SOURCE: "Dreams as History: The Strange Unity of Cymbeline," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 68-79.

[In the following essay, Landry examines the thematic link between dreams and the historical unity of Cymbeline.]

Cymbeline is most remarkably a play about dreams, about the various and often inexplicable functions of the unconscious mind. It is also a romance, a history play, and a tragicomic pastoral. Naturally, critics have found it difficult to interpret the play in any unified way, difficult to assign it any governing structure. Most are still in tacit agreement with Johnson, who deplored its "incongruity" and "unresisting imbecility"; even critics who claim some fondness for its oddities tend to explore particular aspects, leaving the unwieldy bulk of the threefold plot largely unexplained.¹ Frank Kermode and Northrop Frye, respectively, have come closer to pinning down the play's peculiar tone by calling it "experimental,"² and "academic," with a "technical interest in dramatic structure."³

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare is indeed experimenting, but experimenting most resonantly, I think, with the underlying significance of certain natural cycles and their dramaturgical counterparts, with the processes of sleep as a perpetual "ape of death" (Iachimo's phrase; II.ii.31),⁴ waking as a symbolic rebirth, dream as a ritualized purgation. The main dreamers, Posthumus and Imogen, are also the characters with the strongest focus. They are, moreover, the agents of the erotic plot through which the plots of familial and national affection can be salvaged and resolved.⁵ By a series of analogies, the experience of Posthumus and Imogen comes to represent that of the whole community of Cymbeline's kingdom.

I

The play's structural complexities imply an equation: dreams, which contain in however concealed a fashion the facts of personal history, are to one's identity as a nation's past, recovered through legend and chronicle-history, is to its sense of itself as a nation, a true community. Cymbeline is at once the most local and historical of the romances, the only one explicitly grounded in events from Britain's past, and as transcendently primitive as any, with considerable interest in the ritualistic, largely unconscious roots of the drama. In Cymbeline, however, the primitivism or archaic interest of the themes of dreams and chronicle-history is treated with wit and sophistication. The apparent naiveté of the folk-tale plot is constantly undermined by self-consciously theatrical artifice. The panegyrical quality of the chronicles—especially as interpreted under the Tudors with an eye toward legitimating royal authority by aligning it with the national interest⁶—is gently deflated. The play closes with Cymbeline, the King himself, commenting a little wryly on the expeditious nature of the peace just negotiated between Britain and Rome: ". . . Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were wash'd, with such a peace" (V.v.482-83). It is just this tone of naive wonder undermined ever so quietly but insistently by archness and self-control that distinguishes Shakespeare's last plays in general, and Cymbeline, as a peculiar blend of romance and history play, in particular.

Romances are traditionally concerned with the recovery and reconstitution of identity. Quite a bit has been written about the unusual status of Posthumus as a hero.⁷ His absence from the stage is indeed more noticeable than his presence. And yet, at the same time, his experience functions as the only facsimile of developing character we are offered in the play. Not only Posthumus but the entire court and, by analogy, all of Britain undergo a kind of purgation through dream or dreamlike experience. The purgation is dreamlike in that it acts as a working out or incorporation of potentially disruptive elements, which Freud describes as the basis of the dream-work; the pattern or structure of the dream itself incorporates these usually erotic impulses by permitting them to be expressed, however covertly or metaphorically, in the dream's action.⁸ The play suffers a certain break in consciousness followed by a descent to a demonic realm when Posthumus retreats from the action. In romance, the demonic or night world to which the self descends is the domain of tyrannous circumstances, filled with images of displacement of the self: a world of doublings, disguises, misnamings, and mistaken identities, the conventions both of romantic or tragicomic drama and of dreams.

