[In the following excerpt, Kermode calls Cymbeline one of Shakespeare's most oblique works but nonetheless finds it to be a “superb play.” Kermode also considers the play's sources, language, plot, characterization, and themes.]

Heminge and Condell placed Cymbeline with the tragedies. Perhaps the printing was held up by copyright difficulties; perhaps they were puzzled as to the category of so strange a play, by the unprecedented mixture of ancient Britain and modern Italy, comedy and tragedy, history and romance. Dr. Johnson was severe upon these inconsistencies:

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogue, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

Some criticism must, nevertheless, be wasted on the incongruities. Cymbeline is, under one aspect, a history play, and for the story of Cymbeline's disagreement with the Romans over the payment of tribute, and the subsequent war and peace, Shakespeare referred to Holinshed. But he was far less respectful of history than in the English Chronicle Plays, and the freedom of his treatment reminds one rather of King Lear, in which he had once before blended a romance-plot with an episode from British history. As a matter of fact, Holinshed is perfunctory, not to say hazy, about Cymbeline; he is not sure whether it was this king or his son who refused the tribute, or even whether the Britons won the war. Shakespeare eked out Holinshed from a poem in a supplement to The Mirror for Magistrates. In this work the Britons won, which suited him because there was a vogue for incredibly bold and warlike Britons, reflected a little later in Fletcher's Bonduca. Since the accession of James I, the English were British in name as well as by remote descent; they could think of Cymbeline as of their own nation, and perhaps find him especially interesting because he occupied the throne of Britain at the time of the birth of Christ and the Augustan peace.¹

On the other hand, Shakespeare could assume that nobody wanted archaeological accuracy. Iachimo's conduct is, admittedly, un-Roman (though Shakespeare remembered his own Tarquin as he wrote). He is a Sienese, and his Italian manners are appropriate to the wicked Italy of the Jacobean imagination; it was no part of the dramatist's purpose to portray a Tuscan of the time of Augustus. Iachimo's treachery is there to touch another responsive note in the audience; as Dr. Brockbank shows, it was conventional to contrast the craftiness, the ‘doubleness and hollow behaviour’, of Italians with the ‘great strength and little policie, much courage and small shift’ of the British. But this gives rise to one of those contradictions, or at any rate tensions, which abound in Cymbeline; for it was also accepted that the Roman occupation of Britain did us good because it provided an early dose of civility and associated us with the great Empire. ‘Were not Caesars Britaines as brutish as Virginians?’ asked Samuel Purchas. ‘The Romane swords were best teachers of civilitie to this and other Countries.’ So when Cymbeline has won the war he offers the tribute after all, blaming the Queen and Cloten for restraining him from doing so earlier. We are meant to conclude that the valour of the British royal family is ‘gentle’, and not simply a brute toughness which must set the nation against the forces of civility and religion. And we remember that the secular Empire was a preparation for Christianity, and that the England of Shakespeare was the home of the true religion.

For the wager between Posthumus and Iachimo Shakespeare drew, more directly, on Boccaccio.² This ancient and implausible tale goes well enough in romance, and Shakespeare stirs it up with the pseudo-history, the pastoral tale of the King's lost sons, the wanderings of Imogen in the deserts of Wales, the fairy-tale plot of the Queen's drugs, without the least apology:

                    Howsoe'er 'tis strange,
Or that the negligence may well be laugh'd at,
Yet it is true, sir.

(I.i.65-67)

Granville Barker explains the theatrical craft needed to bring this off. As to why Shakespeare wanted to do it, we must assume a desire to experiment in a new kind of play, in which probabilities and personalities count for less than coups de théâtre which suggest with ideal clarity certain truths left obscure in the turbulence of real life.

Not that Cymbeline is a lucid play; its language prevents it being that. The romance plot is not matched by any assumed simplicity of diction, but set off against tough late-Shakespearian verse; and this produces an effect almost of irony, so that several critics, among them Professor Danby, have tried to convey their sense that the dramatist is somehow playing with the play. I think this is true. For example, Cymbeline is the only play in the canon which has characters given to such tensely obscure ways of expressing themselves that not only the audience but the other characters find it hard to make out what they mean. Add to this the extraordinary complexity of the plot, the wanton rapidity of the multiple dénouement, and certain other complications to be mentioned later, and you have a play very remote in tone from Pericles. But it is a superb play nevertheless, and in some ways perhaps it shows more of the difficult, tortuous, ironical mind that made the Sonnets, than other greater works in which the main effort goes into the making explicit of some more public theme.

