantile fixations stands at the right hand of the King, speaking for Cymbeline in defense of national honor and against the authority of Caesar. While the Queen and Cloten exist, the play is webbed with confusions of role and identity, and patriarchal family structure is rendered powerless to reform itself.

What is Cloten's significance in the play? The very fact that sexual drives are isolated and split off from a whole personality indicates that Shakespeare has embodied a deep-rooted ambivalence in Cymbeline. On the one hand we have the notion of chastity and married love and on the other we have the grim reality of unrestrained sexual energy. Under no circumstances must the “arrogant piece of flesh” be permitted to penetrate the temple of Imogen's chastity. Cloten acts out the problematical reality of sexual drives wherever they appear in unsublimated forms. The “arrogant piece of flesh” must literally be killed (symbolically castrated) before Imogen and Cloten's body in Posthumus' clothes can be brought together in the pastoral landscape of Wales. Shakespeare is not merely making use of a conventional Elizabethan version of ambivalence toward women in Cymbeline; he is making use of dramatic conventions to structure an ambivalence which ran deeper in him than in any other dramatist except Marston, who had little of Shakespeare's plastic ability to transform his obsessions into resilient forms.¹¹ The fool Cloten contains feared wishes, isolates one side of this personal and cultural ambivalence: “Sex is dirty. Man violates woman in the sex act. Therefore he must be punished by castration.” As we shall see, this pattern of motives accounts for more than the fate of Cloten in the play.

The devil takes many shapes. Cloten's versions of violation sustain no concepts of beauty or dignity, but the same wishes that compel him can ramify into more engaging forms of perversion. In the character of Iachimo Shakespeare offers a professional violator as subtle as Cloten is crude. The difference between them is one of technique rather than intention. Compulsive intention to disintegrate binds them in the play's movement from negation to affirmation, but Iachimo broadens the circle of perverse possibilities. Since for both of them morality collapses into strategies for sexual possession, we can make our way through Iachimo to the character of Posthumus.

When we first encounter Iachimo he is talking about Posthumus. His first speech is worth noting for two reasons: he neatly separates Posthumus' personality from “the catalogue of his endowments … tabled by his side” (I.v. 5-6), separates the man from his moral qualities as if these virtues were but so many labels. He emphasizes the sense of sight: “But I could then have look'd on him without the help of admiration …” (I.v. 4). Before long we too will look on Posthumus without the help of admiration. Iachimo immediately focuses on the discrepancy between inner and outer, appearance and reality, so predominant in the play. Before Posthumus enters the Roman scene, Iachimo has already articulated his favorite metaphor in suggestive terms:

Ay, and the approbation of those that weep this lamentable divorce under her colours are wonderfully to extend him; be it but to fortify her judgement, which else an easy battery might lay flat, for taking a beggar without less quality.

(I.v. 19-23)

The metaphor of war is pregnant with prefigural meaning in both the national and wager plots. It is Iachimo who will “fortify her judgement” (and our judgment of Imogen) as he attempts to besiege and “lay flat” her sexual integrity. His metaphorical links between love and war feed on conventional associations to prepare us for the play's later displacement of aggression to military conflict, but they also work the other way, to libidinize heroic conflict. Iachimo's psyche (the psyche we fantasize when we hear him) is obsessed with sexual fantasy. His preoccupation with “the dearest bodily part” (I.v. 154-155) of women orbits his language around romantic imaginings of sexual encounters, providing an Elizabethan audience with vicarious participation in forbidden acts and wishes under the guise of Italianate evil and depravity.

Iachimo is Cloten in civilized dress. Driven by the logic of his fantasies to indulge erotic wishes, he sees the world's events only as occasions for the elaboration of tales. Verbal action replaces Cloten's physical reductive literalizations, so that through him Shakespeare projects sexual desire in a sublimated form. Instead of witnessing attempted actions, we are made to look through his eyes at a distorted and symbolic representation of sex. By projecting sexual fantasies in the character of Iachimo, Shakespeare provides a built-in set of defenses; the fantasies will be verbalized and not acted out, and the convention of Italianizing evil will provide moral distance and condemnation as it simultaneously provides distanced participation. Hence, Iachimo will be permitted to enter the bedchamber at which Cloten vainly knocks and will carry away with him a wealth of symbolic detail with which to weave the words of his deceptions on his overwilling victim.

Iachimo's imagery and metaphors employ the device of auxesis,¹² an amplification or hyperbolic enlargement of significance. He ritualizes and mythologizes sexual encounters. When he first faces Imogen, after a greeting of general as well as particular meaning, “Change you, madam,” (I.vii. 11), he speaks at his characteristic level:

[Aside] All of her that is out of door most rich!
          If she be furnish'd with a mind so rare,
          She is alone th' Arabian bird; and I
          Have lost the wager. Boldness be my friend!
          Arm me, Audacity, from head to foot,
          Or like the Parthian I shall flying fight;
          Rather, directly fly.