It is as if Posthumus' physical absence were somehow paralleled by Imogen's absence of mind. Though repudiated unfairly as an adulteress, as Posthumus' wife Imogen remains in Shakespearean conception his lawful helpmate, his other and better self, and, most significantly, his "soul" (V.V.263) in her mind and ours. Throughout the pastoral scenes which follow near Milford Haven her masculine disguise further identifies her with the absent Posthumus. As Fidele she comes to embody Posthumus' own capacity for virtue in the same way that Cloten, as a parodic double, enacts his tendencies toward vice.⁹ The pastoral setting, with its magical and ironic overtones,¹⁰ is an ideal distancing device, and it reinforces in these scenes the sense of a kind of dream action. Both Fidele and Cloten become figures of displacement for the embattled psyche of Posthumus and allow bestial and erotic instincts to surface in a distanced, and therefore acceptable, way. Posthumus' absence from the stage does not preclude his growth as a hero, because we are given instead a psychomachic enactment of his development through the adventures of Imogen, Cloten, and the royal brothers. The relation these scenes bear to Posthumus' moments of crisis and insight—neatly following his disappearance and preceding his return—suggests, I think, at least a subliminal sense of Posthumus himself offstage, dreaming the pastoral action. His very exile to Italy is a kind of sleep, an abatement of his ordinary powers of action and discourse. As the Queen puts it:

His fortunes all lie speechless, and his name
Is at last gasp.

(I.v.52-53)

But the dreaming itself resolves the various dilemmas of the court and of his tenuous hold on identity. When Cornelius predicts the effect of the drug Imogen takes in Belarius' cave, his words are appropriate for the effect produced by the pastoral sequence as a whole:

. . . but there is
No danger in what show of death it makes,
More than the locking up the spirits a time,
To be more fresh, reviving.

(I.v.39-42)

We may think first of the explicit patterning of Posthumus' fifth-act dream in the jail, when imprisonment and impending execution lead directly to revelation and new hope. But the pattern is implicit also in Imogen's "show of death" and revival, followed by Posthumus' change of heart.

Frye has commented upon the "extraordinary blindness"¹¹ of the play's characters, calling attention particularly to Imogen's speech to Pisanio as she prepares to depart on her journey—in psychic terms, her descent—to the wilds of Wales:

I see before me, man. Nor here, nor here,
Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them
That I cannot look through. Away, I prithee;
Do as I bid thee. There's no more to say;
Accessible is none but Milford way.

(III.ii.77-81)

There is a sense of encroaching murkiness, of blurred horizons, of the contraction of vision. Only a journey to Milford, a sacred or enchanted place since Posthumus is supposed to be there, will serve to restore the natural order; it is time for the quest. And that quest requires that Imogen prepare for "the gap" that she "shall make in time" (IILii.61-62)—a phrase suggestive of a lapse of ordinary consciousness—by wearing "a mind dark" as her fortune is (III.iv. 142-43) as well as a boyish disguise. By assuming a false identity as Fidèle, she literally becomes the truth of Posthumus' psychic experience. As Pisanio says, with the insouciance characteristic of the many speakers of dramatic ironies in the play, by vanishing as herself she will "tread a course / Pretty and full of view" which will bring her, in Lucius' service, close enough to Posthumus to receive accurate news of him:

. . . yea, happily, near
The residence of Posthumus; so nigh, at least,
That though his actions were not visible, yet
Report should render him hourly to your ear
As truly as he moves.

(III.iv. 146-50)

Indeed, his actions, his change of heart, will not be made visible, but her actions will signify in the minds of the audience the emergence and eventual triumph of his native virtue. The method is one of visual enactment of a subtext never made verbally explicit, another strategy perhaps originally derived from dreams.

