SOURCE: Hunt, Maurice. “Dismemberment, Corporal Reconstruction, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline.” Studies in Philology 99, no. 4 (fall 2002): 404-31.

[In the following essay, Hunt suggests that Shakespeare's use of corporal metaphors implies that body politics is a core theme in Cymbeline.]

Certain verses in Shakespeare's Cymbeline suggest that the early modern religio-political idea of the body politic is relevant for understanding this late tragicomedy.¹ The two distinct strains composing this idea complicate my argument in this essay. The religious component of the body politic motif can be traced to New Testament passages such as Romans 12.1-8 and 1 Corinthians 12.4-13. “For as in one body we have many members,” we read in the former passage, “and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (New Standard Version). Even as each member of the human body performs a specialized function that preserves and augments that body, so the different gifts of individual persons maintain and build up the body of Christ: “To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. … For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” “Until the Protestant Reformation,” Jonathan Gil Harris remarks, the “use of organic political metaphor in England often involved little more than minimal refinement of Saint Paul's analogy between the body and members of the early Christian church.”² In transforming the Pauline body of Christ into a metaphor for the ideal nation-state, Tudor writers emphasized the division and specialization of labor among individuals constituting the proper arms, legs, heart, brain, and other members of the body politic. The Archbishop of Canterbury's vivid word picture of the harmonious beehive in Henry V registers this emphasis in a memorably politicized Shakespearean version of the corporal motif (1.2.182-208). The sixteenth-century transformation of the Pauline body politic entailed a radical contradiction, succinctly focused in the following autocratic declaration of King Henry VIII: “‘This realm of England is an empire … governed by one Supreme Head and King … unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people … be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural humble obedience.’”³ Gone in this pronouncement is the egalitarian spirit of the Pauline body of Christ, the implied democratic membership of function, replaced by a hierarchical order in which a royal but mortal head commands “‘next to God’” the obedience of the members of the body politic in their various duties.⁴ The obedience commanded in this case was not only political but also spiritual. In the words of Leonard Barkan, Henry VIII's “takeover of the English church was an act which subsumed all those spiritual and ecclesiastical aspects of the corpus mysticum”—the Pauline body of Christ—“into the narrower sphere of the body politic, of which he was without question the head. In this way the traditionally fluid relationship in England between head and members … made it possible for all the limbs to be completely subsumed in the head. The confusion of bodies politic and mystical caused the integrity of the anthropomorphic image to break down completely.”⁵ One can assume that early seventeenth-century Londoners, who formed the audiences of Cymbeline, felt a conflict in this regard (if not this particular confusion), for King James—evoking the terms of the biblical idea of Christ as bridegroom—“had told the English Parliament: ‘I am the Husband, and the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and it is my body.’”⁶ Concerning this famous 1604 royal utterance, Erica Sheen asserts that “[w]hen the body takes upon itself to reorder the orientation of privilege implicit in this metaphor [of King James], there is a potential for violence which is far from transcendental.”⁷

According to Harris, the Tudor apologist Thomas Starkey, in his Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535), replicates the conflict between the Pauline belief that “order can be established within the social body as a result of its constituent members acknowledging their innate interdependence and unity” and the fact that “members of bodies natural and politic share a pathological predispensation to imbalance, discord, and unruliness, the corrective to which is the beneficent, yet decidedly authoritarian, intervention of the soul and/or ruler.”⁸ Shakespeare introduces this conflict, or dilemma, in a play contemporary with Cymbeline: Coriolanus. The relevant passage includes Menenius's notorious fable of the belly and the dialogue surrounding it. In act 1 of this Roman tragedy, starving citizens accuse the patricians of hoarding grain. Menenius rationalizes this injustice by equating the stomach with the patrician senate, the storehouse of foodstuffs and the distributor of nourishment and life to the other dependent Roman members:

The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye,
The counselor heart, the arm our soldier,
Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter.(9)

This portrayal of the members, however, is that of irreverent First Citizen, who interrupts Menenius's parable with these epithets implying that the metaphors of the body politic are predictable and thus a bit trite, commonplace. When Menenius fails to realize that the hoarding patricians of Rome represent the opposite of the life-giving, distributing belly of his fable, Shakespeare puts into question the truth and usefulness of his character's concept of the body politic. Fierce, bloody Coriolanus may be a strong arm protecting the body politic of Rome, but because of his arrogant pride and anger he is also a carbuncle, a poison in the body politic's blood, that must be purged—exiled—through the city gates, if Rome is to become a healthy organism. A mutinous Rome, ruled by self-serving patricians, lacking an actual head, and devoid of the magnificent mailed “arm” Coriolanus, could hardly be regarded as an exemplary body politic. Absent is a charitable, cooperative spirit associated with the later Christian body politic. Shakespeare thus in Coriolanus begs a question for his depiction of the body politic of King Cymbeline's Britain: “Can an authoritative top-down, politicized body politic—a given of Shakespeare's England—function in the charitable, self-sacrificing spirit of the Pauline body politic?” The pagan setting of Cymbeline does not automatically preclude a positive answer to this question. Shakespeare throughout his career for a variety of purposes incorporated Christian ideas into his pagan plays; the Christian epistemology of Troilus and Cressida is a lesser known yet significant example of this practice.¹⁰ Moreover, we shall see that Shakespeare followed Edmund Spenser and other contemporary writers in associating the reign of King Cymbeline with the Nativity of Christ, which was judged to have occurred during it. This association invites Shakespeare's signature introduction of Christian concepts in a pagan context to a degree that the republican Roman setting of Coriolanus does not.

Answering the question formulated near the end of the previous paragraph involves reconstituting several bodies in Cymbeline that are figuratively and on at least one occasion literally dismembered as a result of fracturing within the body politic. Some of these bodies are individual such as those of Posthumus and Cloten, others are corporate such as the married body of Imogen and Posthumus and the martial body of the British troops. Much of the following analysis of Cymbeline concerns the dismemberment and reconstitution of these bodies, a description necessary for a full understanding of the ill effects produced by the malfunction of a historically important British body politic as well as of the Shakespearean means by which it was healed and integrated within a larger, providential whole. But first the presence of the body politic motif in Cymbeline needs to be established beyond dispute.

Two passages in act 5 of the play explicitly evoke the concept of the body politic. Concerning captured Posthumus Leonatus, who has fought the Britons disguised as a Roman, a British captain exclaims,

                                                            Lay hands on him: a dog,
A leg of Rome shall not return to tell
What crows have peck'd them here.(11)

Later in this act, King Cymbeline compliments Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus by likening them to “the liver, heart, and brain of Britain; / By whom (I grant) she lives” (5.5.14-15). This equation retrospectively galvanizes a pun latent in the play in earlier uses of the word “livers.” “We house i' th' rock,” Belarius tells Arviragus and Guiderius, “yet use [heaven] not so hardly / As prouder livers do” (3.3.8-9). Determined to leave Britain in search of her husband Posthumus in Rome, Imogen resolves to “think / There's livers out of Britain” (3.4.141-42). In the second of the three above-cited usages, the rocky cave in which Belarius and Cymbeline's sons live amounts to the body cavity containing the liver.¹² One is tempted to associate each of Britain's primary organs—its “liver, heart, and brain”—with one of the three Welsh characters. In the body politic of Coriolanus, Shakespeare refers to “The counselor heart,” an epithet that at this moment befits Belarius, who repeatedly attempts to counsel Imogen's brothers on the dangers lurking in courts and the virtues of a spartan, country life (3.3.1-27, 44-78).¹³ Belarius reports that Guiderius and Arviragus have different natures. Guiderius responds more vigorously, more completely, to Belarius's war stories, while Arviragus shows a less compulsive, more thoughtful response to them (3.3.86-98). This distinction accords with the fact that Guiderius bravely chooses to alone confront Cloten (4.2.68-70), encountered in the Welsh mountains on a mission to kill Posthumus and rape Imogen, and that Arviragus is the brother to pick up and play Belarius's Orphean stringed instrument and to compose a ravishing elegy to its musical accompaniment (4.2.186-88, 218-29). These differences align Guiderius with the liver and Arviragus with the brain in Belarius's corporate image. Informed Jacobeans subscribed to the classical opinion that the heart was the seat and distributor of the body's vital spirits rather than its blood, which was thought on the authority of Galen to emanate instead from the liver.¹⁴ F. David Hoeniger notes that “the production of abundant, red and warm blood from the liver was … believed to arouse valor. Fabian tells Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night that Lady Olivia has pretended to ignore him only ‘to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver’ (3.2.18-19).”¹⁵ Guiderius certainly is all fire and brimstone confronting Cloten, and Arviragus's creativity surely has an intellectual cast.

