SOURCE: Jordan, Constance. “Contract and Conscience in Cymbeline.” Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 33-58.

[In the following essay, Jordan examines the theme of verbal contracts in Cymbeline, focusing on the marriage of Posthumus and Imogen and Cymbeline's payment of the annual tribute to the Roman Empire.]

Early modern bodies politic—of the family and of the state—were shaped by the terms of verbal contracts observed over time by the continuous consent of the parties to them. In large measure this compliance reflected the fact that what was contracted for were duties of no quantifiable value but rather in the nature of benefits. The services of love and fidelity were beyond institutional enforcement and perhaps even determination. Their very vagueness made performance an act of discrimination and more particularly of conscience. Within the family, certain kinds of material support were, of course, subject to court order; fathers were required to feed and house children up to a certain age; husbands also had to provide for wives. Within the state, parties were comparably if less ambiguously bound: monarchs and magistrates had to promote the welfare of the people; subjects were expected to obey their superiors. But even these obligations were subject to interpretation.

The obedience of subjects was limited to “things indifferent” to their spiritual salvation. Monarch and magistrate were bound to observe positive law in many respects, even when they considered that the commonwealth would benefit from action that, strictly speaking, was illicit. Difficulties became apparent in two kinds of circumstances: that is, when the monarch claimed a wider scope for the prerogative, his absolute or extraordinary power above positive law, than common law and customary practice indicated was allowable and “constitutional”; and, by contrast, when he exercised the prerogative licitly but in such a way as to violate what the subject considered a sacred or natural right. In the first instance, his over-reaching could be (and was) met with a kind of protest that invoked positive law and tradition. In the second instance, the subject who resisted was effectively an “outlaw”: his future “in this life” depended on the extent to which he could summon a real and revolutionary force. In actual practice, he had to choose exile or—resisting albeit passively—martyrdom. Both sets of circumstances fostered a public and political discourse characterized by a high consciousness of the function of conscience and its justification as a determinant of action and responsibility. Here a frequent point of reference was the power of the word to bind parties to mutual obligations. The monarch's word was critically at issue when he exercised his absolute power and authority in actions sanctioned by law and custom; in this instance, the obedient subject had to rely for justice only on the monarch's promise to minister to his whole people and their common wealth.

This essay will explore some of the meanings generated by the terms of verbal contracts and their engagement with conscience as they are represented in Cymbeline. It will focus particularly on the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, and on the tribute to be rendered to Augustus Caesar by Cymbeline. The first is guaranteed by the words of betrothal and entails fidelity; the second, largely symbolic, was instituted by the word of Cassibelan, Cymbeline's ancestor, as a debt the conquered British king owed (and his successors would owe) the Roman emperor. Both contracts are validated by conscience. When Posthumus loses faith in and hence is unfaithful to Imogen, he violates the promises he made at his betrothal. The meaning of Cassibelan's grant and the relations it institutes are comparatively more complex. It marks the indebtedness of a conquered and hence vassal state. In practice, however, such a contract could be and often was subject to revocation if and when the conquered state gained the power to resist its conqueror. A common fate of agreements between states, where the law of nations was strictly speaking unenforceable by any court, agreements between a social or political superior with absolute power and his subject were also susceptible to challenge. In all cases, whether between states or within a political body, the power of a word, an oath, a verbal contract to bind in conscience was in fact possible only as a paradoxical double bind: binding the superior's power conscientiously to minister to the subject is the subject's countervailing power conscientiously to resist his superior.

As words instituting obligations to be honored over time, verbal contracts in Cymbeline have a presumptive (if fictive) validation in salvation history. Chronicles of ancient Britain represented the reign of Cymbeline as coinciding with the rule of Augustus Caesar, a time when all the world was to be taxed, a time of universal peace and the birth of Christ.¹ Mankind was then to live under a new dispensation. Dramatizing events that occurred at a moment after which they were to become susceptible to a Christian justice and love, the play informs its sense of the power of human words by invoking the infinitely more compelling power of the Word. Its authority both supersedes whatever human words may institute and confirms the acts of conscience that bring them to expression.

THE FAMILY

The play's opening scene conveys the most important feature of a contract: its status as a promise and therefore as a matter of conscience. At immediate issue is Imogen's betrothal. As the gentlemen who know court gossip reveal, the “bloods” of courtiers neither “obey the heavens” (choosing celibacy) nor do they accept Cymbeline's decision to imprison Imogen and exile Posthumus (1.1.1-3). Cymbeline's promotion of Cloten, his own abject and venal stepson, to be Imogen's prospective consort is clearly incestuous. Although Posthumus is the foster son of Cymbeline, who “breeds” (1.1.42) him after he is orphaned, his marriage to Imogen violates no natural law. It is further justified by a moral calculus and perceptions of worth, factors made mysterious by allusions to kingship and dynasty that suggest the propriety of the match. The courtiers celebrate Imogen's “election” of Posthumus as a response to his “virtue”—“the regions of the earth” do not have his “like” (1.1.52-53, 20-21). His worth is both demonstrable by his deeds and signified by his ancestry, which, although obscured in the immemorial mists of time (it cannot be “delve[d] … to the root” [line 28]), is symbolically royal—his father is Leonatus and he is Posthumus Leonatus, one of the “lion's whelp.” In scriptural prophecy leonatus is identified with Judah, the progenitor of the house of David: “The sceptre shal not depart from Iudah … and the people shal be gathred vnto him” (Gen. 49.9-10). By being displaced from the succession by Cymbeline's sons at the end of the play, Posthumus will be seen merely to have figured what they actually ensure: a proper dynastic succession.² His character as a metaphor of kingship is respected throughout the action of the play.

But specious as Cloten's suit may be, promoted by Cymbeline and his queen in defiance of natural law, Imogen's marriage to Posthumus is not valid in all respects. It was evidently not a public marriage, per verba de praesenti, endorsed by family and friends, expected of a woman of property, and usually preceded by a written contract, but rather clandestine and marked only by a verbal contract to be married, per verba de futuro, a form of marriage elected by persons who either had little property or wished to defy parental wishes. Clandestine marriages were not legally binding before consummation; in effect, the fact of consummation in a clandestine marriage served the same function as the act of agreeing to marriage before witnesses in a public marriage.³ Exiled in Rome, Posthumus insists that Imogen is a virgin and so reveals the provisional status of their marriage. Despite the status of their marriage, however, the betrothal of Imogen and Posthumus is a valid verbal contract. The verba de futuro on which it is based signified not only a promise to marry (i.e., consummate their union in time) but also to accept the obligations of a married couple: to be faithful to each other. As I've suggested, the play's reference to sacred history makes its representation of betrothal and the agreement to pay tribute especially remarkable; it unifies the disparate “matters” of story (Imogen's marriage) and chronicle (British tribute) by a common concern with conscience.

