[In the following essay, Bruster examines scenes in Cymbeline that strongly suggest the drama's parody of the romance genre and question viewer tolerance for violence.]

At the first performance of its latest Stratford revival tonight the audience laughed at the primitive ravelling of the loose ends of a careless plot.

(1962 Stratford Production)

In 1968 I saw Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival in Ashland and the audience disturbed me by laughing as the dozen odd strands of the mingled yarn of the plot were unravelled in the complicated denouement of the play.

From this point (i.e., the ‘headless man’ scene) the audience seemed to feel the lid was off, allowing them to laugh freely at any part of the play's remaining scenes. … When Jupiter appeared, amid clouds of dense smoke and astride a golden eagle, the theater was in an uproar.

(1970 Ontario Stratford Festival)¹

As the above accounts of three different productions testify, Cymbeline has struck twentieth-century audiences as an unintentionally ludicrous play.² The last reviewer cited above goes on to explain this kind of reaction—one he found unsettling—as the result of modern “surprise” and “inattentiveness” in the face of a Fletcherian romance. J. C. Trewin, who also saw Gaskill's 1962 Stratford production, concurred with this reviewer in feeling that “the final act at Stratford drifts into something of a burlesque as Shakespeare rapidly uncovers fold upon fold of narrative. …”³ For Trewin as well, the basis of this rather unfortunate response lies in the nature of the play itself; romance as a genre poses almost insurmountable difficulties for any staging of Cymbeline: “In this late romance the absurdities of the plot are insistently obtrusive, and though in the text we can appreciate the craft of the fifth act and its ‘cumulated denouements,’ it can be hard sometimes to accept it in the theatre.” Interpreting Cymbeline without regard to its theatrical dimension is a recourse commonly taken by those attempting to bring what Johnson referred to as the play's “folly of … fiction” into the fold of a critical tradition that has labored to paint Shakespeare's last plays as the crowning (hence unquestionably somber) phase of his artistic career. This tendency to privilege the text seems almost an understandable reaction: as the above reviews suggest, a study of contemporary productions of Cymbeline is itself an inquiry into directorial and theatrical gymnastics. “How can one make it believable?” is the question which, invariably, everyone must answer—from director to actor, playgoer to scholar. Since Pope, editors have addressed the problem by proposing theories of textual interpolation and/or misattribution. The stilted fourteeners of the theophany—archaic and thus probably the work of another hand, the argument went—were enough to earn its long exclusion from performance texts. Other problematical scenes likewise begged excision: to play Cymbeline from an uncut text is to play the ridiculous, to invite laughter from pit and box alike. Only during the last two or three decades has critical dialogue suggested that the self-ironizing humor of the “mingled yarn of the plot” is not only intentional, but actually integral to Cymbeline's dramatic project.

