Imogen alone remains as a possible icon of pure Britishness in the complex of gender, sexuality, and nationalism I have been describing. Surely in her we have an early version of Mosse's icon of respectable womanhood to bless the virile bonding of nationalism.⁵¹ She, more than her father or brothers, presents and experiences Britain, wandering through it, calling up its place names, and describing its natural situation. Imogen's name, invented by Shakespeare for the heroine he adds to his historical material, is derived from that of Brute's wife, Innogen, mother of the British race.⁵² And like other ancient queens, Imogen, too, voices a lyrical celebration of the island: "I' th' world's volume / Our Britain seems as of it, but not in't: / In a great pool, a swan's nest" (3.4.138-40). The image of the swan's nest is as evocative of national identity as that of Neptune's park in the Queen's speech, suggesting among other things Leland's great chorographic song of the Thames, Cygnea Cantio.⁵³ The context of the speech, however, is quite different from that of the Queen's national celebration in 3.1. In contrast to the Queen's radical "Britocentrism," Imogen asserts in 3.4 that Britain is only a small part of a larger world, a world from which it is in fact separate. Her line "Our Britain seems as of it, but not in't" raises the historio-graphical question of Britain's isolation from the civilized world. At least one critic has suggested that Imogen's line is a version of the Vergilian verse "Et penitus toto diuisos orbe Britannos, " cited in Holinshed's Chronicles.⁵⁴ Whether the image is derived from a Roman source or not, it perpetuates the imperial view of Britain's separation from the world identified with civilization. Rather than lauding this separation, as would Boadicea or the wicked Queen, Imogen suggests that there is a world outside Britain where she may fare better than she will at the hands of the Queen and her son.

As in early modern accounts of ancient Britain, this flight from native isolation leads inevitably to Rome, for Pisanio answers Imogen's speech with the words: "I am most glad / You think of other place: th' ambassador, / Lucius the Roman, comes to Milford-Haven / Tomorrow" (3.4.141-44). Lucius the Roman and Milford Haven will together shape Imogen's identity for the rest of the play. The mutuality required for them to do so signals how British national identity is formed from the interaction of the Roman invaders with the native land. If there is a magic of place in Cymbeline, it is in Milford Haven. The place name takes on an almost incantatory power as Imogen and the other characters make their way to the haven of final recognition and reconciliation.⁵⁵ Critics since Emrys Jones have stressed the importance of Milford Haven in Tudor mythography as the place where Henry Tudor landed before marching to defeat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field.⁵⁶ They have built on this historiographical reading a sense of Milford Haven as a sacred or enchanted place that saps the strength of Britain's enemies and grounds the resistance of her true defenders. This is very satisfying in terms of Tudor-Stuart mythography, with its claims of Arthurian and British precedence, but it does not explain why Lucius the Roman, rather than Cymbeline, lands at Milford in anticipation of the future Henry VII of England.

The first Britons Lucius encounters on landing are the disguised Imogen and the headless corpse of Cloten in Posthumus's clothes. Lucius's attempt to reconstruct the story of the figure sleeping on the "trunk … / Without his top" issues in a series of questions that demand a recapitulation of the play's action which no single character can articulate (4.2.353-67) and which will occupy much of the lengthy recognition scene at the play's conclusion. The unreadability of this tableau of headless masterlessness emphasizes the confusion of British national identity at this moment, with Cymbeline under the domination of his wicked Queen, Cloten dead in Posthumus's dress, the princes in hiding and ignorant of their royal identity, Imogen disguised and believing Posthumus to be dead, and Posthumus himself at large and still deceived as to his wife's fidelity. Imogen voices this confusion in response to Lucius's final, blunt question, "What are thou?":

                  I am nothing; or if not,
Nothing to be were better. This was my
  master.
A very valiant Briton, and a good,
That here by mountaineers lies slain. Alas!
There is no more such masters: I may wander
From east to occident, cry out for service,
Try many, all good: serve truly: never
Find such another master.
                                   (4.2.367-74)

Recalling medieval laments over the dead body of a feudal lord, Imogen presents herself as a youth who has lost all status or place after the death of the "very valiant Briton" "he" calls master. In this invented identity she gives voice to the inner despair of her presumed widowhood—her sense of being nothing at the seeming death of her husband—in terms of a nationless wandering from east to west. As in the princes' entry into battle, the personal and the national intersect in Imogen's crisis in Wales.

