[In the following essay, Wayne explores the commoditization and objectification of Imogen in Cymbeline. ]

In his introduction to The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai proposes that “economic exchange creates value,” and that focusing on the things that are exchanged rather than the forms or functions of exchanges, as Marxist critics have traditionally done, makes visible the political linkages between exchange and value.¹ Drawing on the insights of Georg Simmel, Appadurai explores the conditions under which objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time. His approach “justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives” (p. 3), and that “specific things, as they move through different hands, contexts, and uses” may be regarded as having life histories (p. 34). One can trace the “career” or life history of objects by noting their participation in various exchanges and their consequent shifts in value. Appadurai is especially interested in the phases and contexts during which things meet the requirement of commodity candidacy, since they may move into and out of the commodity state at different times in their careers.² Luxury goods have a special “register” of consumption that sets them off from other objects. They often exhibit a “semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages” and offer “a high degree of linkage of their consumption to body, person, and personality” (p. 38).

In this essay I want to trace the histories of three stage properties in Cymbeline that are associated with women's bodies: the manacle given by Posthumus to Innogen, which is only named as a bracelet in the last act of the Folio text; Innogen's ring, which she gives to Posthumus and is the only trace of her natural mother; and the bloody cloth, which Posthumus takes as proof that Innogen has been murdered according to his command. I will draw on Appadurai's terms to explore the changes in value and signification that these stage properties take on in the course of the play, and the implications of their value for our understanding of the identities of those who exchange them, because this anthropological theory enables a fuller understanding of the circulation of commodities in social life and literary texts than has been heretofore available. My use of Appadurai differs from other essays in this volume because I apply his theory to the circulation of stage properties in the text and its sources, on the stage, and in reprintings of the text and programs over time. Rather than exploring the objects' pre-theatrical lives, I begin with the textual uses to which those objects are put and work backwards as well as forwards to develop a diachronic appreciation of how and what they are made to signify, especially in connection with class and gender. I also give particular attention to the theatrical uses made of these three properties when they are referred to, manipulated, and worn on stage. In closing, I take up the more recent career of the manacle on the cover and within the texts of Cymbeline, the programs of its performances, and the advertisements associated with its productions, since that stage property has so repeatedly been used to symbolize the play that it has become well qualified to advertise and commodify it.

In examining the difficult distinction between gift and commodity exchanges, John Frow reviews Chris Gregory's argument that “a gift economy depends upon the creation of debt, where what is at stake is not the things themselves or the possibility of material profit but the personal relationships that are formed and perpetuated by ongoing indebtedness. Things in the gift economy are the vehicles, the effective mediators and generators, of social bonds.”³ The manacle and the ring first appear in Cymbeline in a gift exchange between Posthumus and Innogen. Having received from Innogen a ring of some worth—“This diamond was my mother's. Take it, heart” (1.1.113)⁴ after she has termed Posthumus a “jewel” (1.1.92)—Posthumus exhibits what Appadurai calls the “calculative dimension” of exchange (p. 13) when he reciprocates by giving her his bracelet:

                                                                      and sweetest, fairest,
As I my poor self did exchange for you
To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles
I still win of you. For my sake wear this.
                                                  [He gives her a bracelet]
It is a manacle of love, I'll place it
Upon this fairest prisoner.

(1.1.119-24)

As he gives her the “manacle of love,” Posthumus calls attention to the differential values of these luxury goods and how they reflect the donors' class differences. This first exchange in the play suggests how difficult it is to distinguish gift from commodity exchanges, because at the same time that the exchange values of these objects are supposed to be superseded in the gift exchange, Posthumus invokes them as signs of his own insufficiency.⁵ As Frow suggests, the very structure of gift economies sets in motion “forms of calculation and indebtedness.”⁶

A “manacle” was “a fetter for the hand” (OED sb. 1) and derived from manus, Latin for “hand.” In early modern marriages, the “handfast” constituted a promise of marriage in a spousal that could range in meaning from what we now call an engagement to a formal marriage ceremony. One gave one's hand in marriage. The word “handfast” is used with this meaning in the first act of Cymbeline (1.5.78), but it is also used to signal restraint and even arrest in The Winter's Tale (4.4.744),⁷ which was written around the same time: the OED records both meanings for the adjective, “contracted by the joining of hands; betrothed or espoused,” and “bound, manacled” (1, 2). When the stage properties are exchanged in Cymbeline, the ring and the manacle become what Appadurai calls “incarnated signs” (p. 38) of the marital bond between this husband and wife. Posthumus does not expect to receive the gift of Innogen's ring and may even register surprise at his good fortune, but by way of response he calls attention to and then symbolizes the inadequacies of his own birth through the bracelet. Without his doing so, the audience would have no reason to assume that his gift has less material worth than hers. But his saying so makes it so in this theatrical context, and introduces the issue of differential market values even at the moment that the ring and manacle are made to signify marital union.

Thus the marriage is fractured by a discrepancy in exchange values of commodities precisely when it is symbolized on stage as a union through these stage properties. What the manacle actually looks like seems of much less importance: it has varied widely from one production to the next, and the audience is not enlisted in witnessing or attesting to its lesser value. Yet Posthumus's awareness of the discrepancy explains in large part his desire to compensate for his lower birth by fettering Innogen's hand through marriage. As a consequence of his gift, she is doubly imprisoned early on in the play, first by a father who rates birth over merit (“Thou took'st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness,” [1.1.142-3]), and then by a husband who tries to make up for his lack of birth and his banishment by constraining his wife.

The clandestine marriage that occurred before the play began⁸ was not a typically patriarchal exchange of a woman among men, because Innogen's father did not “give” her to Posthumus; on the contrary, when she gave herself, Cymbeline took her back again. But this gift exchange of things as incarnated signs eventually enables another exchange of Innogen among other men, and it is that exchange that the play foregrounds as a crucial problem. Appadurai refers to a category called “enclaved commodities, objects whose commodity potential is carefully hedged” (p. 24): through the early gift exchange, the manacle becomes a visual sign of the enclavement of Innogen's sexuality in the play. It marks containment of the woman's part. The very object that Posthumus intended as a means to reciprocate his wife's gift and simultaneously control her sexuality then becomes a means for her being put into circulation. Appadurai provides a larger context for this development: “the politics of enclaving, far from being a guarantor of systemic stability, may constitute the Trojan horse of change” (p. 26).

