SOURCE: Brewer, Derek. “Some Examples from Shakespeare.” In Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature, pp. 112-47. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1980.

[In the following excerpt, Brewer analyzes the dynamics of the Shakespearean family drama, using Hamlet, King Lear, and Cymbeline as representative examples.]

III

Twelfth Night gives us an imaginative world with no significant parent-images. By contrast Hamlet and the late Romances are obsessed with them. If any one has trouble with parents Hamlet has. He is the only protagonist (Horatio is a shadowy ‘split’ and certainly not a sibling-figure). As usual, the general point of view being from protagonist to the rest, the emerging adult is central and parent-images marginal to him. It is unusual for Shakespeare that the story figures a mother-image. It is less unusual that there are two father-figures, as the actual literal level of the text makes clear, when Hamlet, mourning his dead actual father, refers to Claudius, his father's brother now married to his mother, as ‘uncle-father’.

The nature of Hamlet's problem is made clear in the very first interchange between him and Claudius. Claudius in his oily, odiously conciliatory manner says

But now, my cousin Hamlet and my son. …

Hamlet comments bitterly

A little more than kin and less than kind.

(I (ii) 64-5)

By ‘more than kin’ Hamlet refers to Claudius's being more than just a family relation—he has usurped the father's place. ‘Less than kind’ means ‘unnatural’, and also, perhaps, ‘unkind’ in the modern sense, but the word-play kin-kind emphasises the confusion and the perversion of role that Hamlet perceives in the father-image. Marriage (such as Claudius's) to one's deceased brother's wife was regarded by law and general feeling in the Elizabethan period as incestuous. Incest is almost universally felt to introduce the most fundamental and therefore disturbing confusion of roles and categories within the essential family. (It may be that much of our sense of category difference in the world is produced by our extraordinarily early sense of differentiation between mother and father, which has historically in Western culture been elaborately enriched until the present general collapse of the stability of marriage.) Hamlet, at any rate, bitterly plays upon the parental confusion which does not indeed require any reference to outdated Elizabethan law to be understood.

Both Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, go on to reason with Hamlet. The King in particular emphasises that while mourning is proper it is inevitable that fathers should die. Not to accept this inevitable process is

                    a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd; whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died today,
‘This must be so’.

(I (ii) 101-6)

Claudius as always speaks truth and sense, which of course does not make him in the least more lovable. He accuses Hamlet of failing to accept the first principle of adult reality; in effect, of failing to grow up, to accept maturity and responsibility. He is undoubtedly right in this. Hamlet is a young man distinguished in birth and talents, with the instability of highly gifted young men on the brink of maturity.

Why will not, or cannot, Hamlet grow up? Basically it is because of the confusion of identities in the family circle caused by his mother's incest. That is, the substitution of uncle for father, the perversion of the nature of the father from good to evil, makes it impossible for him either to identify with or clearly to reject the general image of the father because it is too mixed. He thus cannot recognise and accept his father's death, and this prevents his own emergence into independence. Symbolically this means that the father is dead and not dead. Apparently killed, he has come symbolically alive again in a totally unacceptable way, Hamlet's original father being to this new uncle-father as ‘Hyperion to a satyr’. That is why Hamlet cannot get over his death, and why he is so obsessed by his mother's wickedness. It is in effect she who has done this to him: she is the occasion of the death of his father (as the elder Hamlet) and yet in marrying Claudius she will not let his father die. She has corrupted the father-image. Her corruption is the latent cause of Hamlet's grief and the literal cause of his anger at her. There is no concealed, no displaced, latent, love for his mother in Hamlet. After the play-scene he tells himself he must use no violence towards her, only ‘speak daggers’. There is no ‘oedipal’ desire (even if there is in Oedipus). Her corruption extends to Claudius. Hamlet when sent to England says mockingly but revealingly to Claudius

          Farewell, dear mother.
KING.
Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET.
My mother: father and mother is man and wife: man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother.

(IV (iv) 49-52)

So the confusion of the family circle is compounded. The uncertainty of feeling thus created extends to Hamlet's view of the ghost of his father. Since the audience sees and hears this figure he has objective existence, as far as Hamlet and the play are concerned, at a literal level. Shakespeare does not present him as a figment of Hamlet's disordered imagination, nor does the Ghost tell lies. Claudius undoubtedly did murder Hamlet's father. The ghost is not a devil, as Hamlet fears he may be (II (ii) 594-5), and the play-scene proves it. But Hamlet still cannot bring himself to carry out the Ghost's clear orders to revenge because he can neither accept the death of his true father, nor thrust off from himself the sense that after all his uncle is his father. In other words he cannot identify with an adequate father-figure, which in Shakespeare's culture, as in the New Testament, is the mark of full maturity (‘I and the Father are one’).

Another result of the trouble caused by an errant mother is that she arouses in Hamlet that disgust with physical sexuality that is never far below the surface in Shakespeare, though by a familiar reversal it often issues in its comic aspect as bawdy joking. Hamlet accuses his mother of a raging sexuality that is itself unnatural (III (iv) 65 ff). She has much offended ‘his’ father, and ‘would you were not my mother’ (III (iv) 10 ff). He dwells on the incestuous sweaty love-making with disgust, though in logic incestuous sexuality should be no more sweaty than legitimate conjugal love-making. Hamlet attributes Gertrude's corruption to all women, including Ophelia, whom he undoubtedly loves, but whom he rejects in the scene with her which Polonius and the King spy on, and whom he makes the subject of degradingly coarse jokes during the play-scene. Even more, Gertrude's corruption extends to Hamlet himself. Unable either to hate or to love the father, he feels, as part of his incapacity, that he himself is deeply corrupt and accuses himself passionately (III (i) 121 ff).

The course of the play shows Hamlet's terrible struggle to achieve the paradoxical necessity of the male protagonist to do what we have seen done by the heroes of medieval romance, that is, both to kill the father-image and to identify himself with it and be reconciled with the parent-images. He is frustrated by the confusion which has been created in the father-image by his mother's treachery. The hero never kills the true father-image, so that the true father is as it were the eternal father imprisoned within the protagonist's psyche, yet not identified with him. Hamlet's true father returns from the grave to tell him to kill the false, the hostile, father-image, who is Claudius. (A dead father is good, a living father is bad; a variant of the weak but good, or strong but bad, pattern.) The story shows Hamlet killing Polonius, hidden behind the arras, thinking that Polonius is Claudius. The action is direct, vigorous. But that is because the father-figure is unseen. That is, Hamlet cannot kill him openly, as he cannot kill Claudius openly when he finds him apparently praying, though in the latter case Hamlet gives an unconvincing rationalisation for his failure. Hamlet disobeys the clear orders of the Ghost (his true father) to kill Claudius, thus revealing an ambiguity towards the good father-image similar to his ambiguity towards the bad father-image. And in each case the mother's confusing relationship to the father is the cause of the ambiguity and confusion.

Hamlet fails to clarify the confusion, to identify himself with the true and good, to reject the evil and false. The confusion, the failure to establish a mature identity, drives him nearly mad, and Claudius sends him to England.