The upward turn of Imogen's fortunes, and those of her nation, is not far to seek. If there is any straightforwardly respectable character in Cymbeline, it is the Roman commander and emissary Lucius. He conducts himself with honor in the council scenes of 3.1 and 5.5 and succors the disguised Imogen with grace and generosity in 4.2. He is also resolutely masculine, deriving his identity from military and political functions, and appearing in such masculine contexts as the council chamber, the march, and the battlefield. Here indeed is a virile antitype of Henry Tudor at Milford, and an ancient predecessor on which to found a stable masculine identity for the nation. When Lucius questions the disguised British princess about her dead "master's" identity, she gives the latter's name as "Richard du Champ" (4.2.377), suggesting an analogy between his body and the ground. Without putting undue pressure on this analogy, I would suggest that Lucius, in raising Imogen from the ground, also releases her from her quest to reach Milford Haven, from her ritualized laying out by the princes and Belarius, and from her second "death" on the body of "du Champ." In taking her from this multiply constructed British ground, he gives her a new identity in his Roman entourage.

The only constant of Imogen's shifting identity in this scene is her assumed name, Fidele. It is her proper epithet, and yet, for a personification of unwavering marital fidelity, Imogen changes allegiance a remarkable number of times. Her initial defection from her father precedes but informs the play's action; one might even read in her decision to reject the death planned by Posthumus, or in her mistaken abandonment of her marriage while her husband yet lives, a kind of defection from absolute fidelity to him also.⁵⁷ Certainly she moves from one allegiance to another in the middle acts of the play, where she leaves the princes and Belarius, abandons the seeming corpse of Posthumus, and ultimately betrays Lucius himself when she refuses to plead for his life before Cymbeline (5.5.104-5). Both in this series of shifts between British and Roman identifications and in the wager plot, the question of Imogen's fidelity is of central importance. Posthumus reviles Imogen and all women for faithlessness when he believes she has betrayed him (2.5.20-35), and Lucius makes a similar generalization about those who place their trust in girls and boys when she abandons him to his fate (5.5.105-7).⁵⁸ By the conclusion of the play, however, Imogen reconciles all her conflicting fidelities. Cymbeline is again her father; Posthumus, her husband; and the princes, her brothers. Last of all these bonds, she restores her relation to Lucius, to whom she says, "My good master, / I will yet do you service" (11. 404-5).

This restoration immediately precedes the final reversal of the play, in which Cymbeline restores Britain's tributary relationship to Rome and blames its earlier disruption on the nationalism of his "wicked queen." Imogen's final act of fidelity, like her father's, is an acknowledgment of Rome as master, even in defeat.⁵⁹

The Latin name Fidele that she assumes as a badge of her wifely constancy suggests the general importance of Rome in the construction of British faithfulness. Imogen's quest to prove her marital fidelity becomes involved in the complex question of national fidelity when she decides to follow Lucius. It is Lucius who raises her from ritualized death and failure in 4.2, and he who gives her the context in which to reconstruct her identity as Fidele when she acknowledges herself reduced to nothing by the apparent death of Posthumus. Even when she seems to deny Lucius, Imogen reaffirms the Roman bond, telling Cymbeline, "He is a Roman, no more kin to me / Than I to your highness" (5.5.112-13). While she is disguised, she is constituted as her Latin name Fidele, as though her disgrace could only be lifted, her fidelity reconstructed, in Roman terms.

The role of Fidele involves a shift not only in national identity but also in gender, Lucius's generalization about those who put their trust in girls and boys being truer than he realizes. Her relationship with Lucius thus becomes a version of the other bonds between male Britons and Roman commanders. Like Caractacus, she is lifted from the ground by a Roman leader who celebrates her virtue, and in Lucius's redefinitions of their hierarchical relationship, she becomes increasingly the object of his love, not his mastery. The masculine embrace of Roman Britain is thus figured in the relationship of the disguised Imogen and the Roman Lucius even before the Roman and British ensigns "wave friendly together" at the play's conclusion. The complexity of what Imogen represents in this embrace, in terms of both gender and sexuality, illustrates the complicated nature of British national identity in the play. Neither her imagined female body nor her boy's disguise offers a stable masculine identity for Britain.⁶⁰ The instability of the gender, status, and national identities represented in this figure of disguise and much-questioned fidelity precludes the construction of any stable identity, personal or national.