Bertrand Evans in 1960 mentioned almost in passing what he saw as Shakespeare's employment of devices exploiting the audience's “discrepant awareness,” but it was Arthur C. Kirsch who first connected the play to the coterie tradition's emphasis on deliberate and even heightened self-consciousness, arguing that the play possesses a tone similar to that of the drama of the private theaters and the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson and Marston.⁴ Not long after this, R. A. Foakes discussed the play's “overt display of theatricality” and concluded that such self-consciousness distances the characters from us enough to assure our experiencing the same kind of reaction that Posthumus undergoes when he receives the revelation from Jupiter: “He cannot make sense of the prophecy, which, whether it springs from dream or madness or whatever, remains inexplicable, yet somehow like the action of his life.”⁵ F. D. Hoeniger saw Cymbeline as carrying on the tradition of mingling irony with romance beginning in England with Sidney, though tracing its roots through Achilles Tatius to Heliodorus.⁶ This mixture takes us into “the sphere neither of tragedy nor of comedy but in the world of a genre different from both.” Kenneth Muir anticipated Hoeniger's assessment in calling Cymbeline “neither a tragedy nor a comedy, nor even a tragicomedy.”⁷ At least one critic has become so distracted by the conjunction of serious and flippant in the play as to conclude that scenes which create such confusion in the audience “have no place in the world of romance.”⁸ And in a recent treatment Michael Taylor suggests that “Any adequate answer has to take into account the extent to which Cymbeline has from the beginning played fast and loose with the narrative conventions normally governing the lives of young lovers in the romances. …”⁹ Yet in spite of the fact that increasingly the critical tendency has become one which admits the existence of Cymbeline's parodic strain, many of those who have agreed with such an interpretation have contented themselves with an indication of its presence or have attempted to justify it on the grounds that somehow the self-consciousness works within the boundaries of what one finds in the other romances. But to interpret Cymbeline without using Pericles, The Winter's Tale, or The Tempest as what one might call “crutch” or “preemptive” texts, however, is almost necessarily to discover the predominance of its parodic elements, and to come to grips with the dramatic function of its heightened and multivalent irony. In the following remarks I would like to examine two scenes that seem crucial to any interpretation of the play: Imogen's “headless man” scene and soliloquy (IV. ii. 308-32) and Posthumus' (mis)recognition of and assault on Imogen (V. v. 230). I would offer that Shakespeare uses the horrific comedy of the former to condition his audience's reception of the latter, employing self-conscious irony and its corollary, the spectators' cruel ridicule, as a means of foregrounding for the audience its cultural capacity for violence.¹⁰

I. IMOGEN AND THE HEADLESS MAN

The “headless man” scene—where Imogen wakes to find as her pillow Cloten's decapitated body—has often drawn an angry response from male critics eager to defend the character Swinburne called the “immortal godhead of womanhood.” Granville-Barker, for instance, was blunt in his appraisal: “It is a fraud on Imogen; and we are accomplices in it.”¹¹ Imogen's own reaction to the situation is one we might expect from the stock pathetic heroine of Renaissance melodrama: immediate horror followed by stern resolution to future action. Examined closely, however, her soliloquy borders on the ridiculous:

A headless man? The garments of Posthumus?
I know the shape of's leg; this is his hand,
His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh,
The brawns of Hercules; but his Jovial face—
Murder in heaven? How? 'Tis gone. Pisanio,
All curses madded Hecuba gave the Greeks,
And mine to boot, be darted on thee! Thou,
Conspired with that irregulous devil Cloten,
Hath here cut off my lord. To write and read
Be henceforth treacherous! Damned Pisanio
Hath with his forgèd letters—damned Pisanio—
From this most bravest vessel of the world
Struck the maintop. O Posthumus, alas,
Where is thy head? Where's that? Ay me, where's that?
Pisanio might have killed thee at the heart
And left this head on.

(IV. ii. 308-23)

Shaw saw this scene as nearly impossible for any actress continually to carry off night after night.¹² The reviewer cited last in the trio of epigraphs prefacing this essay recalls how the beginning lines of this passage, when delivered at a 1970 production of Cymbeline, “started some tittering, which erupted into torrential laughter when she ended her anatomical journey at his neck. …” This parody of the Petrarchan blazon, reversing the usual (descending) movement, renders both speaker and speech open to ridicule. Certainly the actress playing Imogen must in some way touch or even lift each body part as she adds it to her memorial catalogue. In this way the gestic impulse inherent in the lines, embodied theatrically, solicits from Cymbeline's audience a horrifying form of laughter.

Then come the rhetorical questions: “Murder in heaven? How?” At this point one might recall Imogen's earlier references to the homonymic “Haven” of Milford Haven and see how, through the same word play which has worked the larger fragmentation in the play, her ideal world has been shattered. The next line serves to strengthen such a reading of the passage: “All curses madded Hecuba gave the Greeks, / And mine to boot, be darted on thee!” Hamlet wisely foreswore any real connection with Priam's wife, but Imogen, via her comic, parenthetical interruption, bathetically rehearses grand tragedy. She is no Senecan matriarch, though here she attempts to sound like one. And in the next sentence, when she charges Cloten with conspiracy in the death of her husband even as she clings to Cloten's corpse, the irony is anything but subtle. If in irony there is always a victim, certainly here and throughout this passage that victim is Imogen.