Nothing happens in the course of the story that clearly accounts for the new-found decisiveness that is reported by Hamlet himself of his voyage, when he so easily despatches the father-surrogates and hostile sibling-figures Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But as soon as Hamlet leaves the centre of the stage two significant figures of his own age come to the centre of the action and at the latent level develop the pattern. These are Ophelia and Laertes. Ophelia is shown as mad in the scene immediately following Hamlet's last appearance on his way to England, and later in the very same scene her brother Laertes appears leading a revolt to avenge the death of his father, Polonius, upon Claudius. Of course Claudius easily deflects Laertes's purpose. At the symbolic latent level we may see Laertes as a ‘split’ of the protagonist, and the baleful father-figure easily foils him. At the literal level of verbal realisation Laertes is given a shallow character which makes the management of him easy. More significant is the much more extended scene, both before and after Laertes's irruption, of Ophelia's madness, which is marked by pathetically indecent songs. This must be associated symbolically with the sexual disgust felt by Hamlet at his mother's remarriage. Her madness symbolises the death of Ophelia as a possible beloved for Hamlet and it is soon followed by her actual death. It is the death of the feminine element. The problem of distinguishing the image of the beloved from that of the mother which is so obvious in so many medieval romances is given no prominence in this play, which is why an ‘oedipal’ reading of Hamlet, though it brings insights, must be unsatisfactory. Yet the problem exists as it were in a negative way. The taint that Hamlet finds in Gertrude extends to Ophelia and all women. Not only does the mother-figure impossibly confuse the images of the father, she makes undesirable any image of the peer or mate who must be found outside the family circle. Hamlet is trapped by the mother-image in a peculiarly horrifying way.

Yet there is always an escape, even from the family circle. There is always death. Ophelia dies. If Gertrude by extension taints, for Hamlet, Ophelia, Ophelia's death is the death of all women, and thus, symbolically, of Gertrude, of the mother-image itself. (In most Western tales the literal death of female figures is not by any means so frequent as that of male figures—women are less physically threatening than men, giants or dragons and therefore do not have to be eliminated.) Were the mother-image alone to die, or be got rid of, that would of course remove the tragedy and turn it to romance. But that is not the case. She only dies in the form of the young girl, and it is with the young, not the old, that life and the future live. So Ophelia's death, being that of the young, ensures the tragedy. Yet since it implies the whole feminine element, including Gertrude, the paralysing element in Hamlet's story, the corrupt feminine, is also dead. Since the feminine element is also the generative element of life that cannot turn Hamlet's course towards success. But it allows him to act when he wishes to act, if he wishes to act.

In the scene immediately following the last of Ophelia's madness Horatio is shown receiving a thoroughly business-like letter from Hamlet describing his adventures. From now on Hamlet is a different man.

He is not however a man of action, successfully emerging into the adult world. In a way he has emerged, but at the cost of all he holds dear, all that makes life purposeful and valued. On his return, apart from the quarrel with Laertes at Ophelia's grave, his last outburst of youthful emotion, of which he shows himself ashamed, he expresses nothing but calm resignation, all passion spent. There is a paradoxical maturity here. Gertrude is no longer significant to him—he totally ignores her at the grave-side while he expresses his previous love for Ophelia as greater than that of forty thousand brothers. It needed, alas, Ophelia's death, to clarify to the protagonist the height and depth of his love for the ‘princess’, and now it is for ever frustrated. Yet death has at least swept away the poisonous mother-image; Ophelia's death has paradoxically and symbolically redeemed Gertrude. Gertrude being insignificant, Hamlet is less confused about Claudius. Hamlet is burnt out, but Claudius will, in his own time, die. Hamlet has grown up and accepts the fact of death—all men's death, and thus that also of his father, and of himself:

there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man owes aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

(V (ii) 212-16)

In the acceptance of death, including that of fathers, Hamlet has grown up. In so far as he has gone one stage further and already associates his own death with that of all men in the providential order he has been tragically forced to omit his own central period of maturity. He will die without having married Ophelia and without himself becoming a father-figure for whom death is appropriate. He dies too young, his promise unfulfilled.

For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal

(V (ii) 389-90)

says Fortinbras. Royalty is the normal image in fairy tales for achieved maturity, for being grown up. (Hamlet has earlier reckoned that he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space were it not that he has bad dreams. Denmark is a ‘prison’ to him, and for Hamlet as later in King Lear the prison may be taken as a latent image for the stifling bonds of family relationship (II (ii) 240-58).) Hamlet's maturity then is only paradoxical, not unequivocal, and this is one source of the multiple impressions the play makes on so many readers, its almost infinite plasticity.

Hamlet is killed by the father-figure and does not achieve the princess. That is tragedy. The protagonist is at it were tricked into killing himself, for Laertes at the latent level may be regarded as a ‘split’ of Hamlet. Laertes's hostility to Claudius is easily deflected so as to cause him to kill Hamlet—an apt image (since one aspect of the protagonist kills the other) of the protagonist's failure completely to unify and identify himself, a counterpart of his failure to sort out the confusion of the father-image. That the young protagonist should be inveigled into self-destruction is the most painful tragedy.

Yet the paradoxical if barren maturity of Hamlet is exemplified by the way that he, like Samson (another folktale hero), brings down all in ruin about him. The protagonist does succeed in killing the father-image as he has already in effect shrugged off the mother-image. Claudius is killed by Hamlet and to that extent Hamlet is successful. Gertrude dies appropriately in error by the poison set out by Claudius himself. The mother-figure is rarely directly killed by the protagonist—a hard tradition still treats women in this respect less harshly.

The tragedy is more equivocal than most of Shakespeare's other tragedies but it is to be remarked again that Shakespeare's plenitude of power endows many characters with sometimes paradoxical life and is rich in ambiguities and ambivalences. If ever the multiple points of view of Gothic art are seen in literature it is in Shakespeare, even though this multiplicity sets in one general direction and is never purely relative or totally self-contradictory. There is always a hierarchy of values, an ordering of multiplicity, even where Shakespeare admits the possibility that no such objective order may exist (‘for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’, Hamlet II (ii) 249-50).

In Hamlet as in some other plays of Shakespeare, the inner story has many levels and aspects which are realised at the literal verbal level with extraordinary liveliness. Particularly noticeable is the wealth of traditional ‘sententious’ style full of proverbial or semi-proverbial human wisdom and reflectiveness, not meant ironically, and an unparalleled wealth of serious word-play, or puns. These traditional aspects of style, like the Gothic variety of story, have been constantly condemned by Neoclassical critics up to and including T. S. Eliot. As usually in Shakespeare, and especially in Hamlet, the traditional poet really is the spokesman of the traditional culture. There are in consequence many points about the play which have not been considered here; what has been analysed is the essential core.

IV

KING LEAR

The story of the old man who makes extreme demands for expressions of love from his daughters occurs in many variants, ultimately to be linked with the story of Cinderella. It had been told in relation to King Lear many times before Shakespeare's version as part of the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of Britain. It was well known in outline to his audience, in other words, a traditional story. It is normal for such a story that amongst the various versions names, circumstances, even segments of the plot could be changed within broad limits. In versions by Shakespeare's immediate predecessors Cordelia succeeds in restoring Lear to his throne and he dies happy. Only then is Cordelia herself overthrown; she dies in despair by her own hand. Such might indeed—give or take some oddities—be the arbitrary course of history, but Shakespeare gives us a tighter pattern, and draws it back more firmly within the family drama, to follow up what became almost an obsession with him.