This shift is enabled by what, in Appadurai's terms, is the play's first “tournament of value” (p. 21), when Posthumus displays his pride in Innogen and his conviction that her sexuality is fully enclaved. He is lured into a wager by the conjunction that Iachimo makes between her value and the diamond ring: “If she went before others I have seen, as that diamond of yours outlustres many I have beheld, I could not but believe she excelled many: but I have not seen the most precious diamond that is, nor you the lady” (1.4.68-72). The conjunction of woman and ring becomes a means of commodifying the woman. Posthumus at first refuses this conflation: “You are mistaken. The one may be sold or given, or if there were wealth enough for the purchase or merit for the gift. The other is not a thing for sale, and only the gift of the gods” (1.4.78-81), but even he characterizes Innogen as a gift and hence as a potential object, one that he thinks, as Iachimo makes explicit, “the gods have given” to him (1.4.82). So Iachimo can reassert commodification through the threat of theft: “You may wear her in title yours: but you know, strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds. Your ring may be stolen too; so your brace of unprizable estimations” (1.4.84-7). Note in this phrasing the trace of the bracelet, here counterpoised with the ring: Innogen is constructed as and through Posthumus's “brace of unprizable estimations,” with “brace” evoking a coat of arms and a buckle of a girdle or belt, both current meanings at the time (OED, sb. 2, 1 and 11). Innogen's enclavement through the bracelet was supposed to effect what Igor Kopytoff calls “terminal commoditization, in which further exchange is precluded by fiat,”⁹ so that she becomes literally priceless, beyond price, “unprizable.” But Posthumus fails to maintain her uncommodified status in the face of Iachimo's comparisons with the ring. Like the bracelet, Posthumus's “brace of unprizable estimations” in the form of his boast becomes the means by which she is accorded a price and put into circulation. When they make their wager, Posthumus and Iachimo initiate a commodity exchange that will further fracture the social bonds created by the gift exchange between Posthumus and Innogen,¹⁰ and it is Posthumus's heightened sense of his indebtedness and his corresponding pride in Innogen's loyalty that make him especially vulnerable to the Italian's machinations.

This tournament of value also has some similarities to Baudrillard's account of an auction, whose essential function “is the institution of a community of the privileged who define themselves as such by agonistic speculation upon a restricted corpus of signs” (Appadurai, p. 21). The wager in which these men in Rome participate permits them to exercise the privilege of their gender by debasing women into sexual signs of questionable worth. Innogen is weighed here in relation not only to the ring, but to the women of France and Italy, who are defended by the Frenchman and the Italian as being at least equal to her value. This is a distinctively male tournament of value and a contest among nations, a kind of European Olympics of female worth and attemptability, given the added presence of a Spaniard and a Dutchman in the scene. When Iachimo wagers ten thousand ducats against Posthumus's ring, Italian currency against British jewelry, Posthumus says he prefers to bet gold against gold; but he is goaded into “lending” his diamond as part of the wager. Iachimo then confirms its terms: “If I bring you no sufficient testimony that I have enjoyed the dearest bodily part of your mistress, my ten thousand ducats are yours, so is your diamond too” (1.4.143-6). The manacle becomes testimony to and signifies that “dearest bodily part.”

To provide such proof, Iachimo engages in a theft of the commodity that symbolizes the enclavement of Innogen's sexuality. Appadurai describes commodities as having paths and diversions, and a diversion “may sometimes involve the calculated and ‘interested’ removal of things from an enclaved zone to one where exchange is less confined and more profitable … [W]hereas enclaving seeks to protect certain things from commoditization, diversion frequently is aimed at drawing protected things into the zone of commoditization” (pp. 25-6). Innogen's sexuality, her “woman's part” (2.4.174), is that protected “thing” staged through the property of the manacle. Iachimo later identifies the generative locus of this plot in a more general way, but its association with a woman's body remains: “Your daughter's chastity—there it begins” (5.4.179). Theft, as Appadurai describes it, is “the humblest form of diversion of commodities from preordained paths” (p. 26). When Iachimo comes out of the trunk, he notes the adornment of Innogen's room and the objects present in it; then he takes the manacle (“Come off, come off,” [2.2.33]), and observes the mole on her breast. He does not know the history of the manacle, so he thinks the mole will be the “secret / Will force him think I have picked the lock, and ta'en / The treasure of her honour” (2.2.40-2). But in taking the manacle, rather than seeing the mole, he is diverting the sign of Innogen's sexuality from the enclaved path of marriage.

The mole, or rather its counterpart, was the more important object in Shakespeare's sources. In the ninth book, second day in Boccaccio's Decameron, merchants wager on a wife's fidelity and one of them conceals himself in a trunk to spy on her while she sleeps. The objects in her room are described in the English translation of 1620 as a “small wart upon her left pappe,” a ring, a purse, a light robe of silk, and a “girdle,” a belt worn around the waist.¹¹ In Frederyke of Jennen, the objects are a purse made of pearls and costly stones worth eighty-four ducats, a “gyrdle of fyne golde set with costly perles and stoones, that was worth CCCC ducates,” a ring “with a point of diamond, that was worth 1 ducates,” and a black wart on her left arm.¹² The girdle becomes the manacle in Cymbeline,¹³ retaining its associations with something that constricts the body but becoming smaller, more visually coherent, and more appropriate to the woman's part. Those girdles on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum from the early modern and earlier periods are made of metal, sometimes enamelled, and were to be hung around the hips, a connection with the lower body that suits Shakespeare's play. They are in effect large, flexible bracelets made of links, as distinct from bangles, which are inflexible circles or ovals. Reference to a girdle is made in Cymbeline when Cloten says to Caius Lucius following Britain's refusal to pay tribute to Caesar, “if you seek us afterwards in other terms, you shall find us in our salt-water girdle: if you beat us out of it, it is yours” (3.1.80-1), suggesting that the ocean itself is a defensive belt encircling the island. Thomas Dekker makes a similar reference to England wearing a girdle of waves in The Whore of Babylon of 1606.¹⁴ The salt-water girdle, like the manacle, protects property from invasion, and Linda Woodbridge has emphasized how effectively the play presents a woman's body as a metaphor for the nation confronted with that threat.¹⁵

The description of objects from the wife's bedroom in the sources by Iachimo's counterpart has the effect of unsettling the husband in each narrative. But he remains unconvinced by them when they are described because, as Boccaccio's character says and Frederyke of Jennen's implies, “this may be gotten, by corrupting some servant of mine,” or by some other means than sleeping with his wife.¹⁶ It is the far less erotic wart in each story that convinces the husband, just as Iachimo expects the mole will do for Posthumus. When he first sees the mole, Iachimo says,

                                                                                          Here's a voucher
Stronger than ever law could make; this secret
Will force him think I have picked the lock and ta'en
The treasure of her honour.