The opening scene is a good example of the obliquity that will prevail throughout. The two anonymous gentlemen constitute a simple device for telling the audience what it needs to know about the situation. The explanations of the First Gentleman to his guest do indeed cover a lot of ground in only 70 lines, but there is nothing simple in the way he goes about it. ‘Everybody looks angry because the King is’ becomes:

You do not meet a man but frowns; our bloods
No more obey the heavens than our courtiers
Still seem as does the King's.

(I.i.1-3)

The reason for the King's anger is that his daughter and his only child Imogen has married Posthumus instead of the Queen's son Cloten; but there is room amid all the narrative detail for a comparison between Cloten and Posthumus, with much tortuous praise of the latter:

FIRST Gent.
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 do not think
So fair an outward and such stuff within
Endows a man but he.
SECOND Gent.
                                                                                                              You speak him far.
FIRST Gent.
I do extend him, sir, within himself;
Crush him together rather than unfold
His measure duly.

(I.i.16-27)

From this energetic, indeed violent dialogue—and it is the energy of the writer rather than of the First Gentleman—we certainly learn a number of facts necessary to the progress of the action; but we are also left with the sense that some undoubtedly hectic sequel will unfold the importance of this contrast between Cloten and Posthumus. But Posthumus, of course, departs; though he encounters Cloten on the way, we are merely told of this. There is an angry scene between Imogen and her father, in which the young men are again contrasted: ‘I chose an eagle’, says Imogen in reply to his angry accusations, ‘and did avoid a puttock’. The noble Posthumus sails away, waving a handkerchief; the base Cloten is carefully exposed to us as a braggart and a coward. Is Shakespeare once more treating a favourite theme, the matter of nobility in birth and nobility in conduct? Apparently not, since we next see Posthumus in Italy, Cloten forgotten, contracting his wager with Iachimo; and all our attention is directed to the attempt on Imogen, with only a scene essential to the plot—the substitution of a harmless drug for the Queen's poison—intervening between the wager and the arrival of Iachimo at the British court. There follows the great scene in which Iachimo disgustingly expresses the disgust he feigns at the loose life of Posthumus in Italy; this is verse of an hysterical virtuosity, recognizably from the author of Coriolanus and The Winter's Tale, yet proper to Cymbeline:

IACHIMO:
It cannot be i' th' eye, for apes and monkeys,
'Twixt two such shes, would chatter this way and
Contemn with mows the other; nor i' th' judgment,
For idiots in this case of favour would
Be wisely definite; nor i' th' appetite;
Sluttery, to such neat excellence oppos'd,
Should make desire vomit emptiness,
Not so allur'd to feed.
IMOGEN:
What is the matter, trow?
IACHIMO:
                                                                                                              The cloyed will—
That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both fill'd and running—ravening first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage.
IMOGEN:
                                                                                                    What, dear sir,
Thus raps you? Are you well?

(I.vi.38-50)

She does not understand him; but even when she does she is not equal to his Italian cunning, and allows him to send his chest to her room.

The scene of Iachimo's intrusion in Imogen's chamber is a carefully prepared set piece, and its power quite disarms the criticism that it is inherently ridiculous. Imogen is a lucky Lucretia, reading the tale of Tereus; Iachimo knows how to value the beauty he betrays:

                    'Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her.

(II.ii.18-20)

Iachimo departs; Cloten (after receiving advice from his mother which is too obscurely expressed for his understanding) returns to the suit of Imogen.

The plot is developing fast; there is an embassy from Rome; yet our attention is suddenly returned to the Cloten-Posthumus contrast by a violent scene between Cloten and Imogen. Imogen is straightforward enough:

Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more
But what thou art besides, thou wert too base
To be his groom.

