SOURCE: Simonds, Peggy Muñoz. “The Iconography of Primitivism in Cymbeline.” Renaissance Drama 16 (1985): 95-120.

[In the following excerpt, Simonds links Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus to the medieval myth and emblem tradition of Wild Men. The innate virtue of these three is in stark contrast to the villainy of Cymbeline's court, she contends, and they are integral to the restoration of a purified Britain.]

In his recent article “The Pastoral Reckoning in ‘Cymbeline,’” Michael Taylor follows a long line of Cymbeline critics in mistaking a primitive setting in the Welsh mountains for a pastoral setting, and he finds Imogen's scene with the beheaded corpse of Cloten astonishingly “grotesque” within this ideal if “hard” pastoral world.¹ Although Shakespeare does indeed use pastoralism in a number of his plays, sheep and shepherds are notably lacking in Cymbeline, to the despair of the heroine herself. Imogen yearns for the innocence and security of a pastoral world when she laments in Act I, “Would I were / A neat-herd's daughter, and my Leonatus / Our neighbour-shepherd's son!”² Instead, the dramatist presents her with a cave and three self-proclaimed savages, or Wild Men, to contrast with the corrupt and superficially civilized world of the king and his courtiers, who use the pastoral song genre primarily as a means to seduce innocence.³ Violence and death are everyday aspects of this wilderness life, as Imogen soon discovers, despite the natural courtesy and courage she also finds in Wales.

My purpose in this essay is to discuss the significance of Shakespeare's carefully selected iconography of cultural primitivism and to relate it to the basic Christian theme of the play and to the Jacobean court it both flatters and satirizes. I will show here that the iconography of primitivism serves three major functions in Cymbeline. It ironically portrays the savage life as virtuous and instructive in contrast to life in a depraved court; secondly, it focuses our attention on Shakespeare's use of the literary convention of the hunt, which permeates much of the play's action; and, finally, it endows the newly reformed court of Britain with fecundity, strength, and justice, through its human representatives, the Wild Men.

First we must recognize, however, that although William Empson believed that any alternative world was “pastoral,” there is actually a sharp dichotomy between Wild Men and shepherds in iconography.⁴ Of course these figures may on occasion appear together in tragicomedy, as in fact they do in Guarini's Il pastor fido, which opposes a lustful satyr to a princely shepherd, and in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, which introduces a brief fertility dance by satyrs into a shepherds' festival. But in Cymbeline there are no shepherds, only shaggy hunters, and here the alternative world to the court is distinctly primitive. … This in itself may suggest a satiric or ironic social purpose underlying the events of the play, since wildness always symbolizes the lowest level of Renaissance society, or the extreme opposite from the power and glory of the king and his court.

As the word “pastoral” itself indicates, pastoral characters are shepherds and shepherdesses, and pastoral art concerns the lives of those who domesticate and protect animals from the savage aspects of nature. In contrast, “primitivism” denotes the actions of savages or hairy (sometimes leafy) Wild Folk who live what would usually be considered a subhuman, beastly existence in the wilderness, without any of the arts of civilization, sometimes without even the gift of human speech. The shepherds of the pastoral convention are often poets, musicians, and true lovers, while Wild Men were originally depicted in the Middle Ages as fierce, lustful rapists. Shepherds protect their flocks from foxes and wolves; the Wild Man is a hunter of savage beasts and is often described in terms of the predaceous animals he hunts. Predatory himself and often a cannibal, he is a natural enemy to the domesticated pastoral world. Indeed Shakespeare's innocent pastoral characters tend to be clowns, and their simplicity makes them easy dupes for the trickery of those who enter their Edenic haunts. Shakespeare's Wild Men, on the other hand, derive from the tougher, more radical tradition of postlapsarian primitivism, which depicts a moral and physical descent from the human state to that of the brute.⁵

But the figure is notably ambivalent in iconography. The Wild Man may, like Caliban, represent man's lower nature which must be controlled, or, during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he may represent what Timothy Husband describes as “a free and enlightened creature living in complete harmony with nature,” who is no longer “a symbol of all that man should eschew but, on the contrary … [a] symbol of all that man should strive to achieve.”⁶ In the latter role, he becomes a conventional and thus a safe way to satirize the rigid social hierarchy of the Jacobean age, even when he goes so far as to lop off the empty head of an ungentle prince in Cymbeline. Nevertheless, we should note that judging and executing erring courtiers was also quite within the accepted tradition of the Wild Man, as a manuscript illustration from a Book of Hours (c. 1500) clearly indicates. …