(I.vii. 15-21)

One need not remember the psychoanalytic discovery that flying in dreams represents sexual arousal to perceive Iachimo's erotic elation at merely looking at Imogen. He imagines his whole body erect and powerful, ready to engage in the supreme battle. The Arabian bird indicates to him a nature so purely sublimated that it no longer needs sex to reproduce itself, and therefore becomes his only imaginable obstacle. Mythological references cluster in the scenes of his presence; he calls up the world of Ovidian erotic poetry which the Elizabethans usually indulged under heavy moral trappings. Iachimo's Ovidian banquets of sense reflect the scoptophilia of a sensibility whose ambivalence toward the sense of touch seeks compensatory pleasure in the eroticization of the sense of sight.

Later in Act I, scene vii, Iachimo conjures up a vision of Posthumus' life in Rome calculated simultaneously to activate and to condemn forbidden wishes. His speech is worth quoting in full, because the form in which he tells a tale is as important as the tale itself:

                                                                      Had I this cheek
To bathe my lips upon: this hand, whose touch
(Whose every touch) would force the feeler's soul
To th' oath of loyalty: this object, which
Takes prisoner the wild motion of mine eye,
Firing it only here; should I (damn'd then)
Slaver with lips as common as the stairs
That mount the Capitol: join gripes, with hands
Made hard with hourly falsehood (falsehood, as
With labour): then by-peeping in an eye
Base and illustrous as the smoky light
That's fed with stinking tallow: it were fit
That all the plagues of hell should at one time
Encounter such revolt.

(I.vii. 99-112)

The speech breaks into two parts; first there is the attraction of Imogen, then there is the degraded sex with common whores attributed to Posthumus. The first part fantasizes oral gratification and erotic sight, the second changes “bathe” to “slaver” (with its incorporated pun on “slave” corresponding to the previous use of “prisoner”), substitutes mounting for looking, and makes feeding an affair of disgust entailing all the punishments of hell. Iachimo's narcissistic identification with each element of the fantasy (“Had I,” “Should I”) conjures a coherent structure of interpenetrating opposites; for every hallucinatory indulgence there is a more than adequate punishment. Iachimo is a connoisseur of the repressed content of the overcivilized psyche which views direct genital expression as revolting and unconsciously cherishes the wish for oral fusion above all others. Woman's labor becomes the labor of whores, the hand that caresses becomes associated with erection and the interlocked genitals, genital sex becomes an exhibition surrounded by dirt. The speech is a polymorphous confusion of pregenital sexuality. Iachimo's ambiguous “damn'd then” can refer either to what came before or what comes after. He allows us to view sexual scenes through the distorting lens of the condemning conscience. In this, and in the contortions of syntax his vision involves, Iachimo presents in concentrated form what Shakespeare presents writ large in a number of Cymbeline's scenes.

Iachimo's power, aside from the autistic gratification to which his unrepressed imagination gives rise (speeches like the above are literary masturbation fantasies), depends largely on the receptivity of his audience. His direct verbal assault succeeds only in shutting Imogen's ears, and he is forced to resort to the device of the trunk (which, incidentally, Shakespeare makes Imogen volunteer to place in her bedchamber in ironic accommodation of the convention). He succeeds in undermining the less fortified ego of Posthumus when the power to resist the encroachment of unconscious fantasies into consciousness breaks down, and repressed sexuality returns in horrifying forms. Before we turn to Posthumus, however, we should acknowledge the strange transformation Iachimo seems to undergo in the last act.

The besieger of Imogen's temple returns in Act V, scene ii, as a besieger of Britain and is disarmed by the penitent Posthumus in the dumbshow of battle. This gesture partially indicates the nature of his role in the play. Iachimo is an aspect or projection of Posthumus' psyche, that part of him which returns from its repressed status, enters Britain after his banishment, seduces Imogen in fantasy, and thereby gains dominant control of his personality at the expense of the restraints of conscience. This is not to say that Iachimo is not also an autonomous character in the play. Cymbeline, like all works of art, is overdetermined. Characters can function in many ways simultaneously, as allegorizations of ideas or attitudes (as do humor characters), or as fully rounded personalities (as Hamlet appears to an audience), or as both.

Because Iachimo's assault on Imogen is distanced by being enacted in words, he remains alive, unlike Cloten, whose unmediated aggression calls for the worst of punishments. In the final scene Iachimo is free to reimagine his obsessive dreams before the eyes of the King. (“I stand on fire. Come to the matter,” says Cymbeline [V.v. 168-169].) Since the moral defenses against erotic wishes have by then been reinstituted, his story is longer and more obviously an elaborate fairy tale. “Upon a time …,” he begins, and spins a tale laden with vicarious gratification, until he is cut off by Posthumus. Just as Cloten could go on forever were he not literally cut off, Iachimo descends so fully into his imaginative outpouring that the very characters seem to come alive. By isolating his recapitulatory fantasy Shakespeare makes the larger fantasy which is occurring on the stage seem all the more real by contrast. Iachimo's retelling also functions within the defensive strategy of the final reevaluation, because it allows him to edit the play's previous action in the direction of diminishing Posthumus' responsibility. This reediting of the earlier action is the dramatic equivalent of negation.