(II.iii.125-7)

But then she puts the point of Posthumus' superior nobility in a figure:

                                                                                          His mean'st garment
That ever hath but clipp'd his body is dearer
In my respect than all the hairs above thee,
Were they all made such men.

(II.iii.133-6)

And Cloten, affronted, four times repeats, ‘His meanest garment!’ This is very devious. We discovered from the First Gentleman that Posthumus was meritorious both outward and inward, and this might explain Imogen's high valuation of his clothes. But Shakespeare makes far more of this episode than can be explained in terms of a conventional reference to the outer and inner man. Imogen's insult rankles; Cloten procures a suit of Posthumus' clothes, and sets out in pursuit of her when she goes off to Milford Haven to find her husband with the Roman invasion force. His intention is to ravish her, wearing her husband's suit:

He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust hath dined—which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that she so prais'd—to the court I'll knock her back, foot her home again.

(III.v.143-6)

And Cloten can wear the clothes of Posthumus; the garments of this nonpareil fit him exactly. After an insulting conversation about clothes and tailors, the young prince cuts off Cloten's head (for the true prince, even dressed in skins, is Cloten's superior); and when Imogen awakes out of her drugged sleep and discovers his corpse, she identifies it as that of Posthumus, by the clothes and the unmatchable physique:

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 …

(IV.ii.309-12)

Shortly after this Posthumus, who, it will be remembered, left Britain with a clean handkerchief, enters with a bloody one, and declares his intention of shedding his Italian clothes in favour of the costume of ‘a Britain peasant’. In this way he will be braver in the battle than his clothes lead anyone to expect, and so set a new fashion, ‘Less without and more within’.

Clothes are a familiar figure for the false outward show; but there is far too much emphasis on this theme for so commonplace an explanation. It is not the first time Shakespeare has arranged for what begins as a verbal pattern to break through into the action; Lear is behind us. But why give Posthumus the body of a paragon, and then allow Cloten's to equal it, even in the eyes of Imogen? The point may be that, as Belarius says, ‘Nature hath meal and bran, contempt and grace’, and perhaps the physical identity merely stresses a moral discrepancy, as Shylock's most famous speech misses out the sole but all-important difference between Jew and Christian. But however one looks at it, this thematic figure must seem, especially in a play so packed with plot, a wanton, decorative flourish. Admittedly the contrast between Cloten and Posthumus is related to other themes in the play—nature and nurture, barbarism and civility; but it is so far from the main issues of Roman tribute and the reunion of husband and wife, father and children, that for all its brilliance one feels it is not what Shakespeare would have allowed himself in the comedies of his middle period.

As to the historical theme, it thrives on the ambiguity of the situation of Briton versus Roman. The coward Cloten jeering at the Roman emissaries; Caius Lucius dignified under the threat of brutal British vengeance; the innate nobility of British princes and the victory of Posthumus over Iachimo—all these events exploit, and the final magnanimity of Cymbeline flatters, the prejudices of a contemporary audience. We may have changed preconceptions, but the play still has power to exploit and puzzle us with unexplained ambiguities. Another, perhaps, is the episode of Imogen at the cave of her lost brothers. Away from the intrigues of the court, Imogen—dressed as a boy, like earlier heroines in search of their lovers—speaks a different language; and so does Shakespeare. J. C. Maxwell suspects him of irony in his representation of the royal brothers, and certainly the tone alters, becomes appropriate to pure romance. Brought up as hunters, living in a cave, they are nevertheless bursting with natural nobility:

How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!
These boys know little they are sons to th' King,
Nor Cymbeline dreams that they are alive.
They think they are mine; and though train'd up thus meanly
I' th' cave wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit
The roofs of palaces, and nature prompts them
In simple and low things to prince it much
Beyond the trick of others.

(III.iii.79-86)

So their guardian Belarius. The boys are necessary to the plot, and to the massive family reunion at the end; but in these pastoral scenes Shakespeare apparently presents them with the simplicity of Child Tristram or the noble savage in The Faerie Queene, VI:

          O what an easie thing is to descry
          The gentle bloud, how ever it be wrapt
          In sad misfortunes foule deformity
          And wretched sorrowes, which have often hapt!
          For howsoever it may grow mis-shapt,
          Like this wyld man being undisciplynd,
          That to all virtue it may seeme unapt,
          Yet will it shew some sparkes of gentle mynd,
And at the last breake forth in his owne proper kynd.