Until King Lear, in the course of those plays in which the central core is some working out of the family drama, the protagonist is always the developing child (in the early sense—not an infant but a person seen in relation to parents). In King Lear Shakespeare's infinite variety gives us the father as protagonist, so turning the traditional pattern of the family drama inside out in an astonishing way. The tragedy of so aged a man can hardly be the failure to become adult! Or, to put it another way, his significant personal relationships cannot be with parent-figures. His tragedy is that of one who kills the thing he loves. His own death at so great an age is merely incidental. Cordelia is therefore the point at which the tragedy aims, just as, in the related but opposite case of Cinderella, Prince Charming is the point at which that story aims. But the tragedy is not the tragedy of Cordelia, any more than the happy outcome of the Cinderella story is the success of Prince Charming. The protagonist is all. The winning of the Prince is the sign of Cinderella's success, and the loss of Cordelia is the sign of Lear's tragedy. In Shakespeare's King Lear Cordelia is not the protagonist.

It would be possible to conceive of Shakespeare's version of the story of King Lear with the youthful protagonist normal to fairy tale. In this case we should have to think of the three sisters as a multiple protagonist, and we should have to give them personalities different from those with which Shakespeare has endowed them. We should see how the oppressive father makes an unwarrantable demand on the inclusive love of the protagonist. Two of the daughters equivocate, but the third, in her innocence or folly, answers according to truth and nature, and in the spirit of the Biblical injunction (Genesis II, 24) that a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. Though Cordelia is condemned by her father, she finds a Prince who marries her, as do her sisters. Thus all the daughters have escaped. This is a kind of version of Catskin, a success story. The oppressiveness of the father however is not so easily evaded. He sets up disharmony between the daughters, who may be seen as the various aspects of the protagonist, as Claudius does between Hamlet and Laertes. Yet two of the daughters successfully resist the father and imprison him. That aspect alone of the protagonist which is represented by Cordelia falls his victim, is won over to him, is imprisoned with him, and, like him, dies.

This version is not too far from the bare bones of Shakespeare's version, and is not unrelated to some modern productions that claim to be of Shakespeare's play; but it is enormously different in spirit. Every version must be taken in its own terms and Shakespeare has realised the story in King Lear, it need hardly be said, with a most significant change of perspective, by making the father-figure the protagonist. It is this shift of the general angle of approach which makes all the difference. We thus see the other characters from Lear's general point of view, as is normal in traditional story. I do not mean that we see them literally as he sees them. We, the audience, always have a fuller view of the whole, we see more, than any character, even (or especially) the hero, in a traditional story and especially a Shakespeare play. We always know, as Lear does not, that Cordelia is supremely good and that Goneril and Regan are wicked. We see characters intriguing together when Lear is not present. That does not alter the basic principle that the characters must be interpreted in relation to Lear, and not as if they were fully autonomous rounded characters acting in their own right. Thus Cordelia is supremely good and her sisters irredeemably wicked from the generalised point of view of the protagonist which is spread throughout the play and confirmed by the ending. We see only that aspect of Cordelia's character which is significant to the protagonist and for the inner pattern of the story. Shakespeare, as is his way (like the tellers of fairy tales, the Gawain-poet and the rest), normally makes it abundantly clear at the literal level which characters are good and which bad. A ‘naive’ reading of the literal level of traditional literature is the correct one. There are no moral puzzles based on character. Just as we are told that Cinderella is good, and as the Gawain-poet tells us that Gawain is good, and we must believe this or fundamentally misunderstand the story, so we must take Shakespeare's word for it that Cordelia is good. To present her as in any way hard-hearted, immorally inflexible, foolish, stupidly unwilling to humour the foibles of senile Daddy, is a violation of Shakespeare's traditional art, produced by unconsciously debased Neoclassical realism and literalism. The literal level must not be taken literalistically. The result may be a dangerous version of the tolerations of liberal humanism, when critics blame Cordelia for telling a deeply human truth, and palliate the vile crimes which her sisters do literally commit.

To avoid such distortions we return to the naive, the obvious, traditional reading, accepting the traditional principle of the centrality of the protagonist and the natural interpretation of other characters in relation to him, which does indeed mean accepting what Shakespeare writes (unless obviously ironic) at the literal level, without falling into literalism. It is always worth reminding ourselves that no symbolic interpretation may violate the direct literal meaning of the text. The only apparent exceptions are when there is clear evidence in the immediate context that irony is being used, or when a villain is speaking who can be shown to be lying (as with Goneril, Regan or Edmund). This principle is particularly important for the historical understanding of Shakespeare's plays, where in order to carry on the story, or to give basic information that in non-dramatic narrative is given by the author, the speeches of some characters must sometimes convey a considerable amount of information that is not a part of naturalistic characterisation or a naturalistic imitation of any ordinary interchange between two people. This kind of non-personalised narrative extends to descriptions of a given character's own state of mind, or moral quality, even when such description is put into the character's own mouth, that is, when it is self-description. The outstanding examples are soliloquies. We may take it as a further rule that characters always describe themselves truly, and do not mislead the audience. Yet there is little or no modern introspection, or moral confession, as an aspect of the character's own dramatic personality, in this convention. When Richard Duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III, says ‘I am determined to prove a villain’ (King Richard the Third I (i) 30) he is not engaging in subtle self-examination or special cynicism or modern nihilism. The words are no more part of his character than the blank verse in which he speaks reveals him to be a poet. Both the manner of expression and the metre are like the music in opera, part of the medium. In other words the character on the stage speaks always as it were with two voices, one his own, and one the narrating author's, and part of the experience of a reader versed in traditional narrative is concerned with distinguishing which of these two voices is at any moment predominant. For our purposes here it is enough to say that when a Shakespearean character describes himself the authorial voice is dominant, and thus what the character says, be he never so villainous, is true. When Gloucester says he is going to be a villain, that is the case and the author wants to make sure that we, the audience or readers, know it unequivocally. He is not telling us that Gloucester is especially cynical, or even, as some modern actors now play the line, so delightfully and humorously self-aware that we may forgive him anything. Equally, to return to King Lear, when Cordelia describes herself as ‘true’ and disdains to answer her enraged father's accusation of ‘untender’ (I (i) 105-6), we are to believe her, but not construe her self-description as a precocious self-awareness or, least of all, as a hard-hearted pride. To do so is to apply the inappropriate assumptions of Neoclassical naturalism. That Cordelia is neither proud nor hard-hearted, but true, is the whole point of the story. The audience or readers know it all the time, and the unfolding of the story is in part the narrative of how Lear also comes to acknowledge it. I am not arguing that Shakespeare makes no attempt to give light and shade to a character's personality. Cordelia herself, and the King of France, with a slightly more realistic touch, describe her personality further a little later in the scene, as one who is not only not a liar and flatterer but one who does not with ease express her deeper feelings. Shakespeare has indeed a genius for characterisation at the level of the verbal realisation, but it is often less naturalistic, more related to the underlying pattern, than we may at first realise, swept away as we are by the power of his art. The part of the pattern that we are concerned with in this episode is so powerful that we easily overlook the fundamental implausibility of the actual scene as presented. Far from worrying about the naturalistic presentation of a family row, we respond to the ancient spectacle of a father reluctant to let his daughter grow up and away, and the daughter's determination, in this case, to do so.