But one must be careful not to turn these associations into rigid equations. “Have not I / An arm as big as thine? a heart as big?” Guiderius asks defiant Cloten (4.2.76-77). The majority of psychological treatises in the later Renaissance made the heart the seat of all or most of the passions, including the heroic passions.¹⁶ While Fabian places fire in the heart and brimstone in the liver, the two qualities figuratively rendered seem virtually the same and auditors conclude that Guiderius's reference to his “big” heart is to his swelling courage. The point is not so much that characters in Cymbeline maintain a single, hard-and-fast association with an organ or member of the body as that dramatic context dictates shifting associations important for the articulation of a national (and multinational) body politic in this late play. The notion that Britain could be an articulated body with a bony structure gets reinforced by the Queen, who figures the nation “As Neptune's park, ribb'd and pal'd in / With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters” (3.1.20-21). Heard in the context of our analysis, the adjective “ribb'd” gains added meaning. Granted these evocations of a body politic in Cymbeline, playgoers and readers on subsequent experiences with the text become more attuned to the body politic as an informing principle of dramatic organization and interpretation. And if the playgoer or reader comes to Cymbeline fresh from seeing or reading Coriolanus, he or she wonders whether the body politic of Britain can function more harmoniously, more healthily, than that of republican Rome does.¹⁷

Certain speeches near the end of Cymbeline suggest that the incorporation of several organic parts into a larger whole represents Shakespeare's goal in the play. Referring to Romans and Britons, First Gaoler says, “I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good” (5.4.205-6). More specifically, part of Jupiter's riddle involves the following condition: “and when from a stately cedar shall be lopp'd 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” (5.4.140-45). Later we learn that

The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline,
Personates thee: and thy lopp'd branches point
Thy two sons forth: who, by Belarius stol'n,
For many years thought dead, are now reviv'd,
To the majestic cedar join'd; whose issue
Promises Britain peace and plenty.

(5.5.454-59)

Portrayed this way, Arviragus and Guiderius are severed limbs grafted to grow again on the trunk of their father into a living organic body. Thus passages near the conclusion of Cymbeline point toward the reconstitution of a body politic. At the play's beginning, however, the body of the kingdom of Britain lacks a proper head.

Throughout his career, Shakespeare variously depicted the early modern idea of the king's two bodies, of the royal mortal body of an individual king and the royal eternal body that he presumably inherited through divine grace.¹⁸ Sometimes the gracious royal body was conflated with the body—the land—of Britain itself.¹⁹ In Shakespeare's Elizabethan history King John, the two bodies virtually coincide, with the ironic difference that John speaks of his mortal rather than gracious body. Confronting a French invasion and a civil revolt over his complicity in Arthur's death, John exclaims,

My nobles leave me, and my state is braved,
Even at my gates, with ranks of foreign pow'rs;
Nay, in the body of this fleshly land,
This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath,
Hostility and civil tumult reigns
Between my conscience and my cousin's death.

(4.2.243-48)

Mutinies within the macrocosm of the body of the land and the microcosm of John's royal body do not simply mirror but also affect each other. The same is true in King Cymbeline's Britain. Considered from a patriarchal Jacobean perspective, Cymbeline's fault involves losing mastery over his evil Queen, a mannish, bloodthirsty woman who rules him, even plots against him. His mistake involves letting destructive passions, represented by the Queen, overturn his male royal reason, with the result that the kingdom wants the effective functioning of its ordained head. Shakespeare in this respect follows an influential precedent in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590, 1593), wherein Sir Philip Sidney showed a weak king, Basilius, abdicating rule because of superstitious fear of an oracle and deferring to Gynecia, his wife, and especially to Cecropia, his evil sister-in-law (a likely prototype for the characterization of the Queen in Cymbeline). More important, King James in The trve Lawe of free Monarchies (1598, 1603) had focused on the phenomenon of the body politic's loss of its authoritarian royal head, in a conception with great relevance for Cymbeline:

[T]he proper office of a King towardes his subiectes agrees very well with the office of the head towardes the bodie, and all members thereof. For from the head, being the seate of judgement, proceedeth the care and foresight of guiding, and preuenting all euill that may come to the bodie, or any parte thereof. The head cares for the bodie: so doth the King for his people. As the discourse and direction flowes from the head, and the execution according therunto belongs to the rest of the members, euerie one according to their office: so is it betwixt a wise Prince, and his people. … But what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmity that can fall to it, be cut off, I leaue it to the readers judgement.²⁰

Cymbeline's loss of his reasonable, patriarchal head in effectively giving the reins of rule to his Queen occasions his nation's loss of its political head. In terms of a multinational body politic, Rome could be said to represent the proper head of Britain. Pagan Britain has been a member of the Roman body politic, an incorporation figured by King Cassibelan's agreement to pay Caesarean Rome a tribute of three thousand pounds annually (3.3.1-10). But Cymbeline's Queen peevishly dissuades him from this payment, with the result that the body politic of Britain becomes cut off from its head, the civilizing force of the ancient world—Rome. Cymbeline replicates this dismemberment, this losing of head, in his blind fits of anger, most notably over his daughter Imogen's and Posthumus's private marriage. Mindlessly raging, Cymbeline commands Posthumus out of his court and Britain, projecting the severing into two individuals of the corporate body of man and wife figured by marriage as Jacobeans understood that institution.²¹ When Cymbeline tells Imogen's husband, “If after this command thou fraught the court / With thy unworthiness, thou diest. Away! / Thou'rt poison to my blood” (1.2.57-59), he creates the image of a toxin in the bloodstream of the royal body, an impostume (note the pun “impostume”/“Posthumus”) that must be expelled (exiled). This compulsion is felt, however, only by the essentially removed head of a drifting body politic.

Both Imogen and Posthumus—the potential queen and royal consort of Britain—consider themselves as one body rent apart by his banishment. In the moments after their separation, this rending registers on a metaphoric level as the progressive figurative transformation of Posthumus's body into things of little value—worth so small that it finally dissolves. Pisanio tells Imogen concerning the embarked Posthumus that

                                                                                for so long
As he could make me with this eye, or ear,
Distinguish him from others, he did keep
The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief,
Still waving, as the fits and stirs of's mind
Could best express how slow his soul sail'd on,
How swift his ship.
IMO.:
                                                  Thou shouldst have made him
As little as a crow, or less, ere left
To after-eye him.
PIS.:
                                                                                Madam, so I did.
I would have broke mine eye-strings, crack'd them, but
To look upon him, till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle:
Nay, followed him, till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air: and then
Have turn'd mine eye, and wept.

(1.3.8-22)

The vanishing of Posthumus's body in this passage underscores not simply a lover's absence; it also presages loss of a corporate married body.

