SOURCE: Crumley, J. Clinton. “Questioning History in Cymbeline.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 41, no. 2 (spring 2001): 297-315.

[In the following essay, Crumley evaluates Cymbeline as history and romance, concentrating on themes of historiography, epistemology, and the uncertainty of textual interpretation in the drama.]

I

The First Folio of William Shakespeare's works misclassifies Cymbeline with vigor, including the play in the table of contents under “Tragedies” and setting the running title, “The Tragedie of Cymbeline,” over the play text. Of course, either of the two other kinds of plays listed in the contents, “Comedies” and “Histories,” would have made a better match. Cymbeline ends happily, with joyful reunions aplenty, and its setting in the years of Britain's tribute payments to Rome secures its connection to recorded history. Perhaps the play's dual status as comedy and history compelled the Folio editors to throw up their hands in dismay, prompting the perverse classification that reached print in 1623.

In the twentieth century, when faced with the fact that Cymbeline exhibits the characteristics of both history and what has come to be called “romance,” critics have usually sought to identify the play with its chronological neighbors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale, thereby subordinating the extent to which Cymbeline concerns itself with matters historical. Some have dismissed the play's historical elements outright. For James M. Nosworthy, the play is a “pseudo-historical” experiment in romance; for Irving Ribner, it qualifies as “historical romance,” a kind of play for him “devoid of real historical concern” and ultimately responsible for the demise of the “legitimate” history play.¹ More recent writers have embraced the idea of a historical sense functioning in this play, but their topical interpretations channel history into contemporary politics; Cymbeline is historical only insofar as it comments upon historical (for us) events during Jacobean England.²

In this essay, I wish to open up Cymbeline for discussion as a kind of history play, a play that has something to say about history and historiography. Also, I will argue that, largely through the character of the queen, the play demonstrates awareness that it occupies a space between history and romance, and that it uses romance to question history. Being more firmly rooted in Raphael Holinshed's historiographical practice than traditionally given credit for, Cymbeline honors both the form and the content of its historical source even while it takes exorbitant romantic liberties with that source. Ultimately, my discussion suggests that we take seriously the historical content of other erstwhile historical romances, plays that, for all their romantic qualities, cannot be completely disqualified as, among other things, historical drama. If we seek a full understanding of the practice of history writing in early modern England, so-called historical romances must be considered along with those plays that have enjoyed the status of “history play.”³

In order to demonstrate how Cymbeline bears out the promise of this new direction in the study of Tudor and Stuart historical drama, the present argument begins via an exploration of the play's dynamic attitude to Roman history. Although Rome begins as an anchor, holding the romantic story in a familiar and stable context, Rome's conceptual integrity as represented by popular history comes to be questioned. A pattern emerges as Cymbeline critiques history through its repeated calling into question of the value placed upon reading and interpretation. Ultimately, the interpretative liberties taken with various “texts” throughout the play point to an unresolved epistemological crisis related, I contend, to the play's status as a historical romance, a mode not separate from “real history,” but tremulously situated between history and romance.

II

A primary question demanded by a study interested in the uses of history in a play has to be whether Jacobean audience members would even have noticed that Cymbeline includes references to historical figures and events. We have no conclusive evidence as to how the play was billed in its earliest performances. The full title, Cymbeline King of Britain, clearly suggests a historical subject; but this title belongs to the 1623 Folio, the earliest published version of the play. The play's most famous auditor, Dr. Simon Forman, refers to “the storri of Cymbalin king of England” after having attended a performance in 1610 or early 1611.⁴ One wonders whether his reference to both the king and kingdom derives from the same title as the Folio's or whether Forman supplies the royal descriptor on his own. Surely, most audience members would not have recognized the name of this obscure pre-Conquest ruler the way they would have a Richard II or an Edward Longshanks. If the play were billed as simply Cymbeline, few would enter the playhouse expecting history.

Indeed, the play seems to anticipate its audience's likely dearth of familiarity with its title figure and with his era by first situating itself historically, not through references to Britain, but through talk of battles with Rome.⁵Cymbeline carries out its chronological exposition by way of Roman, rather than British, markers. In the opening scene, two anonymous gentlemen discuss the situation at an unspecified court, where “You do not meet a man but frowns,” as courtiers slavishly mimic the emotions of the royal family.⁶ The discussion tells us that the king has just banished Posthumus Leonatus, the noble-hearted but low-born son of a brave and honorable soldier, for marrying Princess Imogen without paternal approval. Without knowing the national identity of any of these characters, without knowing from which realm Posthumus has been expelled, we learn that Posthumus's father earned his fame while fighting the Romans, thereby gaining his infant son a place in the royal nursery at his death. The fantastic story of the rapid death of Posthumus's entire family sets up the familiar romantic interplay between nature and nurture, which finds its most vivid expression in the wedded, vexed pair of Imogen and Posthumus. In introducing the history of Posthumus's name, the first gentleman also introduces the history/romance binary insofar as his history of Posthumus is itself suggestive of rescued orphans in stories derived from Greek romance, an indirect source of much in the entire corpus of Shakespeare's plays.⁷ Thus, from the first scene, audience members would have known that the gentlemen come from an as-yet-unnamed nation recently at war with Rome, a war once fought by Posthumus's father. However, notwithstanding a reference to Tenantius and Cassibelan (I.i.30-1), pre-Conquest Britons probably even less familiar to audience members than Cymbeline, the historical focus begins on Rome rather than on Britain.⁸