Her fondness for dilation carries on into the next vituperation, as does the same vein of irony, when she stops in mid-thought to abuse what we know to be one of her only true friends in the court: “damned Pisanio.” By this point her speech has become an essay in the ridiculous, even if one generously takes “irregulous” as intentional rather than the malapropism for “irreligious” that it probably is: witness Iachimo's concern with the matter of religion in the wager scene, Aaron's depiction as the “irreligious Moor” in Titus Andronicus (V. iii. 121), and the fact that Imogen's is the only known use of the neologism in the language.¹³ Her rhetoric, generally simple and unlearned, here borders on the farcical.

Yet Cymbeline's sport with Imogen has not ended. Her lament over “Posthumus” missing head achieves not only a level of grim irony rarely equalled in the rest of Shakespeare, but parodies the pitiful rhetoric of the stock pathetic heroine as well: “O Posthumus, alas, / Where is thy head? Where's that? Ay me, where's that?” “Alas” and “Ay me!” by themselves often represent, in English Renaissance drama, the legitimate anguish of a romance heroine or hero. Shakespeare uses these expressions first in Titus Andronicus when Lucius initially encounters the mutilated Lavinia. But Cloten is not Lavinia, nor even, for that matter, is Posthumus.¹⁴ Imogen has made a mistake and with her “Ay me!” becomes the object of a cruel piece of sport.

Shakespeare also used the expression to make light of both Romeo and Juliet. The second cry which comes from Romeo's mouth in that drama is a self-pitying “Ay me! Sad hours seem long” (I. i. 161). The next time we encounter this phrase in the play it is from Mercutio, when he and Benvolio have been deserted by Romeo near the Capulet's orchard. Mercutio shouts for Romeo's return even as he mocks his lovelorn condition:

Romeo! Humors! Madman! Passion! Lover!
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh;
Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied!
Cry but “Ay me!” pronounce but “love” and “dove” …

(II. i. 7-10)

His catalogue of emotions neatly parodies the type of characterized role binding Romeo to his pathetic history. But a short while later, when Juliet comes to her balcony window, the first phrase to spring to her lips is this same “Ay me!”. Those in the audience who remember Romeo's line and Mercutio's mockery of the same are confronted with a tension—what Norman Rabkin has called the “common understanding”¹⁵—between Mercutio's reading of the phrase and Juliet's.

Mellida's first “Ay me!” in her father's presence in Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1599) provokes him into an annoyed reaction: “Blirt on your ‘Ay me's!’” (IV. i. 255-256).¹⁶ His annoyance, however, is not enough to keep her from returning to this phrase later in Marston's farce, when Antonio feigns death for the third and last time in the play: “Antonio! ay me! my lord, my love! my—” (V. ii. 212). Like Imogen, Mellida becomes the butt of parody. She and Antonio are to their play what Imogen and Posthumus will be to theirs. Marston's play, lacking most of the complexity which informs Cymbeline, is more easily recognizable as broad parody. In spite of this, however, Imogen's soliloquy, with its “Ay me!”, contains all the earmarks of a deliberate send up of the pathetic-heroine romance. It is hard to ignore the fact that Cymbeline, to a much greater degree than its companion romances, openly stresses humor and parody at the expense of “seriousness” and solemnity. But if we admit that Imogen is the center to virtually any humanistic or essentialist interpretation of Cymbeline, then the task of explaining a marked lack of traditional seriousness in this, the most serious of her near tragic scenes, clearly becomes one of great difficulty. I suggest that this headless man scene functions preparatorily in Cymbeline, anticipating in its brutal comedy Posthumus' similar violence toward Imogen.