(2.2.39-42)

But the mole is not as compelling a form of evidence in a dramatic context because it is not highly visible or portable, and the non-corporeal objects in the stories have not been exchanged between the married pair as they are in the play, so they have not come to signify their social relations. Upon hearing Iachimo's description of the bedroom, Posthumus remains unpersuaded for the same reasons as the husbands in the sources. When he sees the manacle, he loses his trust and gives Iachimo the ring. Then he retracts it at Philario's urging but returns the ring again after Iachimo swears, “By Jupiter, I had it from her arm” (2.4.121). The mole serves as additional confirmation—“If you seek / For further satisfying, under her breast—/ Worthy the pressing—lies a mole” (2.4.133-5)—but Iachimo has already won the ring and the wager by the time he mentions it.

This second tournament of value is therefore more easily won than Iachimo could have anticipated, because he is unaware of the career of the manacle. An exceptionally lucky villain, like Iago, who says more than he could possibly know, he creates a fictional scene of a gift exchange between himself and Innogen while he is displaying the manacle that, for Posthumus, ruptures the bond created by the former exchange:

She stripped it from her arm. I see her yet.
Her pretty action did outsell her gift,
And yet enriched it too. She gave it me,
And said she prized it once.

(2.4.101-4)

Here the act of giving is accorded even more value than the commodity itself through the narration of the exchange and simultaneously increases its value in Iachimo's eyes. There could be few more eloquent accounts of how exchange creates value than this one—“Her pretty action did outsell her gift, / And yet enriched it too”—and it is this entirely imaginary scene that prompts Posthumus to give over the ring. The theft of the manacle diverts it and the ring from their previous paths and debases the value of both when they come into Iachimo's possession. Having been promoted from their status as “trifles” (1.1.121) to signifiers of the marital and sexual bond, they then become trophies of Iachimo's conquest over another man through his presumed sexual conquest of a woman. Posthumus completes the diversion and consequent devaluation of Innogen by giving Iachimo the ring. Both the manacle as a sign of Innogen's enclaved sexuality and the ring as a confirmation of her maternal lineage have become contaminated through this final exchange, because both confirm and “purchase” women's illicit circulation. The word “contaminated” is Kopytoff's: he applies it to objects having a purely aesthetic or scientific value which are then made to circulate in a monetized commodity-sphere.¹⁷ When they are joined as Iachimo's possessions, the ring and the bracelet become commodities of bad faith.

Once Posthumus is without both objects, he becomes convinced that “We are all bastards, / And that most venerable man, which I / Did call my father was I know not where / When I was stamped” (2.4.154-7). Posthumus's own identity is shattered by his errant conclusion about women as he comes to believe he has no identifiable father, no legitimate name, and no certain country of origin. Since the structures of kinship and nation depend upon women's fidelity, Posthumus's doubts expose men's fragile dependence in patriarchy on the disposition of women's sexuality, and show that the threat to women's physical bodies posed through seduction and rape can also become a threat to personal and national identity, especially when the heir to the throne is a woman. Posthumus's father had fought against the Romans and received the title of Leonatus from Tenantius, a British king, after his success in battle; his two brothers died with swords in their hands. His status as a gentleman was therefore won through physical combat, and although the First Gentleman who reports his lineage “cannot delve him to the root” (1.1.28), what class position he has was won by his father's meritorious actions, not by his birth.

The play poses the problem of Posthumus's class in relation to Innogen in its very first lines; then it returns to the issue of his origin at the very end when the soothsayer construes the prophecy of his identity. Once Posthumus rejects the possibility of women's fidelity, he literally does not know who he is, and his absence for two acts that is sometimes lamented by critics is a dramatization of his status as a non-person on the stage and in the text. His loss of the ring and the manacle, then, are fundamentally related to the loss of his identity and confirm the inter-animating relations of objects and identities: as Margreta De Grazia puts it, a play-text can lock “persons into things, proper selves into property, subjectivity effects into personal effects.”¹⁸ When Posthumus returns to Britain with the Romans, he fights first for Britain and then presents himself as a Roman so he will be taken and executed. His changes in costume are an index of his lost identity and show how malleable he remains in his subject positions, although not in his loyalties. As the prophecy declares, the play's resolution depends on establishing the relation between Posthumus's origin, Britain's fortunes, and peace and plenty among the nations.

The class problems posed by the marriage are intensified by Innogen's position as heir to the throne. Cymbeline's objection that she “took'st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (1.1.142-3) contradicts the observations of the First Gentleman, made twice earlier in the scene, that Posthumus is a gentleman (1.1.7, 34). Yet both agree that the problems of this marriage are a function of class. (Thomas D'Urfey's 1682 adaptation of Cymbeline is usually referred to by its first title, The Injured Princess, but one of its alternate titles was The Unequal Match.¹⁹ Innogen anticipates the solution to the problem when she meets Guiderius and Arviragus and hears them refer to her as a brother:

                                        Would it had been so that they
Had been my father's sons, then had my price
Been less, and more equal ballasting
To thee, Posthumus.