Thanks to Forman's account, we have proof that this primary focus was effective for at least one audience member. Clearly, his recollection of the entire play suggests that Roman history left the deeper impression on him. For Forman, Roman history provides the historical frame of reference into which the British history fits. His opening words beckon his reader to “Remember … the storri of Cymbalin king of England in Lucius time.” This mistaking of England for Britain further implies Forman's uncertain knowledge of British history. Completing the frame of reference, the last plot event he records also involves the Roman general: “& howe Imogen was found by Iucius & c.”⁹ Nosworthy suggests that Shakespeare erred in selecting a monarch associated in the chronicles with Britain and Rome: the former offers a setting sufficiently murky to suit the mysteries of romance while the latter does not.¹⁰ One wonders how many of the audience members would also have made the association had Shakespeare not sought explicitly to establish the Roman connection from the first scene. As Forman's testimony bears out, the Roman dimension of Cymbeline supplies a historical clarity whereas the British elements float in the clouds of legend.

In relying on the authority of Rome, Shakespeare may be following the example of Holinshed's Chronicles. In the popular brief chronicles of Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper, John Stow, and Anthony Munday, Cymbeline's reign provides but a backdrop for a truly epochal event: the birth of Jesus Christ. Lanquet and Cooper put the matter in especially succinct fashion: “Of Cymbelinus there is no notable thyng written, but that in his reigne our sauiour Iesu Christ … was borne.”¹¹ Holinshed's account begins similarly, but it proceeds to describe the British king's upbringing. These details bear relevance further down the page, in what amounts to a more substantial description of the reign of Cymbeline than Shakespeareans have recognized: “Kymbeline or Cimbeline … was of the Britaynes made king after the decease of his father … This man (as some write) was brought up at Rome, and there made Knight by Augustus Cesar, vnder whome hee serued in the warres, and was in suche fauour with him, that he was at libertie to pay his tribute or not. Little other mention is made of his doyngs, except that during his reigne, the Sauiour of the world … was borne of a virgin.”¹² Shakespeare's Cymbeline, of course, emphatically demonstrates this “libertie to pay his tribute or not” at the play's conclusion. But of the historical king's doings, we know little. Consequently, critics have quickly assumed that, for Shakespeare, the most important historical fact of Cymbeline's reign would have been the birth of Christ.¹³ How curious, then, that we find no allusion to that event in Cymbeline, other than the renewal and reconciliation common to all Shakespearean romance.

Although most of the brief chronicles dwell only upon the coincidence of Christ's birth and Cymbeline's reign, Holinshed's Chronicles devotes most of its space to the matter of the tribute to Rome. Frequently intent on presenting multiple perspectives on history throughout the Chronicles, Holinshed's text here focuses on what the Roman historians have to say about international politics during Cymbeline's reign.¹⁴ Indeed, rather than implying a religious significance for Cymbeline, the sense that the play's happy ending conforms to the romance promised by Christianity, the Holinshed account begins to suggest that Shakespeare's play owes a tangible debt to the historiography of its day. According to the Roman historians, “after Iulius Cesar's death, when Augustus had taken vppon him the rule of the Empire, the Britaynes refused to pay that tribute.” In Cymbeline, of course, Britain's refusal to pay Rome originates from the arguments of the queen and Cloten, which will be discussed in more detail later. In Holinshed, the source remains obscure: “whether this controuersie which appeareth to fal foorth betwixt the Britaynes and Augustus, was occasioned by Kymbeline or some other Prince of the Britaynes, I haue not to auouch for that by our writers it is reported, that Kymbelyne being brought vp in Rome, and made a Knight in the Court of Augustus, euer shewed himselfe a friend to the Romanes, and chiefly was loth to breake with them.”¹⁵ Just as the play begins by establishing its Roman elements, Shakespeare's source devotes most of its attention to matters Roman.