For both Cloten and Iachimo chastity exists to be violated. They represent two related obsessions of a Renaissance personality burdened with the idealization and worship of women and seeking to establish a stable relationship between platonic sublimation and crude sexual expression. In the one we see a representation of undeferred sexual drives imagined as a moral void, presocial and uneducable; in the other Shakespeare projects a more complex, socially viable manifestation of erotic conflict, combining displacement of sexual drives to speaking and looking with expressions of negative judgment. In Posthumus we witness a tense and precariously balanced combination of the two. Cloten and Iachimo indicate alternative modes of expression toward which Posthumus' character tends. By following Posthumus carefully through the play, we can identify the dreamlike logic which underlies its sometimes confusing, oversophisticated surface. The techniques of dreams—displacement, condensation, substitution, multiple symbolism—are also the play's dominant dramatic techniques.

The opening scene presents Posthumus' credentials for nobility of spirit with open-ended ambiguity; phrases of unspecified reference generate curious suggestions of hidden malady. First we have a contrast between Cloten and Posthumus:

He that hath miss'd the princess is a thing
Too bad for bad report: and he that hath her
(I mean, that married her, alack good man,
And therefore banish'd) is a creature such
As, to seek through the regions of the earth
For one his like; there would be something failing
In him that should compare.

(I.i. 16-22)

The “thingness” of Cloten is balanced, not by direct expression of nobility or virtue, but by the tortured expression of incomparability. Posthumus is a “creature” who “hath her,” and the immediate qualification, “I mean, that married her,” suggests that the marriage remains unconsummated. Words of intimacy and banishment or pain enter the play's language as if linked by a special bond. The fourth through seventh lines communicate two contradictory messages: (1) no other man can measure up to Posthumus; (2) another man comparable to Posthumus would have “something failing.” Like so much of the play's verse, the lines shun direct expression in favor of elliptical hinting.

The Gentleman then extends the ambiguity in a deliberate generalization of the condition described:

                                                            I do not think
So fair an outward, and such stuff within
Endows a man, but he.

(I.i. 22-24)

The construction of the lines, the way they withhold specific reference until the last moment, marks a recurrent feature of Cymbeline's verse. The contrast between appearance and reality, “fair outward” and “stuff within,” is prefaced by “I do not think,” casting a further oblique doubt on Posthumus' integrity. A few lines later we are told that there is something inarticulable about Posthumus, again in unspecified terms: “I cannot delve him to the root” (I.i. 28). Delving to the root is more than an agricultural image, once we remember Elizabethan associations of plants and bodily parts, yet here its erotic overtone serves no contextual purpose. The Gentleman simply means to say that Posthumus' personality cannot be fully explicated. A few lines before he said:

I do extend him, sir, within himself,
Crush him together, rather than unfold
His measure duly.

(I.i. 25-27)

This may be an unconscious image of erection followed by an unconscious punishment. The accumulation of phrases unanchored in dramatic action tends to activate uncontrolled associations in the minds of the audience, associations which may later find justification on the stage. As Robert Rogers has shown, such images can profitably be studied as “microdramas,” enactments in detail of the play's larger unconscious concerns.¹³ When successful, these microdramas fuse primary-process images (bodily associations) with the play's secondary process, discursive meaning. In Cymbeline the fusion is incomplete. The above lines activate unconscious images in a way that seems to baffle the conscious mind.

After these vague suggestions of disproportionate correspondence between inner and outer, Posthumus' lineage is presented. Sicilius, his father, had his martial power and nobility confirmed in the name “Leonatus,” which Posthumus inherits. His two brothers died “with their swords in hand” (I.i. 36), indicating that their lives were devoted to the service of the state. Their father, “fond of issue” (I.i. 37),¹⁴ died of grief. Posthumus' mother died as he was born. Deprived of parents and brothers, he finds a protector in the King, who has also lost two sons and a wife. The parallel is too clear to be overlooked. Sicilius and Cymbeline are identified by their pasts. Posthumus' relation to Cymbeline is that of son to parents, both parents, for Cymbeline “Breeds him, and makes him of his bedchamber” (I.i. 42). It is a remarkable exercise in condensation, for the parallel between Cymbeline and Sicilius creates common parentage for Posthumus and Imogen without the charge of incest accompanying the marriage. In psychological terms, the absence of real parents corresponds to the shaky status of Posthumus' internal parents, the superego, and this in turn corresponds to the morally weak external father of the play, Cymbeline. Shakespeare takes great pains to restore the father-authorities, Caesar, Jupiter, Cymbeline, to active beneficent power at the end of the play. The restoration of external fathers accompanies the restoration of internal control of conscience in Posthumus.

Posthumus' virtue is not directly located within himself; his name and nobility are conferred by his past and by the fact that Imogen has chosen him. Like Antony's and Timon's, Posthumus' self-esteem depends on large doses of external confirmation. Deprived of external confirmation of their identities, all three succumb to regressive forces within.

In the departure scene (I.ii) Posthumus reveals an inner assent to the forces of separation. His banishment objectifies a distance that is already manifest between him and Imogen, in spite of their exchange of symbolic gifts. His only gesture of physical intimacy is to place a bracelet on her arm. He is self-conscious about his manhood:

                                                  My queen, my mistress:
O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause
To be suspected of more tenderness
Than doth become a man.