(3.6.73-6)

She wishes herself worth “less” so that she can be more equal to Posthumus, and as if in response to her wish, events in the play repeatedly demote her in status. From heir to the throne to appearance in “A riding-suit no costlier than would fit / A franklin's housewife” (3.2.76-7) and then to a male page for a Roman general, changing, as Pisanio says, “Command into obedience” (3.4.156), Innogen finally loses her claim to the kingdom at the very end.²⁰

Yet she places little value on social position or even royal inheritance, and throughout the play she seems remarkably uninterested in exercising any kind of influence over the kingdom.²¹ In her speech on Britain she shows a readiness to leave the country (3.4.137-41). Her loss of the throne is mentioned by Cymbeline almost as an afterthought (5.4.373-4). However resilient Innogen may be when under duress, and however attractive she appears in performance, her desires in this play are expressed primarily toward her husband, which is probably why the Victorians liked her so much. To her the manacle is no form of constraint: she calls it her “jewel” when she cannot find it after it is stolen (2.4.138), adding, “'Shrew me / If I would lose it for a revenue / Of any king's in Europe!” (2.4.139-41). Here she anticipates the consequences of its exchanges, for she will eventually lose a European king's revenue by accepting it, but only after she has lost her husband, her sexual respectability, even her emotional stability. The vacancy of the manacle's interior signifies the state to which Innogen approaches, for she comes close to being “an O without a figure,”²² and admits to Lucius, “I am nothing” (4.2.368), although her “nothing” has a specifically female valence.

The recovery of her newly discovered brothers then constitutes “two worlds” (5.4.375) to her, and is presented as more than sufficient when she is reunited with her husband. As Jodi Mikalachki has demonstrated, this is not a play that validates female autonomy;²³ instead, I would argue, it affirms the importance of marital and familial bonds. The decline in her status makes Innogen's marriage to Posthumus viable according to dominant ideologies of Renaissance unions, in which class positions of spouses were supposed to be relatively equal.²⁴ Her loss of emotional stability is also a direct reaction to the loss of her husband. Both Posthumus and Innogen fall apart when their marriage disintegrates, and the scene of Innogen mourning his supposed death while embracing Cloten's headless corpse dressed in Posthumus's clothing has a dramatic function similar to Posthumus's misogynist tirade: both scenes exhibit the characters' deeply mistaken and foolish judgment.

Posthumus's error has wider implications for his relation with Innogen. When he gives his misogynist speech at the end of act 2, he leaves his sentence unfinished: “Could I find out / The woman's part in me—for there's no motion / That tends to vice in man but I affirm / It is the woman's part” (2.4.171-4). The thought remains suspended because he cannot find that part in himself, that absence of women's genital space that is signified through the manacle; he cannot locate it even to violate it. Part of Posthumus's problem is that he looking for woman's lack, the unseen, on his own body, thereby misrecognizing sexual difference. Women's vaginal space was unlocatable on any body in the play's early, all-male productions, and it is equally unlocatable for Posthumus through the stage properties that represent it in text and performance. Just before these lines, Posthumus has imagined Iachimo mounting Innogen and finding “no opposition / But what he looked for should oppose, and she / Should from encounter guard” (2.4.169-71): he has visualized Iachimo penetrating her after her modest resistance.²⁵ Having lost her, as he thinks, he then looks for the “woman's part” in himself and, finding instead the presence of the phallus that signifies the original loss and separation from the mother, he enters into language as a speaking subject through the discourse of misogyny:²⁶ he distributes the woman's part into a catalogue of faults—lying, flattery, deceit, lust and rank thoughts, “All faults that man can name, nay, that hell knows, / Why, hers in part, or all, but rather all—” (2.4.179-80).

This catalogue still evokes woman's material body, but is more directly related to a body of texts in the early modern debate about women: discursive misogyny constituted by far the largest portion of publications in that debate. When Posthumus declares, “I'll write against them, / Detest them, curse them” (2.4.184-5), he is asserting his new-found identity as a common misogynist writer voicing his rage against women. His loss of Innogen and repressed desire for union with a woman prompt his entry into language as a writer of misogynist texts, and when he does not show up for a full two acts, we have been spared the performance of a Joseph Swetnam.

When we do encounter him again, his first words are, “Yea, bloody cloth, I'll keep thee, for I wished / Thou shouldst be coloured thus” (5.1.1-2). What is this bloody cloth but another sign of the woman's part? The supposed stain of Innogen's blood is designed to confirm her murder, but it also evokes the bloodstained sheets of a marriage bed—like the handkerchief spotted with strawberries in Othello—and has associations as well with menstruation. Cymbeline's bloody cloth is related to As You Like It's use of the bloody napkin as proof that Orlando has been faithful to Rosalind despite his being wounded by a lion, and it affirms a connection to the woman's body as the handkerchief does in Othello; but given this play's attention to “the dearest bodily part” (1.4.144) through the manacle and Posthumus's preoccupation with “the woman's part,” the bodily associations with this stage property are more specific and graphic. The word “stain” first enters the play when Iachimo describes the mole to Posthumus: “You do remember / This stain upon her?” At that point, Posthumus, who is already convinced of Innogen's infidelity through the manacle, replies, “Ay, and it doth confirm / Another stain as big as hell can hold” (2.4.138-40). The mole is used to evoke the stain of womankind associated with Eve and original sin in the second wager scene. Yet when Iachimo first sees the mole on Innogen, he describes it as “cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / I'th' bottom of a cowslip” (2.2.38-9): its red spots are delicately patterned like the inside of a flower. The flower image associated with the mole becomes a stain when Iachimo sullies it to entrap Posthumus, and those associations of the erotic body and sexual guilt migrate to the bloody cloth.

This stage property differs from the manacle and ring because it is never exchanged within the play's narrative. In his letter to Pisanio requiring Innogen's murder, Posthumus requests “some bloody sign” of its performance (3.4.126), and this is it. Yet the text obscures any means by which the cloth is conveyed, so its history in the play is mystified: it simply appears at the beginning of act 5, saturated with enigmatic significance.²⁷ Peter Stallybrass emphasizes that it is “a purely theatrical stain, invented by Pisanio.”²⁸ Pisanio's counterpart in the Decameron delivers some of his mistress's clothes to his master as proof he has performed the murder. In Frederyke of Jennen the comparable character, having been commanded to deliver his mistress's tongue and a lock of her hair, kills a lamb that has accompanied her, uses the lamb's tongue and a lock of his mistress's hair, then anoints her clothes with the blood of the lamb and presents all three objects to his master.²⁹

Traces of this source appear in Cymbeline when Innogen encourages Pisanio to dispatch her quickly and invites his knife with the words, “The lamb entreats the butcher” (3.4.96). The bloody cloth is associated with sacrifice, and it is more like a martyr's relic or a memento mori than a commodity.³⁰ It exhibits the limits of the Appadurian model in approaching this play's stage properties, for that theory seems unable to fully account for its use and signification. It has a history from sources to play-text, but within the text it functions entirely as Posthumus's token of Innogen's body, without any circulation, without any apparent exchange value, imputed importance primarily by memory and guilt. Martyrs' relics and mementos mori could and certainly did become commodities in medieval and early modern culture, but in this play the cloth is presented as an intensely private matter. It signifies not just any woman's part as Posthumus sees it; it is Innogen's.