The play draws upon a solid grounding in Roman history in its audience before it commences filling in its version of British history. Correspondingly, from Holinshed's perspective, apparently only Roman historians provided enough data from the period to clarify the events of Cymbeline's reign. In Cymbeline, different versions of history unexpectedly come directly from the mouths of the play's two most unattractive characters, the queen and Cloten. At the beginning of act III, a conversation remarkable for its implications with regard to the use of history occurs.¹⁶ Caius Lucius, the Roman general, appeals to history in order to persuade Cymbeline to continue paying tribute to Rome:

When Julius Caesar, whose remembrance yet
Lives in men's eyes and will to ears and tongues
Be theme and hearing ever, was in this Britain
And conquered it, Cassibelan thine uncle, for him
And his succession granted Rome a tribute.

(III.i.2-8)

The king closes the discussion with a similar gesture. Cymbeline requests that Lucius report to Caesar that he aims to reform the British legal system, to return it to its pre-Roman state:

Say then to Caesar,
Our ancestor was that Mulmutius which
Ordained our laws, whose use the sword of Caesar
Hath too much mangled, whose repair and franchise
Shall, by the power we hold, be our good deed,
Though Rome be therefore angry. Mulmutius made our laws,
Who was the first of Britain which did put
His brows within a golden crown and called
Himself a king.

(III.i.52-60)

Cymbeline apparently believes that Caesar would appreciate such a justification grounded upon historical tradition. Viewed in this light, the discussion seems symmetrical and logical: Lucius begins with an appeal to history; Cymbeline ends it with an appeal that reaches further back in history.

Yet, the intermittent speeches by the queen and Cloten, though on the same topic, fail to follow the direct logical path implied by the beginning and end of the debate just cited. The queen takes up Lucius's demand for the tribute payment with an address to the king, appealing to royal ancestry and emphasizing Britain's self-sufficiency. Her avowed intent is “to kill the marvel” (III.i.10), to replace Lucius's astonishment at Britain's refusal with a logical explanation of a different order than that proposed soon after by Cymbeline. A recent article quickly dismisses her version of history as “a patent lie.”¹⁷ Yet, a closer look reveals that the queen directly challenges Lucius's version of history, seeking to distinguish legend from fact: “A kind of conquest / Caesar made here, but made not here his brag / Of 'Came and saw and overcame” (III.i.22-4). She offers an untold British version of the Roman invasion, which suggests that legend has obscured the actual facts of the event. Like Shakespeare, she uses her audience's familiarity with Roman history, which here appears in the form of Julius Caesar's most famous words in—most appropriately—English translation, as context for her retelling.

The queen's brief history of Britain's repulsion of Caesar erects several rhetorical markers, seminal moments that carry the authority of actual facts. For instance, her characterization of the shame that accompanied Caesar's defeat as “The first that ever touched him” (III.i.25), a phrase that simultaneously acknowledges his greatness and attaches due recognition to British greatness, suggests not emotion-driven jingoism but the exercise of sound judgment. Her vivid simile of the Roman ships “Like egg-shells … cracked / … 'gainst our rocks” (III.i.28-9) conveys a palpable immediacy that persuades her husband because it rings true. And finally, her description of how the Britons accentuated their triumph with a fire-lit civic celebration clarifies, perhaps, the now obscure origins of a holiday (III.i.29-33). Certainly, her moral position in the play inclines us to treat her nationalistic strutting as utter falsehood. In fact, however, her account corresponds on several points to Caesar's own memory of his efforts to subdue Britain, as recorded in the fourth and fifth books of De Bellum Gallicum.¹⁸ Caesar recounts the damage wrought upon his ships by high tides and storms and the Britons' suspension of intertribal disputes for the united defense of their island. Only on the third try did Caesar defeat the Britons.¹⁹ The queen defends Britain on historical grounds with conviction and in compelling terms, but her defense also has a basis, however oblique, in documented history.

Holinshed narrates Caesar's conquest of Britain in the twelve pages immediately preceding the account of Cymbeline's reign, and De Bellum Gallicum is one of the sources for the Chronicles's narration. Shakespeare's queen goes further than Caesar in emphasizing the Roman difficulties with subduing Britain, and so does Holinshed, who draws attention to the wide discrepancy between Roman and British accounts: “Thus according to that which Cesar himselfe and other autentike authors haue written, was Britayne made tributorie to the Romaynes by the Conduit of the same Cesar. But our histories farre differ from this, affirming, that Cesar comming the second time, was by the Britaynes with valiancie, and martial prowes beaten, & repulsed.”²⁰ In offering Lucius's and the queen's versions side by side, Cymbeline adopts an important formal characteristic of Holinshed's rendering of British history.

