Cymbeline's Queen has no direct source in Holinshed's reign of Kymbeline. She bears a striking resemblance, however, to Voadicia, or Boadicea, who appears in Holinshed's narrative of Roman Britain roughly sixty years after the events depicted in Shakespeare's play.²⁶ Like Cymbeline's Queen, Boadicea man conquerors but ultimately failed to free Britain of the imperial yoke, taking her own life (or dying of "a natural infirmity") after a conclusive battle. Also like the wicked Queen, she was famous for her nationalist stance, especially her great speech on British freedom and resistance to tyranny, where she opposed the payment of tribute to Rome and invoked the same topoi of the island's natural strengths and the glorious history of Britain's people and kings. Ultimately, Boadicea, too, suffered condemnation for her ruthless defense of this position. Although Holinshed acknowledges the legitimacy of her initial grievance (the Romans had seized her late husband's kingdom, raped her daughters, and had her flogged), he finds that her female savagery carried her too far in revenge. Showing no mercy, Boadicea led the "dreadful examples of the Britons' cruelty" until her undisciplined army of women and men finally met defeat at the hands of a smaller, well-organized band of Romans under the leadership of Suetonius. The editorial summary of her revolt makes explicit both the cause of her failure and the reason for her condemnation: "the chief cause of the Britons insurging against the Romans, they admitted as well women as men to public government." ²⁷

Caractacus, on the other hand, wins unqualified historiographical praise for both his initial resistance and his eventual submission to Rome. In 43 AD he led the western tribe of the Silurians in revolt against Rome. Although he, like Boadicea, was defeated, he did not end his life but was taken to Rome to be led as a captive in the Emperor Claudius's triumphal procession. There he so distinguished himself by the dignity of his speech and bearing that he won freedom and commendation of his manly courage from Claudius himself. Caractacus's manliness, his Roman virtus, is the focus of early modern accounts of his uprising. The patriotic oration Caractacus delivers before Claudius is never condemned. On the contrary, the 1587 Holinshed cites it as both laudable and successful, calling it the "manly speech to the Emperor Claudius, whereby he and his obtain mercy and pardon." The term manly draws an implicit contrast with the earlier condemnation of Boadicea's revolt as an example of feminine government. ²⁸

The distinction between Caractacus's manly romanitas and Boadicea's female savagery became a standard feature of early modern accounts of Roman Britain. Camden begins his collection of "Grave Speeches and Wittie Apothegmes of woorthie Personages of this Realme in former times" with a thirteen-line citation of the "manly speech" of Caractacus before Claudius. He follows this with a three-line speech from Boadicea, after which, he reports, she lets a hare out of her lap as a token of the Romans' timidity. This superstitious piece of barbarism meets with the fate it deserves, for "the successe of the battell prooved otherwise."²⁹ As late as Milton's History of Britain in 1671, the distinction was maintained. Milton cites in full Caractacus's manly speech and offers him as a classic exemplum of masculine virtue. When he comes to Boadicea's rebellion, however, he refuses to include her oration, saying that he does not believe in set speeches in a history and that he has cited Caractacus only because his words demonstrate "magnanimitie, soberness, and martial skill." In fact Milton accuses his classical sources of having put words into Boadicea's mouth "out of a vanity, hoping to embellish and set out thir Historie with the strangness of our manners, not caring in the meanwhile to brand us with the rankest note of Barbarism, as if in Britain Woemen were Men, and Men Woemen."³⁰ In this standard pairing of the male and female British rebels against Rome, then, Boadicea represented "the rankest note of Barbarism," that state in which gender distinctions are collapsed. Caractacus, on the other hand, was a figure of exemplary manliness, invoked to counterbalance the overwhelming female savagery of Boadicea and to reestablish British masculinity.³¹

Fletcher seems to have followed this pattern in composing his drama Bonduca. Although he derived most of his historical information from classical sources and Holinshed's Chronicles, he also included a character named Caratach, Bonduca's cousin and general of the Britons.³² Caratach conducts the war by Roman rules, for which he expresses great admiration. He even chastises Bonduca for her extravagant speeches against the Romans, thus anticipating Milton's rejection of her feminine oratory. Because she defied Caratach's order to return to her spinning wheel and instead meddled in the affairs of men, Bonduca is made to bear full responsibility for the Britons' eventual defeat. Despite her eponymous role in the drama, she dies in Act 4, leaving the "Romophile" Caratach to represent Britain in the last act. During that act he earns the further admiration of the Roman soldiers, who publicly honor and praise him for his Roman virtues. The play ends with his embrace by the Roman commander Swetonius and the latter's words: "Ye shew a friends soul. / March on, and through the Camp in every tongue, / The Vertues of great Caratach be sung."³³