A psychomachia becomes inevitable, then, with the arrival of Cloten, whose thinly noble veneer and underlying rashness and brutal sexuality parody Posthumus' much-touted virtue. For we are given reason to believe that Posthumus' reputation, which has been much "extended" since the first scene of the play when the First Gentleman sings his praises unequivocally, is, in fact, much overblown. His eagerness to imagine Iachimo coupling with Imogen makes us highly suspicious of his not only unchivalrous but entirely cold-blooded protests that she "oft" restrained him of his "lawful pleasure" (II.v.9-10). These are his parting words to the audience before his disappearance, and they usher in the pastoral sequence. By the time we see Cloten in Posthumus' clothes, we know that Posthumus too has feet of clay and more than a little of Cloten's brutish instinct. Guiderius' beheading of Cloten neatly gelds the rashness of Posthumus. When Cloten and Imogen are laid to rest side by side, the audience sees a concise literalization of a rather unwieldy metaphor: Posthumus' psychomachic drama is resolved with Imogen/Fidele waking live and therefore triumphant. In one formulation, with Cloten's death the old Adam is laid to rest. Appropriately enough, the audience is prepared early in the play (however ironically) for Cloten to serve as a ritual sacrifice. As the First Lord cautions him after Cloten has bullied the departing Posthumus: "Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice" (I.ii.1-3). In the light of what happens "Milford way," especially with the various changings of garments, Cloten's reply acquires a deeper significance: "If my shirt were bloody, then to shift it." However nonchalant the presentation, the suggestion is clear: Cloten is more than simply a bully, buffoon, or ironic double, though he is something of all three. He is from our first sight of him a marked man, and he serves, as in a quieter way his mother does, as a scapegoat for the purging of the whole community.

Of course, it has been necessary for Imogen as well to undergo a ritualized death for Posthumus' sake. But, phoenix-like, having been deemed by Iachimo "the Arabian bird" (I.vi.17), she also undergoes a ritual of rebirth. In this she is not unlike Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, for each manages by so doing to bring her lover to his senses. In her identification with Posthumus, Imogen assumes the status not only of a receptacle of displaced psychic energies, but of a sacrificial offering. As Freud notes in his essay "The Theme of the Three Caskets,"¹² in folktale a feigned or implied death will often serve as the penance through which a rebirth can be achieved. He cites the Grimm story of "The Six Swans" in which a sister frees her enchanted brothers by remaining dumb for a number of years. Her enforced silence represents a ritualized death on their behalf. Similarly, Imogen is reduced by fatigue, fasting, and a peculiar sapping of inner strength which seems to derive from the Milford landscape, as Cloten also experiences it.¹³ Her familiar "tune" (V.v.238) is forced into abeyance first by physical helplessness and then by the drug's suspension of consciousness. Interestingly, just as Cloten is allied with sacrificial notions from Act I on, early in the play Cymbeline consigns Imogen to a ritualized ordeal:

Nay, let her languish
A drop of blood a day and, being aged,
Die of this folly.

(I.i.156-58)

And she herself reiterates the theme, begging Pisanio to carry out Posthumus' command that she may in dying "pang" Posthumus' memory, a proper penance for his rashness:

Prithee dispatch.
The lamb entreats the butcher.

(III.iv.94-95)

The suggestiveness of the play's vaporous atmosphere and many allusions to unconscious lapsings becomes evident when one realizes that Shakespeare explicitly casts her ordeal in the form of dream.

Waking next to Cloten, she recalls the sense of dislo: cation and haziness which marks her setting out for Milford and, indeed, seems indigenous to the place. She is unable to distinguish between dream and reality and imagines that her association with Belarius/Morgan and, more ironically, with her as-yet-undiscovered brothers must have been a dream:

. . . I hope I dream;
For so I thought I was a cave-keeper,
And cook to honest creatures. But 'tis not so;

'Twas but a bolt of nothing,
shot at nothing, Which the brain makes of fumes. . . .

(IV.ii.298-302)

Shakespeare then makes a characteristic leap, so that we become aware of the entire pastoral sequence as a kind of dream:

The dream's here still. Even when I wake it is
Without me, as within me; not imagin'd, felt.

(IV.ii.307-8)

The setting itself, featuring Belarius' cave which "instructs" his royal charges in a proper reverence for the natural world and "bows" them "to a morning's office" (III.iii.3-4), becomes a landscape charged with meaning. The pastoral generally provides safely distanced, naturalized outlets for martial and erotic conflicts—the paragone, the singing competition, the hunt as sport. As I have suggested, Cloten's pursuit of Imogen both purges and makes apparent in a displaced fashion Posthumus' residual brutish instincts. And I detect a certain suppressed eroticism in the relations between Imogen and her brothers which is diffused, I think, into the landscape in their hunting talk and in the sense of consummation of the natural cycle contained in their burial obsequies.¹⁴ In their eyes Fidele is quite literally returned to rest in homely earth. Her waking to the grotesque possibility the pastoral idyll has concealed at once violates its conventions and reaffirms them; for it is merely Cloten, the distinctly unpastoral scapegoat, who has been destroyed.