While Holinshed draws upon Caesar's De Bellum Gallicum, the sixteenth-century text strives for balance, providing the Scottish version of Hector Boece and Bede's British representation. After offering Boece's perspective, the Chronicles clarifies its purpose in drawing upon so many sources: “Thus haue the Scottes in their Chronicles framed the matter, more to the conformitie of the Romaine hystories, than according to the report of our Brytish and English writers: and therfore we haue thought good to shew it here, that the diuersitie of writers and their affections maye the better appeare.”²¹ In III.i of Cymbeline, the queen, and through her, Shakespeare, offers another history and, truly in the manner of Holinshed, allows the listeners to decide between competing versions. Cloten, of course, interrupts her, in prose, with a typically oafish appeal to the island kingdom's military might, which earns a rebuke from the king: “Son, let your mother end” (line 38). Cloten continues undeterred, and soon, Cymbeline takes up his stepson's martial rhetoric and finally makes his appeal to legal reform.

Critics have puzzled over this scene's nationalist sentiment. Here, the play's two most repellent characters deliver the highest praise for Britain, praise that at first blush recalls John of Gaunt's “this England” speech in Richard II (II.i.40-68). If the play teaches us, in G. Wilson Knight's words, “to reject all for which the queen and Cloten stand,” then what do they stand for in this scene?²² In a reading somewhat consistent with mine, Richard F. Hardin suggests that educated members of a Renaissance audience would have identified more with Rome than with Britain, thus compelling a rejection of the queen's nationalism and explaining the play's final resumption of the tribute payment.²³ Yet, ultimately the perils of speculating on the diverse tastes of the early seventeenth-century playgoer hamper unqualified acceptance of this hypothesis. Several other critics have linked the queen and Cloten with retrograde isolationism.²⁴ I want to add another explanation for this scene's seemingly misplaced panegyric to Britain. By supplying a logical historical justification for breaking ties with Rome, the queen attempts to “kill the marvel” of one-sided history and its exaggerations. Her version of history, furthermore, aiming to challenge the legend of Julius Caesar, follows Holinshed in throwing the subjectivity of historiography into high relief.²⁵

Perhaps even more importantly, Shakespeare, through his dramatic medium, is able to achieve a delicate balance between moral sympathies and any nationalistic biases within the audience. If a sympathetic character, such as Imogen, had presented the account of Caesar's invasion offered by the queen, then that version would have received the playwright's tacit endorsement. In effect, audiences would have been encouraged to give their support to the pro-British version. That version would have been handled as the truth. In giving the pro-British account to the evil characters, Shakespeare prevents one version of history from outweighing the other in terms of historical credibility. As a consequence, the scene leaves us not with anti-Roman sentiment; the queen's words do not negate her treachery. Instead, the scene leaves us with something close to historical objectivity.

Other queens in Shakespeare have resisted subjection to Roman rule. In Titus Andronicus, Tamora exclaims memorably against the Romans' “cruel irreligious piety” and lack of civility;²⁶ in Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra kills herself partly to avoid being made the centerpiece of Caesar's triumph and being “enclouded” amidst the foul-smelling Roman populace.²⁷ Yet, a more direct analogue might be found not by focusing on the dramatic conflict between Roman conquerors and foreign queens but by considering approaches to history. The queen's performance in III.i connects her with female characters in Shakespeare's earlier English history plays. Phyllis Rackin sees the few prominent women in the two tetralogies and in King John as “antihistorians” who stand in threatening opposition to history making and history writing. In the hands of women, such as Joan and Margaret in the Henry VI plays, “historiography itself becomes problematic, no longer speaking with the clear, univocal voice of unquestioned tradition but re-presented as a dubious construct, always provisional, always subject to erasure and reconstruction, and never adequate to recover the past in full presence.”²⁸ As we have seen, Holinshed explicitly underscores the diversity of voices that form the Chronicles. Therefore, we must regard with caution any implication that Tudor historiography speaks in a “clear, univocal voice.” Nevertheless, Rackin's conclusions suggest a rich precedent for the stand taken by Cymbeline's queen against the unappealing version of history offered by Lucius.

Although the queen exits the stage for the last time after III.v, this wicked stepmother plays an important role in bringing a romance atmosphere to Cymbeline. Having no counterpart in the English chronicles, she seems to come directly from the romance tradition. Yet, as David Bergeron has shown, she also resembles in striking ways the Roman empress, Livia, who, with other figures from Roman history, had enjoyed a revival of sorts in the proliferation of Roman histories in English translation.²⁹ I suggest that the queen's simultaneous gesturing to romance and to history—both Roman and British—allows her to embody the transit between fiction and fact.

Given the queen's genealogical instability, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to remember that this character distinguishes herself by her unusually firm reliance on empirical data. When the physician Cornelius asks her why she requires noxious drugs from him, she claims to be “amplifying her judgment” by testing the effects of the chemicals on various animal subjects. Indeed, her response describes an ongoing chemistry program which the ambitious “pupil” wishes to advance into more complex biological subjects:.