In English legal practice, contracts of all kinds had been considered to have a conscientious dimension for centuries. In 1602, conscience became an explicit issue with respect to a kind of contract that relied for its power to enforce behavior entirely on the spoken word. Such contracts were verbal in contrast to written contracts, entered into without legally recognized witnesses. They were inherently weak and susceptible to challenge. The decision of Sir Edward Coke in Slade's case, an action for debt that depended on a verbal contract, made its promissory dimension particularly remarkable. Coke's reasoning underscored the power of the spoken word that even when unwitnessed or undocumented acquired a legal authority.

Actions for debt were usually based on a writ or on a verbal agreement for which witnesses could be produced. When a verbal agreement had been made in the absence of witnesses, the defendant typically resorted to a procedure known as an “action of debt,” which allowed for a trial by “wager of law.” In such a trial, the defendant would summon a number of oath-takers who would swear not to the facts of the case but that the defendant's claim that he owed nothing to the plaintiff was good: they would swear either that he had paid the plaintiff or that no contract existed. The problem with this procedure is obvious: oath-takers could be and were bought—their word was for hire (Simpson 137-40, 295-99; Plucknett 647-48). To remedy this abuse, Coke focussed on the salient feature of contracts entered into without writ or witnesses, namely, that their legal remedies were susceptible to perjury. He stipulated that a plaintiff in a case involving a verbal contract, a spoken word, could resort to a different procedure. He could bring an “action upon assumpsit.” In these cases the thing assumed referred to the thoughts and intentions of the parties to the contract. Their contract, although not substantiated by evidence in the ordinary way, was nonetheless considered to be capable of substantiation because it had a place in conscience. Assumpsit prohibited the defendant from relying on testimony of oath-takers and required that he submit to an investigation of evidence relevant to his defense to determine what would have been clear if the contract in question had been documented or witnessed. As Coke noted, this change in procedure was necessary because the “wager of law” could no longer protect the interests of the plaintiff (assuming it ever had): “experience proves that mens consciences grow so large that the respect of their private advantage rather induces men (and chiefly those who have declining estates) to perjury” (2: fol. 95, 95v). In effect, Coke made a verbal agreement to perform an action the equivalent of a promise to perform an action: “every contract executory imports itself an assumpsit, for when one agrees to pay money or to deliver anything, thereby he assumes or promises to pay, or deliver it” (94). Whereas the “wager of law” had demonstrated how fragile was the moral force behind taking an oath, assumpsit made a contract legally binding by transforming it into a matter of conscience—in short, by imbuing the verbal expression of a contract with a moral force.

Assumpsit was no more than a second-best solution. Coke would have preferred a society more open to ideals, a society in which words, oaths, and agreements did not require an investigation to prove their validity or meaning. Remarking generally on the moral decay of the times, he states: “I am surprised that in these days so little consideration is made of an oath, as I daily observe, Cum jurare per Deum actus religionis sit [for to swear by God is an act of religion, i.e., of faith]” (95v). Coke's belief that an interest in private gain rather than in public justice determined the course of the law made a virtue of skeptical inquiry.

Conscience in Cymbeline is a factor in decisions made by many of its characters, none of whom are as affected by their outcomes as Posthumus and Imogen when they respond to the promises made at their betrothal. These include a promise to keep faith, not only by not being unfaithful but also by not losing faith in the other's fidelity. The couple sharply differ in their understanding of these promises. Neither is adulterous. But while Imogen does not doubt Posthumus's fidelity, Posthumus does doubt hers. The terms defining his doubt are contractual and suggest mercantile relations—what they lack is any reference to conscience. It is no accident that they are initially “Italian” terms and to be associated with the mentality of the merchant, the moneylender, and the trader in currency bought and sold on foreign exchanges, activities prone to actions for debt.⁴ At first, Posthumus rejects Iachimo's terms; it is only after repeated insults that he adopts them in order, as he mistakenly thinks, to defend his honor.

Iachimo is all calculation: to him, Posthumus appears to be “of crescent note,” like a bill of exchange that increases in value as its term nears expiration. His “endowments” can be “tabled” in a “catalogue”; at the same time, he is subject to devaluation; his “weight” by marriage, relying on a “word” not “matter,” is only hypothetical (1.5.1-15). Iachimo's view of women is comparably objectifying: they are all for sale. Upon his arrival in Rome, Posthumus exhibits a different mentality, suggesting a nobleman's largess: he expects to be his friend Philario's “debtor” for “courtesies”; Philario responds in the same vein by stating that his “poor kindness” is “o'er-rate[d]” (1.5.34-36; cf. The Winter's Tale 1.1). Speaking of his marriage while still in Britain, Posthumus used a similar language expressing value; he had declared Imogen's “loss” to herself and therefore his gain as “infinite” (1.2.51). The language of incommensurability here is intended to convey how inadequately any reference to measure can comprehend value; it implies a difference between price that is calculable and a worth that is beyond calculation. Why Posthumus does not continue to use this language is partly anticipated by the gifts he and Imogen have exchanged in Britain. Hers to him is a diamond ring, a token of their betrothal that she sees as without any term or condition as long as she is alive (1.2.42-45); his to her is a bracelet, a “manacle of love,” which is to signify the same thing but looks rather like a device to secure property and therefore seems ironic (1.2.53). Once in Rome, Posthumus is easy prey for Iachimo, who teases him from his faith by language that prices Imogen's diamond and, by association, her fidelity. Posthumus replies that she, a “gift of the gods,” cannot be priced, but the little “religion” that holds him back for a moment soon gives way before an urge to equate Imogen and her virtue with a sum of money (1.5.67-73, 79-82, 133-34). The fact that his wager is for a considerable sum does not obscure the lack of faith and bad conscience that has motivated it. His wager has removed his wife from an inner world of feeling and faith and placed her in a market of items and objects. Once at stake, Imogen becomes an object of calculation, not only priced but also theoretically subject to market fluctuations.