II. POSTHUMUS AND THE SUDDEN BLOW

Posthumus' rash wager in the bourse scene (I. iv.) and even hastier anger at Imogen's apparent infidelity (II. iv) work to parody the typical romantic hero who promises to maintain his faith in his loved one forever. Like the “hero” of Philaster—written the same year (1609) as Cymbeline—he is a pitiful, exaggerated fulfillment of a literary type. A comparison of the two characters, in fact, reveals significant similarities. As Philip Finkelpearl notes, Beaumont was for some time in residence at the Inner Temple, where the young wits often ridiculed the “tendency toward excessive linguistic artifice and fustian speech.”¹⁷ Anti-idealistic, anti-Petrarchan, and anti-Ciceronian, “They mocked pedantry and cant, whether of school or court, and employed parody, irony, and burlesque as satiric tools, particularly against linguistic excesses.”¹⁸ Like Posthumus, Philaster, very much the out-of-control romantic hero, leaps to conclusions about the chastity of the play's pathetic heroine. In a frenzy of jealousy, he stabs Arethusa, a woman who not only has done him no wrong, but one who is deeply in love with him:

PHILASTER.
Are you at peace?
ARETHUSA.
With heaven and earth.
PHILASTER.
May they divide thy soul and body.
(Philaster wounds her.)

(IV. v. 83-85)¹⁹

Such mindless callousness characterizes this “hero” throughout the play and is balanced in its excess only by the macabre, masochistic willingness with which the heroines receive, even desire, his violence. Toward the drama's end, when Philaster seems to have repented of his jealousy, he once more succumbs to the same jealous anger which has him stab Arethusa and later Euphrasia, a woman also in love with him who has disguised herself as a page. Yet Philaster does not escape unpunished. A “Country Fellow” happens upon him in the act of wounding Arethusa and challenges him: “Hold, dastard, strike a woman? Th'art a craven I warrant thee …” This enunciates, perhaps, the sentiments of many in the audience: the romantic hero is not behaving according to his type, or perhaps too much so—so that the notion of romance itself is called into question through his excess. The Country Fellow speaks the voice of prosaic and literal common sense:

PHILASTER.
Leave us, good friend.
ARETHUSA.
What ill-bred man art thou, to intrude thyself?
COUNTRY Fellow.
God 'uds me, I understand you not; but know the rogue has hurt you.
PHILASTER.
Pursue thy own affairs; it will be ill
To multiply blood upon my head,
Which thou wilt force me to.
COUNTRY Fellow.
I know not your rhetoric, but I can lay it on if you touch the woman.

(89-98)

Both Philaster and Arethusa remain locked into the sadomasochistic world of romance, each intent on playing their parts to the hilt—and to the death; the naive, unsophisticated Country Fellow cannot understand this self-destructive ideology. He proposes a remedy: “I know not your rhetoric, but I can lay it on if you touch the woman.” Here we have a progression from the rather innocuous parodic strategies of plays such as Mucedorus (1590), Antonio and Mellida, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607). The Country Fellow speaks of action; in direct contrast to the courtly diction of Philaster and Arethusa, his simple prose reveals the ingenuousness of his perception.

When Posthumus suddenly and irrationally strikes Imogen in the flurry of Cymbeline's fifth act (V. v. 229), we are directly confronted with one of the most unsettling moments in the canon. The almost insentient violence brutally foregrounds the romantic conventions which otherwise innocuously dominate the play. That Shaw, in his ending of Cymbeline, has Guiderius retaliate by striking Posthumus (much as Philaster's Country Fellow retaliates by beating Philaster) and later allows Imogen to voice her discontent over her situation, possesses a tremendous interpretive significance.²⁰ Resenting Posthumus' admittedly undeserved fortune at reconciling himself with Imogen in the end, Shaw gravitates toward a union between Iachimo and Imogen before apparently deciding that such a change would be too much. Although in many ways his heavy-handed ending removes subtlety from the drama, Shaw seems to have understood the idea of parody in Cymbeline as playwright even where he failed as critic. I suggest that, like Shaw, many of us question not only the callous brutality of the drama's romantic hero, but the ethics of the romance world altogether. Philaster, Finkelpearl points out, forces us “to form our own independent judgments, and the ultimate effect of this tactic—seen also in later plays—is to make us question the values of almost everyone in the play.”²¹ As we have seen in the rural character's critique of heightened court language, romantic-heroic rhetoric, no less than behavior, is problematized in Philaster. Posthumus' verbal excesses—even as Iachimo's—seem to undercut the concept of romantic-heroic diction. Certainly his ranting, misogynistic “half-workers” speech (II. v. 1ff.) raises more than a few questions of irony. Like Philaster, he abuses a woman, a woman, in fact, who has not transgressed. That Posthumus and Cloten are frequently doubled is perhaps thematically appropriate: both, ultimately, obey only the whims of their self-centered imaginations; both yearn to work violence against Imogen; both do her harm, either directly or indirectly.²² Their contorted rhetoric, along with Iachimo's “strange” verbiage, depicts the seamy underside of the romance ethic. It is an ethic Cymbeline constantly questions.