The resolution of the play's many riddles of identity depends on the deus ex machina of the oracle Posthumus finds on his bosom after dreaming of his family and lineage in 5.4. This restoration of personal identity has its national analogue. The Roman Soothsayer who explicates the oracle of Posthumus's identity is the same who prophesied the merger of Cymbeline's emblem of the radiant sun with the Roman eagle, as he recalls in the penultimate speech of the play (5.5.468-77). When he reads Imogen into the oracle, he identifies her as "The piece of tender air … / Which we call mollis aer: and mollis aer / We term it mulier: which mulier I divine / Is this most constant wife" (11. 447-50). This display of pseudo-etymology recalls the involved and equally fanciful antiquarian derivations of the name Britain. (Except for its context, it would stand as a parody of such pedantry, in the style of a Don Armado or a Fluellen.) Camden begins the Britannia with a survey of such theories, including Humfrey Lhuyd's derivation of Britain from the Welsh Prid-Cain, meaning a "pure white form," a phrase that resonates with the Soothsayer's "piece of tender air" in its attempt to articulate an ethereal purity.⁶¹ As in the Soothsayer's derivation of mulier from mollis aer, it also works to disembody and desexualize the loaded term Britannia. Even so, by presenting Imogen as a piece of tender air, the Soothsayer completes the separation from the earth begun by Lucius when he lifted her from the ground of Wales and the body of "du Champ." This fancy antiquarian footwork restores Imogen to her husband by reconstituting woman, strongly identified with the land in both Imogen and the wicked Queen, as air so that she might take her place in the prophetic new order of Roman Britain.⁶²

Imogen never regains the visual trappings of her femininity. If she represents a version of ancient British respectability, it is one riddled with the problems of gender and sexuality which characterize the British relation to Rome. To the extent that she reemerges as a respectable ideal at the end of the play, it is through a series of alliances with the male characters, both British and Roman, from whom she derives her identity. Cymbeline's daughter, Posthumus's wife, the princes' sister, and the servant of Lucius, she does not raise the specter of female autonomy and leadership suggested by the wicked Queen's machinations and the example of Boadicea. The anxieties provoked by these ancient British queens are thus ultimately defused in the series of bonds Imogen has established by the end of the play. These bonds emphasize the necessary sub-ordination of the feminine within the patriarchal structures of marriage and empire. The fact that Imogen reestablishes these bonds while still in her boy's disguise indicates the degree of anxiety about female power to destroy them. Like Bonduca, The Valiant Welshman, and The True Trojans, Cymbeline concludes with the image of an exclusively male community.

I would like to close with a word about the relative roles of homophobia and misogyny in early modern constructions of national origins. In Mosse's formulation the greatest threat to the male bonding of nationalism is overt male homosexuality, an anxiety Goldberg discovers as early as the 1630s in Plimoth Plantation. Both theorists emphasize the interrelatedness of homophobia and misogyny in the formation of masculine national identity. In the masculine romance of Roman Britain, fears of effeminacy and of women are also interwined. It strikes me, however, that the latter are much more explicit than the former. A fear of originary female savagery consistently drove early modern historians and dramatists of ancient Britain to find refuge in the Roman embrace. The complexities of Britain's position in this embrace certainly raise issues of sexuality, but these seem to me to be subordinated to an overriding concern about the gender of national origins. British origins in all these works emerge as unavoidably feminine, either in the savagery of a wicked queen or in the feminized domesticity and submission of the British male to the Roman embrace. I take the violence with which early modern dramatists and historians rejected the figure of the ancient British queen as an indication of how thoroughly their failure to transform the femininity of national origins disturbed them. Their attempts to avoid this originary femininity led them ultimately to embrace a subordinate status in the Roman empire. While this new status also consigned Britain to a feminized role, it avoided the savagery of the purely British nationalism articulated by ancient queens. It also allowed for a historical afterlife for Britain. In contrast to the ancient queen's savage refusal of empire, the masculine embrace of Roman Britain became the truly generative interaction, producing a civil masculine foundation for early modern English nationalism.

Notes

¹ Quotations are taken respectively from Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 23; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 205. Anderson's formative study was first published in 1983.

² For their respective theoretical positions, see Greenfeld, 17-21; and Anderson, 1-7. Anderson's preface to his second edition provides a useful summary (c. 1991) of changes in the study of nationalism during the 1980s and the ironies of the global political transformations that defined the early 1990s.

³ The historical bibliography for this "crisis of order" in early modern England is a long one; the model has received some recent challenges from within the ranks of social historians (who largely developed it). For studies emphasizing the issues of gender and sexuality I take up in this article, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Amussen, "Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560-1725," and D. E. Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," both in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 196-217 and 116-36. For a broader Continental perspective, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top." Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stan-ford UP, 1975), 124-51. For a recent critique of the historiographical use of the term crisis and a call for greater attention to the disorder of masculinity as well as femininity in the period, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 37-52.

⁴ Anderson, 12.

⁵ In his description of the revolt led by the Iceni queen Boudicca, Tacitus notes this political equality of the sexes and identifies it as one of the defining features of British barbarism: "neque enim sexum in imperiis discernunt" (see Tacitus, Agricola, trans. M. Hutton, Rev. R. M. Ogilvie, in Agricola, Germania and Dialogus, 5 vols., Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970], Vol. 1, Bk. 16.1-3). For corroboration of this assessment in early modern English historiography, see the discussion of Boadicea below, p. 309.