Although the audience knows that this object does not have the history that Posthumus thinks it does, his taking it as proof of Innogen's death endows it with crucial significance in the narrative. When he re-enters in act 5 he has abandoned the ranting misogynist for the repentent husband, and this change is marked by an acceptance of a token of the woman's body as he blames all husbands who would murder their wives “for wrying but a little” (5.1.5). What Coppélia Kahn terms “Posthumus's astonishing forgiveness of Imogen without proof of her innocence” in those lines—a remarkable event in the context of Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Winter's Tale, early modern dramatic texts and even early modern culture—is the verbal counterpart to the visual accommodation that he holds in his hands.³¹ When he then says, “Gods, if you / Should have ta'en vengeance on my faults, I never / Had lived to put on this” (5.1.7-9), “this” can be taken to refer to the bloody cloth mentioned eight lines earlier. Editors since Samuel Johnson have overlooked the stage property when they glossed the pronoun “it” as to instigate or assume responsibility for Innogen's murder,³² and it may have that meaning as well; but the performance tradition has offered as an antecedent the cloth that Posthumus holds in his hand.

Having lost the ring and manacle, Posthumus wears that cloth like another token of his beloved. David Jones's 1979 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company directed Posthumus to put the cloth around his neck and tie it when he says “put on this.”³³ In the National Theatre's 1988 production directed by Sir Peter Hall and the 1997-98 RSC production directed by Adrian Noble, Posthumus later wraps the cloth around his head.³⁴ Other productions make similar uses of it.³⁵ He is putting on what Peter Stallybrass refers to as Innogen's meanest garment, the last remnant of her as far as he knows, and, having killed her “is forced to learn the value of the trace.”³⁶ In making this accommodation, Posthumus cherishes this sign of women's sexuality, a visual stain associated with the sex that bleeds at the loss of virginity and has a bloody discharge as part of the process of generation, but not because the cloth has any value in the world at large. The term “meanest garment” is first associated with the underwear that Innogen probably refers to when she uses it to insult Cloten,³⁷ but for Posthumus the cloth replaces the diamond ring that had belonged to Innogen's mother. It functions as a sign of women's role in establishing lineage, as a token of Innogen's body, and evidence of Posthumus's guilt.³⁸

Through this stage property, the play provides some alternative to Janet Adelman's opinion that “the fantasy solution of Cymbeline was to do away with the female body altogether,” and to Jodi Mikalachki's argument that it participates in a disincorporation of the feminine because the wicked Queen is killed off and Innogen remains in male attire at the end.³⁹Cymbeline effectively stages woman's parts through the properties of the manacle, ring, and the bloody cloth. In this last instance the token functions to show Posthumus's repentance for his behavior and his acceptance of the woman's part in relation to his own body. Those parts are displaced onto objects in ways that distance them from the female body, but the female body was itself absent from the English Renaissance stage, and these stage properties register that absence and materialize women's exclusion, so that the circulation of and accommodation to women's (absent) bodies can be represented.⁴⁰ Posthumus and Innogen's marriage at the end does, as Mikalachki suggests, “emphasize the necessary subordination of the feminine within the patriarchal structures of marriage and empire,”⁴¹ because Innogen's loss of her kingdom is presented as far less important than her union with Posthumus, and the social status of the partners is altered to make each more equal to the other.⁴²

But marriage is not the only agent that contains Innogen's erotic power: Posthumus's form of instantiating his desire through marriage as ownership, his impulse to enclave Innogen's sexuality as figured in the manacle, intensifies that containment. The play also foregrounds the larger wrongs of misogyny through staging Cloten's desire to rape Innogen, Iachimo's slander of her, and Posthumus's outrage against all women: it dramatizes those abuses and punishes all three men. Misogyny is rebuked in Cymbeline even as the claims of patriarchy are reasserted,⁴³ and the corresponding changes in Posthumus become evident by means of the stage properties. Our attention as an audience is called to his manacle of possessive marriage. Through the bloody cloth, Posthumus's acceptance of the stain of womankind, his incorporation of it on his own body and admission of his greater guilt, are presented as resolutions to sexual and marital discord. The theatrical display of the cloth animates this accommodation and manifests it through performance.

After Posthumus has contributed to the British victory and changed to Roman attire so that he can be taken by the Britons, he finds himself in fuller bondage than he ever desired to place on Innogen, with “locks” on both his “shanks and wrists” (5.3.102-3). He considers this a “welcome bondage, for thou art a way, / I think to liberty” (5.3.97-8) and death. Then after the dream in which he recovers his family—including his mother and her other legitimate sons—the messenger advises the jailer, “Knock off his manacles” (5.3.284). Posthumus has to live the constraint of his own limbs before he can recover his identity through his family connections and be reunited with his wife. In the recognition scene that follows, Innogen, as Fidele, being granted a boon by Cymbeline, asks Iachimo to “render / Of whom he had this ring” (5.4.135-6), and the ring sets in motion a chain of discoveries in which the identities of Iachimo, Posthumus, Innogen, Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus, and yet again Posthumus via the Soothsayer are recognized and revealed. Although Iachimo confesses his crime, he still retains both objects. Even after husband and wife are reunited in a long embrace, it is another 150 lines before those properties are returned.

This final exchange occurs principally between men. Iachimo says to Posthumus:

                                                                      Take that life, beseech you,
Which I so often owe; but your ring first,
And here the bracelet of the truest princess
That ever swore her faith.

(5.4.415-18)

Posthumus's reply shows no trace of the calculative dimensions of these goods. He spares Iachimo's life and forgives him for his injustices:

The power that I have on you is to spare you,
The malice towards you to forgive you. Live,
And deal with others better.