(I.ii. 23-26)

“Tenderness” and manhood are placed in inverse relation to each other; as one increases the other becomes threatened. Renaissance identities were more sensitive than we are to degrees of social tact in close relationships. Imogen's tears soften Posthumus, and his response resists their power while admitting their potential for evoking sympathetic resonance in him. Yet in the eyes of the paranoiac King, Posthumus' tenderness has already far exceeded the limit, making his concern with the judgment of others sharply reflect an inner condition, a fear of physical intimacy. The juxtaposition of “queen” and “mistress” rings odd, since the Queen enters and exits throughout the scene, and she is not lovable.

Too close an identification of wife and mother can result in violent ambivalence toward sexuality.¹⁵ On the one hand Posthumus needs to be reprimanded for his haste to depart before the gifts are exchanged, and on the other hand he expresses “loathness to depart” (I.ii. 39) at precisely the same moment. When he gives the bracelet, his words express more than conventional meaning:

                              For my sake wear this,
It is a manacle of love, I'll place it
Upon this fairest prisoner.

(I.ii. 52-54)

The gift imposes an identity upon the giver as well as the receiver. His metaphor reveals an unconscious holding-on too tightly, an excessive dependence. Without her he is nothing, with her he is everything. It is the relationship of child and mother (Imogen's ring belonged to her mother), not the relationship of mature love, and its roots lie in oral dependence:

And with mine eyes I'll drink the words you send,
Though ink be made of gall.

(I.ii. 31-32)

Drinking with eyes, which is what Iachimo does, for all its conventionality as a metaphor, here expresses the nature of a particular kind of love; it is the expression of an unconscious passivity experienced from an adult point of view. Hence the association of oral gratification and poisoning.

Posthumus' words contradict his actions because an unconscious need for total sustenance conflicts with the conscious expression of mutual love. What we witness in the departure scene is the first exposure of the confusion between queen and mistress, mother and wife. It is this confusion which will account, in psychological terms, for Posthumus' later behavior.

Before the scene ends, we get another significant instance of Posthumus' condition. Pisanio reports that Posthumus has been attacked by Cloten and violence only avoided because “my master rather play'd than fought” (I.ii. 93). Again, Posthumus takes the passive role, restraining his masculinity when threatened. Imogen responds with self-assured control:

I would they were in Afric both together,
Myself by with a needle, that I might prick
The goer-back.

(I.ii. 98-100)

Posthumus will not actively use his sword until the last act, when he disarms Iachimo. Between the departure scene and that moment of self-possessed aggression, Shakespeare explores his complex motives with consistently revealing insight.

We have seen that Posthumus' actions in the departure scene indicate an inner prohibition against direct expression of physical intimacy. There is no middle ground between idolatry and Cloten's phallic aggression. This inner tyranny corresponds to the King's outer tyranny, Cymbeline too would “pen her up” (I.ii. 84). To Imogen's contrast of Posthumus and Cloten, “I chose an eagle, / And did avoid a puttock” (I.ii. 70-71), Cymbeline replies, “Thou took'st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (I.ii. 72-73). To keep the throne from contamination Imogen's purity must be isolated, fortified against the touch of defiling sexuality. With respect to Posthumus, Cymbeline represents the tyranny of the superego which, because sex is considered dirty, would split the psyche into diametric opposites, one part that worships and another that defiles.

It is precisely of this split that Imogen reminds us at the end of Act I. She tells us that the King's intervention, which, “like the tyrannous breathing of the north, / Shakes all our buds from growing” (I.iv. 36-37), has prevented three things from being done; (1) Posthumus has not been allowed to give assurances against betrayal of Imogen and “his honor” in Italy; (2) Imogen has not been allowed to charge him with the duty of worship; (3) the sensual expression of love, “that parting kiss,” has been denied. The blind authority of the father breaks the delicate balance of love and sensuality, fragments the political world into opposing forces, and this fragmentation mirrors the internal struggle that will break out in Posthumus. Of course, repressed sexuality returns with greater violence. In banishing the alleged “baseness” of Posthumus, Cymbeline allies himself with Cloten and the Queen. Symbolically, he is split into Cloten and the Queen. The play's extremely complex overdetermination enacts the conflict between sexuality and purity over and over again. Just as Cymbeline's insistence on Imogen's purity entails his bonds with the evil pair, Posthumus' insistence on testing that purity activates his own unconscious wishes.

Defending the purity of his “fair, virtuous, wise, chaste, constant, qualified and less attemptable” (I.v. 61-62) mistress is not new to Posthumus. The Frenchman in Act I, scene v, tells us that he has done it before, “upon importance of so slight and trivial a nature” (I.v. 42-43). The effective cause of the “arbitrement of swords” (I.v. 50-51) remains unsettled; Posthumus tells us both that “my quarrel was not altogether slight” (I.v. 48-49) and that his judgment is “mended” (I.v. 47). Immediately after, his judgment is challenged by Iachimo, his alter ego (“we are familiar at first,” says Posthumus [I.v. 105-106]). Iachimo says, “but I make my wager rather against your confidence than her reputation” (I.v. 114-115). After insisting on “convenants” (I.v. 148) with the Italianate fiend, Posthumus embraces these conditions more fully than he embraced Imogen:

I embrace these conditions, let us have articles betwixt us. Only, thus far you shall answer: if you make your voyage upon her, and give me directly to understand you have prevail'd, I am no further your enemy; she is not worth our debate. If she remain unseduc'd … you shall answer me with your sword.