I wonder, Doctor,
Thou ask'st me such a question. Have I not been
Thy pupil long? Hast thou not learned me how
To make perfumes? distil? preserve? yea, so
That our great king himself doth woo me oft
For my confections? Having thus far proceeded—
Unless thou think'st me devilish—is't not meet
That I did amplify my judgment in
Other conclusions? I will try the forces
Of these thy compounds on such creatures as
We count not worth the hanging—but none human—
To try the vigor of them and apply
Allayments to their act, and by them gather
Their several virtues and effects.

(I.v.10-23)

The queen never intends to experiment with what she believes to be poison. Of course, if she did, she would soon discover that she had been swindled by the kindly Cornelius. Undoubtedly, however, her false statement, combined with her stance toward history in act III, further suggests a mind keen on “killing marvels,” in whatever form they assume, through appeals to reason and its concomitant weighing of evidence.

Modern scientific experimentation and historical method, both of which rely on principles of inductive reasoning, arguably sprouted their English roots in the early seventeenth century. Sir Francis Bacon certainly called for reform in these areas, in addition to the law, in his Advancement of Learning (1605, 1623). Julian Martin makes Bacon's connection between legal and scientific procedure explicit in demonstrating how Bacon “envisioned an ‘experiment in ‘natural philosophy to be closely similar to a lawsuit and its trial in a court room.”³⁰ Moreover, D. R. Woolf contends that the increasing primacy accorded documentary evidence over oral testimony constitutes one of the most significant historiographical developments in this period.³¹ I wish to suggest that, in addition to her position on the boundary between romance and history, Cymbeline's queen also connects to the intellectual currents contemporary with the play's earliest performances. She questions a hardened legend about Julius Caesar, and she attempts to undermine an authorized version of history with an alternate version. Emblematic of the recent turns to rationalism and of the multivocality of historiography in early modern England, she resists the mimetic slippage between fiction and fact and embraces the new inductive methods advocated by Bacon and already beginning to shape history writing.

Other critics have also pinpointed epistemological issues as major concerns for Cymbeline. E. M. W. Tillyard's book on Shakespeare's late plays discusses each of them in terms of their explorations of different “planes of reality.”³² According to Douglas L. Peterson, Cymbeline proceeds from “representational to emblematic narrative,” a movement which he links with Sir Philip Sidney's poetics, in which the brazen world gives way to a golden one in the imagination.³³ More recently, and more usefully for the present study, Karen Cunningham argues that the play “attends self-consciously to the uncertainties of getting at the truth.”³⁴ Focusing primarily on Katherine Howard's trial for treason in the mid-sixteenth century, Cunningham's article shows how this play's interrogation of the processes of fact making implies a relation between the theater and the state of legal testimony during the early Jacobean period. For even as far back as Howard's trial, we can locate the beginnings of “a complex historical process in which documentary evidence is gaining authority and becoming institutionalized as the most persuasive form of testimony.”³⁵ Surely, part of what makes the process so “complex” is the corresponding development occurring in historiography.

The “book,” or tablet, that rests on Posthumus's breast when he awakes from his vision helps illustrate how Cymbeline's textual instability extends beyond legal concepts and into a general undermining of texts, including those that constitute historical evidence. The writing offers hope for both Posthumus and Britain, but its meaning otherwise remains obscure: ‘“When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty” (V.iv. 138-44). The incarcerated Posthumus makes no sense of this text until the stunning succession of resolutions in the final scene demands that the Roman soothsayer Philarmonus read aloud the entire tablet again. Kristian Smidt takes this duplication, unprecedented in Shakespeare's plays, as evidence proving that the vision and attendant prophetic text were late additions to the play.³⁶ As Leah Marcus observes, however, such a repetition of “riddles” occurs throughout Cymbeline, implying authorial intent and inviting audiences to participate in deciphering them.³⁷ For example, Philarmonus twice interprets his vision of the Roman eagle's flight from the south to the west, once, in anticipation of Roman victory in battle, and again, after Cymbeline's free decision to renew the tribute. I would submit, moreover, that since a large part of printed texts' utility resides in their capacity for endless repetition, the inclusion of a verbatim reproduction of Posthumus's tablet even further emphasizes its status as a written text.

Cymbeline subjects the notion of reading, in general, to interrogation through its frequent employment of textual metaphors.³⁸ Upon reading Posthumus's letter to Pisanio, commanding him to kill Imogen, Britain's princess reinterprets her husband's erstwhile sacred writing: “What is here? / The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus / All turned to heresy?” (III.iv.80-2). When Imogen misidentifies the headless body of Cloten as Posthumus, she believes Pisanio to have forged the letter, a belief that provokes her into exclaiming against textuality in general: “To write and read / Be henceforth treacherous!” (IV.ii.316-7). In act V, King Cymbeline responds to the news that the queen had harbored malice toward the welfare of the realm with the rhetorical question, “Who is't can read a woman?” (v.48).