Posthumus's situation becomes contractually contradictory as a consequence of his wager. He allows himself to become indebted to Iachimo for a honorable reputation: he seeks to prove he is not a cuckold. Iachimo, in turn, takes up the position of a witness who will provide evidence that will either support or deny Posthumus's claim. Because it is evidence that will not be questioned by a jury, Iachimo actually functions as an oath-taker—a function that, as Coke noted, was highly susceptible to perjury. In the case at hand, Iachimo's self-interest is obvious. He is in fact a party to a second contract: the wager he makes with Posthumus (in effect, charging him with being a cuckold), one that effectively breaks the terms of the earlier contract of betrothal with its promise of spousal fidelity. Its language is explicit; Iachimo and Posthumus make a “covenant,” a “match,” a “bargain,” a “wager”; they draw up “articles” set down by “lawful counsel” (1.5.40-66). Posthumus elects to defend himself from the threat of a bankrupt marriage (the first contract) by the word of an oath-taker who stands to benefit from that bankruptcy (the second contract). The idea of a wager figures twice: as Posthumus's bet and as the procedure by which he defends himself. In the event, he is shown to be unfaithful by doubting his wife's fidelity; she, by contrast, is revealed to be faithful to all her vows. When Iachimo attempts to tease Imogen out of believing in Posthumus, he is unsuccessful; she rejects his speech as an “assault” on the honor of a gentleman (1.7.145-50). The details of the episode expose the corruption possible when, in the absence of faith, the value of a human relationship is subjected to mercantile negotiation.

Iachimo's intention is quite obviously to win the wager. As soon as he knows he cannot do so in fact (Imogen will not be seduced), he resorts to deceit. Like the oath-taker Coke objected to, his word is not to be tied to any truth but merely to a fiction that will serve his own material interests. This much is clear when, emerging from the trunk in Imogen's bedchamber in which he has hidden, he inventories her possessions: even her “mole cinque-spotted” becomes a “voucher” (2.2.38-39). His lust is not the lover's who longs for the horses of the night to run slowly but rather the merchant's who wants a quick return on his investment: “Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning / May bare the raven's eye” (48-49). The process by which Posthumus is duped into believing Iachimo's perjury reveals the extent to which he shares Iachimo's mentality.⁵

The initial reasons Posthumus gives for doubting Iachimo's word and the “evidence” he gives to prove Imogen's adultery remain good at all stages of the interrogation and not just at its outset: it could all be the result of a conspiracy. If a servant could have reported the contents of her bedchamber and stolen her bracelet, a maid could have described her “mole” (2.4.133-36). Posthumus's failure to persist in doubt reflects a more fundamental distrust of women. Like Iachimo, he sees them as merely objects; they have a price (like a diamond) but no unique worth. His state of mind is expressed as a dream of parthenogenesis, a unique and unpartnered generation in which the male is the only parent and the “woman's part” excised altogether. “Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers?” he asks (2.4.153-54). As the answer is no, he insists that generation produces only “counterfeits” (158)—coins appearing to correspond to a price but actually of adulterated worth. By revealing that he thinks of woman as a property without generative agency, Posthumus also reveals that he could not have kept his own promise to keep faith in marriage, a revelation that in retrospect makes his parting from her all the more pathetic. Aboard his ship bound for Rome, Posthumus eventually vanishes from the horizon of sight, but clearly not from Imogen's mind as she hears Pisanio describe the scene (1.4.8-16). The perspectivism of the image establishes the difference between a perception of an entity that fluctuates circumstantially (in this case, with space) and an inner vision of a being that retains her worth despite contingency. The sense of this difference is again evident later in the play when the character of Cymbeline's lost sons is at issue. They exhibit a royalty quite independent of place. “Place,” as their guardian Belarius explains, only “lessens and sets off” (3.3.13)—it has nothing to do with an inherent virtue.

Posthumus's wager obviously affects Imogen's status as heir, the British succession, and the commonwealth as a whole. Iachimo's fictionalized picture of Posthumus in Rome—he “slaver[s] with lips as common as the stairs / That mount the Capitol”—politicizes adultery (1.7.105-06). Although a fiction—Posthumus is not adulterous—the image hides a truth. Having priced Imogen, Posthumus engages in a kind of prostitution. Rejected by her husband and abandoned by her father, Imogen's state is metaphorically “headless.” Its vulnerability is further suggested by Iachimo's “trunk.” Having told her to seek revenge for Posthumus's supposed adultery or else lose her “great stock,” Iachimo emerges from his trunk to compile evidence that will reduce her moral stock to nothing in Posthumus's eyes. Important to the play's imperial theme is the image of a royal “stock” figuring Cymbeline's dynastic interests—interests that the play will depict as extending to the translation of empire from Rome to Britain. Cymbeline's “trunk” is what remains after the branches of his family tree, his sons and his daughter, are lopped off, lost or abandoned; when they return at the end of the play, the king's “stock” is revived.

The language of arboriculture was current in defenses of the Union of England and Scotland in the interest of creating a British empire. In general, these texts pictured the Union as an extension of the monarchy to occur when the two branches of the kingdom, England and Scotland, were regrafted to a central trunk. A common authority is to Zechariah, who celebrates the union of Judah and Israel as their return to the “tree” of Joseph.⁶ A second reference in the most prominent of these defenses, John Thornborough's The Ioiefull and Blessed Reuniting of the two mightie & famous kingdomes, England and Scotland into their ancient name of great Brittaine (1605), alludes to the conditions in which such a truncated tree can be revived. They define the nature of the monarchy itself, and particularly its kind of rule; in a context in which the tree in question is prospectively imperial, the text implies its limitation with respect to divine law and God's will. Thornborough's text, from Daniel, describes the regeneration of Nebuchadnezzar. Imagined as “tree of great height,” the king is reduced to a “stump,” a sign that God punishes overweening ambition. Daniel prophesies the revival of the royal “tree” “after that thou [the king, Nebuchadnezzar] shalt knowe that the heauvens haue the rule.” He is to “breake of [his] sinnes by righteousnes, & [his] iniquities by mercie to the poore” (Dan. 4.11-27). In short, the king must not pretend to divinity. Thornborough thought that James I had already respected Daniel's conditions: “great Britain” is “for the height of his honor, like the tall and goodly Cedar, in whom the dream of Nabudchodonorser hath beene verified … out of the Stumpe of the rootes … the tree is growne vp againe to [its] former beautie” (C4v, D). To find Cymbeline's stock revived, however, Shakespeare's audiences have to wait for the end of the play.