(I.v. 161-169)

Other men are his enemies only so long as she remains chaste; they cease to be his enemies if Imogen is seduced. It is quite clear that Posthumus is not defending Imogen. He is testing an idea upon which he is dependent for his own identity. The idea is that women, as the embodiment of chastity, transcend sexual impulses. “Where they love,” said Freud of maternally fixated men, “they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.”¹⁶ Once women are “voyaged upon,” the debate ends; there is nothing left to fight for. Phallic aggression, answering with swords, exhausts its value and uses in defense of the idea, which is to say that the polarity of sublimated sexuality manifest in conflict and the maintenance of the idea of chastity is self-perpetuating. The instability of this psychological configuration exposes itself by its repeated need to be tested. When the test fails, the whole configuration collapses; the “stuff within” breaks its chains, violent ambivalence becomes conscious. The idea of desexualized purity has a vested interest in war.

The wager is a conventionalized form of altruistic surrender.¹⁷ Iachimo will enact Posthumus' repressed wishes, and the consequences of his enactment will be embraced by Posthumus. As usual in such carefully stated mental bargains, the real reciprocity is unconscious. The covenant is the occasion for the release of unconscious wishes and the anxiety which infuses the possibility of their gratification.

The sequence of scenes from Act I, scene vii, to Act II, scene iv, is, with the exception of the final tour de force, the most sharply focused pattern of action in the play. Iachimo and Cloten alternate in attempts to penetrate Imogen's temple, with the end of the sequence being Posthumus' hysterical diatribe against women. As Cloten grows more absurd, Iachimo grows more successful. After this sequence Iachimo and Posthumus will be absent from the stage until Act V. As in The Winter's Tale, we are led to a point of maximum conflict at which our detachment threatens to fail, and the energy gathered in the form of anxiety is then free to be recoordinated in a long pastoral sequence.

Shakespeare frames Act II, scene ii, by references to time, isolating it from the previous and subsequent action in a strategy of demarcation which serves to keep its symbolic contents controlled while permitting intensified verbal expression of Iachimo's stylized violations. Psychologically, every detail contributes to the fabric of highly defended erotic enactment. As Iachimo activates sexual fantasies, mythological allusion distances them; as he idealizes and depersonalizes his encounter with dazzling chastity, we participate vicariously in a ritualized symbolic rape. The entire encounter is not only distanced into words, but it becomes equivalent to the fabled reality of Imogen's book, a “story” the elements of which Iachimo reports as he records them.

Imogen's concern for external detail—she asks the time, marks her place in Ovid, requests that the taper remain, sets a time to be awakened, prays for divine protection—attunes us ironically to expect some threat to this careful preparation. Immediately after her prayer, we enter the timeless world of symbolic eroticism, the spell broken only by Iachimo's exit into the world of time (“One, two, three: time, time!” he says [II.ii. 51]). Iachimo “comes from the trunk” into the chamber, in what, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, is a clear representation, by its opposite, of going in. As in dreams, the manifest act reverses its latent meaning. The trunk itself is too obvious a feminine symbol to need comment, and Imogen's bedchamber, given the play's frequent associations of contained or fortified spaces with taboo feminine parts, can be seen as a symbol of her body and its secret places. Iachimo's entrance thus represents an overdetermined act of penetration. Once inside, he turns to formalized descriptions of erotic detail colored by his scoptophilic interest. Twice he recalls mythological rapes:

                                                                      Our Tarquin thus
Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd
The chastity he wounded.

(II.ii. 12-14)

                                                  She hath been reading late,
The tale of Tereus, here the leaf's turn'd down
Where Philomel gave up.

(II.ii. 44-46)

These allusions to sadistic primal scenes, however, define only one level of the scene's sexual engagement. Iachimo's sublimated presentation of Imogen's peerless body weighs idealized anal and visual excitement as heavily as the genital penetration his entry symbolizes.

                                                                                That I might touch!
But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd,
How dearly they do't: 'tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids,
To see th' enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure lac'd
With blue of heaven's own tinct.

(II.ii. 16-23)

Moving from taboo touch to visual concentration characterizes Imogen's forbidden power as readily as it reemphasizes Iachimo's fixations. Imogen's perfumed breath and the intensity of response her veiled eyes evoke extend the range of Iachimo's vicarious gratification to include pregenital eroticism. Imogen becomes a cosmic image, magnified to proportions that shrink the participant by comparison. The taper displaces Iachimo's own excitement and visual response. We might almost call the description a sexual act performed by visual incorporation.