Shakespeare's rather puzzling use of anachronism, which has long perplexed critics, may also be linked with the play's dream-like texture: plain-spoken Roman soldiers and Machiavellian intriguers just up from Renaissance Italian courts are perfectly free to mingle and skirmish in dreams with Celtic mountaineers. The analogous juxtaposition of these respective representatives of the three plots suggests something more than dream-logic, but I shall take up this matter in a moment.

When Posthumus returns to the stage at the beginning of Act V, it is apparent that he is as changed a man as if he too had witnessed or undergone Imogen's ordeal. In the logic of the double- or triple-plot, he has in effect undergone such an ordeal within himself. The demonic drama of the pastoral sequence of Acts III and IV has laid to rest those disturbances of character which had sundered him from wife and "soul," from his own best self. And that self is finally inseparable from the greater social harmony. His alienation has been both signified and compounded by banishment from his native soil. Dramatically, the pastoral sequence prepares him, and us, for a visitation by the past in the dream of the parents and brothers he, born literally posthumously, has never known:

Post. [Waking] Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire and begot
A father to me; and thou hast created
A mother and two brothers. But, O scorn,
Gone! They went hence so soon as they were born.

(V.iv.123-26)

Still under the dream's spell, he falls into couplets like the ghosts. But though they have vanished, a token has been left behind—the riddle which prophesies Posthumus' eventual good fortune as part of Britain's newly found prosperity in peace. Less tangibly, the dream's legacy is a legitimation, through the recovery of origins, of his full identity as Posthumus Leonatus, a warrior-patriot, now strong in the defense of peace. The curious thing is that the more he comes to know himself, the more he ceases to matter as a character at all and comes instead to embody the psychic experience of the play as a whole. He whose reputation has been so hyperbolically "extended" becomes in fact symbolically dilated to encompass both the realms of dream and waking, of alienation and identity. The strangeness of Posthumus as a hero may be more easily accounted for if we remember that the nature of "identity," as it functions within comic, or tragicomic, structure, is always twofold. The singular sense of identity comes close to our conventional notion of the word; its larger sense requires that the social tyranny with which the play begins be dismantled and the community more harmoniously rebuilt. Posthumus' experience is, I think, both profoundly individual and social, at once peculiar to him—the recovery, through dream, of his personal history—and, by analogy, comparable with a larger movement—the recognition of a growing sense of national identity through the dramatization of national history, with its politic blend of fact and legend, reportage and myth.

Because his potential for virtue was always present, merely waiting to be purged of its darker impulses, in the course of the play Posthumus is changed, and yet not changed. He experiences a dilation of being in at least two senses. The pastoral action—itself a dream displaced and enacted—functions as an incorporation of the unconscious, without some acknowledgment of which a complete and seamless identity is impossible, and as a preparation for his actual dream, in which his personal history is returned to him. In a larger sense, Posthumus' being is dilated through the pressure of such incorporation to signify, by analogy, the experience of the play as a whole, its pattern of purgation and reintegration of consciousness in communal and national terms.

II

Empson describes the phenomenon of the "identification of one person with the whole moral, social, and at last physical order" as a device fundamental to the structure of the double-plot.¹⁵ In its capacity for complex sympathy, says Empson, the Elizabethan imagination was for some reason quite at home with both a great deal of dramatic ambiguity and the double-plot's "vague suggestiveness."¹⁶ In contrast to most modern critics, Cymbeline's first audiences would have perceived not only the connection between Posthumus' experience and that of the other characters, but the analogies yoking the three plots as well. The doctrine of analogy as it applies to history, both personal and national, seems to have been firmly implanted in their minds. They were, after all, not so very far from the tradition of medieval exegesis, which in the reading of church history encouraged a particular sensitivity to a layering of analogous relationships. Indeed, one could characterize the structure of feeling at work in Cymbeline as a kind of dialectical relation between the one and the many. On one hand, the play's deepest experience is distilled into the psyche of Posthumus; on the other, the audience is made aware of certain forces compelling the action on several levels, so that the last act especially bears witness to an overriding order, a sense of unity in multiplicity.