The move to defer resolution is, of course, characteristic of romance. In this case, the interval between Cymbeline's loss of Imogen, his heir and the last of his children, and her return and the rediscovery of his sons is marked by various trials. They conclude when, having lost his queen, he regains his headship in marriage and in his kingdom. His relations with his subjects become “gracious,” predictive of the Christian era that is about to begin, and also in line with the requirement that a Christian king act for his people. The moment at which his reformation is apparent coincides with his agreement to pay Augustus Caesar. By honoring this contract, a verbal contract made in circumstances that no longer obtain, Cymbeline exhibits his willingness to respect its promissory character and its guarantee in conscience.

THE STATE

Caius Lucius, speaking for Augustus Caesar, asks Cymbeline for tribute on the basis of an agreement made years earlier by Cassibelan, Cymbeline's uncle, to pay Rome an annual sum in recognition of Julius Caesar's conquest of Britain (3.1.5-9).⁷ In theory, a victor's rights following conquest were absolute; over time, of course, they invited modification or, worse, provoked outright revolution. The conflict over tribute in Cymbeline ends in a negotiated settlement; although the British have won, the Romans are paid. The idea of imperial rule is reconceived to preserve the liberties of the subject. Initially, however, the British monarchy chooses resistance. The queen and Cymbeline argue two quite different cases.

The queen states that Cassibelan's word is meaningless because Rome never actually conquered Britain. Caesar's was but “a kind of conquest.” In reality, “he was carried [by the British] / From off our coast, twice beaten” (3.1.23, 26-27). This protest is based on what most audiences would have recognized as a patent lie; virtually everyone in Shakespeare's London would have seen or heard of some evidence of Roman Britain. The queen's misrepresentation of fact is comparable to a tyrant's silencing of the subject. She presumes that her word will not be subject to question, even on the basis of contradictory evidence. Cymbeline denies tribute on subtler grounds. He bases his position on the prior and fundamental freedom of the British people, a freedom that permits them to cancel any contract limiting that freedom provided they have the will and the force to do it. His argument makes the word of his ancestor subject to a kind of contingency; it holds good only in certain circumstances:

                                                                      You must know,
Till the injurious Romans did extort
This tribute from us, we were free. Caesar's ambition,
Which swell'd so much that it did almost stretch
The sides o' th' world, against all colour here
Did put the yoke upon's; which to shake off
Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon
Ourselves to be. … Say then to Caesar,
Our ancestor was that Mulmutius which
Ordain'd 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.

(3.1.47-59)

Following Caius Lucius's pronouncement of “War and confusion / In Caesar's name” (66-67), Cymbeline declares that the British will follow the example of the “Pannonians and Dalmatians [who] for / Their liberties are now in arms” (74-75). This is suggestive language. It implies that British freedom entails more than independence from the Roman “yoke,” that it is provided for in British law and as much to be exercised by the British subject (under positive law) as in behalf of a subject Britain (under the ius gentium, the law of nations). In short, British defiance of Roman hegemony is rooted in her institution of a positive law that comparably defies an abrogation of the liberties of the British subject within Britain.

The notion of a double freedom—of the British people and the British subject—drew on a uniquely English understanding of imperialism. To promote support for the Union, James I had represented the peace that would follow it as an extension of the peace between England, Spain, and the Low Countries that was concluded in 1604. He would consequently become a second Augustus whose pax Britannica would supersede its Roman prototype. He had also inherited an earlier and historically Tudor imperialism whose ideological function was not to harmonize but rather to divorce English and Roman interests. Published by Henry VIII as a feature of Reformation policy, the doctrine that the English monarch was an “emperor without a superior” was a means to justify the liberties of the English subject under Elizabeth. After 1559, the doctrine protected the vast properties—formerly of the church but confiscated by the Tudors—that belonged to English subjects.⁸ By its association with property, it was seen also to guarantee English liberties. The two imperialisms, British and English, were in a sense contradictory. The imperialism James pretended to was associated with absolutism, at least in some measure. The imperialism of the Tudors was bound up with English liberty and liberties. Linking the two was the question asked by all political systems and, notably, dramatized by the action in Cymbeline: the limits of a subject's obedience to authority.

In general terms, the question was framed by reference to Scripture's representation of the historical Caesar and the nature of his rule after the birth of Christ. It asked under what circumstances was Caesar to be obeyed, whether in matters of tribute or other situations. The dictum in Matthew 22 proved to be enigmatic. When asked whether it was “lawful to giue tribute to Caesar,” Jesus answered: “Giue … Cesar the things which are Cesars, and giue vnto God those which are Gods” (19-21). Interpretations of this text usually restricted Caesar's claims to those which did not impinge on the subject's obligations to God. Aquinas prefaced his discussion of obedience by stipulating the fundamental “freedom” of all Christians. In his commentary on Peter Lombard, he noted that the dicta in Matthew 22 are preceded by a declaration of Christian liberty:

It would seem that Christians are not bound to obey the secular powers, and particularly tyrants. For it is said, Matthew XVII, 25: “Therefore the children are free (liberi).” And if in all countries the children of the reigning sovereign are free, so also should the children of that sovereign be free, to whom all kings are subject. Christians have become the sons of God as we read in the Epistle to the Romans (VII, 16); … Christians then are everywhere free, and are thus not bound to obey the secular powers.⁹

As Aquinas recognized, however, there is a countervailing argument in Romans 13: “Let euerie soule be subiect vnto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: & the powers that be, are ordeined of God” (1). To mediate these claims of freedom and subjection, Aquinas went on to qualify obedience so that it was due only when it was truly “of God,” and “derived from God [a Deo descendit].” He acknowledged that authority (prelatio) did not derive from God if it was falsely obtained or wrongly used. In cases in which an authority commands the performance of a sinful act, a subject “is obliged to disobey [tenetur non obedire]” (182-83). In cases in which an authority exceeds the scope of his office—“as, for example, when a master demands payment from a servant which the latter is not bound to make”—a subject “need not obey … need not disobey [non tenetur obedir … (non) tenetur non obedire]” (184-85). In all cases, the subject's conscience determines the validity of a command and of the authority making it.

Erasmus returned to Romans specifically to explain the conduct of a Christian prince. Discussing tyrannical rule in his Institutio principis christiani (1516), he notes that although Paul had in fact commanded Christians to obey a pagan prince (ethnicus princeps), he would have devised a different rule to cover a Christian polity (had such a thing existed). As Christians, both prince and people were to regard their obligations in light of divine love: “owe no one anything unless you love each other [inter vos nemini quicquid debeatis nisi vt inuicem diligatis].”¹⁰ True, Paul had ordered people to tolerate bad magistrates for the sake of civil order, but he had also said that Christians were privileged to live in a new era. To Erasmus this meant that a Christian prince was not to command his people “to undertake slavish works,” nor was he “to dispossess them or to seize their goods [ad seruiles operas adigere, exigere possessionibus, expilare bonis]” (150); in short, to make them martyrs. After the creation of a Christendom, Erasmus maintained, Paul's dicta were to be modified. As the foundations of a Christian polity, they created a Caesar whose authority was subject to question and whose power was limited. His pagan prototype had been absolutely free, even by Pauline standards; he, by contrast, was bound by principles that transformed his freedom into something like a servitude.