Cordelia has said:

                    Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

(I (i) 94-103)

Lear's response is totally to reject her, but this is not a disaster for her at the latent level and it is significant that at the literal level the King of France immediately comes forward to accept her without a dowry. Cordelia has already symbolically broken away from the family circle even before an actual Prince Charming is supplied. Cordelia needs an actual mate no more than Gawain in order psychologically to grow up, though in the situation of resident suitors in the court we may detect the vestiges of a testing by the father of various suitors, and when the Duke of ‘wat'rish Burgundy’ refuses to accept her without a dowry it is a kind of failure of a test. Cordelia thus, as the King of France says, has only lost ‘here’ (i.e. at home) ‘a better where to find’ (I (i) 261), to find, like Catskin, a better home.

Lear's other daughters have equally clearly made the same transition, even though they hypocritically pretend not to have done so. As the story unfolds they ill-treat their father progressively worse. Although this is highly deplorable and merits the strongest condemnation in the play, it would not in itself constitute a tragedy even for Lear; it would be pathos, sorrow, the way of the world, wicked hypocrisy, and so forth, but not tragedy, and though in the working out of pattern and plot the part played by the wicked daughters is crucial we may leave them out of consideration in the central tragedy.

What then is the central tragedy in Shakespeare's King Lear? Although Lear is the protagonist, and does indeed develop more self-awareness, humility, and care for others, he dies. It might be enough to say that the death of the protagonist is sufficient to allow us to define a story as tragic, and as far as that goes it is true. But the death of so aged a man cannot be felt like that of one who is young, and cannot account for the deep emotional power of Shakespeare's story. Moreover, Lear is more than just an old man. He is a father and the story has centred on the family drama, although from an unusual angle. In the family drama death of parents is the happy ending; it is the death of children which is tragedy. We return then to Cordelia, but in a different light. The play is not about Cordelia. Her death is not her tragedy, but it is Cordelia's death which is Lear's tragedy. In a sense he kills her and in so doing kills himself.

We may express the tragedy at the symbolic level by saying that it lies with Cordelia's returning to her father, her voluntary rejection of her emancipation. On the literal level Lear does not ask her to return, but his plight calls her. She says

                    O dear father
It is thy business that I go about

(IV (iv) 23)

The Biblical echo, one of several in this play, does not establish Cordelia as a Christ-figure, or suggest any regular allegorical parallel in the action, but emphasises the seriousness and virtue of Cordelia at the literal level at this moment. She identifies herself with her father, as Christ did with his, and that is one of the supreme virtues for Shakespeare. Virtue is essential to tragedy. Moreover it is only as little children, we are told, that we can enter heaven. But we are not concerned centrally with Cordelia's virtue, only with the tragic recognition that it destroys Cordelia when the battle is lost and she and Lear are imprisoned together—a highly symbolical situation. The tragedy is the death of Cordelia, but her death is not a tragedy for her because she is not the protagonist. Her death is the tragedy for Lear because all the time she is what he wants and cannot have. He causes to be destroyed what he most values, and it is indeed a tragedy that he over-values his daughter's love. He will not let go when he must. It is characteristic of Lear that he only pretends to let go, as we see very clearly at the literal level when he first divides his kingdom:

                    Only we shall retain
The name and all th'addition to a king:
The sway, revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours.

(I (i) 134-7)

Lear will retain the honour (name) and glory, and others can do the hard work. He gives up the practical reality of power while wishing to retain the prestige and personal advantage it gives. Life is not like this: he sets up a fundamental self-contradiction in political terms. He does the same in personal family terms, wanting love without responsibility, above all wanting to keep what cannot live if he retains it. That is Lear's tragedy at the latent and indeed at the literal level.

To say that Lear wants too much of his daughters is not at all to deny in Shakespeare's or in Christian or in general human terms that children should honour their fathers and mothers and do their duty to them. It merely asserts the ineluctable order and sequences of the family drama: that parents are older than their children and should behave accordingly. Disturbance of such order will lead to tragedy if it is not corrected or redeemed.

V

CYMBELINE

Shakespeare had by no means exhausted the potential of the family drama with King Lear. On the contrary he became obsessed with it. It even invaded his historical and political interests in Coriolanus. The late Romances, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, highly traditional and extremely non-naturalistic stories, all work in various ways at the problem we see first clearly formulated in King Lear—how to reconcile the fate of the father-figure with the successful survival of the young on whom the future depends. Shakespeare became less and less interested in general naturalistic plausibility as he mined the rich vein of the symbolic reality of these themes in his last plays. The wealth and variety of the material is too great for me to do more than suggest some of the many possibilities, and concentrate on only one play which has often given difficulty, Cymbeline. Some themes must be left almost totally aside, as for example the subordinate and at best ambivalent attitude to mothers, as in Coriolanus. The emphasis in the later plays on daughters as opposed to sons may perhaps be accounted for quite simply by the fact that Shakespeare was himself an elderly man with daughters, though to posit such a close connection between the actual existence of a writer and his work would be challenged by much modern criticism.

Broadly speaking the plots of the late Romances, rightly so called, seem to be a series of attempts to convey a pattern of reconciliation within the family circle after an apparently tragic breakdown. Pericles, based on the medieval romance by Gower, bluntly confronts the horror of a father's incest with his daughter, first in actual fact (within the fiction) which is not very interesting, then in a more disguised way which shows difficulties and transferences of feeling more subtly, though in a rambling version not all by Shakespeare. The Winter's Tale shows disharmonies between two families and between parents and children which are repaired by the love between the children. The Tempest, where the protagonist is again the father, shows fraternal treachery and disharmony repaired by reconciliation effected through a daughter. All these plays are full of romance and folklore themes. Shakespeare cared little for naturalism at any time, and by the end of his life he seems almost completely to have given up bothering even about local realism, or poetic verse, so interested was he in working out possible permutations of family relationships within the nuclear family, and in presenting families reconciled after being divided for many years by faults, jealousies, angers, mutual offence. This too is traditional, as I have shown, with the medieval English romances, but Shakespeare comes back to the topic from different points of view and enriches the story-structures in a remarkable number of ways, articulating them sometimes through many inter-linked events, weaving in themes, general concepts, descriptions, characterisation, local motivation, ‘sententious style’, wit, etc. etc. He even adds a touch of pantomime at times, and occasionally has a sort of detached fun with these stories as he does not with the tragedies. It is as if he takes seriously, and can therefore afford not always to be serious about, his own message in these plays, that all shall in the end be well, that there is a providential order, and joy cometh in the morning.

The stories are absurd from a Neoclassical and naturalistic point of view, and even in his own time drew Ben Jonson's criticism in his Prologue to Every Man in his Humour. No story is more absurd than that which centres on Imogen in relation to her husband Posthumus Leonatus, who makes the extraordinary bet with his Italian friends on his wife's chastity and is so easily deceived. Yet it is also worth recalling that even such a hardboiled and cynical story-writer as Boccaccio liked this story enough to use it in the Decameron (Day 2, Story 9), and the audience there calls it ‘beautiful’; though it is also true that after the coarse and brutal tenth story the ladies agree that the hero in the ninth corresponding to Posthumus was in comparison to the ruthless hero of the tenth a blockhead.