I

The first function of Shakespeare's inconography of primitivism in Cymbeline is to portray the wild life as virtuous and instructive in contrast to life in a corrupt court. Twenty years before the first scene opens, a malicious courtier had slandered Belarius to the king, who promptly exiled his formerly trusted adviser. Desiring immediate revenge for his dishonor, Belarius kidnapped the infant sons of Cymbeline and took them with him into a desolate exile in the Welsh mountains, where we first meet all three of them in Act III, scene iii, living in a cave.

They are simple worshipers of the goddess Natura and of the sun, Platonic symbol of the Good. By now their only clothes are those they have fashioned themselves from the skins of animals they hunt for food. Belarius is later described as having a long white beard, and the boys must be equally shaggy in appearance, since Arviragus complains of their state in terms clearly identifying them as ignorant and savage Wild Men: “We have seen nothing: / We are beastly: subtle as the fox for prey, / Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat” (III.ii.40-41). According to Hayden White, “In most accounts of the Wild Man in the Middle Ages, he is as strong as Hercules, fast as the wind, cunning as the wolf, and devious as the fox.”⁷

Cymbeline's other kidnapped son, Guiderius, calls their cave dwelling “A cell of ignorance” (III.iii.33), which further suggests the traditional medieval image of Wild Folk cut off from civilization, unable to read or write. However, Belarius, who knows “the art o' th' court,” sees their lives as pious rather than bestial: “This rock, and these demesnes, have been my world, / Where I have liv'd at honest freedom, paid / More pious debts to heaven than in all / The fore-end of my time” (III.iii.70-73). And he has tried consciously to raise the boys to a life of courtesy within nature.

Husband tells us that early medieval myths of the Wild Man describe him as a hairy hunter who often lives in a cave located on a desolate mountain or deep within the forest. His behavior tends to be brutish and violent, “not only against wild animals but also against his own kind.”⁸ In Cymbeline, Shakespeare's Guiderius displays just this natural aggressiveness in a prompt and ferocious way when he beheads the king's lustful stepson Cloten in Act IV, scene ii. In telling contrast to the hairy Guiderius, Cloten is decked out in elegant court garments he has stolen from Posthumus; yet he arrogantly calls the honest Wild Man a “thief” and “villain base” (ll. 74-75), clear evidence of the dramatist's implicit social satire. Guiderius, in turn, considers Cloten of no more value than a tailor's mannequin and coolly chops off his head, to the horror of the former courtier Belarius. The contrast in this scene between the two younger men represents an important symbolic inversion of the Wild Man topos, since in Cymbeline the savage is indeed a true prince, and Cloten is a crude courtly imposter who has obtained his social position at the top of the hierarchy only through his mother's marriage to the king.⁹

His opposites, the Wild Boys—despite their innate and still uncontrolled violence—are natural young noblemen, well-born but bred in the wilderness and innocent in their own lives of all courtly artifice.¹⁰ In Act III, scene vii, of Cymbeline, when the wandering Princess Imogen, disguised as a page, unexpectedly meets her shaggy and still unrecognized brothers in the mountains, she wishes they were indeed her father's lost sons:

                                                                                                                                                      Great men
That had a court no bigger than this cave,
That did attend themselves, and had the virtue
Which their own conscience seal'd them, laying by
That nothing-gift of differing multitudes,
Could not out-peer these twain.

(III.vii.54-59)

They in turn instantly love her and accept her as a “brother,” although instinctively doubting her masculinity. Cloten, on the other hand, desires to rape her, much as Shakespeare's most famous Wild Man, Caliban, longs to ravish Miranda in The Tempest.