Arguing for a “free and absolute” monarchy, James I (and absolutists who later supported him) rejected Thomist and Erasmian interpretations of Scripture and insisted that Paul's words were to be taken literally at all times. To imagine that the “Spirit of God,” having commanded the people to give their rulers “heartie obedience for conscience sake, giuing to Caesar that which was Caesars, and to God that which was Gods,” would renege on this fundamental point of government was a “shamelesse presumption.” It posited an “vnlawfull libertie” of the people (72). Scripture allowed them rights only in conscience; they could not disobey the monarch and remain within the law; their only recourse was to ask for grace. Constitutionalists, on the other hand, tended to adhere to traditional Christian notions of a polity, which were on the whole consistent with their idea that monarch and people were bound together by mutual duties and obligations under positive law. But their habit of linking the freedom of a subject in conscience to his liberties as a property holder had theoretical and practical consequences unforeseen in literature that dealt with general principles.

Inevitably, their language of freedom of conscience, a Christian liberty, became bound up with the language of property, the liberties of the subject. With the exception of purely doctrinal matters, in no respect did the distinction between the monarch and God have more meaning than in disputes over property, subsidies, impositions, and other forms of tribute that were owed to or demanded by the monarch. Invoking Aquinas, Sir John Fortescue had limited the monarch's authority and power over the property of subjects and had stated that beyond what the monarch could demand by his prerogative, his revenues were a gift from the people. Moreover, all his revenue was to be spent in the interest of the commonwealth:

Ffor as Seynt Thomas saith, Rex datur propter regnum, et non regnum propter regem (a king is given for the kingdom not the kingdom for the king). Wherfore all that he dothe owith to be referred to his kyngdome. Ffor though his estate be the highest estate temporall in the erthe yet it is an office, in wich he mynestrith to his reaume defence and justice. And therfore he mey say off hym selff and off his reaume … seruus seruorum Dei [that he is a servant of the servants of God].

(126-27).

The monarch was supported by his people not because he was absolute but because they had “much ffredome in thair owne godis” (140)—that is, their right to property was the guarantee that he would not want for support.¹¹ Later commentators were more precise in considering the possibility that the people might resist such support—presumably acting on their freedom—should they see it as inhibiting the growth of the commonwealth. In his Pandectes of the Law of Nations (1602), William Fulbecke made the monarch's prudence a condition of his ability to get tribute: “it behoueth euerie Monarch to haue a watchfull care of his subiects good, and to bend the force of his minde to the preseruation and maintenance of their safetie and good estate; so subiects should not grudge to pay vnto them tributes & subsidies and other publike impositions” (S4). Barnabe Barnes saw that the monarch's temperance in collecting and spending was the chief assurance of his revenue: a prince is to be “vertuously liberall according to strict conscience” (C2v). But such formulations also set limits to freedom: they left the monarch's prerogative absolute. Were a subject to exercise his Christian freedom against the prerogative, he took himself outside the protection of positive law. This point is made inferentially by George Saltern in a treatise ostensibly devoted to the thesis that English (or British) common law was at one with divine law.

Of the antient Lawes of great Britain (1605) rehearses an extract from the leges Anglorum which claims that after Britain became Christian, their bishop, Elutherius, empowered their kings to reject the authority of the Roman Caesar. His phrasing is, I think, deliberately ambiguous. It is not always clear whether the Caesar in question is the Roman emperor or merely a figure of any head of state. If he is Roman, then the British king stands in the position of subject and is encouraged to be as free as a Christian conscience will allow. If he is any head of state, then the British king is being instructed in the limits of his own authority and power—limits imposed by the countervailing freedom of his Christian subjects. In any case, Caesar's rule is to be circumscribed by the greater authority of God. “We may (saith he [i.e., Elutherius]) alwaies reproue the Lawes of Rome and Caesar, but not the Lawes of God,” states Saltern, an assertion that implies British independence of Rome. When Saltern reports that the bishop ordered the British king, Lucius, to “rule by Gods law & not by Caesars,” however, it looks as if he is referring to the monarch's Christian conscience (Dv). Saltern had identified the “principles” of English “Common Lawes” and the “auncient British constitutions” with “the verie Lawes of the eternal God,” “written in the two immortal tables of nature & Scripture,” and effectively denied the absolutist premise that the monarch, obeying divine law, could flout positive law (B2). But this formulation left the prerogative as absolute and the subject who disobeyed it without legal recourse. Resisting the prerogative, the subject became an outlaw automatically and a revolutionary potentially. By 1606, a case involving a customs duty, a form of revenue and therefore a kind of tribute from the subject to the monarch, had clearly established this point.

Sitting on the court of the Exchequer, Chief Baron Fleming decided that John Bate, an importer of currants, had to pay the king a customs duty. This was a consequence of the fact that the monarch's prerogative, absolute and above positive law, had always covered imports and exports; in any case, the tax was against an item, not a man and his labor, and it did not, therefore, impinge upon his liberties as a holder of property. On the question of liberties in general, Fleming's decision embraced issues beyond the payment of customs duties. It described the character of the prerogative and its practical consequences. As Fleming admitted, the prerogative—by conferring an authority and power beyond determination in positive law—could freely go wrong as much as right. It was, in that sense, a terrible instrument. Faced with the prerogative, a subject had only the recourse provided by petition; having no standing at law, he could only ask for grace:

And whereas it is said that if the King may impose [i.e., by the prerogative], he may impose any quantity what he pleases, true it is that this is to be referred to the wisdom of the King, who guideth all under God by his wisdom, and this is not to be disputed by a subject; and many things are left to his wisdom for the ordering of his power, rather than his power shall be restrained. The King may pardon any felon; but it may be objected that if he pardon one felon he may pardon all, to the damage of the commonwealth, and yet none will doubt but that is left in his wisdom … to restrain the King and his power because that by his power he may do ill, is no argument for a subject.