There is a sense in which all art, and thus all stories, should be regarded as ‘play’. Within this general quality some stories are more playful than others, either because they are in fact comic, which is not the case with Cymbeline, or because they have something extravagant or schematic, together with a happy ending, which allow us, and often the author, to be interested in the story without as it were worrying about it. Romance, with its deliberate artificiality and such well-recognised conventions as girls disguised as boys, lends itself particularly well to such playfulness, without losing its capacity to articulate our interests and our necessary daydreams. In his late plays Shakespeare exploited this romance element, allowing himself much casualness of execution and perhaps occasionally a touch of mockery.¹

All these elements have to be accepted when we read or see Cymbeline. How disastrous the wrong assumptions about a work of literature can be to its understanding is illustrated by our greatest critic's summation of the play:

This Play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity.

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecillity, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

(Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh, London, 1908, p. 183.)

Johnson's own comments sum up implicit Neoclassical criteria that are often still with us, even in productions which make no attempt at that degree of local realism which Shakespeare's own stage practised. But the play can be taken as a traditional story and found not merely interesting but a penetrating analysis of aspects of the family drama as part of the human situation.

There are two main strands in Cymbeline, each based on a version of the family drama, and one of the chief purposes of the story is to draw these two strands together. The first concerns Imogen and the second the unknown princes Guiderius and Arviragus. All three are the separated children of Cymbeline. Cymbeline is not himself the protagonist, rather surprisingly since he gives his name to the play, and since Lear, Prospero, Pericles—all fathers of daughters—have such dominant parts. Cymbeline's folly and anger, of which he repents, are the motive forces of the action, and perhaps this was in Shakespeare's mind. Furthermore, although as the story turns out the centre of the action lies with the young people, of whom the most important is Imogen, the audience is given to know so much more than she that the exposition itself has a sort of paternal omniscience.

Even a blow-by-blow account of the action of the play at the most literal level would show how close it is to fairy tale. A more summary account emphasises this quality, though doing injustice to the plethora of event and intricacy of narration. There are naturally variants. At the opening of the story Imogen is already married, but it is against her father's will and her husband, Posthumus Leonatus, is immediately banished. So Prince Charming is already identified, and the story is to be how the union is validated. It is important for this version of the family drama to note that Posthumus has been bred up by the King himself as Imogen's ‘playfellow’ (I (i) 40-54 and 145) and so he has been almost as a brother to Imogen. Although in every way noble he has one deficiency, which though not personal will need to be remedied. He is without a family. This alone would show that he is not the protagonist, but in order to be fully integrated within the whole story he will eventually have to be established in a family setting, like any hero in a medieval English romance.

We are immediately made aware that there is a wicked stepmother, who deceives and manipulates the King. Shakespeare uses the simplest devices of asides and soliloquies to make us aware of her wickedness, and also to show us that all the other characters, except Cymbeline, are aware of it. Thus the poison she procures from the Doctor and gives to Imogen's servant is not what she thinks it is, because the Doctor knows she is wicked and has made it innocuous. Although Cymbeline rages at Imogen and the Queen is courteous, Imogen is not deceived by her, and we immediately recognise the basic pattern of the fairy tale with a female protagonist: wicked stepmother, father under her influence, innocent heroine oppressed at home.

There is a development in the number of characters. The Queen has a son, Cloten, by a previous marriage, who is in every way as ignoble as Posthumus is noble. Cloten is also a suitor to Imogen and pursues her even though she is married. He too is in a sort of ‘brotherly’ relationship to Imogen, again not by blood, but in his case by his mother's marriage to her father. I return later to his place in the family drama as it centres on the protagonist.

Imogen is now forced to leave the court. The causal mechanics of this at the manifest literal level are brought about by the Italian intrigue which enmeshes Posthumus Leonatus, but the fairy-tale pattern of heroine forced to leave home is clear, and Imogen, under threat of Cloten, feels that she has no choice but must even try to leave Britain (III (iv) 130-9).

Although Cymbeline says later that she is ‘the great part of his comfort’ (IV (iii) 5), and he has been enraged by her marriage, his anger was because she had evaded Cloten, and we obviously do not have here the Catskin-pattern in which the protagonist has to escape a dangerously doting father. The father is manipulated by his wife, whom he loves, but who hates the protagonist, and the protagonist is escaping from the wicked Queen, her stepmother. From the protagonist's point of view she is fleeing the hostile mother-image and seeking her mate. The pattern is close to that of Snow-White, although the overt rivalry in beauty between the Queen and the protagonist does not appear. I am not arguing that we have in Cymbeline an actual analogue to the interesting folktale of Snow-White; only for a certain similarity of deep pattern and effect, and I hope the lover of Shakespeare will forgive me if I also argue for a similarity in the play to the Seven Dwarves.

Imogen flees to Wales in hope of meeting the Roman ambassador Lucius and becoming his page. This will also bring her closer to her still beloved husband. Wales is also the abode, though Imogen does not know it, of yet more brothers. Guiderius and Arviragus have already been introduced into the narrative by Shakespeare as boys living in wild Wales with their father Belarius. Belarius tells them, as he has told them many times before, his history: that he was once Cymbeline's best general but was the subject of false accusations of treachery which Cymbeline immediately believed, and so Belarius was banished twenty years ago. The boys run up a mountain and Belarius immediately explains to himself that they are really the sons of Cymbeline whom he took with him in revenge. Samuel Johnson remarks of this passage:

Shakespeare seems to intend Belarius for a good character, yet he makes him forget the injury which he has done to the young princes, whom he has robbed of a kingdom only to rob their father of heirs.

The latter part of this soliloquy is very inartificial, there being no particular reason why Belarius should now tell to himself what he could not know better by telling it.

Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Raleigh (p. 182.)

This notes both the incompatibility frequently to be observed between action and character in the re-telling of traditional stories, and the ‘conventional’ authorial nature of much speech in Shakespeare. We must read with acceptance of the author's evident intention, that Belarius is a good character, and look for patterns rather than material causes. The pattern of the Belarius episode is not naturalistic, but will soon be recognised as illustrating a very widely held concept of the self. Although Belarius has moralised at great length in Shakespeare's favourite sententious vein on the superiority of the simple rustic life, Shakespeare has given him a deliberately artificial tone, for though what he says is true it has only a limited truth. Belarius has also told the young men about his own experience of the world, and as Belarius acknowledges, their royal nature expresses itself in eagerness to leave this dull quiet life and to win honour and fame. They rightly object to being kept in this ‘cell of ignorance’ as Guiderius, the elder, calls it. Arviragus complains that ‘We are beastly’ (III (iii) 33 and 40). The situation of the two youths is a beautiful and simple representation of what Rank called ‘the family romance of neurotics’—the notion many people have when young that our real parents are persons much more distinguished than those poor old souls who have the honour of bringing us up.² The difference within this particular fiction is that ‘the family romance’ is not a mere fantasy, it is true. The youths really are sons of a King, and superior to their apparent father. Although the young men feel no hostility towards Belarius Shakespeare makes it plain that they are straining at the leash and must soon be away. They are at the point of emergence into adult life. It is characteristic for Shakespeare that the wife of Belarius, whom the young Princes at the moment believe was their mother, is dead. Being dead, her memory is loved and revered.