Obviously, Cymbeline's preoccupation with slander points to the unreliability of testimony. Unlike Othello's handling of slander, however, Cymbeline concentrates on written proof. The false accusations placed on Imogen and Belarius, of course, constitute important parts of the play's overall undermining of texts, as do other more subtle examples. While Iachimo writes down his description of Imogen's bedchamber, he notices that she has been reading about Tereus's rape of Philomel. That Imogen sleeps straight through Iachimo's symbolic rape suggests the worthlessness of reading as a preventive measure, an arming with knowledge against criminal acts. Traditionally, too, critics have remarked on the inferiority of the prophetic tablet's prose. Marcus rightly observes that, rather than disqualifying the prose's Shakespearean authenticity, it conforms to the play's overall pattern, insofar as its relative awkwardness even further underscores the “fallibility” of texts in Cymbeline.³⁹

Readers of Cymbeline have redeemed what earlier critics had scorned as unrefined by calling attention to the play's multiple manifestations of self-reflexivity. Joan Hartwig, for example, sees the play's various elaborate “artifices” as signs of tragi-comic sophistication.⁴⁰ Along these lines, Peggy Muñoz Simonds finds enough references to conventional emblems to fill an entire book.⁴¹ Marcus sees topical history, the “Jacobean line,” as the primary point of this play. Its constant interrogation of the use of texts thus demonstrates a questioning of its own method.⁴² Robert Uphaus claims that Cymbeline “wavers between tentative romance and pure parody.”⁴³ The queen's attitude toward British and Roman history clearly contributes to the play's oft-mentioned self-reflexiveness. Her desire “to kill the marvel” amounts to a demystifying impulse, an epistemological stance essentially at odds with that of romance. Moreover, her relation both to the romance tradition and to the multivocal history writing of Holinshed situates her between romance and history, within and without each. The entire play's emphasis on documentary instability further suggests an awareness of its own unstable generic status as a romance grounded upon the written documents of historiography, as a historical romance.

III

As critics such as Annabel Patterson and Graham Holderness have pointed out, textual instability in the midst of apparent fixity also characterizes early modern historiography. Holderness notes that history writing was “more complex in practice than the … theories the historians sometimes espoused.”⁴⁴ Verbatim reproductions from one chronicle to another also contribute to the sense of profound conservatism when reading these writers. Seeing through the superficial sameness and recognizing the multiple kinds of dialogues about history lying beneath can create room for new interpretative possibilities, dramatic and otherwise. I do not wish to attribute to Cymbeline the qualities of an emblem for the unsettled state of the chronicles; however, its primary chronicle source, Holinshed, also contains a provocative and productive contradiction.

As the Chronicles's account of Cymbeline's reign must rely on Roman historians for the suggestion of a conflict over the tribute, it prefaces the relatively lengthy Roman excerpts with the British historians' version: “our histories do affirme, that as well this Kymbeline, as also his father Theomantius, liued in quiet with the Romans, and continually to them payed the tribute which the Britons had couenanted with Julius Cesar to pay.”⁴⁵ On whether such a battle as dramatized in Cymbeline ever happened, Holinshed leaves us doubtful. Judging by the Roman writers, who record the British refusal to pay tribute, such an event certainly seems plausible. Yet, even the Roman historians cited by Holinshed do not know whether Augustus Caesar ever followed through on his intention to travel personally to Britain in order to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, “our histories” say that armed conflict never happened because tribute payment continued unabated. Once again, we are left to decide for ourselves.

Shakespeare opts to have it both ways, converting Holinshed's uncertainty over war or peace into a historical (and dramatic) sequence. In his battle, no one of any importance dies, clearly minimizing the representational impact of any war's horrors. And his king becomes far more magnanimous than that depicted in the chronicles, thanks to his astonishing generosity in victory. Given the Roman historians' rendering of the subsequent rebellious rule of Guiderius, as well as the mystery over what happened to Cymbeline's tribute, one is not shocked to find Guiderius's battles back-dated into Cymbeline's reign in Shakespeare's play. It seems that the playwright has taken from Holinshed both the Roman recorded wars and the British emphasis on peace in fashioning his fifth act.

That peace emerges only through the defeat of the mighty Roman legions smacks of nationalism and basic ignorance of history. Yet the play refuses to allow the fantastic elements completely to subdue its historical sense. For example, III.vii exists entirely to establish the plausibility of a Roman defeat at the hands of the Britons. In this sixteen-line scene, two senators and a tribune discuss current events, just the sort of newsy interaction we would expect to find in a history play. With word that “the common men are now in action / 'Gainst the Pannonians and Dalmatians” and that elsewhere in Europe the armies are weak, the first senator brings the command to the tribunes to levy an emergency force of “gentry” to fight in Britain (lines 2-3, 7). Thus, Shakespeare shows us that the army that fights and loses has been hastily summoned and assembled. Though the soldiers are elsewhere described as “most willing spirits / That promise noble service” (IV.ii.338-9), this forced change in military practice portends a change in military fortunes, thus preserving for Shakespeare some semblance of historical plausibility.