Critics who complain of the play's lack of unity seem to have trouble most often with the historical elements, particularly the Roman/British pact, with its accompanying aura of anachronism. Some of the sense of illogicality and dislocation can, as I have suggested, be attributed to play's dream-like texture. But I also think that the abrupt yoking of the issues of personal, familial, and communal or national reunification heightens the audience's awareness of the correspondences between them. Each plot becomes a metaphor for the other two; we are shown the destinies of man, family, and the larger community under the same reassuring management. In what Kermode wryly calls the "twenty-four-fold denouement"¹⁷ of Act V, scene v implied relationships become visible, a movement characteristic of the play's controlling pictorial or spatial technique. Just as Posthumus' divided psyche is spatially realized in Cloten and Imogen side by side, the unity of the narrative strands upheld by various characters is made manifest on the stage. Clusters form and are forcibly joined: Posthumus-Iachimo-Imogen; Imogen-the brothers-Cymbeline; Cymbeline-the brothers-Lucius. These groups correspond to the erotic, familial, and national plots, respectively. As Granville-Barker takes pains to emphasize, the wondrous impact of the recognitions can only be achieved through the cooperation of all the actors in a sustained panoply of characterization.¹⁸

The obvious question, then, is what precisely constitutes the compelling force yoking individual natures with their larger contexts? The play has its share of references to an unseen power, all of them, I think, deliberately murky. Jupiter's utterance of the doctrine of felix culpa—"whom best I love I cross"—is delivered in a self-consciously theatrical context, to the rumble of thundering machinery and the chime of strained and stagey rhymes:

No more, you petty spirits of region low,
Offend our hearing; hush! How dare you ghosts
Accuse the Thunderer whose bolt, you know,
Sky-planted, batters all rebelling coasts?

Be not with mortal accidents opprest:
No care of yours it is; to make my gift,
The more delay'd, delighted. . . .

(V.iv.93-102)

To which the ghosts of Posthumus' family respond with exaggerated awe:

Sici. He came in thunder; his celestial breath Was sulphurous to smell; the holy eagle Stoop'd, as to foot us. His ascension is More sweet than our blest fields. . . .

All. Thanks, Jupiter!

(V.iv.114-19)

The explicit artifice of the spectacle renders Jupiter's pronouncement formally de rigueur, and therefore commonplace—a requirement of the tragicomic structure rather than a satisfying answer to the powerful suggestion offered by one of Cymbeline's lords:

The want is but to put those pow'rs in motion
That long to move.

(IV.iii.31-32)

Here, of course, Frye and others speak of Christian providence, of the play as a religious allegory, though Frye maintains that the signs are implicit and point beyond the play to the greatest known event of Cymbeline's time, the birth of Christ. Certainly the play is imbued with a sense of impending catastrophe followed by ameliorating circumstance, always beyond the characters' control. A certain amount of helplessness seems a rare virtue. In the case of Imogen, physical reduction and the surrendering of consciousness yield the salvation of her husband, her marriage, her family circle, her country, and, by implication if the Christian allusions are taken into account, the collective soul of the community. Similarly, the jailed Posthumus submits his will to the powers that be and receives the sight of his dead forebears and Jupiter himself as absolution, while Cymbeline capitulates to the Roman demand for tribute that peace may reign. A religious allegorist might specify Christian humility as a covering answer. But I hesitate to invoke a Christian interpretation too emphatically; the play seems to me to be deliberately infused with pre-Christian, primitive elements. From Guiderius' designation of a Celtic burial, head eastward, for Fidele, to the Soothsayer's panegyric to "radiant Cymbeline" (V.v.473), there seems, to be sure, a double vision, but the emphasis is earthly. The play itself, in fact, makes sacred the local habitations and names of this world.