To this all-male family comes Imogen alone, in a boy's clothes, lost and deadly tired. The young men take her for a boy, but feel instant friendliness, being in fact her siblings of the opposite sex. Notwithstanding Imogen's apparently male sex it is agreed that when the men go hunting the ‘youth’ will stay at home to be their ‘huswife’, and it turns out that ‘he’ is an excellent cook! Snow-White too kept house for the Dwarves, to whom Guiderius and Arviragus are the equivalent. The Dwarves however in the fairy tale are insignificant in their own right, not to say comic, while these sibling-figures in Cymbeline have their own significance and contribute to the general pattern of children and parents in the play beyond their immediate relationship to the protagonist—which is however their primary function in the pattern.

We now come to the crucial episodes in the protagonist's story. The Queen had prepared poison for Imogen which she entrusted to the ever-faithful Pisario as sovereign remedy. Imogen has been carrying this, and takes it to revive herself after the rigours of her journey. It is not poison, but it casts her into a death-like trance. So far we are still close to the story of Snow-White, whom the Queen discovers in her retreat and to whom she gives a poisoned apple. In the fairy tale the Prince eventually moves the beautiful corpse, dislodges the piece of apple and so brings Snow-White into adult life. It is a pattern also reflected in The Sleeping Beauty. In Cymbeline the story-line is more complicated and subtle, though at the deepest and simplest level it is similar.

It is Cloten, not the fairy-tale Prince, Posthumus, who now comes into the picture. He has followed Imogen to Wales, and is disguised in Posthumus's clothing. Just after Imogen has met her unknown brothers, and has received succour from these disguised siblings, Cloten appears and in a soliloquy expresses his brutal lust for Imogen, whom he intends to rape and ‘spurn her home to her father, who may, haply, be a little angry for my so rough usage; but my mother, having power of his testiness, shall turn all into my commendations’ (IV (i) 23-7). Besides this brutality of sexual desire Cloten has also expressed the intention of killing and decapitating Posthumus. Since we know Cloten to be a fool and a coward we do not worry unduly about his threats, but they provide a deeply interesting symbolic pattern, which we can follow with interest even if at the level of subconscious response.

I shall argue in a moment that Cloten's murderous lust is the deepest element in the whole drama, the knot which the whole story sets out to disentangle, though of course at a level deeper than that of characterisation and plausibility on the level of verbal realisation, which Shakespeare has to sacrifice. The full demonstration depends on slightly later scenes, but here it is important to recognise first that Cloten represents the Queen's hostility. The absence of any intention to marry Imogen, even were Posthumus dead, and the strange intention to return the violated Imogen to her father, express the mother-figure's powerful determination not to let the protagonist escape from home. That Imogen would have been raped shows how Shakespeare, like many traditional writers, including the Gawain-poet, does not consider that physical sexual experience is in itself significant of maturation. Gawain is mature, has escaped, without it, while Imogen, having been forced into it, would nevertheless still be entrapped within the family circle. That the mother-figure's hostility should be expressed in such powerfully male symbolism as rape reveals a strange ambivalence that I do not fully understand.

We proceed however to the deeper aspects of what Cloten represents, which are clarified by the immediately following events in the story. Cloten meets and challenges Guiderius and is killed and beheaded. Since he has boasted to Guiderius that he is the Queen's son (thus symbolically expressing that aspect of himself which embodies the Queen's hostility), Guiderius remarks

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

(IV (ii) 185-7)

Symbolically, the Queen's hatred returns upon herself. Imogen's apparently dead body is then brought in, is mourned, and laid side by side with the headless Cloten's, which, it will be remembered, is wearing the clothing of Posthumus. Immediately all leave and Imogen wakes to think that Cloten's body is that of Posthumus. It is a grotesque situation. The speech in which Imogen expresses her nightmarish recognition, as she thinks, of her dead husband is surely one of the most difficult to play in all Shakespeare, for such is the balance of feeling that it is hard to avoid inappropriate laughter. Shakespeare's task was to make us sympathise with Imogen while knowing that there is now no real cause for grief. The death of Cloten has removed the essential danger. Why does Shakespeare run this extraordinary risk, create this apparently ‘unresisting imbecillity’?

Abandoning hope of plausibility we also rightly abandon ourselves, in this scene, to relief as well as sympathy, along with detachment. Something is in process of being solved, and the audience's attitude to Imogen, from its superior point of view, is that of a father who may smile at a child's present suffering because he knows that it will be brief, not damaging, and even good for it. What then is in process of being solved? It is clearly good that Cloten is dead, and we should follow the play's own lead that identifies him, with a difference, with Posthumus. Each has a sort of brotherly relationship with Imogen. They are obviously physically alike, and each loves Imogen in his own way. Cloten is all bad to Posthumus's all good; he is the mirror-image of Posthumus. At the deeper level of symbolic interpretation it is obvious that he is a ‘split’ of Posthumus. In the latent sense Posthumus and Cloten are the ‘joint’ Prince Charming at the beginning of the play. This is where Cloten's murderous lust is so important. If at the deepest level of symbolic interpretation we regard the whole story from the point of view of the female protagonist, we can see that murderous sexuality is for her an aspect of love, one that she cannot accept, that she has banished, but which she must come to terms with. Or, to put this complex matter in another way, sexual love has an aspect of aggressiveness which has to be tamed, or got rid of. To put it yet another way, the virgin has to learn to become a wife. This is an entirely traditional theme, represented in such stories as The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. Chaucer puts the traditional attitude in his own more literal way:

For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges
They moste take in pacience at nyght
Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges
To folk that have ywedded hem with rynges
And leye a lite hir hoolynesse aside
As for the tyme—it may no bet bitide.

The Man of Law's Tale, The Canterbury Tales II (B) 709-14

The point is made in the very text of Cymbeline. That is why Shakespeare uses the absurd story from Boccaccio about the chastity-bet. Implausible as that story is, it is a paradigm about the need to trust love to control the natural savagery of sexual desire. Posthumus himself says of Imogen (when raging against her apparently rapid betrayal of him with the villainous Iachimo, a mere acquaintance whom he has after all encouraged to try to seduce his own wife and whose word he immediately accepts):

Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd,
And pray'd me oft forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn: that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow.

(II (iv) 8-12)

One could hardly have it more clearly expressed in humane and civilised terms. Shakespeare in no way implies that this is false delicacy on Imogen's part, yet the story takes us, and her, beyond it. When we realise that, at a latent symbolic level below the level of literal consciousness, Cloten represents what is to the female protagonist the untamed, or unacceptably aggressive, sexual element in the lover's love for her, we can see that the daring, dangerous, confusion Shakespeare apportions to Imogen in lamenting the dead Cloten as if he were the dead Posthumus shows a progress in deep human relationship that could hardly be made otherwise. As usual in traditional art we are presented with significant juxtapositions placed in a pattern, not with a chain of material cause and effect, for these are movements of the mind and feelings. Least of all, of course, is there any attempt at discursive analysis, which must always be, like the present effort, secondary to the multiple effects of creative art, laborious, single-stranded and simplifying. At the deep level of symbolic interpretation which we are considering here we have to leave aside other elements of the play, including consideration of detailed characterisation at the level of verbal realisation. But it is the deeper level which ultimately controls the other elements.