(343-44)¹²

What “wisdom” a monarch might call on when empowered absolutely was therefore the question. Fleming, like all theorists of the monarchy, had stipulated that the prerogative must be used for “the general benefit of the people and is salus populi; as the people is the body and the King the head” (340-41). The wisdom informing its exercise must reflect a common interest. But he also pointed out that the only faculty promoting monarchic wisdom in prerogative cases would be a moral one. Such wisdom would necessarily depend on a discrimination of better and worse, good and evil—distinctions that have their basis in conscience.¹³ This reasoning clearly exposed the subject's vulnerability. Were he to challenge the monarch on a matter falling within the scope of the prerogative, no positive law would protect him. Literally an “outlaw,” he had to live by whatever lights his conscience could supply. Cymbeline represents three notable challenges to monarchic authority, each by a subordinate who acts on the basis of moral conviction.

Conspicuously unwise in his toleration of the queen's tyranny, Cymbeline's misgovernment is mended, to a degree, by Cornelius, the queen's physician, and Pisanio, Posthumus's servant, who disobey or in some way contravene the commands of their superiors. They do so deceptively and without attracting attention. A third, Belarius, Cymbeline's soldier-courtier, represents a more critical case. His abduction of Cymbeline's sons is actually an instance of treason; it makes him an “outlaw” (4.2.138). It also ends by preserving the kingdom: helped by Posthumus, who leaves the Roman army and disguises himself as a British “peasant,” Belarius and his two foster sons rescue Cymbeline in battle and defeat the Romans. There is then no political or material reason that Rome should continue to collect British tribute; that Cymbeline pays tribute is therefore a political paradox and only comprehensible on moral grounds. It indicates that the force of a word, a verbal contract, inscribed in conscience, can supersede the weight of circumstance, registered in moments of history. The play concludes by a series of acknowledgments of contracts broken and then renewed. They are all reviewed in light of the most imposing of contracts made by the Word of God for the generations to come and continuously present in Cymbeline by a consciousness of the “time when” the action of the play is represented as having taken place.

Having fought for Britain in disguise, Posthumus allows himself to be captured as a Roman. He has accepted Pisanio's proof of Imogen's death, a “bloody cloth,” and, although he accuses Pisanio of a bad conscience (the “bond” of service requires only obedience to “just” commands [5.1.1-7]), he focuses on his own breach of faith. It justifies his imprisonment in a Roman “bondage” whose only release is in death, a “liberty” from the consciousness of sin (5.4.3-11).¹⁴ The language of calculation is voiced again but only to be rejected, not once but twice. Posthumus wishes to render his “whole self” to satisfy a debt that he could legally discharge by the payment of a mere fraction (18-28), but Jupiter, who governs such business, is disposed to make gifts rather than engage in commerce. Posthumus's dream of the Leonati, his parents and his brothers, indicates how forcefully a moral arithmetic determines his sense of personal worth. He “sees” them plead with Jupiter to spare him: his pitiable birth, his orphanhood, his virtue in Imogen's eyes, his undeserved exile, Iachimo's treachery all speak to their claims for consideration. Posthumus experiences the god's answer in a more sensuous and palpable way.

Jupiter's descent appears anomalous in its fusion of moral decorum and visual hyperbole—the god, seated on an eagle, was presumably lowered from the rafters to the sound of thunder and the smell of sulphur (114-19). The scene makes sense, however, as the moment at which the two “matters” of wager and chronicle, marriage and empire, are brought together. Jupiter settles the matter of the wager, for which Posthumus believes he should die, by rejecting the Leonati's claims for justice but bettering their requests by displaying mercy. He answers them by a Christian logic: “Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift, / The more delay'd, delighted” (101-02). What is exchanged in the balance is the god's benefit of a human life; Posthumus will not only live but prosper. Jupiter's actions also represent the matter of chronicle by their reference to two prophetic accounts of the future British empire.

The divine eagle, actually a prop and figuratively the god's power, is a reminder that Posthumus shadows an imperial self. It is also the central figure in the Roman soothsayer's prophecy of victory. Misinterpreted at first, the true meaning of the prophecy is not apparent before the last moments of the play. Jupiter's eagle in 5.4 recalls the first of these interpretations in 4.2:

I saw Jove's bird, the Roman eagle, wing'd
From the spongy south to this part of the west,
There vanish'd in the sunbeams, which portends
(Unless my sins abuse my divination)
Success to th' Roman host.

(348-52)

As the audience can now recognize, the truth in the soothsayer's prophecy is mingled with falsehood: the British have in fact defeated the “Roman host.” The eagle which has signaled success seems to have altered his Roman and traditional character to embrace a British and novel presence. Plausible in light of figurations of James's own imperial monarchy in contemporary Stuart iconography,¹⁵ the identification of a triumphant British eagle flying west anticipates the conflation of empires, Roman and British (a version of the classic notion of translatio imperii), imagined in the play's concluding vision of history.

The tablet Jupiter leaves with Posthumus establishes a direct link between the marriage story and its place in the future history of empire. It tells of two fortunes, one of “a lion's whelp … to himself unknown,” who will “without seeking find, and be embrac'd by a piece of tender air,” and the other of “a stately cedar” whose “lopp'd branches … which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow.” These events will signal the end of Posthumus's “miseries,” and the “peace and plenty” of Britain (5.4.138-45). Ignorant of the language of Scripture and pro-Union literature, Posthumus cannot know that “the lion's whelp” or Judah signifies the Scottish inheritance; or that embraced by “air” (or revived), it will be at one with Britain, and the two, the heirs of Scotland and Britain, will form one empire. Nor could he guess that the “old stock” of a “stately cedar” (a tree of state or royal dynasty), which is about to be revivified by the return of its branches, constructs an image favored by pro-Union apologists. His own situation gives no hint as to how Jupiter's words will be fulfilled; they are not only literally riddling but dramatically enigmatic. Posthumus is being asked to have faith in what he cannot find plausible or even quite understand.

The final scene, dazzling in its revelations, realizes the terms of the prophecy as if to dramatize the hand of providence in human history. Those who have been lost are found: Imogen, Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus. Offenders are recognized and pardoned: Posthumus, Iachimo, Belarius, Guiderius. The courageous are praised: the four “peasants” who saved Cymbeline. Villains are named and dismissed: the queen and Cloten. And law is celebrated. It is imagined less as the natural law of mortality, registered in generation, and more as the divine law of keeping one's word, apprehended by conscience. It is not fully recognized before Posthumus recognizes Imogen; it is only realized when Cymbeline exercises his absolute power of pardon and honors Cassibelan's agreement by paying Roman tribute.