In his persuasive discussion of the historical groundings of the play, Emrys Jones argues for an implicit unity exactly where many critics have found fault—in the play's historical dimension. Jones refers to both the contemporary, topical significance of certain aspects of the play and to Shakespeare's reliance upon his audience's possessing a strong sense of national history. The topical references surface mainly in relation to Cymbeline as a figure of the peace-making king, an obeisance to James I. This homage-to-patron also yields such dramaturgical features as the masque-like theophany, since James was fond of masques. Jones also pins the main flaw of the dramatic design to the Cymbeline/James analogy in an interesting way, attributing certain inconsistencies of character to Shakespeare's various strategies for avoiding giving offense. While I am not persuaded that the play is as logically flawed as Jones suggests, I would agree that a proper understanding of its intricacies depends to a great extent upon a recognition of its use of history.

Jone's most penetrating comments concern the significance of the history which shrouds Milford Haven: its importance as the landing-place of the Earl of Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, and thus its function as a cradle for the Tudor-Stuart line of which James was the latest embodiment. Certainly, Shakespeare goes to some lengths to give Milford a peculiar resonance, so that it becomes a magical and sacred place; its irresistible drawing power is especially evident in relation to Imogen. I think that Shakespeare uses this strategy for dramaturgical as well as political reasons. But let us look first at what Jones says about the place as conceived in strictly historical terms. He quotes G. Wilson Knight and proceeds from there:

'She is, one feels, magnetized to this, enchanted, spot. . . .' She is indeed 'magnetized' to Milford Haven. Without knowing it, she is helping to fulfill a 'prophecy'. But the compelling force is ultimately nothing other than the facts of history:

the Earl of Richmond
Is with a mighty power landed at Milford.

¹⁹

The analogies the play makes between the logic of events of chronicle-history and the logic of dreams point up the disorder and illogic of unreconstructed historical facts, and the essentially fictive structure the historian, like the dramatist, must impose to give shape to his narrative. It is not that the sanctity of national history is being deliberately undermined, but that Shakespeare makes us aware that history is constructed, that both our personal and national myths must of necessity scaffold truth with an artificial, purposive design. By heightening theatrical artifice throughout the play, Shakespeare makes us aware of the instrumental use we make of history to further present ends. In the case of Milford Haven, the play confers lasting significance on a particular time and place in history and makes obeisance to James as a peacemaker, but we are aware all the while of the dramatic illusion, of the necessity of incorporating politic facts into the play's design. Again, the closing lines of the play encapsulate this tension and redound upon all that has gone before:

Cym. . . . Set we forward; let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. So through Lud's Town march;
And in the temple of great Jupiter
Our peace we'll ratify; seal it with feasts.
Set on there! Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were wash'd, with such a peace.

(V.v.477-83)

The celebration of the Tudor ascendancy we find in Shakespeare's histories is framed in Cymbeline with irony designed to deflate the panegyrical and demystify the larger political use of national history, but not to demolish it. It is an irony which flirts with but refuses to embrace outright satire.

Milford Haven is sanctified and made memorable, and Cymbeline is unique among Shakespeare's romances in its historical particularity and its hallowing of a specific, real place. Instead of a flight or withdrawal to an imaginary island, we are made to see the English landscape as magically charged. Milford Haven is "blessed" (III.ii.58); the very topography conspires in a British victory when Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus, fighting in their narrow lane, are "Accommodated by the place" (V.iii.32). We are also, by analogy, made to feel reverence for the kingdom as a spiritual community, whether explicitly Christian or not. That there is something transcendent in the movement of the play from incipient tragedy through purgation to "the harmony of this peace" (V.v.465) can hardly be denied. But the kingdom is specifically Britain, the body politic of Shakespeare's "scept'red isle," at peace with the aggressor, Rome, after having maintained an impressive defense. For all our interest in the psychic identities of Posthumus and Imogen, the "radiant" Cymbeline, King of Britaine, as the Folio title stresses, is the center about whom all others are meant to move. Interestingly, Imogen too is firmly attached to the nation, as a mother of succeeding generations of Britons; her saving grace is not, though the two are very close in Renaissance thought, the magical integrity of virginity, but rather Milton's "Sun-clad power of Chastity."²⁰ She draws her strength from her marital fidelity, her sacred social union. T.S. Eliot is perhaps striving for a similar conjunction of time-hallowed place and the recapturing of our collective ancestral history when "East Coker" he recalls:

The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye, coniunction,
Holding eache other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. . . .