A few lines later Iachimo's fantasy marks the deepest level of oral gratification, the detail which will trigger Posthumus' hysteria:

                                                                                                              On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops
I' th' bottom of a ćowslip. Here's a voucher,
Stronger than ever law could make; this secret
Will force him think I have pick'd the lock, and ta'en
The treasure of her honour.

(II.ii. 37-42)

The visually intense simile of the “crimson drops i' th' bottom of a cowslip,” like Ariel's “in a cowslip's bell I lie” (Tempest V.i. 89), evokes a feeling of repose.¹⁸ That this detail is associated with the breast and with the “pick'd lock” of sexual violation prepares us for the unconscious confusion of maternal and genital sexuality, with its incestuous potential, which will incite Posthumus' masochistic rage. The bedroom scene thus ritualizes the unconscious orientation repressed unstably in Posthumus, the view that adult sexuality inherently transgresses the law of the father because its object, purified into idealized chastity, promises the gratification attainable only from a mother.

In Act II, scene iv, Posthumus begins by expressing his passive relation to the King and ends in an ambivalent relation to action. To Philario's question, “What means do you make to him?” he replies,

Not any: but abide the change of time,
Quake in the present winter's state, and wish
That warmer days would come: in these fear'd hopes,
I barely gratify your love; they failing,
I must die much your debtor.

(II.iv.4-8)

Only the Queen and Cymbeline share his faith in time's curative powers (cf. II.iii. 42-45), making his position an ironic defense of passive wilfulness. The oxymoronic “fear'd hopes” articulates a more complex motivation. The fear of the father, who is always associated in the first part of the play with barren winter, and the hope to be possessed by and possess the mother, who is warmth and fertility, result in stasis. Posthumus' feared hopes cancel active defiance as surely as they deny satisfaction of his wishes. A few lines later his metaphor of rooted exposure finds implicit contrast in his own praise of British “discipline” (II.iv.23) in defiance of Ceasar's demand for subordination. Before Iachimo, returned from Britain, enters the scene, we have registered both Posthumus' ambivalence toward authority and his unconsciousness of that ambivalence.

Iachimo returns, but, ironically, the first erotic words come from Posthumus:

The swiftest harts have posted you by land;
And winds of all the corners kiss'd your sails,
To make your vessel nimble.

(II.iv. 27-29)

Posthumus' consciousness is attuned to vicarious participation. Before succumbing to the evidence, however, he restates the terms of the contract. Unlike Faustus, he does not need to be reminded of his bargains:

                                                            If you can make't apparent
That you have tasted her in bed, my hand
And ring is yours. If not, the foul opinion
You had of her pure honour gains, or loses,
Your sword, or mine, or masterless leave both
To who shall find them.

(II.iv. 56-61)

Unconsciously, sex for Posthumus, as for so many Elizabethan and Jacobean characters and poetic personae, is oral gratification. In the economy of his psyche phallic action becomes relevant only insofar as “tasting in bed” does not occur. He defends the thought of “her pure honor” against “foul opinion” because otherwise the knowledge that sex is genital would stand up against the forces of repression, and the illusion of purity would be lost. In Posthumus' psyche the illusion of purity provides a strong counter-cathexis against the fact of genital sex, and this counter-cathexis enables the unconscious wish that sex be oral (infantile) to find metaphoric expression. This is why external conflict will be avoided if Iachimo can “make't apparent” that he has “tasted her in bed.” A wish will have unconsciously been gratified, the wish to return to the oral stage prior to Oedipal conflict. Yet the very gratification is expensive to psychic integrity, because the confusion in his mind between oral and genital sexuality fails as a defense against Oedipal fears. Once the unconscious wish is granted to the receptive Posthumus, a violent conflict between the wish for purity and the wish for gratification erupts. Why? Because then the repressed truth that sex is genital forces its way into consciousness, and his rage is turned “against himself” (II.iv. 152).

The process by which Iachimo “induces” (cf. II.iv. 63) Posthumus to believe Imogen seduced begins with erotic descriptions of her chamber: that tapestry depicting the story of Antony and Cleopatra, “the chimney-piece, / Chaste Dian, bathing,” “Her andirons” and “winking Cupids,” the whole array of erotic ornamentation, which, like the Ovid at her bedside, rehearses the sexual life denied in reality but indulged in fantasy. Posthumus resists these suggestions easily; even the display of the bracelet is temporarily resisted at the rational advice of Philario, although we first have an extremely significant expression of its unconscious significance:

It is a basilisk unto mine eye,
Kills me to look on't.