Some of the self-conscious theatricality in Cymbeline is quite blatant, almost farcical. The range of irony, however, becomes difficult to compress into a single cohesive interpretation. What one reader sees as “bad” drama another might perceive as satire, and might be taken by a third as burlesque: the difference between such terms is not marked by distinct gradients. The play encompasses almost every kind of dramatic irony imaginable, from subtle innuendo to tiring proleptic discourse. That it was played both at the public and private theaters is surely significant, though the politics of reception in the two nations of Jacobean drama remain, for the most part, unknown to us.²³ The past of reception—no less than the historical—is always elusive; the very fine line between belief and scorn, pathos and bathos is different for every age: most probably it varied in individual Jacobean theaters and almost certainly between particular playgoers as well.²⁴ But at the very least I suggest that we recognize the aura of play, of ludus, surrounding Cymbeline, and acknowledge that parody takes on more than a superficial role within the drama, for Cymbeline is intent on undercutting the audience's dramatic expectations and idealist assumptions. A play which very openly and purposefully displays its dramatic outrages, Cymbeline manipulates the self-satisfied onlooker. At fairly frequent intervals an actor steps forward to acknowledge that he knows he is in a play, that he is uncomfortably struggling with his idealist archetype. Irony, satire, parody, burlesque—all make up a composite that questions the business of received convention. Of The New Inn's self-consciously fanciful denouement, Anne Barton remarks: “[it is] a poignant wish dream, a palpable but highly charged fiction that gains strength from the very honesty of its admission that this is how we should all like the world to be, but know it is not.”²⁵ Surely this is not altogether distant from the aesthetic informing Cymbeline's mingled achievement. But there is a point where the self-consciousness of Shakespeare's play is anything but private. By playing upon a received body of conventions, Cymbeline foregrounds the audience's ideology, and through the dynamic of shared laughter and outrage lays bare an anatomy of common assumptions. Parody (and the interruption of it through added levels of irony) perpetrates a “fraud” on us no less than on Imogen, for when the blow is struck, a world of illusion—one which parody has helped to perpetuate—is shattered. In this way Cymbeline, through a complexity of registers, functions on a level that parodic dramas like Mucedorus, Antonio and Mellida, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle never achieve. No longer can Shakespeare's audience sit complacently laughing at burlesque as both they and the dramatic court had in A Midsummer Night's Dream. With Cymbeline, both the court and theater audience is implicated inextricably in the senselessness of the fantasy—indeed, embodying and defining it. Though dramatic closure in Cymbeline (as in Pericles and The Winter's Tale) stresses acceptance and community, the problems inherent in romance ideology have been, if only temporarily, brought to the fore. Posthumus' violence mocks the facetious tone of the play itself, and chastises the audience for its capacity for fantasy, for wishing the world to be as it is not. If it is the case that such brutality is a “fraud on Imogen,” then certainly we have to acknowledge as well that “we are accomplices in it,” for the headless man scene has already ensured our complicity. And if, examining Cymbeline within the context of parodic representation, we find the plot in some ways to be less “serious” than it was previously, such a reading certainly poses new, even more “serious” questions as to the image of courtly society and gender relations presented by this melodrama of pre-Christian England. For, located firmly in the dramatic imagination of its Jacobean audience, Cymbeline directs its focus upon their social conscience as well.