The disintegration of the married body of Imogen and Posthumus is stressed symbolically during the wager scenes in Posthumus's betting of the ring Imogen has given him and in Iachimo's theft of Imogen's bracelet and use of it as evidence of her imputed unchastity.²² Shakespeare alludes to the incorporation of two bodies into one married body through Posthumus's way of saying that his ring—Imogen's gift—is priceless. “I will wage against your gold, gold to it,” he tells Iachimo; “my ring I hold dear as my finger, 'tis part of it” (1.5.129-30). As a synecdoche for Imogen, the ring implies that she and her husband have become one sacramental body. Thus when Posthumus foolishly says, “I dare you to this match: here's my ring” (1.5.142-43), he figuratively rends apart that body, adumbrating his later violent desire to have Imogen murdered. A finger ring worn by a man sometimes obscenely signifies in Jacobean literature the lady's pudendum.²³ Considered in this context, Posthumus's removal of his finger from Imogen's ring represents his sexual withdrawal from her and her isolation.²⁴ Evocation of this earthy context is crucial for grasping the similar significance of Iachimo's theft of sleeping Imogen's bracelet. Like the ring, the “slippery” (2.2.34) bracelet gains an obscene sexual connotation when Iachimo steals it, his act amounting to a symbolic rape of a defenseless woman in her bedchamber. These connotations account for the intensity of Posthumus's rage at Iachimo's later offer of the bracelet as evidence of Imogen's adultery. In the symbolic dramatic business of the ring and bracelet, playgoers witness not only the disjoining of a married body but also the figurative dismemberment of Imogen's sexuality. This dismemberment finds a chilling voice in Posthumus's cry, “O, that I had her here, to tear her limb-meal [limb-from-limb]” (2.4.147). His cruel wish finds its complement in Imogen's despairing exclamation, uttered after she learns of her husband's murderous plot against her, that

Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,
And, for I am richer than to hang by th' walls,
I must be ripp'd:—to pieces with me!

(3.4.52-54)

This self-lacerating sentiment is perhaps the most poignant expression of the many figurative and literal rendings of the human body in Cymbeline.

While the responsibility for Posthumus's and Imogen's behavior and emotions must be laid at their feet, the catalyst for the figurative dismemberments of different bodies associated with the couple—it is worth reminding ourselves—is a blind act of the effectively separated head of the body politic: Cymbeline's decree of banishment. It serves to trigger and unleash a series of destructive emotions within Imogen and especially within Posthumus. The several distortions and rendings of individual bodies in the play could be said to mirror a primary dislocation within the king. These mutations include the apparent incorporation of one body within another. In several key instances, Cymbeline is a play of body possession, of the apparent incorporation of one body within another.²⁵ This is most obvious when Imogen, upon close inspection, cannot tell the difference between Cloten's headless body and the torso and limbs of her husband Posthumus. Imogen once angrily told Cloten that Posthumus's “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.

(2.3.132-35)

Insulted by this hyperbole, fixating upon Imogen's reference to the “mean'st garment” of Posthumus, Cloten persuades Pisanio to give him the clothing that Posthumus wore when he took leave of Imogen (3.5.124-30). Cloten plans to wear these clothes on a journey to Wales to find Posthumus and Imogen, who he assumes are together there, kill him by cutting off his head before her eyes (4.1.15-17), and then cruelly ravish her in the terms of her previous hyperbole. But through a rough kind of justice Cloten suffers this fate himself at the hands of Guiderius. The justice here is subtle. Cloten has snobbishly believed that clothes make the man (e.g., 4.2.80-86). Posthumus's clothes precisely fit him (4.1.1-3), making him a man in one sense deserving death for the murder of Imogen that Posthumus has ordered and believes effected. Imogen's identification of the headless body derives not just from the clothes of Posthumus that Cloten has donned to humiliate her during his projected rape but also from her intimate knowledge of Posthumus's body:

I know the shape of's leg: this is his hand:
His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh:
The brawns of Hercules; but his Jovial face—
Murder in heaven! How—? 'Tis gone. …

(4.2.309-12)

Many commentators on the play have remarked the dramatic appropriateness of this confusion of bodies, for Posthumus's homicidal rage toward Imogen closely resembles Cloten's rapacious mood. It is as though the play's protagonist has grown a boorish Cloten within himself. Like Cymbeline, Posthumus could be said to have lost his head in a mindless savage rage. In this sense, Cloten literally loses what Posthumus has figuratively lost and undergoes what the protagonist figuratively deserves (if believing that a commissioned murder has been accomplished deserves the death penalty).

The suggestion of the incorporation, or conflation, of bodies does not end with Posthumus and Cloten. In many respects, Iachimo resembles Cloten, not simply in his egotism, cynicism, and general nastiness but particularly in the greasy nature of his desire for Imogen. His hovering over her scantily clothed body, his allusion to Tarquin and “The chastity he wounded” (2.2.14), his admiring the “mole cinque-spotted” on her left breast, and especially his theft of her bracelet constitute a symbolic rape, whose effect in one respect is the same as a literal one: the loss of a wife's married chastity in her husband's mind. If there is a Cloten within Posthumus, there is an Iachimo also—a suggestion tenuously made by Iachimo's emergence from the trunk in Imogen's bedchamber. Retrospectively considered, this trunk and the trunk of Cloten's body in the Welsh mountains begin to merge in the play's design, with the result that Iachimo becomes identified with Cloten and both with Posthumus. In Posthumus's dream-vision of act 5, the ghost of his father Sicilius asks the god Jupiter,

Why did you suffer Iachimo,
          slight thing of Italy,
To taint his nobler heart and brain
          with needless jealousy?

(5.4.63-66)

Iachimo taints Posthumus's “nobler heart and brain” with fierce sexual jealousy and cynicism about women's constancy because in one sense Imogen's husband could be said to harbor an Iachimo within his trunk.

Imogen herself is not exempt from this phenomenon involving the figurative absorption of one being within another character. After Cloten has drawn Imogen into an escalating angry debate over her dislike of him and the controversial status of her marriage to Posthumus, she exclaims,

                                                            I am sprited with a fool,
Frighted, and anger'd worse. Go bid my woman
Search for a jewel that too casually
Hath left mine arm: it was thy master's.

(2.3.138-41)

Cloten's outrageousness has provoked Imogen to utter her most spiteful language in the play:

                                                                                          Profane fellow,
Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more
But what thou art besides, thou wert too base
To be his groom: thou wert dignified enough,
Even to the point of envy, if 'twere made
Comparative for your virtues to be styled
The under-hangman of his kingdom; and hated
For being preferr'd so well.

(2.3.123-30)

This is the bitter hyperbolic language of Cloten. Imogen is “sprited with a fool, / Frighted, and anger'd worse” in the sense that a foolish, angry Cloten lives within her momentarily, passionately overthrowing her reason and possessing her voice.

Presented this way, the major characters of Cymbeline stand in need of a purge of the Cloten within, and indeed Shakespeare carefully indicates that Cloten will perform this sacrificial function for the world of the play. “Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt,” First Lord tells sweating Cloten early in the play; “the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice” (1.3.1-2). Ironically, Cloten becomes a sacrifice figuratively redeeming Posthumus and cleansing the play's world when he shifts a shirt to wear Posthumus's clothes and is beheaded by Guiderius. Cloten serves as the catalyst for reviving Posthumus's and Imogen's marriage when the sight of Cloten's beheaded body, mistaken for Posthumus's, catapults Imogen into a grief that displaces all other sorrows she feels. In accordance with the dynamic described by Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing (4.1.210-36), Imogen's grief-stricken imagining the ultimate loss of Posthumus causes her before long to devalue and forgive his sins and recover her love for him. Imogen had figuratively dismembered Posthumus when, feeling parts of the body before her, she inventoried “the shape of's leg,” “his hand,” “His foot Mecurial: his Martial thigh: / The brawns of Hercules.” In her imagination she will reconstitute that body into a whole that she yearns to love, to touch and know again in its completeness. Distinct from this imaginative redemption, Cloten's cleansing of the play's world is more allegorically symbolic, representing a first step in the reconstitution of the British body politic.