⁶ The most elaborate articulation of this model is George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). Sexuality is also implicit in much of Anderson's study and emerges explicitly in the closing pages (199-203), where Anderson posits two versions of eroticized nationalism that also consider how attitudes to race and miscegenation figure in this complex. See also While Pateman does not examine sexuality, she usefully describes how the fraternal pact that excludes women from power remained constant in the transition from patriarchal to social-contract theories of government in seventeenth-century England.

⁷ For the historical and landbased nationalism developed by Elizabethan antiquarians, see Richard Helgerson, "The Land Speaks," Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1992), 105-47. G. Wilson Knight includes this Jacobean speech with other Shakespearean examples of what he calls Elizabethan post-Armada sentiment: Hastings's short invocation of the impregnable isle in Act 4 of 3 Henry VI: John of Gaunt's speech in Act 2 of Richard II; and Austria's description of the kingdom he promises to the young Lewis of France in Act 2 of King John. (This last is a somewhat equivocal appeal to nationalism, given its context.) See The Crown of Life (London: Oxford UP, 1947), 136. Indeed, this Elizabethan sentiment persisted into James's reign, when many of its more accessible monuments were first published; e.g., the first English translation of William Camden's Britannia in 1610; Part 1 of Michael Drayton's chorographical epic Poly-Olbion in 1612, along with John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, the first fully developed county atlas of England. Saxton's 1579 atlas, often combining several counties to a sheet, and not including inserts of county towns, represents a less fully realized version of what came to be the countyatlas genre.) J. M. Nosworthy's dating of Cymbeline as probably 1609 puts it at the peak of popular interest in national history and topography (The Arden Shakespeare Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy [London: Methuen, 1955], xiv).

⁸ All quotations of Cymbeline follow Nosworthy's Arden edition.

⁹ For a rich account of nostalgia in Shakespearean appeals to national history and topography, see Phyllis Rackin, "Anachronism and Nostalgia," Stage of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), 86-145. Rackin notes the receding horizon of nostalgia in John of Gaunt's "scepter'd isle" speech in Richard II, where the nineteen-line accumulation of appositive noun phrases grammatically constructs the desired past "as an ideal substance beyond the reach of historical process," a changeless prehistory that syntactically resists narrative (122-23).

¹⁰ Alexander Leggatt, "The Island of Miracles: An Approach to Cymbeline." Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 191-209; Leah S. Marcus, "Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality" in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds. (Chicago, IL:U of Chicago P, 1988), 134-68; Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 206-35; Joan Warchol Rossi, "Cymbeline''s Debt to Holinshed: The Richness of III.i" in Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs, eds. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978), 104-12; Warren D. Smith, "Cloten with Caius Lucius," Studies in Philology 49 (1952): 185-94.

¹¹ Geoffrey Hill, '"The True Conduct of Human Judgment': Some Observations on Cymbeline" in The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: André Deutsch, 1984), argues that although Shakespeare ultimately rejects the "ferocious insularity" of 3.1, most of his original audience would have applauded it (55-66). J. P. Brockbank, in "History and Histrionics in Cymbeline" (Shakespeare Survey 11 [1958]: 42-49, esp. 44 and 47), characterizes Cloten and the Queen as "hypostatized versions of the arbitrary spleen and malevolence that Geoffrey [of Monmouth] often found antecedent to the rule of law," yet he ultimately argues that their "minimal virtue of defiant patriotism" is never allowed to menace seriously the natural integrity of the British court.

¹² Knight, 136. For his full reading of Cymbeline in this regard, see 129-67.

¹³ Mosse, 18. As France settled into the bourgeois early nineteenth century, for instance, the revolutionary icon of Marianne, once depicted halfnaked and leading men into battle, became a fully clothed, seated figure. For Mosse's full argument about respectability, see his "Introduction: Nationalism and Respectability," 1-22; for the development of woman's role in this alliance, see chap. 5, "What Kind of Woman?" 90-113.

¹⁴ Knight regards the Queen as an extreme figure of motherhood, "a possessive maternal instinct impelling her violent life" (132).

¹⁵ It is not quite clear that the Queen dies by her own hand. As in the historiography of Boadicea described below, the Queen might also be said to have succumbed to an excess of savage emotion. Cornelius's response to Cymbeline's question "How ended she?" bears both interpretations: "With horror, madly dying, like her life, / Which (being cruel to the world) concluded / Most cruel to herself (5.5.31-33).