When Imogen identifies Posthumus and tries to stop his grief, he sees her merely as a page boy and knocks her down: “There lie thy part” (5.5.229). His impulsive beating of a subordinate testifies to his continuing tendency to objectify whoever is beneath him in rank or by virtue of gender. The “staggers” that then afflict him are both retribution and a lesson (233); he is put down because in victorious Britain status is to be conferred by kinds of virtue. Imogen's response is enigmatic, but it rectifies their relations:

Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?
Think that you are upon a rock, and now
Throw me again.

(261-63)

Her words reflect her history as faithful and Fidele; they also imply her chaste sexuality.¹⁶ Posthumus responds appropriately by asking her, now his “soul,” to be fruitful (5.5.264) and thereby recalls her complaint that Cymbeline, by exiling Posthumus, had “like the tyrannous breathing of the north, / [Shaken] all our buds from growing” (1.4.36-37). By calling Imogen his soul, Posthumus rejects the notion of her as a pricey item and renews the terms of betrothal. He also experiences a more pervasive conversion of spirit in which Cymbeline then finds inspiration.

When Cymbeline orders the execution of his Roman captives, including Lucius, in order to appease the kinfolk of slaughtered Britons, he appeals to an ancient code of retributive justice that defied the usual practice of bargaining for ransom. By refusing to negotiate with the Romans, Cymbeline exercises his absolute authority and power to refuse pardon or anything comparable to pardon. His wisdom in doing so is, however, called into question when Posthumus pardons Iachimo, who has confessed his part in promoting Posthumus's faithless wager: “my heavy conscience sinks my knee … [take] the bracelet of the truest princess / That ever swore her faith” (5.5.414-18). Posthumus becomes a model of prerogative rule, telling Iachimo, “Kneel not to me: / The power that I have on you, is to spare you,” to which Cymbeline responds, “Nobly doom'd! / We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law: / Pardon's the word to all” (418-23). This change in policy illustrates more than a presumptively benign exercise of the monarch's absolute power. By associating his “freeness” specifically with the prerogative power to pardon, that is, by not making the grander and more extensive claims of a “free and absolute” monarch (as, for example, they were expressed by James I), Cymbeline tacitly invokes the political relations of a constitutionalist monarchy.

His moment of self-reflection coincides with his recognition of his “son-in-law,” not only as his daughter's husband but as one of the four “peasants” whose resistance to an imperial force was the occasion of his own salvation. To acknowledge Posthumus as Imogen's consort signals in a formal way what the action has already established: that Cymbeline must abandon and indeed has abandoned plans for the incestuous marriage he had earlier envisaged. To learn his son-in-law's “freeness”—in the sense of his freedom to resist even the authority and power from which he, an outlaw, has no legal recourse—also constitutes a warning. Absolute authority and power are absolute only to a point: the monarch is not a god. Beyond positive law and the “auncient constitution,” the subject has a footing in Nature that makes contingent even the prerogative. Cymbeline, as Caesar's subject, benefits from this resistance, which validates, in turn, his respect for conscience and contract. Cymbeline as king of Britain and prospectively emperor of the west is therefore in a position to arrive at the “wisdom” Fleming had indicated was the only guarantee that the prerogative would be exercised to the benefit of the subject. As Fleming's decision and Saltern's treatise reveal, the common law leaves the subject vulnerable to the monarch's absolute will. Cymbeline dramatizes the limitation of that will by a resistance that gets its strength and inspiration from the “outlaw” in natural law.

The soothsayer's interpretation of Jupiter's tablet confirms that what has just happened on stage is the result of a divine intention; it establishes what those characters who had been made helpless by their own confusion (especially Pisanio) had hoped for: the heavens working in and through history. The soothsayer's re-interpretation of his own vision of the Roman eagle's flight west obviously speaks both to the fact that Rome has not won the kind of victory he had earlier foreseen but has secured the tribute she had requested in the first place. It alludes by figures of thought and of speech to the forces both personal and numinous that have resolved the conflict between Rome and Britain. Its explanatory power is the more important because Cymbeline himself gives no reason why the queen's argument for rejecting tribute, to which he did not in any case subscribe, is no longer good, nor does he explain why he is no longer convinced that his own position on very fundamental English liberties and liberty is correct. He simply “promises” to pay Caesar “our wonted tribute” (463). In effect, he repeats Cassibelan's promise—a promise that he must now regard as holding good despite the fact that the circumstances in which it was first made no longer obtain.

Cymbeline's decision to honor his ancestor's verbal contract is plausible only if he has accepted what he earlier rejected: a word given in good faith has a force in conscience. What guarantees its privilege is both in Nature and in the Word, the hidden subject of the soothsayer's new interpretation of the Roman eagle:

                                                            For the Roman eagle,
From south to west on wing soaring aloft,
Lessen'd herself and in the beams o' the sun
So vanish'd; which foreshadow'd our princely eagle,
Th' imperial Caesar, should again unite
His favour with the radiant Cymbeline,
Which shines here in the west.

(471-77)

British victory and Roman success coincide in a moment at which imperial rule is both enlarged and reduced—enlarged by assimilating a western people, reduced by light from a sun in the west. The eagle's fabled vision—said to be able to look into the sun—becomes one with the radiance it seeks. Literal historicism opens a figuratively contrived perspective on salvation history when the soothsayer's words are read as puns: thus the Roman eagle “lessen'd” (that is, “lessoned”) herself in the “sun” (that is, the Son) and so “vanish'd.” The condition of this Roman lesson—the eclipse of Caesar before God—would therefore appear to be the precondition of the translatio imperii, which is clearly alluded to as Caesar's “favour” to “radiant” Cymbeline. Cymbeline literally pays tribute to the Roman Caesar; figuratively, however, he pays tribute to that lessoned or instructed emblem of imperial rule by which he must now, that is, in the future the play looks forward to, agree to govern. Under the aegis of the Word, this new imperialism paradoxically guarantees the liberties and liberty on which Cymbeline had originally insisted. It leaves the Britons as “naturalized” Romans,¹⁷ the tribute they owe to Caesar paid not from the abject position of a conquered people but granted in conscientious observance of a contract. Tribute paradoxically signals their freedom, not their servitude. It also casts Cymbeline in the self-reflexive light that according to virtually all theories of monarchy, whether absolutist or constitutional, was supposed to show him how to rule. His status as subject, by way of fictions of accident, deprivation, or sympathetic identification, provides a mirror in which he can see the effects of his authority and power. Enabling these exchanges is the contractualism effected by the human word and legitimated by divine law represented in the Word.