(5.4.419-21)

Cymbeline's response then marks his recognition of Posthumus's new status after he has just learned that Posthumus fought the Romans alongside Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus: “Nobly doomed!” he says (5.4.421). The general pardon that the king offers to everyone and his reference to Posthumus as a “son-in-law” (5.4.422) are the fullest signs we have of his acceptance of his daughter's husband.⁴⁴

When the Soothsayer expounds the prophecy, he shows how fully Posthumus's identity and fortunes are intertwined with those of his wife, his family, and his nation. If it was a form of male pride, stemming from the inadequacy of his own origins, that prompted Posthumus to enclave his wife's sexuality and to participate in the tournaments of value earlier in the play, then the audience is shown by the end that Posthumus has neither the impulse towards possession nor the reason for it that he once had. His reward is a reunion with Innogen in a long embrace. When he associates her with fruit in the lines, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” (5.4.263-4), his revision of the marriage topos of the elm and the vine figures her as the dearest and best part, even the soul, of their union. The passage claims a full incorporation of husband and wife at this moment, one that achieves its intensity as a resolution of the earlier fragmentation of both persons, their union, even their bodies.⁴⁵

In this final scene, most of the characters are looking pretty ragged. Cymbeline refers to “bloody hands” not yet washed in the play's last line (5.4.486), and in many productions everyone who has engaged in the fight shows signs of blood and dirt, including Posthumus, though he is not wearing the clothes in which he fought. Innogen is still dressed as a male page, and most of the other characters are in garments that show the effects of toil and conflict. This is no accident in a play that puts so much emphasis on clothing and class, calls the worth of all noble characters into question, and dramatizes with grotesque consequences how clothes can make the man. Nearly everyone except Cymbeline in the last tableau looks base rather than noble, as if the events of the play have reduced them to their lowest common denominator, the status that occasioned Posthumus's exile at the play's opening. They are so stained with the blood of war that the stain of womankind on the bloody cloth is no longer a visual exception to the scene but in keeping with the larger spectacle.⁴⁶

Meanwhile the manacle, having swung so widely in value from signifying Innogen's sexual containment to marking all women's sexual license, can revert to the status of a bracelet, perhaps even a trifle, since its earlier associations and its commodifying potential have been nearly evacuated by the movement of this narrative. Once Posthumus and Innogen have recovered their identities and each other, there seems little need for those properties to mark their bond, and the nearly continuous connection between their physical bodies in the last scene in some productions becomes an even more obvious confirmation of their union. Unlike the ring which is named seventeen times in the play, or the handkerchief in Othello that is mentioned twenty-seven times, the bracelet is only referred to as such on two occasions, and then only in the last scene. Readers of modernized texts encounter it in editorial stage directions as early as the first gift exchange, but the noun is not heard in performance until the end. It is such a visible stage prop that the bracelet does not even have to be named, and the absence of a stable or repeated verbal signifier permits greater play with its signification.

As staged in most recent productions, it is simply a big ring, large enough to be seen from a distance and functioning as an exaggeration of the claims and commitments often associated with the smaller object. Bracelets are referred to rarely in Shakespeare, occurring only in a catalogue of finery in The Taming of the Shrew (4.3.58); as “bracelets of … hair” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of many love tokens that Lysander has given to Hermia (1.1.33); as the previously vended contents of Autolycus's pack in The Winter's Tale (4.4.587); and as “iron bracelets” or shackles that Palamon wears in Two Noble Kinsmen (2.6.8, 3.1.31). Manacles are mentioned in Henry IV Part Two, Measure for Measure, Coriolanus, and The Tempest as agents of constraint and imprisonment.⁴⁷ Only in Cymbeline does a bracelet actually appear on stage, but its size is even more appropriate than a ring as a sign of the woman's part, the visible presence of women's lack and a mark of their commodification, containment, circulation, and devaluation through exchange, as well as a materialization of their exclusion in early modern theatrical representation.

It is this stage property, especially in the context of the bedroom scene, that has repeatedly been used to represent the play. As early as the first edition of Shakespeare's plays to be published after the four folios, Nicholas Rowe positioned opposite the title page to the first printing of his 1709 edition an image of the bedroom scene with Iachimo coming out of the trunk. The manacle is not evident in this engraving, but it is visible in the frontispiece to Bell's 1773 printing of the play, where Iachimo is noting down details of the chamber while Innogen sleeps. Nosworthy's 1955 Arden edition of the play reproduced this image in its earlier and probably original printing, until the cover was changed to a portly and grizzle-haired Posthumus placing a bracelet on Innogen's arm. The slipcase for Roger Warren's 1989 book on the theatre history of Cymbeline in the Shakespeare in Performance series uses a photo from the 1962 RSC production that shows the bracelet on Vanessa Redgrave's arm with a cormorant Eric Porter about to take it off. A different view of the play was created in 1987-88 by the program cover for the RSC production directed by Bill Alexander at The Other Place and The Pit, when a huge eagle spread its wings as the program unfolded. Yet when this production was recast, moved to Stratford's mainstage in 1989, and needed a larger audience, the cover was changed to reveal a seemingly naked Innogen, asleep, with her braceleted arm draped across her face. The viewer of this program is positioned like the voyeuristic Iachimo and invited to scan her body, its singular ornament in stark contrast to the smooth surface of her skin. Still another RSC production changed its image of the play in the middle of the run: the 1997 Stratford performances used an orientalized drawing of characters in a landscaped setting for the program cover, but for the 1998 London performances the cover was altered to a steamy close-up of Innogen and Posthumus staring in unison at the bracelet he has apparently just placed on her arm. … Roger Warren's 1998 edition of the play published in the Oxford Shakespeare Series reproduces a portion of Titian's Sleeping Venus, naked from the breasts up, for its paperback cover, once again evoking the seduction scene and aligning the viewer with Iachimo's voyeurism.