Notes

1. Reviews taken from, in sequential order, Howard Taubman's account of William Gaskill's Stratford-upon-Avon production in the New York Times (18 July 1962), p. 21; Louis Marder in “Cymbeline, Romance, and the Modern Audience,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 20 (1970), p. 27; and Robert F. Willson Jr., “The Audience Reaction to Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 20 (1970), p. 27. Willson was reviewing Jean Gascon's production.

2. See also Roger Warren's “Shakespeare at Stratford and the National Theater, 1974,” Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), 169-180, where he finds fault with much of the production's humor: “At other times, he [director Christopher Morley] appeared to be sending scenes up: it is one thing for Cloten to mock ‘Hark, hark, the lark’, quite another for the musical setting to anticipate him with mindless roulades which distracted him completely from the significance of the exquisite language, thus encouraging the audience to take the whole scene as so much nonsense; but they had already begun to chatter in derisive bewilderment at the extraordinary performance of Iachimo,” p. 173. All references to Shakespeare in this essay are to The Complete Siqnet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

3. “Festival Terms,” Illustrated London News (28 July, 1962), p. 154.

4. Evans in Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 245-289; Kirsch in “Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy,” English Literary History, 34 (1967), 285-303. See also Kirsch's “Jacobean Theatrical Self-consciousness,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 13 (1980), 9-13. Granville-Barker noticed something of this sort in his preface to Cymbeline in Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series, (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930).

5. R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 118.

6. F. D. Hoeniger, “Irony and Romance in Cymbeline,” Studies in English Literature, 2 (1962), 219-228.

7. Kenneth Muir, Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1961), p. 44.

8. See Diana Childress, “Are Shakespeare's Last Plays Really Romances?” in Shakespeare's Last Plays, Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod, eds. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1974), p. 51.

9. Michael Taylor, “The Pastoral Reckoning in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey, 36 (1985), 99. Taylor suggests that Imogen's experience with Cloten's decapitated corpse is the “manifestation of a particular kind of symbolically appropriate pastoral reckoning,” p. 104.

10. Much criticism of the past several decades has contained a new understanding of self-consciousness and parody in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Marston's satirical parodies, such as Antonio and Mellida, Jack Drum's Entertainment—even, to a certain extent, Antonio's Revenge—have been rescued from the scrap heap to which insensitive readings had assigned them. See R. A. Foakes' “John Marston's Fantastical Plays,” Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 229-239; Michael C. Andrews, “Jack Drum's Entertainment as Burlesque,” Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), 226-231. Many of Middleton's dramas have also been examined in light of this same self-consciousness, with an eye toward the parodying of contemporary stage conventions. See John F. McElroy, Parody and Burlesque in the Tragicomedies of Thomas Middleton, Jacobean Drama Studies, 19 (Salzburg, 1972). The First Part of Hieronimo, long taken to be a poor work from the pen of a hack writer, was salvaged from many years of misreading in 1972 by John Reibetanz, who convincingly demonstrated that it is an open burlesque of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy: “Hieronimo in Decimosexto: A Private-Theater Burlesque,” Renaissance Drama, 5 (1972), 89-121. Other equally persuasive estimations of parodic elements in such diverse works as Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Jonson's The New Inn have been offered as well. See Eric Rothstein, “Structure as Meaning in The Jew of Malta,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 65 (1966), 260-273; David Zucker, Stage and Image in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Salzburg, 1972), 80-98. Larry S. Champion in Ben Jonson's ‘Dotages’: A Reconsideration, (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1967), 76-103, argues that The New Inn satirizes the court's Platonic love cult and consciously parodies the conventions of romantic comedy. It is one of my regrets that length does not permit a comparison here of Shakespeare and Jonson's last works, many of which seem the product of both sentimental longing and, at the same time, detached awareness of the artificialities of (Elizabethan) dramatic convention. For a more complete (if unfriendly) bibliography of criticism of dramatic parody, see Richard Levin's New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979).

11. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, p. 340. He calls “the whole business of it” (i.e., the “headless man” scene) “dramatically inexcusable”, and later (343) “a pretty damnable practical joke …”

12. July 4, 1897 letter to Ellen Terry. Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Dan H. Laurence, ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 779-780. The whole of Shaw's correspondence about Cymbeline and Imogen, together with Granville-Barker's remarks, make apparent the tremendous obstacles which the play presents to actors and directors.

13. This did not, however, prevent the editors of the OED from constructing an etymology for Imogen's new construction.

14. Indeed, when compared to the seriousness with which decapitation and dismemberment are handled in Titus Andronicus, Macbeth—even Measure for Measure, where the audience (presumably) has no real sympathy for Barnadine—the beheading of Cloten shows itself for an indulgence.

15. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967).

16. The Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. Macdonald P. Jackson and Michael Neil, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).

17. Philip Finkelpearl, “Beaumont, Fletcher, and ‘Beaumont & Fletcher’: Some Distinctions,” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), p. 147.

18. Finkelpearl, p. 148.

19. John Fletcher, Philaster, ed. Andrew Gurr (London: Revels Plays, 1969).

20. Reading Shaw's privately circulated ending for Cymbeline—“as Shakespeare might have written it if he had been post-Ibsen and post-Shaw instead of post-Marlowe”—serves to indicate the hilarious jumble of plot strands left for any reviser. The reaction of Guiderius and Arviragus to Cymbeline and the promise of life in the court is also highly instructive. For text of this ending and a preface to it see Geneva, Cymbeline Refinished, Good King Charles (London: Constable and Co., 1946), 133-150.

21. Finkelpearl, p. 154.

22. Stephen Booth's suggestion that Cloten and Posthumus are doubled (“Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare's Plays,” Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension, ed. Philip C. McGuire and David A. Samuelson, [New York: AMS Press, 1979], 103-131) has been carried out in recent productions of Cymbeline. Don Baker's 1984 production at Lexington, Virginia, for example, drew these comments from a reviewer: “The doubling intensified nicely Shakespeare's contrast of love and lust, true chivalry and macho foolishness” (William W. French in Theatre Journal, May (1985), pp. 227-228). But I suggest that we are not to see the doubling as separating the two characters as much as we can perceive through it the fact that they are very much the same. Indeed, Cloten makes a very good replacement for Posthumus during his absence from the stage, such a good replacement, in fact, that the two characters become blurred: Posthumus' ostensible heroism mingles with Cloten's idiotic cowardice. R. G. Hunter (Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965], 157-172) suggests that Cloten assumes Posthumus'moral degradation during his absence. Of Mike Alfreds's 1980 production at Hammersmith, which featured five actors playing all the roles, one reviewer remarked that “his occasionally simplistic changes of identity seem inevitable amid such complexity” (Ned Chaillet, London Times, 12 April [1980], p. 8). Booth's discussion of doubling in Cymbeline is a brief one, and does not mention that Cloten and Posthumus “trip over each other in the wings” between the third and fourth scenes of Act II. However, as he points out in his essay, such incidents occur in other instances when we may suspect doubling, so their passing each other does not preclude doubling of their roles. The humor of the “duel” between the two of them—of which we are informed in I. ii.—would only be intensified by our realization of its “impossibility,” as would Cloten's “His meanest garment?” (II. iii. 157) and, of course, Imogen's lament over the decapitated corpse. David Bevington's discussion of the seventeenth century's reluctance to double parts—in that such practice reflected the unsophisticated nature of Tudor popular drama—has significance for this play in which Shakespeare constantly refers to early, naive drama. From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 112.

23. The classic study of the “two theaters,” of course, is still Alfred Harbage's Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952).

24. On the “characters” of the different playhouses, see the argument Andrew Gurr makes in his excellent study, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).

25. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 281. Barton disagrees with Champion's assessment of The New lnn as parody, while admitting its rather light-hearted moments.