Other plays of the period which deal with British rebellion against Rome end with the same masculine embrace. In The Valiant Welshman, a dramatization of Caractacus's rebellion, the character "Caradoc" is betrayed into Roman hands by the duplicitous British queen Cartamanda and brought before the Emperor Claudius. Claudius then recalls Caradoc's valor in battle, lifts him up from his kneeling posture, and celebrates his valiant name.³⁴ In William Rowley's A Shoemaker, a Gentleman, a disguised British prince twice saves the life of the Emperor Dioclesian and rescues the imperial battle standard in successive clashes with Vandals and Goths.³⁵ On resigning his trophies to Dioclesian in the next scene with the words "Now to the Royall hand of Caesar I resigne / The high Imperiali Ensigne of great Rome," the prince is bidden by the emperor to "Kneele downe, / And rise a Brittaine Knight" (3.5.17-49).³⁶Fuimus Troes, or the True Trojans, a play about Julius Caesar's conquest, ends in a metaphorical embrace of empire, with the words "The world's fourth empire Britain doth embrace."³⁷ With the exception of Rowley's Shoemaker, these plays work toward a reconciliation between Rome and Britain that is exclusively masculine.³⁸ Any women who might have figured in the action (and they usually do so in invented love plots) have been killed off, leaving the stage free for men to conclude matters of true historic import. With the exclusion of women from the action, the stage of Roman Britain becomes the "exclusive preserve" of men, both British and Roman. This triumph of exclusion is figured in the masculine embrace that is the dominant trope of these final scenes, invoked as a metaphor of empire and embodied in the stage embraces of male Britons by Roman commanders and in the symbolic merging of their national emblems.³⁹

If the masculine romance of Roman Britain delivers Britain from the self-destructive violence of the wicked Queen, however, it also defines the province of Britannia as the passive object of Roman desire. Mosse emphasizes the fear of male homosexuality that haunts the fraternal bonding of nationalism.⁴⁰ Goldberg expands on this idea in his analysis of Plimoth Plantation, citing William Bradford's need to separate the pervasive homosociality of his founding American fantasy of all-male relations "by drawing the line—lethally—between its own sexual energies and those it calls sodomitical." Commenting on Bradford's reluctant inclusion of '"a case of buggery'" because '"the truth of the history requires it.'" Goldberg sets the unrealizable desire to distinguish originary male bonding from sodomy at the heart of Bradford's history: "The truth of the history, as I am reading it, is the entanglement of the 'ancient members' with and the desire to separate from the figure of the sodomite who represents at once the negation of the ideal and its literalization." ⁴¹ Fear of homosexuality is neither so clear nor so lethal in early modern constructions of Roman Britain, where female savagery is the primary object of revulsion. When Fletcher and Shakespeare attempt the literalization of this masculine ideal in terms of a purely British nationalism, however, they produce scenes of male bonding characterized by feminine and domestic behavior. ⁴²

The assumption of women's work, speech, and familial roles characterizes male bonding among Britons in Bonduca and Cymbeline. Wales, the last preserve and final retreat of pure Britishness, provides the setting in both cases. ⁴³ In Bonduca this nationalist male bonding dominates the last act, where Caratach, hiding from the Romans, cares for his nephew Hengo, last of the royal Iceni after the deaths of Bonduca and her daughters. In doing so, Caratach takes on the maternal role that Bonduca, in her unfeminine lust for battle, has refused to exercise. His whole concern in this last act is the nursing and feeding of the boy Hengo, who is dying of sickness and hunger after the British defeat. Caratach's language to the boy is tender and protective: he tries to shield him from the knowledge of their loss and soothes him with such endearments as "sweet chicken" and "fair flower" (5.1.27; 5.3.159). Hengo's name (Fletcher's invention) points to Hengist, the first Saxon ruler in Britain, often used in early modern iconography as the representative of England's Saxon heritage.⁴⁴ The moving spectacle of the old warrior nursing the last sprig of British manhood might thus suggest an imaginative attempt to construct a native masculine genealogy proceeding directly from ancient Britain to the Saxon heptarchy, and excluding both women and Rome from the national past. The death of Hengo signals the failure of this fantasy. Only after the collapse of this last hope for the continuation of the British line does Caratach allow himself to be won over by the brave courtesies of the Romans, who promise the boy honorable burial (5.3.185-88). Caratach's embrace by Claudius follows the failure of this domestic interlude, in which Caratach tries to keep alive the generative fantasy of a purely masculine Britain.⁴⁵