There are exceptions to this tradition, especially on the American side: the Ashland Shakespeare Company used three overlapping images of an upright, clothed, and Celtic Innogen for the cover of its festival program in 1998, and the New York Shakespeare Festival's theatre program of the same year reproduced an engraving from Barry Cornwall's 1846 Works of Shakespeare showing two hands in a round, stone vault, one pointing to a ring on the other. Yet when the New York show was reviewed by Shakespeare Bulletin in its Fall 1998 issue, the photo used from the production was once again the scene of a recumbent, manacled Innogen and a predatory Iachimo. Shakespeare Santa Cruz's playfully postmodern production of 2000 imposed the head of a king of clubs from a deck of cards onto a Union Jack for its T-shirts and program, but the festival also sold as a bracelet a wide purple rubber band on which was stamped, “For my sake wear this: it is a manacle of love. Cymbeline 1, i.”

Theatre companies, booksellers, and their advertisers have been quick to see the erotic and voyeuristic appeal of the manacle and the seduction scene, so they have used it to commodify the text and lure consumers. As far as I know, the bloody cloth only served this function once, when it appeared along with the ring and bracelet as a russet-colored handkerchief, more dyed than stained, in the revised program cover for the RSC London production in 1998. That property is deemed representationally undesirable even at a time when books and art celebrate dislocation, grime, and grunge. Perhaps the lack of its use to signify the play is another indication that those in advertising still know a commodity when they see it, and when they don't.

Notes

1. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” in Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3. Subsequent references to this source are given in parenthesis in the text.

2. Appadurai resists the notion that gift and commodity exchanges are fully separate from one another. He also finds commodities even in pre-industrial, non-monetary societies. In both respects he is revising the work of Karl Marx and other early political economists.

3. John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 125.

4. Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), which will serve as the edition for subsequent citations to this play except those noted below. Warren modernizes Iachimo's name to Giacomo, but in this essay I have retained the Folio's spelling.

5. For this observation I am indebted to Garrett Sullivan.

6. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, p. 124.

7. All references to Shakespeare's plays excluding Cymbeline are to The Norton Shakespeare based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

8. See Ann Barton's discussion of the likelihood that this marriage is only a spousal de praesenti, a clandestine pre-contract, in “‘Wrying but a little’: marriage, law, and sexuality in the plays of Shakespeare,” chapter I. of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3-30; and Roger Warren's objections to Barton's argument that Innogen is still a virgin, in the “Introduction” to his edition, pp. 32-3, a portion of which is quoted at note 25 below.

9. Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, p. 75.

10. Frow quotes Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1979): “‘the conversion of gifts to commodities can fragment or destroy such a group’” (p. 80). Frow presents Hyde's approach as the “simplest and purest model of the gift … against which all more complex versions,” such as his own, “are set” (Time and Commodity Culture, pp. 103-4).

11. Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. VIII (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 55.

12. J. M. Nosworthy (ed.), Cymbeline (London: Routledge, 1955), p. 196.

13. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. VIII, p. 11.

14. Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1607), sig. B1v, where the Empress of Babylon says, “Her Kingdom weares a girdle wrought of waves, / Set thicke with pretious stones, that are so charm'd, / No rockes are of more force.”

15. Linda Woodbridge, “Protection and pollution: palisading the Elizabethan body politic,” in The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 45-85. A longer version of this essay appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327-54.

16. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. VIII, p. 56.

17. Kopytoff, “Cultural biography,” p. 78.

18. Margreta De Grazia, “The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece,” in Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (eds.) Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 17-42; p. 21.

19. Thomas D'Urfey, The Injured Princess (1682; facsimile reprint, London: Cornmarket Press, 1970). The title of the play given on the page on which act I. begins reads “The Unequal Match; or the Fatal Wager,” sig. B1.

20. See Ann Thompson, “Person and office: the case of Imogen, Princess of Britain,” Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 76-87.

21. Diana E. Henderson makes this point effectively in “Rewriting family ties: Woolf's Renaissance romance,” in Sally Greene (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. 136-60: “Although Imogen's ultimate reunion with those blood brothers displaces her as royal heir, she celebrates it. Restoration of the male line of inheritance removes the impediment to her marriage with the commoner Posthumus Leonatus; that marriage is always her primary concern” (p. 137).

22. History of King Lear, 4.171; Tragedy of King Lear, 1.4.158.

23. Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998), chapter 3. First published as “The masculine romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and early modern English nationalism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 301-22.

24. In The Flower of Friendship, Edmund Tilney's primary spokesperson in the dialogue advises that “equalitie is principally to be considered in this matrimoniall amitie … For equalnesse herein, maketh friendlynesse” (ll. 286-89). I have discussed how slippery this passage is and related it to issues of class in the introduction to my edition of the dialogue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 50-9.

25. I find Roger Warren's discussion of these lines in his “Introduction,” pp. 32-3, especially compelling. Countering Anne Barton's claim that the “opposition” refers specifically to Innogen's hymen and that she is a virgin, Warren says the quoted passage “simply means that Giacomo anticipated pleasurable physical ‘opposition’ to penetration, and that her behaviour was a mere prelude to intercourse (‘encounter’).” As for Posthumus's remarks at ll. 161-9, “any criticism is directed not at her [Innogen] but at Posthumus for a sexual demandingness that now, apparently humiliated, drives him to interpret her restraint as the behaviour of a professional ‘tease’” (p. 33).

26. Lacan's account of the male child's discovery of the phallus as signifying separation and loss of the union with the mother, thereby prompting his entry into the Symbolic Order as a speaking subject, relates to Posthumus's loss and his discovery at this moment of a new discourse, one that is distinctly phallogocentric and governed by the Law of the Father. Posthumus's loss of Innogen triggers his earlier, infantile separation from his birth mother, since he was “ripped” from her via Caesarean section (5.3.139), and another separation from whoever nursed him as surrogate mother.

27. In a note to Posthumus's opening soliloquy in act 5, the Variorum editor observes: “Eccles here expresses much and prolonged wonder over the difficulty of accounting for this ‘bloody cloth’; since it must have reached the hands of Posthumus after his arrival in Britain. Eccles thinks that Posthumus must have privately dispatched a messenger with authority to receive it from Pisanio. And if this be so, Shakespeare should unquestionably have communicated some intelligence of it to the audience.” The Tragedie of Cymbeline, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1913), pp. 349-50, n. 3. Shakespeare's failure to do what Eccles and Furness advise indicates how unimportant the conveyance of the cloth is in the play. It is more mystified and resistant to commodification if it appears without explanation.

28. Peter Stallybrass, “Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage,” in De Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object, p. 310.