Brotherly and lover-like relationships of the protagonist's are being explored and clarified. Her true brothers will foster her tenderly but without sexual feeling, and for all their love she is dead to them. Yet she has in a sense found them, and it is immediately after their appearance and rescue of her that Cloten appears, a false brother at the opposite extreme, a brother in the aspect of brutal sexual desire. True brotherly love kills him. The protagonist has not really lost her beloved, though she thinks she has. She has lost her fear of his aggressive sexuality. The decapitation of Cloten also suggests that the complex beloved has overcome his own sexual aggressiveness. This is made clear when Posthumus appears in the scene after next, lamenting his own previous angry command to Pisario to murder Imogen. There has been no sequential build-up of causal motive, no view of Posthumus which has led to this sudden repentance. We do not need it. Motivation and the analysis of character in its presentation is the function of the novel and Shakespeare rarely presents character through such means. We see his people in violently changed moods which are part of the general pattern he presents. The pattern now allows, indeed requires, Posthumus to repent of his anger towards Imogen, and this is natural, though not naturalistic, after the death of Cloten who represents the beloved's intemperance, greed and cruelty. Once these natural but morally reprehensible aspects of love are purged Posthumus can also repent of his possessiveness and self-regarding pride which his bet with Iachimo expresses. Absurd as that story is, it exposes, in its schematic way, an anatomy of husband's love as unduly proud, possessive, and egotistic—all counterparts of Cloten's mere physical desire without true love. But now Cloten is dead and in the pattern of the action these untoward elements of love are being purged.

It is also a part of the pattern that before Posthumus's repentance is shown, in the scene of Imogen's fainting over Cloten's body, she is taken up by the Roman Senator Lucius. We should expect a father-figure here, and lo, Lucius, who in terms of probability has taken to the ‘boy’ with astounding speed and trust—but who minds that?—says to Imogen that he will

And rather father thee than master thee.

(IV (ii) 398)

It is equally a part of the pattern that with the sexually hostile, false-brotherly element in the beloved killed, and with the re-establishment of a genial father-figure for the protagonist, the very next scene, only a few lines further on, should show us Cymbeline's court and immediately tell us that the Queen is so ill that her life is in danger. Cymbeline's own grief for Imogen is apparent. The death of Cloten symbolises the end of the Queen, for he is an aspect of her hostility, and a genial father-figure is correspondent with the wane of her powers.

Thus at the beginning of the long Act Five the ground is cleared for a satisfactory outcome and a grand reconciliation. Although the core is the relationship between protagonist and beloved much else happens.

Cymbeline has, on his Queen's advice, rejected the payment of tribute to Rome and Lucius is now at Milford Haven with a Roman army and a bloody battle is toward. Posthumus has come to fight with the Romans against his own countrymen, but in the same speech in which he expresses his repentance for what he has done to Imogen, he says

                                                                                                    'Tis enough
That, Britain, I have kill'd thy mistress; peace!
I'll give no wound to thee.

(V (i) 18-20)

He says he will disguise himself as a British peasant

                                                                                                    so I'll die
For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life
Is every breath a death.

(V (i) 25-7)

Imogen and Britain are associated. There is a strong and agreeable patriotic element in the play which is more subtle and more closely connected with the inner theme than may at first appear.

As well as Posthumus, Belarius and the sons of Cymbeline also fight marvellously well in the ensuing battle, and it is largely owing to the bravery of these four that the battle is won and the Romans soundly defeated.

Posthumus however is assumed by the British to be a Roman and is cast into prison, where another most extraordinary scene (or what would be so if plausible appearances and naturalistic assumptions were the basis of the story) now takes place. He is visited by the apparitions of his dead father, mother and younger brothers—a splendid demonstration of family solidarity—who one by one reproach Jupiter, king of the gods, for allowing Posthumus to be banished because of his marriage, to be tainted by Iachimo, and now to be ‘in miseries’. Thus is the integration of Posthumus within his own family circle expressed. He is not the protagonist, and so has no inner psychic drama portrayed for him, but he is shown now to be fully worthy of the protagonist because a full sense of his own family has been openly established within the story. He is fully himself. This interest in hereditary identity is strong in medieval English romance. Posthumus says

Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire and begot
A father to me; and thou hast created
A mother and two brothers.

(V (iv) 123-5)

It is true that they have now vanished, but Jupiter has left a tablet on his breast containing a symbolic prophecy, that a ‘lion's whelp’ (Posthumus's full name is Posthumus Leonatus) shall be embraced by a piece of tender air, that previously lopped branches shall grow on a stately cedar tree (obviously Cymbeline), and that Britain shall thrive. All shall be well. Posthumus has been shown as united with his family, but he does not need, even if he must lament the absence of, his family. Fathers need heirs, but heirs, once established, do not need fathers. Furthermore, Posthumus has been fully established as from a different family and not in any sense a brother to the female protagonist. Brothers are excellent helpers and protectors but a female protagonist no more wants to marry them than to marry her father. Exogamy is the fundamental rule of traditional stories (E. R. Leach sees exogamy as the basic ‘motive’ for many Old Testament stories³). No doubt part of the horror of Cloten's sexual desire is his ‘brotherly’ relationship, and his death kills that element too in the general image of the beloved.

We proceed immediately to the great reconciliation scene, where all the persons of the drama are brought face to face, and proper family relationships are restored. The final necessity before all can be unravelled is the death of the Queen, source of all the woe. Of this we are immediately informed, as also that, with glorious improbability, she has in dying confessed all her past and even her intended future misdeeds. Cymbeline of course immediately believes what we all know to be true, and the unravelling and knitting up begins. Imogen, naturally enough, being now successful, sets the action going, though she is still disguised as a boy. She controls Cymbeline—a docile, rejoicing, no longer dangerous father-figure—and then brings Iachimo to confess his crime. We are not surprised to find that Iachimo is glad to confess, for that re-inforces the underlying pattern.

A word must be spared at this stage for Iachimo's role. On the level of the verbal realisation he is a thinly sketched character playing a role familiar in a schematic folktale. His unmotivated lust and malice are sufficiently matched in life, alas, to allow us to accept his treachery towards both Posthumus and Imogen without looking for further cause or deeper characterisation. His unmotivated repentance is equally acceptable in this final scene when all is being revealed and when repentance and pardon are the themes. In other words he fits well enough into a verbal realisation of a folktale kind. At the deeper symbolic level, adopting the principle that most characters are ‘splits’ or aspects of the three or four main characters, it is plain that Iachimo is another aspect of the beloved's aggressive sexuality, as Cloten is. Unlike Cloten, he is not brutal, but he is sly, dishonest, seductive, untrusting, cynical, sociable, superficial. He represents even on the literal level the jesting about private matters of psychic as well as physical integrity to do with sex that young men are seen to be prone to, with the easy degradation that it brings. This does not call for extirpation, like Cloten, but for repentance and after repentance, pardon. His repentance is called for by the protagonist and at the latent level we may say that the beloved now rejects, or is purged of, the more ignoble, untrusting, self-seeking elements of his love. At the literal level Posthumus's pardon of Iachimo re-inforces our sense of his manifest noble nature. At the latent level, taking Iachimo as a ‘split’ of the beloved, we may say that from the beloved's point of view it is important for people not only to repent, and forgive others, but also to forgive themselves, to forgive that aspect of the self which has sinned.