The experiment in an all-male British world is more developed in Cymbeline. In the middle of Act 3, after ties with Rome have been broken, Shakespeare introduces the Welsh retreat of Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus. This idyll represents as full a return to unmitigated Britishness as the wicked Queen's opposition to the payment of tribute. Just as her resistance to Rome fails, causing (in Cymbeline's view) her own death and that of her son,⁴⁶ so, too, does the primitive fantasy of the Welsh cave fail to stave off the ultimate embrace with Rome. In the latter case it is not the death of the British heirs that ends this hope but rather their fear that they will lack a historical afterlife. When Belarius praises the purity of their Welsh retreat, contrasting it with the tales he has told the boys "Of courts, of princes; of the tricks in war" (3.3.15), the elder son responds: "Out of your proof you speak: we poor unfledg'd, / Have never wing'd from view o' th' nest; nor know not / What air's from home" (11. 27-29). He concedes that the quiet life of their retreat may be sweeter to Belarius than the court but asserts that "unto us it is / A cell of ignorance" (11. 32-33). His younger brother then adds:

                  What should we speak of
When we are old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December? How
In this our pinching cave shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen
  nothing:
We are beastly.
                               (11. 35-40)

What the brothers protest is their exclusion from history. They have seen nothing; they are barbaric. Confined to their pinching cave in Wales, they have, quite literally, no history to speak of. This conflict between the princes and their presumed father comes to a head when the brothers want to enter the battle against the Romans. Belarius takes their zeal as an irrepressible sign of their royal blood, which longs to "fly out and show them princes born" (4.4.53-54). It is equally, however, a sign of their desire to enter the world of history. Belarius's own sense of having been painfully shaped by a wider experience only fuels this desire. "O boys, this story / The world may read in me: my body's mark'd / With Roman swords," he claims (3.3.55-57), as though his body were a literalization of the Roman writing of ancient British history. Without fighting the Romans, the princes will have no such marks to read by the winter fire when they are old.

The masculine rite of passage such scars represent for them personally is a version of the national entry into history by means of the Roman invasion. For early modern historiographers Britain, too, would have remained outside history had she never entered into battle with the Romans.⁴⁷

This convergence of the personal and the national in the forging of masculine identity offers the possibility of reconciling two of the most important interpretive traditions of Cymbeline: the psychoanalytic and the historicist. Where historicists find the battle and its aftermath puzzling and inconclusive in terms of the play's treatment of Roman-British relations, psychoanalytic critics focus on the battle as the play's central masculine rite of passage, interpreting it in archetypal terms that ignore its historiographical complexity.⁴⁸ The approach I have been advocating, developed from Mosse's insight about the interrelatedness of nationalism and sexuality, historicizes the development of sexual and national identities as it demonstrates their interdependence. Janet Adelman, while recognizing the historiographical complexity of Cymbeline's submission to Rome, interprets it in psychoanalytic terms as a result of "the conflicted desire for merger even at the root of the desire for autonomy."⁴⁹ In historiographical terms, I would argue that in early modern England an originary engagement with Rome was necessary for the formation of an autonomous national identity. Roman Britain came to play a foundational role in the recovery of native origins not only because it provided a context for the male bonding that characterizes modern nationalism but also because it enabled exorcism of the female savagery that challenged both the autonomy and the respectability of nationalism.

Engagement with Rome also brought Britain into the masculine preserve of Roman historiography. It is battle with the Romans that affords Cymbeline's sons, the male Britons of the next generation, that historical identity they lacked in their pastoral retreat. In the dramatization of this episode, they achieve historical status instantly, not because they rewrite Roman history, or win a lasting victory, but rather because that victory is immediately described and preserved in historiographical forms. As soon as the princes' stand with Belarius has been presented dramatically, Posthumus recapitulates it as a historical battle narrative, complete with citations of brave speeches and descriptions of the terrain and deployment of troops (5.3.1-51). His interlocutor responds by producing an aphorism to commemorate their action, "A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys" (1. 52), which Posthumus improves into a rhymed proverb: "Two boys, an old man twice a boy, a lane, / Preserved the Britons, was the Romans' bane" (11. 57-58). The transformation of the dramatic stand in 5.2 into narrative, aphorism, and proverb in 5.3 represents instant historicization. This making of history issues directly from engagement with the Romans, which also leads to the princes' restoration as Cymbeline's male heirs. Both the continuance of the masculine British line and the entrance of its youngest branches into written history require abandonment of the purely British romance of the cave in Wales.⁵⁰