This movement of demystification squares with the queen's various efforts “to kill the marvel,” with her offering of a British version of history, and with the play's self-reflexive interrogation of all things textual. Yet, act V obviously places a premium on mystery, on the wonder inspired by the multi-layered reunions and repentances which conclude Cymbeline. I suggest that the demystification in this play ultimately gets erased by act V's remystification. The peace between Britain and Rome resolves the play's engagement with historiographical debate into a single, tidy version of history, sealing off the romantic excursion, surrounding it with the known past recorded by native historiographers: “our histories do affirme … that Kymbeline … lieud in quiet with the Romans.” The fictional queen and Cloten, blotted from memory, might as well never have existed. The tribute, once resumed, might as well never have been interrupted.

IV

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare takes exorbitant liberties with the facts of history. He gives the king a daughter. He orphans the two princes. His Britons defeat the Romans. With regard to its overall atmosphere, Cymbeline clearly owes more to literary than to chronicle history. Yet, history constitutes more than a mere backdrop to the romantic stories in this play. We have seen how Shakespeare remains loyal to the spirit and even to the letter of Holinshed while filling in the historical gaps with romance. But more than revealing how careful a reader of Holinshed Shakespeare was, Cymbeline makes vivid the difficulties in finally separating the romantic impulse from the telling of history. It dislodges the sense of difference between history and romance.

Countless early modern title pages attest to the fact that the word, history, could encompass both “story” (considered to be fictional) and “history” (considered to be factual) until, as the OED tells us, the nineteenth century. To the extent that much early modern historiography shaped the chronicled facts into conformity with the master narrative that we call providentialism, one might refer with more accuracy to all early modern history writing as “historical romance.” In Hayden White's terminology, the writer of history in any era “emplots” the known facts according to the most familiar narrative genres of his or her day.⁴⁶ In the case of Cymbeline, historical romance seems most appropriate as a generic label. In spite of its taxonomic precision, though, the phrase has traditionally carried the same stigma for Shakespeareans as “pseudo-history.” As recently as 1990, a critic of historical drama could make a reference to “history plays per se” and “historical romances” as though the two were obviously distinct kinds of plays.⁴⁷ How much “pure” history does a play need in order to escape being labeled as, in essence, a bastardized history play? And how could one ever hope to measure the amount?

I want this essay to suggest that historical romances must be reexamined if we seek a full understanding of the practice of history writing in early modern England. By bringing suggestions of historiography to bear in Cymbeline, Shakespeare calls attention to the storytelling inherent to any telling of history. For as the play's ending achieves plot resolution, it brings us back to history even as we return to romance.

Notes

1. J. M. Nosworthy, “Introduction,” in Cymbeline, ed. Nosworthy, Arden Shakespeare Series (1955; London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. xix; Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 253. Ribner's final chapter, “The History Play in Decline,” discusses historical romances such as Cymbeline and alleges their collective role in extinguishing the history play (pp. 266-305).

2. See Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 116-48; David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1985); Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 189-96; and Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11, 1 (Winter 1961): 84-99.

3. For a preliminary list of such plays, see Ribner, appendix B, pp. 319-27. Also, see my “Anachronism and Historical Romance in Renaissance Drama: James IV,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 24 (1998): 75-90.

4. Quoted in Nosworthy, p. xiv.

5. For a different reading of the play's indebtedness to Roman history, this time to English translations of historians of Rome, see Bergeron, “Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly [SQ] 31, 1 (Spring 1980): 31-41. Coppélia Kahn compares the Roman ideology in Cymbeline with that in the more fully Roman plays by Shakespeare. Focusing on the play's “specific concern with British national identity,” she argues that Cymbeline restricts that identity, even as it restricts notions of gender, to Roman standards (Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 160). Robert S. Miola addresses the connections to Shakespeare's other depictions of Rome in “Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Valediction to Rome,” in Roman Images, ed. Annabel Patterson, Selected Papers from the English Institute 8 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 51-62.

6. William Shakespeare, “Cymbeline,” in The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage, The Pelican Text Revised (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1969), pp. 1290-1333, I.i.I. All subsequent citations of this play come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

7. See Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romances: A Study of Origins (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970).

8. Although the first gentleman also refers to the British king, Tenantius, and his brother, Cassibelan, in this opening scene, the audience is no more likely to recognize these precise references to pre-Conquest Britain than they are the play's title figure. My assumption is that, for many audience members, this precision in naming the British works against recognition; the vague references to “the Romans” would have carried at least some meaning, however imprecise. For all that many in the audience likely knew, the unfamiliar names, Tenantius and Cassibelan, could have been those of Danes or Greeks.