Notes

1. See Holinshed 1:478-79; Geoffrey of Monmouth, De origine et Gestis Brittanorum 1.26, qtd. in Moffet 209; John Stow, Chronicles of England 35, qtd. in Geller 243. See also Spenser 2.50.

2. For suggestions on topicality in Cymbeline, see Marcus.

3. For details on marriage law, see Stone, Road to Divorce 51-58; see also Stone, The Family 30-37. On the play's representation of sexuality in general, and some aspects of the marriage contract in particular, see Bergeron. See also Thompson.

4. On women as objects in a market, see Hutson. For the inventoried female body, see Parker. For the theater and market activity, see Agnew.

5. Posthumus's suit is later assumed, both literally and figuratively, by Cloten, who incarnates the spirit of mercantilism even more crudely than Iachimo. He buys music in order to “penetrate” her (that is, he buys an “air”), and he sees marriage as a way to get rich (2.3.7-8, 11-18, 81-82). He tells Imogen that her “contract” with Posthumus is null because he is a “base wretch,” and she cannot be allowed the “enlargement” available to “meaner parties” who “knit their souls … in [a] self-figur'd knot” (2.3.114-21); that is, her marriage must find its social and material correlatives.

6. John Thornborough argued that England and Scotland were “at first both but one. [But] … it pleased God, for sinne of people, to breake those Bands … to dissolve the brotherhoode of Israell and Iuda” and invoked Zech. 11.14: “Then brake I asunder mine other staffe, euen the Bandes, that I might dissolue the brotherhode betwene Iudah and Israel.” Explaining Zechariah, Thornborough refers to Ezek. 37.19: “Thus said the Lord God, Beholde, I wil take the tre of Ioseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellowes, and wil put them with him euen with the tre of Iudah, and make them one tre, and they shalbe one in mine hand.” Later, James is represented as a single “Vine,” divulged by “the inserting and fast grafting of each branch and al fruite into his owne Royal person, as into a fruitfull and flourishing vine, even into the head of the whole body” (cf. Jer. 23.5-8) (The Ioiefull and Blessed Reuniting A, Av, A2). In an earlier treatise Thornborough asked, “Are not diuerse boughes from one tree, and all they of one and the same substance? And may not diuers people vnder one Prince, though they are deuided in persons, yet be vnited in lawes?” (A Discovrse Plainely Prouing C3v). See also Barnabe Barnes's treatise, in which he notes that the “auncient tree” of Britain has been grafted with Danish, French and Saxon branches, collected in the person of James I: “these seuerall plants graciously sprout out on high, like the sweet Cedars in Salomons forrests: which shortly by transportation or inoculation of their sprigs into other kingdomes may beare rule and preheminence in all the goodliest gardens of the world” (L3v). For the iconography of the cedar in Cymbeline, see Simonds 241-43.

7. Cymbeline's refusal to pay tribute is not mentioned in Holinshed's chronicles. See Rossi.

8. To illustrate Henrician imperialism, John Guy quotes the preamble to the Act of Appeals: “Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience; [the king] being also institute and furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with plenary, whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction” (24 Hen. VIII c. 12; Guy 67). For an extended examination of Cymbeline in light of Stuart church/state relations, see Hamilton 128-62.

9. b. 2, 44.2.2; ed. D'Entrèves, 180-81.

10. This text reproduces that of the Opera omnia (1540). For a modern English translation, see The Education of a Christian Prince. The idea of Christian obligation is expressed to a different purpose by William Tyndale; see his The Obedience of a Christian Man.

11. Fortescue compares English with French subjects and finds the former rich, free, and taxable, and the latter poor, lacking justice, and likely to rebel: “Ffor nothyng mey make [a] people to arise but lakke of gode, or lakke of justice. But yet sertaynly when thay lakke gode thai woll aryse, sayng that thai lakke justice” (140). For the concept of revenue before the Great Contract (1610), see Holmes.

12. For Bate's case, see Oakley.

13. Bate's case therefore characterized the monarch's power as a “mystery”; to the extent that this allowed him not to give a reason for his actions, it gave rise to parliamentary resentment. See Judson 159-60.

14. This “bondage” is to what Posthumus recognizes as sin; it is to be distinguished from the obligations of parties to a contract. “Liberty” from the first comes with grace; mutual freedoms are the condition of the second. For a different view, see Lawrence.

15. For a literary representation of this iconography, see especially Barnes, who illustrates James I's monarchy by allusions to an eagle and the sun: James is “hyeroglyphically represented by the figure of the sun” and the “eagle,” who looking into the “Sunne,” finds “miracles within that sanctified orbe of bright vertue.” The eagle is also “shadowed in Phoebus or Apollo, bearing also with him the thunderbolts of Iupiter (who mystically reueileth soveraigne Maiestie) to grinde, burne, and consume into powder the violence of his enemies” (par. iii, iiii.v, A). For the self-representation of James I, see Goldberg.

16. J. M. Nosworthy sees that the “rock” Posthumus must think he stands on is that to which he anchors later (5.5.394), that is, Imogen herself. Hamilton reads these lines as an intervention in the debate on church and state under James I (147).

17. Works from 1606 to 1608 by Francis Bacon—including an early version of his essay “Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain” (1612), which is entitled “Of the Greatnesse of Kingdomes”—take up the prospect of a British empire created not by conquest but by trade and commerce (12: 376-78). It is typically the province of a tough and poor citizenry, uninterested in luxury and disciplined by a rural life. In “Of the Greatnesse of Kingdomes” Bacon returns to a topic he addressed as early as 1606 in a speech to Commons (13: 221-23)—the need for restraint in taxation: “The blessing of Iudah and Issachar will neuer meet, to be both the Lions whelpe and the Asse laid betweene burthens: Neither will a people ouercharged with tributes, bee euer fit for Empire. Nobilitie & Gentlemen multiplying in too great a proportion, maketh the common subiect grow to bee a pesant and base swaine driuen out of heart, and but the Gentlemans laborer … take away the middle people, & you take away the infantery, which is the nerue of an Armie. … For it is the Plough that yeeldeth the best soldier; but how? maintained in plentie and in the hand of owners, and not of meere laborers” (“Of the Greatnesse of Kingdomes,” 12: 377-78). In its final form, published in 1625, Bacon's treatise on empire puts a special emphasis on Rome's peaceful conquests by naturalization: “you will say that it was not the Romans that spread upon the world, but it was the world that spread upon the Romans; and that was the sure way of greatness (“Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” 12: 182).

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