In the end they behave like princes before they are recognized as princes, and save their father's cause. But the ambiguity lies in such details of presentation as their brutality towards the body of Cloten and their sentimental affection for Fidele; and the tone of these scenes is somehow suspiciously simple and open, as if Shakespeare were covertly parodying Fletcher.

The last act of Cymbeline includes not only the fighting but the vision of Posthumus when prisoner, and the twenty-four-fold dénouement. As to the vision, as Mr. Maxwell says, there seems no reason why it should not be accepted as Shakespearian, and none either why it should therefore be overvalued. Posthumus' soliloquy before the vision is very fine; and so is the rapt speech of Sicinius at Jupiter's departure—late Shakespeare of the kind reserved for moments of awe:

He came in thunder; his celestial breath
Was sulphurous to smell; the holy eagle
Stoop'd, as to foot us. His ascension is
More sweet than our blest fields.

(V.iv.114-17)

The prose of the gaoler is again very characteristic; and his hangman humour is a good enough introduction to the high-flown royal recognitions of the last scene. Here is the untying of all knots, a ‘fierce abridgement’ indeed of the plot. The queen dies; Imogen turns up and wins the life of Posthumus; identities are established by ring or by mole (‘It was wise nature's end in the donation / To be his evidence now’); condemnations, pardons, exposures, further condemnations and general forgiveness follow, and the tribute is promised which will ‘let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Together’.

The last scene is hard to bring off on the stage because the too rapid untying of all those knots awakens farcical associations. (This is to assume that Shakespeare did not want it to.) Yet this scene is very obviously the focus of the play; here all those separate plots and themes, so skilfully expounded through the play, are brought together straitly, in a multiple recognition which is, to put it at the lowest, a virtuoso exercise. However far Shakespeare got from the archetypal simplicity of Pericles in this remarkable ‘historical-pastoral’ tragi-comical romance, he was still thinking in dramaturgical terms about the recognition.

Notes

1. See J. P. Brockbank's article on the play. Emrys Jones argues for a close application to contemporary political opinion or mythology; for both articles see the Bibliography.

2. For details of this and other sources and analogues see the New Arden and New Cambridge editions of Cymbeline. An important source which seems to have been overlooked is the episode of Child Tristram in Faerie Queene, Vi. ii. Tristram, like Guiderius, is ‘a Briton borne, Sonne of a king,’ and like him is a great hunter. More important, it was easy to see at a glance that he was ‘of noble race’, and ‘borne of some Heroicke sead’. He is anxious to learn ‘the use of arms’, and so are the sons of Cymbeline. As Guiderius kills the discourteous Cloten, Tristram kills the boorish knight who wronged Priscilla. These parallels are further testimony to the importance of the relation between the Romances and The Faerie Queene, especially Book VI.

Cymbeline

First Edition: First printed, 1623, in the FIRST FOLIO.

Modern Editions: Yale, ed. Hemingway, 1924; Arden, ed. Nosworthy, 1955; New Cambridge, ed. Maxwell, 1960.

Critical Studies

Granville-Barker, H. Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series. 1930.

Thrall, W. F. ‘Cymbeline, Boccaccio, and the Wager Story in England’, Studies in Philology [SP], 28, 1931, 639-51.

Tinkler, F. C. ‘Cymbeline’, Scrutiny [Scr] vii, 1938, 5-20.

Shaw, G. B. Cymbeline Refinished. 1938.

Stephenson, A. A. ‘The Significance of Cymbeline’, Scr. x, 1942, 329-38.

Smith, W. D. ‘Cloten with Caius Lucius’, SP, xlix, 1952, 186-94.

Wilson, H. S. ‘Philaster and Cymbeline’, English Institute Essays 1951. New York, 1952, 146-67.

Hoeniger, F. D. ‘Two Notes on Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, viii, 1957, 132-3.

Brockbank, J. P. ‘History and Histrionics in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Survey, xi, 1958, 42-49.

Jones, E. ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, xi, 1961, 84-99.