When Cloten and Guiderius exit, fighting, and Guiderius shortly thereafter re-enters with Cloten's head in his hand, he signifies that a rankling, embossed “head” on a body—a carbuncle—has been excised.²⁶ At least Shakespeare symbolically suggests so within his focus on the reconstitution of a body politic in Cymbeline. Arviragus's words—

                                                                      Poor sick Fidele!
I'll willingly to him; to gain his colour
I'ld let a parish of such Cloten's blood,
And praise myself for charity

(4.2.166-69)

—portray Cloten in terms of bloodletting, the standard Jacobean medical technique for draining the imagined excess of a humor supposedly causing a disease. By having Arviragus suggest that letting blood from Cloten can restore Imogen-as-Fidele to health, Shakespeare confirms our impression that Cloten's characterization in this dramatic context operates allegorically. The notion of a poison gathered to a head pervades Cymbeline, appearing for example in Iachimo's exclamation, “'twas at a feat, O, would / Our viands had been poison'd (or at least / Those which I heaved to head)” (5.5.155-57). In his depravity, Cloten is one of the two most toxic characters in the play's world, his mother the Queen being the other. Shakespeare conflates two distinct contemporary therapies: through the image of bloodletting, Arviragus describes the curative effect of lancing a symbolic festered “head” on the body politic and draining the poison metaphorically condensed in Cloten from that body.²⁷ (Aptly, the Queen dies of a fever, of her own disease, so to say, unmitigated by any medical remedy). The odd word “parish” in proximity to the word “charity” in the above-quoted passage of Arviragus's suggests that the symbolic purgation of Cloten has spiritual benefits for others.

These at first have artistic overtones. Several interpreters of Cymbeline have noticed that Shakespeare associates the circumstances of Cloten's death with that of the divine poet Orpheus.²⁸ Like the head of Orpheus, separated by the female devotees of Bacchus during their mad dismemberment of the poet who forswore women after the second loss of Eurydice, that of Cloten is thrown into a stream that empties into the sea (4.2.150-53). Punning on Cloten's name, Guiderius announces,

I have sent Cloten's clotpoll down the stream,
In embassy to his mother; his body's hostage
For his return.

(4.2.184-86)

Orpheus' severed head, miraculously prophesying and accompanied by his harp, floated to the isle of Lesbos and to his mother, the muse Calliope. Guiderius's pronouncement that Cloten's trunk is hostage for Cloten's return amounts to anti-resurrectional sarcasm. Guiderius, naturally enough, expects no rebirth to occur. But in the “solemn music” that immediately is heard, played offstage by Arviragus on Belarius's long-silent “ingenious instrument,” the divine musician-poet Orpheus is again invoked.²⁹ “Not Hercules / Could have knock'd out [Cloten's] brains,” Guiderius asserts, examining the trophy head, “for he had none” (4.2.114-15). It is as though the lancing of the poison Cloten and the bloodletting that follows symbolically free the more creative brother, Arviragus, from impurities that have hampered ideal music and poetry. It is as though the purgation of the Cloten principle makes possible the ravishing lyricism of Arviragus's elegy for Imogen-as-Fidele (4.1.218-29) as well as, in a more removed sense, the rich pathos of the great dirge “Fear no more the heat o' th' sun” (4.2.258-81). Cloten's sacrifice begs comparison with the other sacrifice of Cymbeline—that of Posthumus's mother, who gave her life for her son during childbirth (5.4.43-47). She unknowingly sacrificed her life so that the heroic consort of the princess of an eventually revitalized, harmonious Britain might be born. This realization prompts us to determine the degree to which Cloten's sacrificial death benefits not simply Welsh art but the body politic as a whole.³⁰

A passage in the midst of act 5 indicates the manner of this sociopolitical cure. Describing the course of the battle, Posthumus speaks to a cowardly British Lord, who fled the field early:

No blame be to you, sir, for all was lost,
But that the heavens fought: the king himself
Of his wings destitute, the army broken,
And but the backs of Britons seen; all flying
Through a strait lane; the enemy full-hearted,
Lolling the tongue with slaught'ring, having work
More plentiful than tools to do't, struck down
Some mortally, some slightly touch'd, some falling
Merely through fear, that the strait pass was damm'd
With dead men, hurt behind, and cowards living
To die with length'ned shame.

(5.3.3-13)

For our purposes, the emphasis here falls upon a “damm'd” (clogged) “strait lane.” This topographical detail comes straight from Shakespeare's source, Holinshed's Chronicles, but in the context of the present argument it gains a thematic relevance. It is as though a major vessel of the martial body of Britain has become clogged by timorousness, by the constriction of cowardly fear.³¹ Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus, assisted by Posthumus dressed in rustic garb, open this blocked passage and cleanse it through their heroic fortitude. An “ancient soldier” suddenly appears:

(An honest one, I warrant) who deserv'd
So long a breeding as his white beard came to,
In doing this for's country. Athwart the lane,
He with two striplings …
Made good the passage, cried to those that fled,
“Our Britains' harts die flying, not our men;
To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards; stand,
Or we are Romans, and will give you that
Like beasts which you shun beastly, and may save
But to look back in frown: stand, stand!” These three,

.....

With their own nobleness, which could have turn'd
A distaff to a lance, gilded pale looks;
Part shame, part spirit renew'd, that some, turn'd coward
But by example (O, a sin in war,
Damn'd in the first beginners) 'gan to look
The way that they did, and to grin like lions
Upon the pikes o' th' hunters. Then began
A stop i' th' chaser; a retire: anon
A rout, confusion thick: forthwith they fly
Chickens, the way which they stoop'd eagles: slaves,
The strides they victors made: and now our cowards
Like fragments in hard voyages became
The life o' th' need: having found the back-door open
Of the unguarded hearts, heavens, how they wound!
Some slain before, some dying, some their friends
O'erborne i' th' former wave, ten chas'd by one,
Are now each one the slaughter-man of twenty:
Those that would die, or ere resist, are grown
The mortal bugs o' th' field.

(5.3.16-51)

Allegorically considered, the tumultuous verse of this passage portrays the removal of a stoppage in the body military and a resurgence in the flow of vital spirits, symbolized by the now-brave British troops, through the alleys of that body. Like physicians, Belarius and Cymbeline's sons “gild” “pale looks”—in early modern terms return a color of health to a diseased body. One could argue that the beheading of the symbolic poisonous Cloten indirectly facilitates this process. While the bravery of Belarius and the two hardy young men springs from their spartan lifestyle in Wales, far away from the mannered court, this virtue flows the more strongly for its having been freed from the toxin represented by Cloten through the previously described figurative purgation of this poison.³² Earlier I suggested that Belarius could at a certain moment represent the heart in a symbolic assignment of organs to the trio of Welsh characters. And we saw that Shakespeare's contemporaries sometimes thought of the heart instead of—or as well as—the liver as the source of valor. Given these associations, auditors note that Belarius in the above-quoted passage is the primary heroic speaker inspiriting cowardly British troops. Considered in the light of his earlier possible association with the heart, his utterance “‘Our Britains' harts die flying, not our men’” gains special significance. The four seventeenth-century folio texts and Nicholas Rowe's three early eighteenth-century editions all print “hearts” rather than “harts” in the line. Alexander Pope, in his 1728 second edition of Shakespeare's plays, first introduced the word, adopted by almost every editor afterwards, that transforms the fleeing British troops into deer.³³ But the folio “hearts” is especially apt in this Shakespearean pun. One heart, a heroic one, reprimands other hearts devoid of valorous passion. Posthumus reports that “having found the back-door open / Of the unguarded hearts, heavens, how [the renewed Britons] wound!” (5.3.45-46). In the phrase “unguarded hearts,” Shakespeare sustains his pun on “hearts”/“harts,” with the difference that, in this case, editors—with one major exception—have printed “hearts” rather than “harts.”³⁴ Their decision is particularly felicitous, for it urges auditors to realize that the British heart has triumphed over the famed Roman organ.