(II.iv. 107-108)

The bracelet betrays the gift's obligations because symbolically it presents the sight of the female genitals to Posthumus. The very bracelet he wished would be a “manacle” of chastity returns as an expression of sexuality. The sight of the female genitals “kills” because it is unconsciously interpreted as a castration of the male member. Women are men without penises: this is the unconscious message.¹⁹

Still, Posthumus is able to repress even this sight for a moment; he demands a “corporal sign” (II.ii. 119), but immediately succumbs at the mention of Jupiter:

IACH.
By Jupiter, I had it from her arm.
POST.
Hark you, he swears: by Jupiter he swears.
'Tis true, nay, keep the ring, 'tis true …

(II.iv. 121-123)

Why should the mere mention of Jupiter cancel his ability to resist? Is it not because he wants to believe that “he hath enjoy'd her” (II.iv. 126) and finds in Jupiter an ultimate authority for his deception? His own repressed libido impresses the superego into its service, ignoring the rational persuasion of Philario. In a complete reversal, the most traumatic in a play full of reversals, he now demands his own cuckolding, and Iachimo grants his most cherished unconscious wish:

IACH.
                                                                                If you seek
For further satisfying, under her breast
(Worthy her pressing) lies a mole, right proud
Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,
I kiss'd it, and it gave me present hunger
To feed again, though full. You do remember
This stain upon her?
POST.
                                                                                          Ay, and it doth confirm
Another stain, as big as hell can hold,
Were there no more but it.

(II.iv. 133-141)

The gratification in fantasy of the oral wish to feed at the breast entails the recognition of the fact of genital sex: “it doth confirm another stain” the thought of which is absolutely revolting and leads to an image of violence. “O, that I had her here, to tear her limb-meal!” (II.iv. 147). The thought of that other stain and the horror of torn limbs are in the unconscious one and the same, the irrational fear that sex involves castration. This is the fear underlying Posthumus' insistent defense of chastity, his ambivalent relation to authority, and his unconscious confusion of wife and mother.

Posthumus' soliloquy at the end of Act II brings together all the strands of the conflict we have been discussing. In denouncing women, he attempts to negate his own sexual drives, to preserve the shreds of honor in the face of the facts of his own nature. He begins with a wish for self-sufficiency and an attempt to absolve his father:

Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,
And that most venerable man, which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp'd.

(II.iv. 153-157)

“Venerable” authority and sexual intercourse are irreconcilably opposed in his mind. Posthumus always insists on absolute authorization for his actions and thoughts, a determination which accords well with the play's total moral distinctions, but which forbids psychic compromises. The sexual father must be made anonymous, and the mother appears in the image of Diana, chaste huntress, woman with phallic power:

                                                            Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit: yet my mother seem'd
The Dian of that time: so doth my wife
The nonpareil of this.

(II.iv. 157-160)

Mother and wife are identified in purity, sexual taboo extending from one to the other. Birth and biological process diverge in the coin image in an attempt to deny genital reality.²⁰

Then Posthumus reverses himself, claiming revenge for having been denied “lawful pleasures”:

                                                            O vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd,
And pray'd me oft forbearance: did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow.

(II.iv. 160-165)

In this confluence of overdetermined images he manages first to project the source of restraint onto Imogen, and then to call up the very image which repels him. Earlier Imogen said:

                                                                                                    When he was here
He did incline to sadness, and oft-times
Not knowing why.

(I.vii. 61-63)

In other words, the sexual repression imposed by his own tyrannical conscience had already displayed its existence in unaccountable depressions. This view is consistent with the pattern of his actions. In his present hysteria, Posthumus edits the past to externalize responsibility. The “pudency so rosy,” the “sweet view” of which now enters his imagination, expresses opposites simultaneously; it is the blush of chastity and an image of sexual arousal. He is unconsciously entertaining the Iachimo part of himself which derives erotic pleasure in looking. And “old Saturn” projects an image of the father as lecher, in whose guise the looking can be permitted to enter consciousness. Next we get a vision of Iachimo as a boar, and sex becomes the primal scene, nothing but violence and violation:

                                                                                                    O, all the devils!
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour, was't not?
Or less; at first? Perchance he spoke not, but
Like a full-acorn'd boar, a German one,
Cried “O!” and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look'd for should oppose and she
Should from encounter guard.

(II.iv. 165-171)

Yellow was the color of disease and jealousy;²¹ “full-acorned” means full-testicled, and the word “German” may be a pun on “germen,” the male seed.²² The image of the boar is the greatest possible contrast to Iachimo's gorgeous description in the bedroom scene. It takes Posthumus two lines to say one word, “pudenda.” Again we have emphasis on looking.

In the following lines another reversal occurs, as Posthumus projects the thought of hated sexuality onto women:

                                                                                          Could I find out
The woman's part in me—for there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it,
The woman's: flattering, hers; deceiving, hers:
Lust, and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers …

(II.iv. 171-176)

In his search for the “woman's part” we have a clear example of affirmation by denial. By embodying an anthology of evils in women, Posthumus articulates his extensive terror at the possibility of female sexuality, his diseased relationship to genitality. The “part” against which he rages is exactly the part that Imogen has not played. Posthumus is trying to exorcise the image of the female genitals in himself (“the woman's part in me”). The pun, unconscious as it is, reveals the root of his disgust, as he simultaneously expresses and defends himself against his castration anxieties. The uneven, distracted movement of the verse corresponds to its ambivalent content.²³