²¹

The erotic plot, anchored as it is in the dreams of Posthumus and Imogen, becomes both necessary to and emblematic of a greater social harmony.

Perhaps the play's concern with this connection between private and social experience may help account for its strange tone, its mixture of archness and affecting simplicity. As Freud defines them, wit and dreams share a common parentage in the unconscious; the most important difference lies in their "social behavior." Freud holds the dream to be "a perfectly asocial psychic product," which not only finds it "unnecessary" to be intelligible, but "must even guard against being understood" since it can only exist in disguised form. Wit, on the other hand, Freud considers "the most social of all those psychic functions whose aim is to gain pleasure." Wit requires an audience.²² In Cymbeline Shakespeare conveys much of the experience of dreams and some of their wonder within a sophisticated dramatic vehicle, aware of its own artifice.

As Granville-Barker recognized, in Imogen's waking next to Cloten and in the final recognition scene especially, the audience is both sympathetically engaged and ironically distanced. The grotesque irony of the former scene is replaced in the latter by the potentially "farcical associations,"²³ in Kermode's phrase, of so many revelations so neatly contrived. In both cases, the core of the narrative moves us; it is the palpable presence of the master dramatist pulling both affective and witty strings which holds us apart. Within the conventions of the tragicomic double plot, heroic and pastoral or comic episodes reflect and redound upon one another, but remain distinct. But Cymbeline's complexity of tone derives from a deliberate confounding of the two.

While it sounds paradoxical, in this respect Cymbeline is a peculiarly medieval play. The sacred and the profane exist side by side, and to some degree merge in their essential effect. The grotesque and the farcical help give the transcendent an earthly location. At the same time, they allow the controlled intrusion of unconscious impulses, an acknowledgment of man's kinship with the beasts, and at once direct the mind upward toward reverence. I am reminded of Hugh of St. Victor's belief that

The ugly is still more beautiful than beauty itself. . . . Beauty encourages us to linger. The ugly does not permit us to rest; it forces us to depart, to transcent it . . . .²⁴

This is the impulse which underlies those medieval grotesques carved into Miserere seats. And Shakespeare captures it to some extent in the the union of sympathy and ironical amusement he manages to evoke in Cymbeline. The play's rarefied atmosphere of wittiness infused with the insouciance of dreams, its impression of artlessness artfully executed, is not only a sophisticated exploration of tragicomic form, but an unusually primitive dramaturgical experience. Beside The Winter's Tale or The Tempest, Cymbeline provides relatively few verbal clues to its underlying meaning; its effects are mainly visual, its affectiveness a concatenation of texture and atmosphere. There is an implicit silence in the play, suggested by those quietenings down which occur as the various characters fall asleep. And these lapsings, these cessations of consciousness which yet contain the deepest truth of that consciousness, suggest the silence which signifies that state of complete identity in which the perils and restorative rituals of the romance are no longer necessary.

Cymbeline's greatest interest lies, I think, in the suggestiveness of its bold peculiarities. As Granville-Barker described the play:

. . . One turns to it from Othello, or King Lear, or Antony and Cleopatra, as one turns from a masterly painting to, say, a fine piece of tapestry, from commanding beauty to more recondite charm.²⁵

This rather specialized charm is probably what Shaw had in mind when he ventured to suggest that the proper setting for a modern production of Cymbeline was not the London stage, but a village schoolroom.²⁶ There, unself-consciously, the drama would be played with the degrees of ardor and artlessness natural to it, and to a nation's sense of itself when it fancies it has recently come of age. The smallish stature of the actors would adumbrate their faint absurdity as heroes without bringing down charges of unpatriotic license, and we as the audience could remain complacently detached, congratulating ourselves on our greater historical sophistication.