The recovered body military of Britain promises a recovered body politic in Cymbeline. The reconstitution of that body politic proceeds from the incorporation of the body matrimonial and the body royal. In the case of the body matrimonial, reincorporation depends upon Imogen's willingness to forgive Posthumus and love him again, capacities made possible for her by the Shakespearean process of imaginative transvaluation occasioned by profound loss that I described in an earlier paragraph of this essay. This process begins not at the moment she believes Posthumus dead but shortly afterward. The horrifying sight of the body she presumes is Posthumus's sends her into hysterics that, in the loss of all reasonable control, suggest a kind of beheading—or headlessness—as regards Imogen. Like her land, she regains rational order mainly by placing herself in the service of Rome, in her case as a page, a servant, to Lucius.³⁵ This service of Imogen's involves faithful self-sacrifice (as her alias, “Fidele,” implies), a virtue important for her marriage. Imogen too easily believes that an Italian whore has corrupted Posthumus's marriage vows (3.4.50-51). Faithful Pisanio, however, is not so credulous. Shakespeare introduces Pisanio into Cymbeline in part to be a standard of loyalty revealing that not only Posthumus's but also Imogen's faith lacks requisite strength. The good servant correctly suspects that “it cannot be”

But that my master is abus'd: some villain,
Ay, and singular in his art, hath done you both
This cursed injury.

(3.4.121-24)

Imogen on the contrary believes that “[s]ome Roman courtezan” has, and Pisanio must repeat “No, on my life” (3.4.125). By domestically serving Belarius and her brothers,³⁶ and by serving the enlightened Roman Lucius, Imogen-as-Fidele in self-mortifying fashion better prepares herself for the faithful service of marriage, as Posthumus in the meantime has also done offstage. For when he reappears at the beginning of act 5, he reveals that remorse for ordering Imogen's murder has worked to transvalue her supposed sin of adultery into a “little” “wrying” (5.1.5) and herself into a “noble” woman (5.1.10) for whose dear life he offers his own in a hoped-for martyrdom of dying disguised as a base “Briton peasant” (5.1.23) fighting for her kingdom Britain against invading Romans and their allies. Thus Posthumus and Imogen, by the last scene of the play, are ready for matrimonial reincorporation.

There, Shakespeare presents an emblem of the whole, harmonious body matrimonial in the intensity of reunited Imogen and Posthumus's embrace. “Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?” Imogen asks; “Think that you are upon a rock, and now / Throw me again. [Embracing him.]” (5.5.261-63). The metaphor of Posthumus's ecstatic reply suggests the organic wholeness of body signaled by the tight embrace: “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” (5.5.263-64). This rich metaphor implies that Posthumus would sacrifice his life, his pith, in order to cause Imogen to bloom and ripen fully. As for Cymbeline, the reinvigorated Britons' rescue of the lost head of the body politic (captured by the Romans) suggests Cymbeline's functional recovery for his nation. But that recovery will become beneficial only when Cymbeline, like Posthumus, enacts the spirit of self-sacrifice.

Characters' fifth-act impressions of miraculous preservation and providential reunion serve to intensify the integrating natural bonds between the members of the body royal at the same time that this body incorporates other members of the nation. Convinced by Guiderius's wondrous mole that he has recovered his sons, Cymbeline asks, “O, what am I? / A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (5.5.369-71). “O Imogen,” the monarch continues, “Thou hast lost by this a kingdom,” implying by these words that her brothers have a greater claim on the throne than she does. “No, my lord,” Imogen replies:

I have got two worlds by't. O my gentle brothers,
Have we thus met? O, never say hereafter
But I am truest speaker. You call'd me brother,
When I was but your sister: I you brothers,
When ye were so indeed.

(5.5.373-79)

Deeply moved, Cymbeline extends the family royal to include Belarius. “Thou art my brother,” he tells the old man, “so we'll hold thee ever” (5.5.400). “You are my father too,” Imogen tells Belarius, “and did relieve me, / To see this gracious season” (5.5.401-2). Arviragus seizes upon this precedent of familial extension to confer Posthumus's well-merited new identity upon him. “You holp us, sir,” he tells Imogen's husband, “As you did mean indeed to be our brother; / Joy'd are we that you are” (5.5.423-25).

As is the case in the reconstitution of the body matrimonial, arboreal imagery conveys the image of a rearticulated body royal. After seeing Cymbeline miraculously reunited with his long-lost sons, Philarmonus, the Roman seer, pronounces—in a passage previously cited—that

The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline,
Personates thee: and thy lopp'd branches point
Thy two sons forth: who, by Belarius stol'n,
For many years thought dead, are now reviv'd,
To the majestic cedar join'd; whose issue
Promises Britain peace and plenty.

(5.5.454-59)

This holistic recreation of the tree of life indicates the recovery of the British body royal in whose reconstruction the hand of the god Jupiter can be seen. Playgoers can gather the importance of the human body for the providential outcome of Cymbeline from the physical marks that proclaim a person's divine election and that confirm the identity of the reconstituted body royal. Iachimo says that the mole he sees on Imogen's left breast is “cinque-spotted” (2.2.38)—that is to say, five-spotted. Five-spotted, it most naturally assumes the shape of a star, a pentangle that from at least the time of the late fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight symbolized divinity.³⁷ This unusual mole of Imogen's matches that of her brother Guiderius, for he, according to his father Cymbeline, showed “Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star; / It is a mark of wonder” (5.5.365-66). “This is he,” Belarius exclaims,

Who hath upon him still that natural stamp:
It was wise Nature's end, in the donation
To be his evidence now.

(5.5.366-69)

This stamp is more properly Providence's than Nature's, for it is Jupiter's divine signature that warrants the recovery of the royal body and thus the body politic with which the royal body was thought to be synonymous. Guiderius's star-shaped mole becomes a sign authorizing the grafting of the cedar's true limbs to the royal trunk, the composite organic metaphor for the reunified land.

The death of his malignant queen frees Cymbeline, and with the reconstitution of his family, his mind clears and he becomes magnanimous. For its flowering, Cymbeline's magnanimity depends upon his being touched finally by the spirit of self-sacrifice invoked in the play's final scene by Lucius's plea that Cymbeline save Fidele's life rather than his own (5.5.78-92). This plea sets off a chain of self-sacrifices that finally includes the king.³⁸ Moved by Posthumus's forgiveness of self-sacrificing Iachimo (5.5.418-19), Cymbeline pronounces,

                                                                                                                        Nobly doom'd!
We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law:
Pardon's the word to all.

(5.5.421-23)

Cymbeline sacrifices not simply his personal revenge and a barbaric but hallowed Roman custom but also Britain's independence in his pledge to renew the tribute due the Roman emperor. One of the first benign directives of the rehabilitated head of the British body politic entails the reincorporation of Britain within the grander multinational body politic of the Roman Empire. “My peace we will begin,” Cymbeline announces to the characters gathered around him,

                                                                                          and Caius Lucius,
Although the victor, we submit to Caesar,
And to the Roman empire; promising
To pay our wonted tribute, from the which
We were dissuaded by our wicked queen,
Whom heavens in justice both on her, and hers,
Have laid most heavy hand.