To return to the literal level, which is not inconsistent with this, Iachimo's praise of Posthumus's nobility allows us to accept Posthumus as good without priggishness, and Iachimo's revelation provokes Posthumus to reveal his own identity and in his own person to express the deepest repentance. This is what is needed. The beloved must repudiate all the hateful aspects of his love, for he too needs pardon. Imogen intervenes to moderate Posthumus's rage against himself, and thinking that ‘he’ scorns or mocks his desperate self-condemnation Posthumus knocks ‘him’ down. It is an aptly paradoxical last expression of his aggressiveness towards her, his beloved wife, or of what, at the deepest level, we may say that the protagonist feels is the beloved's aggressiveness towards her. The blow is a repetition, so to speak, of his previous offence. It also produces the full revelation that the ‘boy’ is his own wife in disguise, and the aggressive deed now made again explicit and conscious can be finally and fully recognised, repented of, forsworn, and pardoned.

The episode with Posthumus allows us to note again, as with the case of Belarius, the general point that in traditional stories the moral quality of the character and that of his actions may not at the literal level exactly co-incide. There can be no doubt that Posthumus, like Belarius as Johnson notes, and like such other Shakespearean characters as Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, Prince Hal at the beginning of Henry IV, Part I, even Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well, are meant to be taken as good men. The literal texts constantly tell us so. Yet if their actions are taken as proceeding from them by their own volition, as if they were characters in a nineteenth-century novel, they may be seen as ‘blockheads’, hypocrites, or worse. We must recognise that the stories have their own schematic structure, and that the personality of the character is added on the literal level ‘inorganically’, even, by naturalistic standards, inconsistently. In many cases the personality of the character, at the level of verbal realisation, is only slightly etched and shaded. The character is primarily a role, as in Posthumus's case. The richness of psychological insight lies in the presentation of several such characters which add up to what the twentieth century can understand as a fuller and truer psychic whole, with a mixture of good and bad. This is why we must insist that Posthumus himself, as a character in the action, plays fully the role of paragon, is essentially ideal, noble, brave, even if in his actions temporarily tainted by the wicked Iachimo, for which he must repent; and this is why we may also insist that, at the latent level, Iachimo and Cloten are both, like Posthumus himself, elements in the total image of the beloved, though these others are elements that need to be repudiated.

To return to the story, the revelation and reconciliation concerning the protagonist and the beloved lead to a sequence of others. This is one of Shakespeare's most exciting final scenes. It is an admirable example of the narrative interest of a traditional tale, where the audience knows the whole story and finds pleasure in seeing how the characters within the fiction learn its realities, so that eventually both audience and characters share the same truths of relationship. The image of the united family is dominant in the text. Cymbeline says of the recovery of his two sons and of Imogen:

          O what am I?
A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother
Rejoic'd deliverance more.

(V (v) 368-70)

The image of the mother which is adopted by the father validates re-birth and re-union. Cymbeline also recognises Imogen's devotion to Posthumus, and sees her, as we must, as the central rock, the protagonist, round whom all the characters are ranged:

Posthumus anchors upon Imogen;
And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye
On him, her brothers, me, her master [i.e. Lucius], hitting
Each object with a joy; the counterchange
Is severally in all.

(V (v) 393-7)

Each reciprocates. Cymbeline calls Belarius ‘brother’, and Imogen calls him ‘father’. Posthumus is recognised as brother to Guiderius and Arviragus. Jupiter's symbolic tablet is interpreted, the ‘tender air’ being in Latin ‘mollis aer’, a word-play on ‘mulier’, ‘wife’, which signifies Imogen. It is towards this full recognition of Imogen as ‘wife’ by both Posthumus and Imogen herself, with all the many ramifications of that acceptance within the family, that the whole story has been working. This family drama is the web into which the woof of all characterisation (such as it is), and all the other elements, including the religious and the political-national themes, is woven.

It is worth then asking why the absolutely last action of the play should be religious and political. Why are we not left with the family? Important as such public themes are, they are not in themselves central to the essential personal drama and have been given only marginal treatment in the deployment of the story. The scene of Iachimo in Imogen's bed-chamber, for example, is far more extensively treated than these apparently grander, more general themes. Even more remarkable, it may seem, is the light-hearted manner in which, after much strongly-expressed patriotic sentiment about Britain's freedom from the Roman yoke, and so many deaths incurred in procuring it, independence should now be jettisoned, and Cymbeline proclaim his intention of paying tribute despite his victory. The rationalisation is that Cymbeline was persuaded to revolt by his ‘wicked Queen’. This is satisfactory in that it brings the political element in relation to the fundamental motivation of the inner drama, but does it fit into the deeper pattern?

The patriotism is genuine, but it is subsumed, not negated, in a higher ideal of equal alliance with Rome which publicly repeats, extends and validates the personal pattern of reconciliation and peace. That pattern is repeated again in the religious references. Cymbeline is a pagan, but a devout one, and his intention of praising the gods and his reference to ‘our bless'd altars’ are easily assimilated to Shakespeare's ordinary Elizabethan Christianity, which is a cultural donnée for all his plays. Religion and country, in Shakespeare's time normally, and even nowadays still for some, are closely identified, and are a normal extension of the family. A king may easily be thought of as ‘the father of his people’; he was thought of in Shakespeare's day as God's vicegerent on earth; God himself is ‘Our Father’. These generalities lie behind the images of re-birth and re-union worked out through the family drama, and complete them with a sense of universal peace, that extends from the inner psyche to the furthest stars.

VI

These examples of the family drama in Shakespeare by no means exhaust his treatment of the subject. Beside the other late Romances and the mature comedies there are other examples to explore. The subject is strongest in romance, which gives most play to inner drama and to the devising of patterns of action; in the history plays, in so far as they depict what appears often to be so desultory, inconsistent, arbitrary and wasteful in ordinary life, the family drama is at work, but more interruptedly, and we are less close to the type of folkloric and mythic narrative, nearer to superficial appearances. But in some of the history plays the family drama plays a part. Coriolanus has been already mentioned, and the two complementary father-figures of Prince Hal, Henry IV and Falstaff, will be easily recalled. The family drama hardly appears in the Roman plays, nor in Othello or Macbeth. The notion of the family drama is not a universal key, and Shakespeare's infinite variety takes up other human interests in many plays. It is this absence in some which re-inforces our sense of the truth of the appearance of the family drama in those plays where it can be seen.

Notes

1. Beside cf. Derek Brewer, “The Nature of Romance”, Poetica 9 (1978), 9-48, cf. N. Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1976. For a stimulating psychological study see M. M. Schwartz, ‘Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline’ in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. F. Crews, Cambridge, Mass., 1970, pp. 219-83.

2. ‘The family romance of neurotics’, more briefly ‘the family romance’, seems to have been discovered by Freud but the concept was first formulated under Freud's inspiration by O. Rank, Der Mythus der Geburt des Helden, Leipzig and Vienna, 1909, repr. Gesammelte Werke, London, 1941, vol. VII, p. 224; translated by F. Robbins and S. A. Jelliffe, Robert Brunner, New York, 1957; cf. M. Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman, Paris, 1972, p. 43. Cf. also Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, London, 1968.

3. Cf. E. R. Leach, Genesis as Myth, London, 1969, p. 34.