9. Quoted in Nosworthy, p. xiv.

10. Nosworthy, p. xlix.

11. Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper, An Epitome of Cronicles (London, 1549), Fol. 89r. See John Stow, A Summarie of the Chronicles of England (London: R. Tottle and H. Binneman, 1575); and Anthony Munday, A Brief Chronicle of the Successes of Times, from the Creation of the World, to this Instant (London, 1611).

12. Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1577), 1:46.

13. See, for example, Peggy Muñoz Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's “Cymbeline”: An Iconographic Reconstruction (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 44; Felperin, pp. 180-1; and Robin Moffet, “Cymbeline and the Nativity,” SQ 13, 2 (Spring 1962): 207-18.

14. For a full study of such multivocality, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed's “Chronicles” (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).

15. Holinshed, 1:46-7.

16. As Joan Warchol Rossi has demonstrated, Shakespeare reworks his chronicle source to dramatic effect in Cymbeline, just as he did in the 1590s history plays (“Cymbeline's Debt to Holinshed: The Richness of III.i,” in Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978, pp. 104-12).

17. Constance Jordan, “Contract and Conscience in Cymbeline,” Renaissance Drama [RenD] 25 (1994): 33-58, 42.

18. Cited by Kahn, p. 162.

19. Homer Nearing Jr., “The Legend of Julius Caesar's British Conquest,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association 64, 4 (Autumn 1949): 889-929.

20. Holinshed, 1:43. Kahn partially anticipates my discussion of Cymbeline and its source in this paragraph (p. 162). While she calls attention to the relations between notions of gender and national identity, I wish to examine the competition between versions of history.

21. Holinshed, 1:40.

22. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 132.

23. Richard F. Hardin, “Unnoticed Contemporary Analogues of King Lear and Cymbeline by John Ross of the Inner Temple (1606),” Humanistica Lovaniensia 44 (1995): 270-81.

24. See, for instance, Marcus, p. 122; Felperin, p. 187. Also see Jodi Mikalachki (“The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism,” SQ 46, 3 Autumn 1995: 301-22), who explores what she calls a “hybrid nationalist response to the Roman Conquest” (p. 309).

25. That the queen ultimately draws from Caesar's own writing is an irony that is, for the present purposes, beside the point. I wish only to call attention to the juxtaposition of two versions of history.

26. Shakespeare, “Titus Andronicus,” in Complete Works, pp. 823-54, I.i.133.

27. Shakespeare, “Antony and Cleopatra,” in Complete Works, pp. 1169-1211, V.ii.207-21. I thank Geraldo de Sousa for suggesting that I consider Tamora and Cleopatra in comparison with Cymbeline's queen.

28. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), p. 148.

29. Bergeron, “Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play,” SQ 31, 1 (Spring 1980): 31-41.

30. Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 165. Also see B. H. G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics, and Science, 1561-1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

31. D. R. Woolf, “The Common Voice: History, Folklore, and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 120 (Summer 1988): 26-52.

32. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (1938; rprt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1964). He discusses Cymbeline's planes on pp. 68-76.

33. Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1973), p. 113.

34. Karen Cunningham, “Female Fidelities on Trial: Proof in the Howard Attainder and Cymbeline,” RenD 25 (1994): 1-32, 17.

35. Cunningham, p. 7.

36. Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's Later Comedies (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), pp. 132-3.

37. Marcus, p. 120.

38. For other observations of this phenomenon, see, for example, Bergeron, “Treacherous Reading and Writing in Shakespeare's Romances,” Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. Bergeron (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 160-77; Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, pp. 147-57; Marcus, p. 140; Cunningham, pp. 1-31.

39. Marcus, p. 140.

40. Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), p. 92.

41. See note 13.

42. Marcus, p. 142.

43. Robert W. Uphaus, Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1981), p. 50. Also see Diana T. Childress, “Are Shakespeare's Last Plays Really Romances?” in Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 44-55.

44. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), p. 20.

45. Holinshed, 1:46; emphasis mine.

46. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 58, 83, and passim.

47. Rackin, p. 31. In 1957, Ribner made the most recent and, to my knowledge, the only attempt to codify the difference between history play and historical romance. Richard Helgerson (Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 232-9) and Paola Pugliatti (Shakespeare the Historian New York: St. Martin's, 1996, pp. 35-6) have briefly discussed historical romance, placing very limited samples in the “subversion” and “containment” camps, respectively. For studies of the presence of romance in history plays, see Paul Dean, “Shakespeare's Henry VI Trilogy and Elizabethan ‘Romance Histories: The Origins of a Genre,” SQ 33, 1 (Spring 1982): 34-48; and “Chronicle and Romance Modes in Henry V,” SQ 32, 1 (Spring 1981): 18-27; also Anne Barton, “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 92-117.