¹⁶ Amussen, Ordered Society, 118-23. Literary challenges to the ideal of wifely subordination persist into the eighteenth century, notably in Restoration and Augustan comedy. Within a Lockean context of the family as private, however, these challenges no longer represent the same disruptive force to society that they did earlier in the seventeenth century. Indeed, one might argue that wifely insubordination (and adultery) figures as largely as it does in Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy precisely because it was no longer perceived as a social threat. For the perceived threat of feminine insubordination to earlier seventeenth-century English society, see the bibliography incorporated into note 3, above.

¹⁷ The kind of complex prehistory to Mosse's model of nationalism that I develop in this article is what gives meaning, I think, to the term early modern, i.e., the broader field of less-developed alternatives to the naturalized constructs of modernity, from nationalism to psychic or sexual identity. I invoke the term prehistory here in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture" in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), 210-24. Greenblatt's assertion that "psychoanalysis is, in more than one sense, the end [purpose? goal? final point?] of the Renaissance" (210) can be adapted to nationalism, or the kind of respectable nationalism whose birth Mosse, Anderson, and others locate in the eighteenth century. The "compulsive cultural stabilizing" of individual identity that Greenblatt finds "unusually visible" in the story of Martin Guerre (218) is also remarkable in the construction of national identity in this period. I explore its specificities here in the case of English recovery of native origins, working on the assumption that the quest for national identity, like psychoanalysis's quest for the individual, is (in Greenblatt's words) "the historical outcome of certain characteristic Renaissance strategies" (224). In my discussion of masculine historical identity below, I suggest ways in which historicist and psychoanalytic readings of early modern texts need not be mutually exclusive.

¹⁸ For an account of Imogen as the pattern of conventional Elizabethan womanhood, see Carroll Camden, "The Elizabethan Imogen," The Rice Institute Pamphlet 38 (1951): 1-17.

¹⁹ Helgerson points in this direction in his brief afterword to Forms of Nationhood, "Engendering the Nation-State," 295-301. For a more developed discussion of how gender anxieties figure in early modern English nationalism, see Jean E. Howard, "An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national identity in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West" in Women, "Race, " & Writing in the Early Modern Period, Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 101-17.

²⁰ Jonathan Goldberg, "Bradford's 'Ancient Members' and 'A Case of Buggery … Amongst Them'" in Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 60-76, esp. 63-64. Goldberg acknowledges here the pioneering work of Ann Kibbey on the collapse of Pequots and Anglo women in (masculine) Puritan accounts of the Pequot War; see her chap. 5, "1637: the Pequot War and the antinomian controversy" in The interpretation of material shapes in Puritanism: A study of rhetoric, prejudice, and violence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 92-120.

²¹ Indeed, even before she assumes her boy's disguise, Imogen's status and authority as a married woman are not clear. Anne Barton, in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), has recently pointed to numerous ambiguities in the play's references to the union of Imogen and Posthumus, suggesting that it might have been an unconsummated precontract rather than a solemnized marriage (19-30). Janet Adelman, in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), notes the degree to which Imogen's disguise disempowers her, in contradistinction to the ways it enabled the selfhood of Shakespeare's earlier comic heroines (210).

²² Cymbeline's first queen, mother to Imogen and the lost princes, leaves no other trace in the play than the diamond Imogen gives Posthumus (1.2.43). Belarius's wife, Euriphile, nurse to the young princes and mourned by them as a mother, also seems to have been dead for some time (3.3.103-5). Adelman comments on the need to efface the maternal in the all-male pastoral of Wales (202-4).

²³ Goldberg, 63-64. Rackin elaborates how women function as "antihistorians" who resist patriarchal structures of masculine history-writing in Shakespeare's histories ("Patriarchal History and Female Subversion," 146-200). For the particular danger posed by mothers in this regard, see 190-91.

²⁴ Brockbank, 44-45; David M. Bergeron, "Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play," Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 32-41. Bergeron expands his reading of the play's Augustan elements in Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985), 136-57. For other accounts of the idealization of Augustus as a context for Cymbeline, see J. Leeds Barroll, "Shakespeare and Roman History," Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 327-43; and T.J.B. Spencer, "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans," SS 10 (1957): 27-38. See also and

²⁵ Robert S. Miola articulates the most radical development of this position in two essays: "Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Valediction to Rome" in Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982, Annabel Patterson, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 51-62; and "Cymbeline: Beyond Rome," Shakespeare's Rome, 206-35. See also ; and Both "pro-British" and "pro-Roman" historiographical readings of Cymbeline have trouble placing Iachimo and the scenes in Rome in a first-century Roman-British context. The only historiographical sense critics have made of Iachimo is to read his symbolic rape of the sleeping Imogen in 2.2 as a figure for the Roman invasion of Britain. Like the Romans at Milford Haven, Iachimo fails to achieve his conquest yet collects his "tribute." The anachronistic intrusion of Renaissance Italy in all its degeneracy may also provide an outlet for anti-Roman sentiment by invoking the early modern context of Rome as the Papacy rather than as the ancient seat of empire. For a brief discussion of 2.2, see note 51 below.