The speech ends with a final note of ambivalence over whether to write or not to write. After deciding to “write against them” (II.iv. 183), he decides that prayer, submission to a higher will, is the better alternative. Writing satire, an active way of coping with forbidden wishes through sublimated aggression and sadism, is judged inferior to dependence on God's authority. God will send devils to plague the sinners. In psychological terms, Posthumus' conflict centers ultimately on his relation to father-authority. The father demands the punishment of castration as the price of sexual desire. The fear of losing the vital organ in the sex act is converted into the fear of genital sex itself and this fear is then located wholly in woman. The obverse of chastity is castration fear, and castration fear is fear of the tyrannical father who possesses the mother (wife) for himself. In the test of Imogen, Posthumus ends up confronted with the unresolved Oedipal fears which the defense of purity was designed to preserve in a state of repression. We have observed his constant need to feel that ultimate authorities join the side of his wishes. But the wish to possess Imogen sexually conflicts with the dictates of conscience, in spite of Posthumus' attempt to claim the authority of Jupiter, and the conflict within him will hereafter center on the mollification of father-authorities at the expense of erotic gratification. …

Notes

1. London, 1955, p. xli.

2. Shakespeare's relation to a new theater is discussed by G. E. Bentley in “Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre,” Shakespeare Survey, I (1948), 38-50.

3. General Observations on the Plays of Shakespeare (1756).

4. Quotations from Cymbeline follow the Arden edition.

5. The Crown of Life (London, 1947), p. 132.

6. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Cleveland, 1963), p. 24.

7. Sister Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time (New York, 1947), p. 331.

8. See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York, 1960), entries under “nose” and “nose-painting” for confirmation of this symbolism.

9. See Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York, 1945), pp. 281, 427-436, for a summary of psychoanalytic thought on this theme. See also Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, et al. (hereafter abbreviated S.E.), 24 vols. (London, 1953-1966), IX, 169-175. Karl Abraham supplemented the connection between feces and money in “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character,” in Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York, 1953). Doing and undoing is a characteristic defense in obsessional neurosis. See Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York, 1966), p. 34. Fenichel (p. 155) remarks on “the fact that the mechanism of undoing is so often applied in conflicts around anal erotism.” Cloten represents an example of what Freud called “regressive deteriorization of the genital function.” “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism” (1917), S.E., XVII, 127-133.

10. I am indebted to Miss Margaret Darby for this suggestion.

11. See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 465-507, for a summary of material on “The Popular Controversy over Women.” Evidence for this ambivalence is pervasive in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The other side of idealization is summarized by Vindice in Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy: “Wives are but made to go to bed and feed.”

12. Joseph, Rhetoric, p. 331.

13. The paper, entitled “The Psycho-Dynamics of Metaphor,” is unpublished. It was delivered before the Group for the Psychological Study of Literature in Buffalo in the spring of 1968.

14. “Fond,” meaning “foolish,” seems to cast doubt on the father's integrity, as if Shakespeare were playing with his own reverence.

15. See Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), S.E., XI, 179-190.

16. Ibid., p. 183.

17. The concept of “altruistic surrender” is discussed by Anna Freud, [The] Ego and [the] Mechanisms [of Defense, Rev. ed. New York, 1966], pp. 122-134.

18. Cf. Pastorella's birthmark, also on the breast, in The Faerie Queene VI.xii.vii:

    Vpon the little breast like christall bright,
    She mote perceive a little purple mold,
    That like a rose her silken leaues did faire vnfold.

    Although this passage may be a “source” for Imogen's mole, notice how Shakespeare thinks in terms of enfolding while Spenser thinks in terms of opening out. In the other possible “source” for the image, Frederyke of Jennen, the mark is “a blacke warte” on “her lefte arme.” Shakespeare accentuates the breast and with a tone characteristic of the play.

19. The bracelet's effect on Posthumus is precisely that of Medusa's head. See Freud, “Medusa's Head” (1940 [1922]), S.E., XVIII, 273-274.

20. The coining conception of birth derives from the child's equation of feces and child. See Freud, “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), S.E., IX, 209-226. The defense against genital sex is thus a regression to this earlier conception of reproduction. It has the advantage of absolving the parents from sexual contact, and it makes generation a possibility for men alone. “If babies are born through the anus, then a man can give birth just as well as a woman” (pp. 219-220). In Act V this wish is symbolically fulfilled as Cymbeline becomes a “mother to the birth of three” (V.v. 370). Anality defends against incest.

21. See The Winter's Tale II.iii. 102-106, where Leontes wishes to banish yellow from the colors of the ordered mind. Yellow is there clearly associated with the jealous mind, and it is regularly associated with diseases like jaundice.

22. “German” also means “blood relation,” which makes the boar a part of the family. Cf. Othello I.i. 112-113: “you'll coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.” The boar is a traditional symbol of sexual aggression, as in Venus and Adonis and Richard III. This is true in the East as well as the West. “On the one hand it occurs as a symbol of intrepidness, and of irrational urge toward suicide. On the other hand it stands for licentiousness.” J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (London, 1962). Such ambivalence is appropriate in Posthumus' fantasy.

23. It is worth noting that the speech keeps us at a distance from its fantasy content by the relative absence of images in its final fifteen lines. The absence of images and heavy reliance on general moral qualities may account for the “ungenuine” quality critics have sensed here. The speech does not permit the intensity of participation characteristic of, say, Othello or Leontes.