29. Nosworthy (ed.), Cymbeline, pp. 197-8.

30. Stallybrass connects it with the “senseless linen” (1.3.7) of Posthumus's handkerchief when he parted from Innogen, and sees it later as “the sentient material of the cloth which has ‘clipt’ her” (ibid.).

31. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 168. Diana E. Henderson and James Siemon observe that “The most remarkable aspect of Posthumus's behavior, his repentance for killing his wife prior to learning of her innocence, in fact derives from Shakespeare's anonymous ‘lowly’ source, Frederycke of Jennen, rather than from Boccaccio” in “Reading vernacular literature,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 220. While this is strictly correct and the repentance is prompted by the husband's seeing tokens of his wife's death, the stated reasons for his repentance are very different: “And whan Ambrose sawe theim [the tokens], than was he more sorier than he was before, because that he spake not with her before that he caused her to be put to death, to examyne her, wherfore John of Florence [Iachimo's counterpart] had the jewels” (Nosworthy [ed.], Cymbeline, p. 198). In the source the husband regrets not confirming her guilt before having her killed; he gives no indication that had she been guilty—wryed by a little—he would have regretted his order for her death.

32. Warren, note to 5.1.9 “put on instigate”; J. M. Nosworthy, note to 5.1.9, “put on usually explained as to instigate, incite (this crime), but assume, take on myself seems equally possible,” in Cymbeline.

33. The promptbook indicates that Posthumus enters the act with “cloth in R hand,” and at the line “put on this” the direction reads, “Cloth round neck and ties it” (Shakespeare Centre Library).

34. Of the National's 1988 production, Warren comments that “Posthumus's transformation was clinched by the very effective device of wearing the bloody cloth wrapped round his head, with eye-holes cut in it, like a guerilla's balaclava. By the time he had gone through the battle, his face and body not only caked in grime but streaming with blood, his own and other people's, it was no surprise that he was unrecognizable to anyone except the audience until he chose to reveal himself.” Roger Warren, Staging Shakespeare's Late Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 74. In Noble's 1997-98 production, Posthumus had the cloth tied around his head after he re-entered at 5.3. The production by the Los Angeles company A Noise Within in 2000 followed Peter Hall's use of the balaclava.

35. In the 1982 BBC production for television, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, Posthumus had the bloody cloth in his belt for much of act 5. The 1996 production for the Washington Shakespeare Company, directed by Joe Banno with Cam Magee as dramaturg, had Posthumus tie the cloth around his neck at a later point in 5.1 and it was still there in the last scene. Innogen then took it off after they were reunited. A Noise Within's 2000 production in Los Angeles, directed by Art Manke, had Posthumus wrap the cloth around his head at 5.1.24. For the Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of 2000 directed by Danny Scheie, with Ros King as dramaturg, Posthumus returned from battle with the bloody cloth tied around his wrist.

36. Stallybrass, “Worn worlds,” p. 310.

37. Warren (ed.), Cymbeline, n. to 2.3.130-1: “Posthumus' meanest garment is presumably his underwear, chosen by the now enraged Innogen because the point at which it clipped (encircled) Posthumus' body will be particularly provocative and humiliating to Cloten.”

38. Coppélia Kahn remarks that “in his fifth-act soliloquy he internalizes that part and cleanses it of sexual contamination. Surely the play works as hard to enable Posthumus to accept ‘the woman's part’ as to foster manly virtue in him,” in Roman Shakespeare, p. 168. I agree with this important observation and recommend Kahn's entire discussion, but I do not think that Posthumus is able to “cleanse” the woman's part of its sexual contamination. Instead, he accepts contaminated woman, the wife whom he thinks has wryed by a little. Neither he nor anyone else in the culture is capable of removing that stain from the bloody cloth.

39. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 219; Jodi Mikalachki, Legacy of Boadicea, p. 113.

40. See Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), especially pp. 26-43.

41. Mikalachki, Legacy of Boadicea, p. 113.

42. Jean Howard observes in her “Introduction” to the play in the Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 2963, “In its narratives of nation, Cymbeline seems able to reprove the most virulent forms of misogyny only when it simultaneously removes women from public power, transforms them into chaste, domesticated wives, and reaffirms the dominance of husbands.” While I agree with the first point, the play's emphasis on chastity is mitigated through Posthumus's forgiveness of Innogen when he believes she has committed adultery, and I see little evidence that it asserts Posthumus's dominance over her at the end. The emphasis is on their union, not on the hierarchical disparity between them.

43. I have explored the difficult distinction between patriarchy and misogyny in “Historical differences: misogyny and Othello,” in Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 153-79.

44. Barton emphasizes the reference to “son-in-law” in “‘Wrying but a little,’” p. 30.

45. I would also argue that this embrace, rather than the “masculine embrace” between Fidele and Lucius discussed by Mikalachki (Legacy of Boadicea, p. 112), is the more important embrace of the play.

46. The bloody cloth frequently reappears in production in the last scene. See note 34 for two instances.

47. The Tempest, 1.2.465, Prospero to Ferdinand: “I'll manacle thy neck and feet together”; Henry VI Part Two, 5.1.147, Clifford to York about Warwick and Salisbury: “We'll bait thy bears to death / And manacle the bearherd in their chains”; Measure for Measure, 2.4.90-4, Angelo to Isabella: “… that you his sister / Finding yourself desired of such a person / Whose credit with the judge, or own great place / Could fetch your brother from the manacles / Of the all-binding law”; Coriolanus, 1.10.55-6, Cominius to Coriolanus: “If 'gainst yourself you be incensed we'll put you, / Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles.”

I am grateful to members of two seminars at the meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in 1997 and 1998 for their responses to different versions of this essay, and to those who offered questions and comments when I presented it at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; Froebel College at Roehampton Institute; and King's College, University of London, all in spring 1998; and the Medieval and Renaissance Consortium at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in spring 2000. Those who were particularly helpful at various stages of this project include Laura Lyons, Tina Malcolmson, Helen Hackett, Joan Perkins, and Carol Rutter. Garrett Sullivan prepared a response to the essay for volume I of the electronic journal and seminar, Early Modern Culture, where an earlier version of it first appeared, and his astute critique led to a thorough revision. I have also benefited from information on productions provided by directors and dramaturgs: Cam Magee, Art Manke, and Ros King. Thanks to all.