Notes

¹ Richard Levin, in his study of the various kinds of unity achieved in Renaissance multiple-plot drama, merely alludes to Cymbeline in a footnote with the comment that, while certain parallels exist between the rash condemnations Cymbeline and Posthumus bestow on Belarius and Imogen, "little is done with the relation of the two areas"; The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 167. In his psychoanalytic reading, Murray M. Schwartz attempts to link the play's concern with "sexual and familial" integrity with "British self-esteem," but he never develops the connections, concentrating instead on the psychoanalytic "meaning" of individual characters and incidents; see "Between Fantasy and Imagination: a Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline," in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), pp. 219-83. In her subtler psychoanalytic reading, Meredith Skura links certain "unconscious" elements in the play with its themes of familial and personal identity, but she stops short of transforming these categories into the political ones of nation and community: "Cymbeline has been called a history play, but it is a history play of the individual too, and it shows that what we are now comes out of what we were"; "Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 213. I am most indebted to Arthur Kirsch's application of dream theory to the play in his Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 144-73. Although he and I come to many similar conclusions, different emphases lead us to different valuations of the play's political import.

² In generic exasperation, Frank Kermode has christened the play an "'historical-pastoral' tragi-comical romance"; he agrees with those who sense behind the odd combination of naiveté of plot and virtuosity of dramatic technique "an effect almost of irony," a sense that the dramatist is "somehow playing with the play"; The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1963), pp. 29, 22.

³ Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), p. 70.

⁴ The text used for all quotations from and references to Shakespeare's writings is that of The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951).

⁵ In Howard Felperin's formulation, each of the three plots may be subsumed to some extent under the heading "erotic plot": "The genius presiding over Elizabethan dramatic romance is ultimately Eros, or an Eros figure, who embodies the principle of love in either its narrower sense of sexual union or in its wider ones of family solidarity and social harmony or in its widest Christian one of 'the love that moves the sun and the other stars,' as Dante put it at the end of The Divine Comedy"; see Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 21. While applauding his notion of analogous relations among the three levels of affection, I prefer to reserve the term "erotic plot" for the relations between Posthumus and Imogen.

⁶ I am grateful to G. M. MacLean for introducing me to crucial changes in British historiographical models. For a distillation of current scholarship on the subject and an up-to-date bibliography, see his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, "Time's Witness: English Historical Poetry, 1600-1660" (University of Virginia, 1981), pp. 11, 100, 253, 267. See F. J. Levy's study, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1967) for a general discussion of changes in contemporary historiography and interpretation.

⁷ See, for example, Homer Swander's "Cymbeline: Religious Idea and Dramatic Design," in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene: University of Oregon Books, 1966), pp. 248-62, and his "Cymbeline and the 'Blameless Hero,'" ELH, 31 (1964), 259-70, and Joan Hartwig's Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1972), pp. 61-103.

⁸ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), pp. 544-46.

⁹ Schwartz sees Iachimo as another vice-like double for Posthumus, but one whose sexual proclivities run to looking rather than "tasting," pp. 227-31; I find him much closer than Cloten to the conventional vice—a less demonic Iago, scaled to fit a tragicomic rather than a tragic design.

¹⁰ William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 29.

¹¹ Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. 67.

¹² Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), XII, 296.

¹³ Cloten enters the environs of Belarius' cave with the words: "I cannot find those runagates. That villain / Hath mocked me. I am faint" (IV.ii.62-63).

¹⁴ Schwartz overreads the relations between Imogen and her brothers by suggesting that "Their unconscious recognition of familial bonds affirms defenses against the play's incestuous anxieties," p. 258.

¹⁵ Empson, pp. 42-43.

¹⁶ Empson, p. 65.

¹⁷ Kermode, p. 28.

¹⁸ Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946), I, 490.

¹⁹ Emrys Jones, "Stuart Cymbeline," Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 99.

²⁰ John Milton, Comus, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 108.

²¹ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, from Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 197.

²² Freud, "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious The Basic Writings, ed. A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 760-61.

²³ Kermode, p. 29.

²⁴ Edgar De Bruyne, The Esthetics of the Middle Ages, trans. Eileen B. Hennessy (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969), p. 61.

²⁵ Granville-Barker, p. 543.

²⁶ G.B. Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (London: Cassell, 1961), p. 39.