(5.5.460-66)

Cymbeline's clear-headed, humble decision is actually part of Christian rather than Jovian Providence, for it makes possible the Pax Augustus, the condition that all the world be at peace necessary for the birth of Christ.³⁹ Cymbeline was king of Britain at the time of the Nativity.⁴⁰ One day the body of the Roman Empire, including the country of Britain, would be absorbed within the greater body of Christendom, or—to put the point another way—within the body of Christ. The cumulative effect of the chain of offered self-sacrifices in the play's last act lies in setting the stage for the advent of the supremely redemptive self-sacrifice. “Let's quit this ground,” Cymbeline says near play's end, “And smoke the temple with our sacrifices” (5.5.398-99). In the coming centuries, a new spiritual dispensation would render such material sacrifices unnecessary. King Cymbeline's sacrifice of himself and Britain to Rome proceeds from the clarified head of a reconstituted body politic, a renovated authoritarian hierarchy. Ironically, an expressive act that reflects the spirit of, and in fact prepares for, the egalitarian Pauline body of Christ issues from the head of a type of political body that history, especially the time of King Henry VIII, would suggest is antithetical to the values of that spiritual body. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare resolves this tension in a memorable image of absorption suggested earlier in this paragraph and described below. In this way, the playwright dramatically solves the problem of the politicization of the Pauline body of Christ.

The symbolism of the Soothsayer's final interpretation of his earlier vision confirms the suggestion that one day the authoritarian body of the Roman Empire, including Britain, will be absorbed within the redemptive body of Christ. According to Philarmonus,

                                                                                                                                  The vision,
Which I made known to Lucius ere the stroke
Of yet this scarce-cold battle, at this instant
Is full accomplish'd. 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.

(5.5.468-77)

Obviously the soothsayer's explication appears a bit strained. In his reading, the mighty Roman eagle becomes lessened until it disappears within the beams of the sun, “radiant Cymbeline [personified Britain], / Which shines here in the west.” In fact, Britain is minuscule in comparison to the Roman Empire, and the small western island nation has willingly incorporated itself within the expansive empire of Augustus Caesar. The ill fit of Philarmonus's reading to the details of the vision implies that the meaning of it is quite different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew, historically, theologically, that the Roman Empire would be absorbed and revalued within the greater body of Christendom. In the seer's vision, Rome lessens itself in the beams of the sun, the Son of God—Christ, whose birth Cymbeline's peace has made possible. Punning upon “Lessen'd”/“Lesson'd,” Shakespeare suggests that one day later Christianized Rome would be “lessoned” by the Son, taught by the doctrines of Christ.

The reconstitution of the body royal of Britain makes possible the reconstitution of the body politic of that land, and that recreation in turn makes possible the reconstitution of the Roman Empire, a recreation that will indirectly make possible the redemptive, paradoxically absorptive body of Christ celebrated in those passages of Romans and 1 Corinthians quoted at the beginning of this essay.⁴¹ Through these inferences one concludes that Shakespeare gave the reconstitution of bodies in Cymbeline not only global but also cosmic significance. Still, these conclusions, by themselves, do not account for the probable catalyst for Shakespeare's construction of a comprehensive body politic in Cymbeline. Glenn Clark has noted that King James I wanted to abolish “‘all straingenes’” between the bordered nations of England and Scotland. In May 1603, James had issued a “Proclamation for the Uniting of England and Scotland” and he wished that the English and Scottish should “be reconciled in ‘ane universall unanimitie of hartis.’”⁴² In a speech to Parliament in March 1604, an address recommending the making of Britain one borderless land, James rhetorically asked whether God

hath … not made us all in one Iland, compassed with one Sea, and of itselfe by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselues on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discerne their owne limits? These two countries [England and Scotland] being separated neither by sea, nor great River, Mountaine, nor other strength of nature, but only by little small Brookes, or demolished little walls, so as rather they were divided in apprehension, then in effect … [are] like a litle World within it selfe, being intrenched and fortified round about with a naturall, and yet admirable strong pond or ditch.⁴³

The complement in Cymbeline of James's speech is the Queen's jingoistic encouragement of Cymbeline to remember

The kings your ancestors, together with
The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
As Neptune's park, ribb'd and pal'd in
With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters

(3.1.18-21)

—with, in other words, natural barriers that allowed his royal ancestors to defy Julius Caesar and other invaders. Like King James, Shakespeare's Queen emphasizes an integral land, an island nation; unlike him, she promotes national isolationism, an “us-against-the-world” hostility that eventually would subvert Britain's best interests. The fact that Shakespeare puts this superficially attractive patriotic speech in the mouth of the absolutely ruthless Queen, considered by itself, implicitly endorses his royal patron's borderless approach to geopolitics. King Cymbeline, to use James's phraseology, has been “‘divided in apprehension’” only rather than “‘in effect’” from Augustus Caesar and the Roman Empire. By implying in Cymbeline that success comes to the monarch who keeps a tight grip on his passions and the doings of his court, one who also practices Christian-like self-sacrifice, Shakespeare shows James and his subjects the keys to building an inclusive, enlightened body politic out of fragmented and fragmentary bodies.⁴⁴

Notes

1. Leonard Barkan, in chapter 2, “The Human Body and the Commonwealth,” of Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 61-115, traces “a path from the simplest and earliest anthropomorphic conceptions of the commonwealth all the way to the point where body politic, idealized body, and natural body are internalized in such figures as the heroes of Sejanus and Coriolanus” (61). Barkan does not include Cymbeline among the literary works that he explores in terms of the human body and the commonweath—or for that matter, of the body politic.

2. Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30.

3. 24 Henry VIII c. 12, Tudor Constitutional Documents, A.D. 1485-1603, ed. J. R. Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 41, quoted in Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 32.

4. Harris amply documents his idea of a “significant [Tudor] shift from the residual Pauline doctrine of unity amidst diversity, figured as the mutual interdependence of the body's many parts, to an emergent ideology of royal absolutism, figured as the unquestioning obedience of the body's subordinate members to the monarch” (Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 32-33). This author also notes a shift at this time from the notion of a universal body politic with the pope as its head to “a variety of competing bodies—English, French, Spanish, Roman—all headed by princes” (33). This last notion is important for Shakespeare's conception of different corporate bodies in Cymbeline.

5. Nature's Work of Art, 76. Barkan states that “the first and most basic challenge within the medieval mind to the doctrine of overarching unity was the obvious duality between Church and State. This essential doubleness could cast considerable doubt on the idea that a single analogous body might contain both spiritual and temporal powers” (72). Barkan thus finds considerable tension as early as the Middle Ages between the cooperative nature of the Pauline body of Christ and the hierarchical organization of the body motif for the purpose of secular rule (72-75).

6. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 272, quoted in Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 32.

7. Erica Sheen, “‘The Agent for His Master’: Political Service and Professional Liberty in Cymbeline,” in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London: Routledge, 1992), 55-76, esp. 72. For similitudes likening Christ to a husband and the Church or New Jerusalem to his wife or bride, see 2 Corinthians 11.2; Ephesians 5.22-33; and Revelation 21.2.

8. Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 37.

9. 1.1.114-16. All references to Shakespeare's plays except Cymbeline are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1997).

10. Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Christian Epistemology,” Christianity and Literature 42 (1993): 243-60.

11. All quotations of Cymbeline are taken from the New Arden Shakespeare edition by J. M. Nosworthy (1955; reprint, London: Routledge, 1988). This quotation is from 5.3.91-93.