²⁶ Raphael Holinshed, "Historie of England" in Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, (London, 1587), 32-33 and 42-46. Spelling of quotations from Holinshed has been modernized throughout. Brockbank cautiously suggests a resemblance between Cymbeline's Queen and Boadicea (49, n. 20).

²⁷ Holinshed, "Historie of England" in Chronicles, 44 and 42. Abraham Fleming added moralizing headnotes to chapters and episodes in the 1587 Holinshed. These headnotes seem designed both to summarize the narrative and to influence reader response to it. My references to "Holinshed" imply the multiply-authored 1587 text, as opposed to the individual named Raphael Holinshed. For a recent account of the "syndicate" that produced the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1994), 1-70.

Throughout his account of the uprising, Holinshed emphasizes the presence of British women in battle as well as government. To introduce Voadicia's oration, set off with its own subtitle in the 1587 edition, he describes the Iceni queen as wearing "a thick Irish mantle" and carrying a spear (43). Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England" in Andrew Parker et al., eds., discuss how the Irishwoman wearing the mantle became an icon of disorder, confusing gender, class, and political categories in early modern English accounts of Ireland (165-69). They also comment on the conflation of mantled Irishwomen and vagrants (158-59). In Holinshed's account Boadicea cites such a conflation in her own case to inflame her troops against the Romans, whose "cruelty showed in scourging her like a vagabond" (45).

²⁸ Holinshed, "Historie of England" in Chronicles, 39. Both evaluations were added to the 1587 edition by its editor, Abraham Fleming.

²⁹ Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. C. Dunn (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984), 205-6. Dunn uses the 1605 editio princeps as his basic text but notes revisions and additions to the 1614 and 1623 editions, also prepared by Camden. The accounts of Caractacus and Boadicea date from the first edition and were neither revised nor expanded in 1614 and 1623. In addition to the Agricola, Bks. 15-16, the classical sources for Boadicea's revolt were Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson, in The Histories and The Annals, 4 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1937), Vol. 4, Bk. 14.30-36; and Dio Cassius, Dio's Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1935), Vol. 8, Bk. 62.1-12.

³⁰ Milton, History of Britain, ed. French Fogle in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Don M. Wolfe, gen. ed., 8 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1971), 5:70-72 and 79-80. Camden, while giving a truncated speech in Remains, omits Boadicea's oration from any edition of the Britannia published in his life-time, perhaps for reasons similar to Milton's. Camden mentions Boadicea in conjunction with Camalodunum, London, and Verulam, the three settlements she sacked, gradually increasing the amount of information and detail in each Latin edition of the Britannia (1586, 1587, 1590, 1600, 1607), until she plays a major role in the historical narrative of Roman Britain in the first English-language edition (Britain, trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1610], 49-52).

³¹ Rackin describes a similarly gendered antithesis between Talbot and Joan of Arc in Shakespeare's first Henriad (151).

³² In this, Fletcher also drew on the account of Voada, a northern queen, which includes a British leader named Caratake; see Holinshed, "Historie of Scotland" in Chronicles, 45-50.

³³ John Fletcher, Bonduca, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Fredson Bowers, gen ed., 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), Vol. 4, 5.3.201-3

³⁴ R. A., The Valiant Welshman, or The True Chronicle History of the life and valiant deeds of Caradoc the Great, King of Cambria, now called Wales. ed. Valentin Kreb (Leipzig: Georg Bohme, 1902), 5.5.39-58.

³⁵ William Rowley, A Shoemaker, a Gentleman in William Rowley: His "All's Lost by Lust, " and "A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, " University of Pennsylvania Series in Philology and Literature 13, ed. Charles Wharton Stork (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1910), 3.4.

³⁶ The defeated Vandal Prince Roderick kneels in turn at the end of this scene, promising to confine his people to Germany, to which Dioclesian responds, "And that obedience Roderick weele imbrace" (3.5.64). Cymbeline's combination of British victory with submission to the embrace of empire is thus refracted through a third nation in this probably contemporaneous drama of Roman Britain. (Stork dates Shoemaker to 1609 [162]. Bergeron notes the contemporaneity and relevance of this play to Cymbeline [Shakespeare's Romances, 140].) Despite an unusual emphasis on Roman atrocities (invoked throughout in the context of Christian persecution), Rowley's play too presents a Roman emperor praising the valor of a British prince in the final scene, with Dioclesian's words: "It is a man, whose Fate / Vpheld the glory of the Roman State" (5.2.22-23). I am grateful to an anonymous SQ reader for bringing this intriguing play to my attention.