12. Jodi Mikalachki, in “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 301-22, notes that “[m]ost psychoanalytic critics interpret the Welsh cave as a form of maternal protection [a womb] from which the princes must emerge into battle with the Romans, which restores them to their father and their patrilineal identity” (315). For Belarius's cave as womb, also see Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 127.

13. F. David Hoeniger, in Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 137-39, locates Shakespeare's attribution of counsel to the heart in William Camden's Remains of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine (1605), an attribution in the Platonic and Galenic tradition.

14. See Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 133-35, 140-49; Patrick Cruttwell, “Physiology and Psychology in Shakespeare's Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 75-89, esp. 79-81; Maurice Pope, “Shakespeare's Medical Imagination,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 175-86, esp. 175, 178-79; and Gail Kern Paster, “Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body,” The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107-25.

15. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 175.

16. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 154, 166; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 64-66.

17. For treatments of the body-politic concept in Coriolanus, see Andrew Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 63-69; Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 455-69; and Philip McGuire, Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 144-52.

18. For the medieval and early modern concept of the monarch's two bodies, consult Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

19. In this vein, Rhonda Lemke Sanford, “A Room Not One's Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 63-85, asserts that “Imogen's reference to herself as ‘Britain’ (1.6.113) and Jachimo's comment that she is ‘fasten'd to an empery’ (1.6.120) recall the Ditchley portrait [of Queen Elizabeth]” (63), the painting in which Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger suggests that she and the land are intimately bound up with one another by depicting her, giant-like, standing upon a map of England. Roy Strong has asserted that “in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait Queen, crown and island become one. Elizabeth is England, woman and kingdom are interchangeable” (Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I [New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987], 136).

20. Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I, ed. James Craigie and Alexander Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982), 74-75.

21. Despite Cloten's claim to the contrary (2.3.111-23), early modern English marital law supported the assertion of the play's characters that Imogen and Posthumus are man and wife. First of all, we should note the strength of and basis for this assertion. First Gentleman, speaking of the couple, says, “She's wedded, / Her husband banish'd” (1.1.7-8). Of Posthumus, the same courtier says, “and he that hath her / (I mean, that married her …)” (1.1.17-18). Imogen addresses Posthumus as “My dearest husband” (1.2.16), and he promises in exile to “remain / The loyal'st husband that did e'er plight troth” (1.2.26-27). Moreover, Iachimo, speaking in Philario's house in Rome, introduces “this matter of [Posthumus's] marrying his king's daughter” (1.5.12). These characters understandably make these assertions of wedlock because, as the god Jupiter later testifies concerning Posthumus, “Our Jovial star reign'd at his birth, and in / Our temple was he married” (5.4.105-6).

    How, then, could Cloten make a contrary claim? Cloten's reference to the “self-figur'd knot” by which Imogen and Posthumus have “knit their souls” (2.3.116, 118) refers to the couple's clasped hands, which he imagines have formed a handfast. Handfasts, which were accompanied by the couple's mutual informal pledges, took two forms in Shakespeare's time. In the words of Margaret Loftus Ranald, “English canon and civil law recognized two kinds of betrothal contracts [handfasts], whose effects were determined by the tense employed. A vow made in words of the present tense (sponsalia per verba de praesenti) constituted an agreement to enter into the married state immediately. A vow in words of the future tense (sponsalia per verba de futuro) was merely a promise to marry at some future time. A de praesenti spousal created the status of virtual matrimony at that moment, without future action on the part of the persons concerned” (“‘As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks’: English Marriage and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 30 [1979]: 68-81, esp. 71). Cymbeline's Queen assumes that Imogen and Posthumus have a de futuro handfast. She portrays Posthumus's servant Pisanio as “the agent for his master, / And the remembrancer of her to hold / The hand-fast to her lord” (1.6.76-78). In effect, the Queen says that Pisanio will help to maintain the strength of a de futuro betrothal contract so that marriage will later occur. But, as Jupiter reveals in act 5, Imogen and Posthumus have been married in his temple. That event could only occur before Posthumus's banishment from Britain's court. Has the Queen forgotten this fact? Or was the temple marriage a private affair, with the Queen, Cymbeline, and Cloten not invited (or made aware of the ceremony)? Occasionally (but often futilely) English clergy argued that de praesenti hand-fasts did not amount to canonical marriages until they were celebrated in church. But if Imogen and Posthumus formed this kind of handfast, its sanctification has occurred in the classical version of the Church of England.

    Sometimes critics assert that Imogen and Posthumus's union lacks sexual consummation. (See, for example, David M. Bergeron, “Sexuality in Cymbeline,” Essays in Literature 10 [1983]: 159-68, esp. 160.) They base their assumption on these angry words of Posthumus: “Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd, / And pray'd me oft forbearance” (2.4.161-62). By the word “lawful,” Posthumus seems to be alluding to an after-marriage sexual pleasure. The key word here, however, is “oft”: Imogen often but not always begged Posthumus to refrain from sexual intercourse. He is acquainted with the mole on an intimate part of her breast. For an analysis of the iconography of Imogen and Posthumus's marriage, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's “Cymbeline” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 217-18, 249-68, 274-85.

22. My focus on Imogen and Posthumus as a corporate married/royal body precludes analysis of Iachimo's initial fragmentation of Imogen's body in his voyeuristic inventory of it in her bedchamber as she lies sleeping (2.2). Glenn Clark provides an excellent account of this rhapsodic dissection “The ‘Strange’ Geographies of Cymbeline,” (in Playing the Globe, ed. Gillies and Vaughan, 230-59, esp. 240, 241, 244), as Iachimo's anti-blazon divides Imogen's physical wholeness into compartmentalized lips, eyelids, a breast, and a mole beneath it—an inventory that prepares Imogen to be thought of as a ring and a bracelet during the wager scenes. For the blazon of the lady's body parts as a reflection of the Renaissance preoccupation with anatomical dissection, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 201-2.

23. See, for example, John Webster's Duchess of Malfi 1.1.410-20.

24. Clark, “‘Strange’ Geographies of Cymbeline,” 237.

25. Simon Palfrey's account of a shared body politic in Cymbeline derives from his assumption that Cloten enacts a severing and sharing of his “‘passable Carkasse’” with Posthumus, Imogen, Guiderius, and other characters (Late Shakespeare, 80-99, 135-36).

26. In Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), Constance Jordan asserts that “[b]y beheading Cloten, [Guiderius] destroys the tyrannical organ for which Cymbeline is actually responsible and reestablishes the proper succession. Like Belarius, from whom he learned the art of venery, he physics the body politic” (95). Jordan briefly describes a body politic in Cymbeline (94-96), but her treatment of the subject differs from mine.

27. Jonathan Gil Harris asserts that Paracelsus's and Fracastoro's notion of disease as an exogenous, invading entity began in the later Elizabethan age to replace the Galenic view of disease as an exclusively interior phenomenon, caused by an imbalance of the body's humors and purportedly cured by working with them alone (Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 14, 22). Shakespeare's emphasis upon Cloten's symbolic purgative function, especially in terms of bloodletting, reveals his conservative Galenic viewpoint in this respect, a viewpoint consistently represented in plays throughout the canon.

28. Among them are Joan Carr, “Cymbeline and the Validity of Myth,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 316-30, esp. 317-22; and David Armitage, “The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Mythic Elements in Shakespeare's Romances,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1986): 123-33, esp. 132. Cf., however, Brian Gibbons, “Fabled Cymbeline,” in Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18-47, esp. 35-36.

29. Armitage notes that, like the sweetly divine singer Orpheus, Cloten is the instigator of the most sweetly divine song in Cymbeline, the aubade “Hark, hark, the lark” (2.3.19-25). Cloten “can understand that Imogen may be moved by the music he controls … yet the crudity of [his] word-play belies the sweetness of the music, and renders it impotent” (“Mythic Elements in Shakespeare's Romances,” 132). Moreover, Cloten must commission the music and song; he cannot perform them himself.