³⁷ Jasper Fisher, Fuimus Troes, or the True Trojans in A Select Collection of Old Plays, ed. Robert Dodsley, 12 vols. (London: Septimus Prowett, 1825), 7:456.

³⁸ The masculine embrace of Shoemaker takes place in the third act rather than at the play's conclusion. Several outspoken female characters, British and Roman, take part in the conclusion to this play, distinguishing it from the all-male reconciliations of the other Roman-British dramas. Indeed, the embrace that closes the play is performed by the newly liberated British queen and her recently restored sons.

³⁹ Just as the Roman and British ensigns "wave friendly together" at the conclusion of Cymbeline, so, too, Cymbeline's emblem of the radiant sun is said to merge with the Roman eagle in the Soothsayer's interpretation of his vision before the battle (5.5.468-77). In this interpretation, the meeting of the emblems becomes the symbol of the right relation between Britain and Rome, vested with the force of destiny, and presented as the key to understanding the play's peaceful resolution. The implicit embrace of national emblems in Cymbeline is made explicit at the conclusion of The True Trojans. There another soothsayer, the Druid Lantonus, describes the new device of Roman Britain, in which the British lion and the Roman eagle are surrounded by two semicircles, representing the double letter C from the names Caesar and Cassibelan: "the semicircles, / First letters of the leader's names, we see, / Are join'd in true love's endless figure" (453). In Lantonus's description of their meeting, "true love's endless figure" represents the embrace of the names Caesar and Cassibelan, even as "The world's fourth empire Britain doth embrace."

⁴⁰ See Mosse, chap. 2, "Manliness and Homosexuality," 23-47.

⁴¹ Goldberg, 67-68.

⁴² Jones and Stallybrass comment on early modern antiquarian assumptions about national character that linked barbarism with effeminacy in descriptions of the "Scythian disease," a condition of masculine effeminization that included impotence and the assumption of women's work, clothing, speech, and other forms of behavior, represented in national terms by the hereditary effeminacy of the Scythian royal family. Noting the derivation of Irish origins from the Scythians in some late-sixteenth-century apologies for Irish colonization, Jones and Stallybrass argue for the English need to distinguish their own national identity from this barbaric effeminacy (158-65).

⁴³ For Wales as a place of geographical and sexual liminality in Shakespeare's histories, as "a scene of emasculation and female power, … the site of a repression in the historical narrative," see Rackin, 170-72.

⁴⁴ Hengist was the architect of the Saxon heptarchy, or seven minor kingdoms, that introduced Saxon rule to Britain. Holinshed chronicles his ascendancy and how as a result "the Saxons come over by heaps to inhabit the land" ("Historie of England" in Chronicles, 78-86, esp. 78). Hengist appears with Brute, Julius Caesar, and William the Conqueror, representing England's Saxon heritage on the title page of Drayton's PolyOlbion. A similar figure entitled "A Saxon" appears with a Briton, a Roman, a Norman, and a Dane on the title page of Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain.

⁴⁵ Sharon Macdonald, in "Boadicea: warrior, mother and myth" (Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives, Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden, and Shirley Ardener, eds. [London: Macmillan, 1987], 40-61, esp. 49-50), also notes the emphasis on manliness and homoeroticism in Bonduca.

⁴⁶ See, for instance, 5.5.462-66, where Cymbeline attributes the deaths of the Queen and her son to divine retribution for her interference in the proper submission of Britain to Rome.

⁴⁷ The Welsh retreat of the princes has in fact led some critics to conclude that the setting of Cymbeline has no historiographical importance and merely enhances the play's romantic qualities. I would argue that the Welsh setting of these scenes is of historical importance precisely because it dramatizes the anxiety of being excluded from history. For the opposing readings, see Irving Ribner, "Shakespeare and Legendary History: Lear and Cymbeline." SQ 7 (1956): 47-52; and Arthur C. Kirsch, "Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy," ELH 34 (1967): 288-306.

⁴⁸ In a recent historicist account, Leah Marcus highlights the battle as an essentially mysterious and unassimilable episode, recapitulated four times in forms that exemplify the insoluble nature of the play's many riddles of interpretation (139-40). Most psychoanalytic critics interpret the Welsh cave as a form of maternal protection from which the princes must emerge into battle with the Romans, which restores them to their father and their patrilineal identity. Caesar functions in these readings as the ultimate father, with whom Britain works out its relationship through the Roman conflict and its resolution. See Meredith Skura, "Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics" in Representing Shakespeare, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 203-16, esp. 209-14: D. E. Landry, "Dreams as History: The Strange Unity of Cymbeline" SQ 33 (1982): 68-79; and Murray Schwartz, "Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline" Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1970), 219-83, esp., 250-59. In contrast, Adelman regards the Welsh retreat as an exclusively male preserve where Belarius can raise Cymbeline's sons free from the tainted maternity that haunts masculine imagination in the play (203-4). David M. Bergeron, while not discussing the battle, notes that the Welsh retreat affords the princes no opportunity for sexual experience, arguing that their seclusion is another version of the play's sterile or incomplete sexuality; see his article "Sexuality in Cymbeline," Essays in Literature 10 (1983): 159-68, esp. 167.

⁴⁹ Adelman, 207. Although I disagree with her reading of Wales as an unproblematically masculine sphere, I find Adelman's general discussion of Cymbeline (200-219) insightful and persuasive, particularly in her insistence that masculine anxiety about gender and sexuality informs both the marriage plot and what she calls "the Cymbeline plot" (the question of British autonomy and the relation to Rome).

⁵⁰ Rackin notes the nostalgic longing in Richard II for an all-male past where heroic deeds of warfare conferred meaning and value (191). Her historicist reading of masculine longing in Richard II complements and reinforces psychoanalytic analyses of the princes' entry into adult masculine identity in Cymbeline.

⁵¹ Imogen's identity with Britain has been commented on from a variety of critical perspectives, especially regarding the analogy between the Roman invasion of Britain and Iachimo's invasion of Imogen's bedchamber; see Leggatt, 194; Schwartz, 221; and Skura, 210. Robin Phillips's 1986 production at Stratford, Ontario, indicates the staging possibilities of this scene within the culminating period of Mosse's argument. Phillips set the play in twentieth-century England between the two world wars, with Iachimo as an Italian fascist whose invasion of Imogen's bedchamber enacted fascist intrusion into and regulation of private relations. His monologue was delivered in an amplified whisper, recalling the role of radio in bringing fascist "morality" literally into the home. I am indebted to Elizabeth D. Harvey for suggesting the radio analogy.

⁵² Indeed, some recent editors have made a strong argument for "Innogen" as Shakespeare's intended form of the name. For a summary of this argument, see Roger Warren's Shakespeare in Performance: Cymbeline (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1989), viii.

⁵³ But see Nosworthy's note to this image in the Arden edition, where he surveys critical concern about the image as undignified or degrading.

⁵⁴ Brockbank, 48; Holinshed, "Description of Britaine" in Chronicles, 2. The line is from the First Eclogue, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough as "wholly sundered from all the world"; see Virgil, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950), 1:36.

⁵⁵ Simon Forman, who saw a performance of Cymbeline in 1611, mentions Milford Haven several times in his account as the place toward which all the action tends. Nosworthy prints Forman's account in full in the introduction to the Arden edition (xivxv).

⁵⁶ Emrys Jones, in "Stuart Cymbeline" (Essays in Criticism 11 [1961]: 84-99), presents the original and most elaborate reading of the historiographical importance of Milford Haven (93-95). For discussions of the power of Milford developed from Jones's argument, see Landry, 71-73; Leggati, passim; Marcus, 148-51; and Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1975), 47-52.

⁵⁷ In the medieval ballads her lament of masterlessness invokes, her role would have been to remain by her dead master's body until she herself died (e.g., like the "fallow doe/lemman" in "The Three Ravens").

⁵⁸ One might even suggest that Posthumus provides a needed vent for the collective masculine anxiety about Imogen's fidelity when he unwittingly strikes his disguised wife onstage (5.5.228-29).

⁵⁹ Cymbeline's earlier recollection (3.2.69-73) of having served as a page in Augustus's household (a courtly anachronism culled from Holinshed, "Historie of England" in Chronicles, 32) strengthens this parallel.

⁶⁰ The boy's disguise adds a further complication in that it foregrounds the theatrical convention of boy actors playing female roles.

⁶¹ See Holland's translation of this passage in Camden, Britain, 5-6.

⁶² Adelman reads the Soothsayer's linguistic transformation of Imogen as an unmaking of her sexual body that "does away with the problematic female body and achieves a family and a masculine identity founded exclusively on male bonds" (218). Rackin, noting the importance of Elizabeth of York, Katherine of France, and the infant Elizabeth at the end of Shakespeare's two Henriads and Henry VIII, argues that "the incorporation of the feminine represents the end of the historical process … [and] can only take place at the point where history stops. A world that truly includes the feminine is a world in which history cannot be written" (176). From my analysis of Cymbeline, I would agree. I would suggest that the converse is also true, that in the romance of national origins, the disincorporation of the feminine is the place where history starts.

Source: "The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 301-22.