30. Carr notes that “Orpheus' death was regarded in the Renaissance as an allegory of continuity and regeneration” (“Cymbeline and the Validity of Myth,” 318). See Caroline W. Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,” PMLA 64 (1949): 189-207. Stephen Greenblatt provides a broader context for understanding the connection between a new harmony or beneficent order and Cloten's—and Orpheus's—death of physical mutilation. In an essay titled “Mutilation and Meaning,” included in Hillman and Mazzio's The Body in Parts, 221-41, Greenblatt notes that the Christian savior “is an incarnate God, a God made flesh. And that flesh was repeatedly, spectacularly, and, as it were, crucially wounded. The root perception … is that there is a link between mutilation, as a universal emblem of corporeal vulnerability and abjection, and holiness. Pauline Christianity saw the physical marks on Jesus' body, from his circumcision to his scourging, piercing, and crucifixion, as the signs of his exalted sanctity, the salvific manifestations of a divine love that willingly embraces mortal vulnerability” (223). I quote Greenblatt not to suggest that Cloten is a Christ figure, but to draw the inference that the harmonious Pauline body of Christ paradoxically is founded upon—in fact, derives from—a mutilated body, that of Jesus.

31. Frank Whigham, in “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama,” ELH 55 (1988): 333-50, remarks that for dramatists Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, “the internal passages of the alimentary and vascular systems figure [in their plays] primarily as the conduits for contamination rather than, as in Shakespeare, sites of resistance and blockage” (342). Linda Woodbridge, in “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327-54, likens the “strait lane” defended by Britons not to the most clogged part of a blood vessel but to “the cervix” of a body: “Here the attempted invasion of a country is paralleled by the attempted invasion of a woman's body” (334-35).

32. Manly courage never animates Cloten. His aggressiveness (his swordplay with Guiderius, for example) is not bravery. Belarius tells us this much. Concerning Cloten, he says,

                                                                Being scarce made up,
    I mean to man, he had not apprehension
    Of roaring terrors: for [th'effect] of judgement
    Is oft the cause of fear.

    (4.2.109-12)

    Cloten was so stupid that he never detected the danger in “roaring terrors”; lacking judgment, he did not feel fear. Aristotle remarks in his Nicomachean Ethics that “of those who go to excess, he who exceeds in fearlessness has no name … but he would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor waves, as they say the Celts do not” (The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984] 2:1761). Courage, classically defined, involves bold action with full awareness of personal danger and physical risk to oneself and others. (Consult for example Nicomachean Ethics, book 3, chapter 7 [Barnes edition, 2:1761]). Lacking this perception, Cloten's physical aggression amounts to animal rage. (My dissociation of Cloten and bravery contradicts G. Wilson Knight's judgment that Cloten “is a fool and rash, but no coward”; see The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays [1947; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966], 134). Cloten may not be a coward, but he is not brave either. Given this aspect of his character, playgoers find plausible the Britons' new access of bravery following the purgation of the Cloten-principle within them.

33. The major exception is Samuel W. Singer in his first edition of The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (London: Chiswick, 1826), 9:120.

34. The exception again is Singer, this time in the second edition of The Dramatic Works (Boston and Cambridge: J. Munroe, 1856), 10:466.

35. For Imogen's representation as Britain, see Murray Schwartz, “Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychoanalytical Exploration of Cymbeline,” in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1970), 219-83, esp. 221; Alexander Leggatt, “The Island of Miracles: An Approach to Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 191-209, 194; Meredith Skura, “Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 203-16, esp. 210; Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 189-207, esp. 191; Mikalachki, “Masculine Romance of Roman Britain,” 309 n. 25, 316-20; and Woodbridge, “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” 350. Shakespeare's original audiences would have understood Shakespeare's equation of Imogen and Britain as analogous to that of Queen Elizabeth—during her lifetime—and England. In this last respect, see Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-42, esp. 129-30; and Claire McEachern, “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 33-56, esp. 52.

36. Imogen acts the part of the Welsh trio's housewife, dutifully cutting their root diet into letters for an original alphabet soup (4.2.44-51). “That the reaffirmation of Imogen's faith in Wales refers to her marriage is suggested by Guiderius's allusion to Juno. Struck by the fanciful nature of Fidele's culinary art, he exclaims, ‘But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters, / And sauced our broths, as Juno had been sick, / And he her dieter’ (IV.ii.49-51). The seventeenth-century Juno was primarily regarded as the goddess of marriage, as her role in Prospero's masque in The Tempest reveals. … Through her faithful Welsh service, Imogen, in [Guiderius's] opinion, cures the goddess of marriage—that is, she begins to make healthy a languishing marriage (her own)” by practicing the faithful service that a successful marriage requires of each partner (Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare's Romance of the Word [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990], 63).

37. Erica Sheen likens Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Cymbeline by noting that each is a “decapitation story concerned with the British revival of Roman imperium” (“Political Service and Professional Liberty,” 69).

38. According to pagan custom, Cymbeline would sacrifice Lucius and the surviving Romans to satisfy the relatives of slain Britons. Lucius in a spirit of self-sacrifice begs Cymbeline to save his exemplary page Fidele and “spare no blood beside” (5.5.92). Spared, Fidele gets Cymbeline to require captured Iachimo to explain how he obtained the diamond ring on his finger, which she recognizes as the jewel she gave Posthumus. Iachimo's compelled story precipitates the discovery of Posthumus, Imogen, and the ecstatic reunion of the reformed couple. Belarius begins the next series of discoveries by offering to sacrifice his life by the revelation of his true identity (a banished kidnapper of princes whose crime warrants death), so that he might save Guiderius (who has received a death sentence for admitting that he killed Cloten) by disclosing the young man's royal lineage. “I will prefer my sons,” Belarius concludes; “Then spare not the old father” (5.5.327-28). The revelation of course saves his life as well as those of his so-called sons. In the midst of general reconciliation and reunion, Iachimo's heavy conscience sinks his knee and he tells Posthumus, “Take that life, beseech you, / Which I so often owe” (5.5.415-16). “Kneel not to me,” Posthumus replies; “The power that I have on you, is to spare you: / The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live / And deal with others better” (5.5.418-21). It is this speech and Iachimo's offer of self-sacrifice that move Cymbeline to renew Britain's pledge to Rome.

39. See Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 84-99; and Robin Moffet, “Cymbeline and the Nativity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 207-18; and Parker, “Anachronistic Cymbeline,” 204.

40. In The Faerie Queene 2.10.50-51, Edmund Spenser, in his “chronicle of Briton kings,” wrote: “Next him Tenantius raigned, then Kimbeline, / What time th'eternall Lord in fleshly slime / Enwombed was” (Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton [1977, 1980; reprint, London: Longman, 1989], 267).

41. My phrase is “paradoxically absorptive” rather than “absorptive” because the redemptive body of Christ—in theory at least—enfolds and revalues what historically helps to bring it into being.

42. Clark, “‘Strange’ Geographies of Cymbeline,” 230.

43. King James I, The King's Maiesties Speech in The Parliament House (London: Robert Barker, 1604), sig. B2r, quoted in Clark, “‘Strange’ Geographies of Cymbeline,” 232.

44. My description of Shakespeare's construction of a British body politic in Cymbeline provides a basis for critical arguments like those of Mikalachki and John E. Curran, Jr. that in this late play Shakespeare concerns himself with “the complex formation of a national identity” (Mikalachki, “Masculine Romance of Roman Britain,” 307). For Curran's argument, see “Royalty Unlearned, Honor Untaught: British Savages and Historiographical Change in Cymbeline,” Comparative Drama 31 (1997-98): 277-303.