Unlike the “natural” young noblemen, Arviragus and Guiderius, their kidnapper Belarius is a Wild Man of a more sophisticated Renaissance variety, an educated exile from contemporary civilization.¹¹ When he emerges from his cave in Act III, scene iii, he may well have reminded Shakespeare's audience of Emblem 37 in Andrea Alciati's widely read Emblemata. The inscriptio or motto of this emblem, “Omnia mea mecum porto” or “I carry everything I own with me,” derives from the Erasmian adage, “Sapiens sua secum bona fert” (“The wise man carries his goods with him”).¹² It refers to that which we carry within us, such as learning and virtue. The adage is an allusion to Bias, one of the Seven Sages of the classical world, who left all his material goods behind him after a fire. The pictura in the 1551 edition of Alciati depicts a Wild Man dressed in skins which have been stitched together. In the background are a cave, trees, and the Scythian Sea, suggesting a reference to the De Germania of Tacitus and his ironic descriptions of the barbarians of the north as virtuous in contrast to the Romans of his own time. The subscriptio of the emblem reads:

The poor Hun, the most wretched inhabitant of Scythian Pontus, constantly has his limbs burnt livid with unending cold. He knows not the resources of Ceres, or the gifts of Bacchus, nevertheless he always wears precious clothing. For animal skins envelop him on all sides: Only his eyes are visible, every other part is covered. Thus he has no fear of thieves, thus he disdains the wind and rain: He is safe among men, and safe among the gods.¹³

Some editions of the Emblemata show the “poor Hun” as naked, a common variant of the Wild Man topos. …

Shakespeare's Belarius appears to be a Wild Man of this virtuous Erasmian type so wistfully celebrated by Alciati. He is a soldier-scholar, who carries his learning and virtue with him into the wilderness to escape the multiple evils of life at court. He assures Arviragus and Guiderius, who complain of their savage existence, that, “this life / Is nobler than attending for a check: Richer than doing nothing for a robe, / Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk: / Such gain the cap of him that makes him fine, / Yet keeps his book uncross'd: no life to ours” (III.iii.21-26). One may object, however, that Belarius is also a kidnapper. In this respect, Husband informs us that the mythical Wild Man did characteristically abduct children, “but often only to fulfill parental instincts.”¹⁴ And, in fact, Belarius had considerably better parental instincts than does Cymbeline, who is described by his daughter Imogen as like the tyrannous north wind which “Shakes all our buds from growing” (I.iv.37).

The audience witnesses in Act III, scene iii. of Cymbeline, on the other hand, an excellent model of the proper education of princes when the Wild Man Belarius, by pointing out examples in nature, trains his royal pupils against moral abuses arising from the unnatural hierarchy of the Renaissance social order. Even the mouth of their humble cave provides a lesson in natural piety: “Stoop boys: this gate / Instructs you how t'adore the heavens; and bow you / To a morning's holy office. The gates of monarchs / Are arch'd so high that giants may get through / And keep their impious turbans on, without / Good morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!” (III.iii.2-7). These Wild Men are indeed comfortably “safe among the gods,” as Alciata had put it. The antithesis to such pious humility can be seen at Cymbeline's court, where “You do not meet a man but frowns; our bloods / No more obey the heavens than our courtiers / Still seem as does the king's” (I.i.1-3).

Defending the wild life in the kind of speech termed an argumentum emblematicum by Albrecht Schöne,¹⁵ Belarius also informs the princes that in the wilderness, “often to our comfort, shall we find / The sharded beetle in a safer hold / Than is the full-wing'd eagle” (III.iii.20-21). As H. W. Crundell has noted, this peculiar image originated with Aesop, was later elaborated upon by Erasmus, and then was used by John Lyly in both Euphues and Endimion before reappearing in Shakespeare's Cymbeline.¹⁶ However, Shakespeare and the educated members of his audience would probably have known as well Alciati's use of the eagle and the beetle in Emblem 169 of his Emblemata. Since Alciati's inscriptio reads “A Minimis quoque timendum” (“Even the smallest is to be feared”), the reference in Cymbeline should probably be understood as a warning by Belarius to the princes not to abuse their own future dependents as he himself has been abused by the tyrant Cymbeline. By extension, a gentle warning is also being sent by the playwright to his own patron, James I, who owned a copy of Alciati and could not possibly be offended by what had become a Renaissance commonplace taught to schoolboys.¹⁷

The subscriptio of Alciati's emblem tells us that,

The beetle is waging war and of his own accord provoking his enemy: And inferior in strength, he conquers through strategy. For without being recognized, he secretly hides himself in the feathers of the eagle, in order to seek the enemy's nest through the highest stars, and piercing the eggs, he prevents the hope of offspring from growing: in this way he goes away, having had vengeance for the dishonor he has suffered.¹⁸

Alciati's emblem sums up the situation in Shakespeare's play very well indeed, although we have no reason to consider it a direct source. In the tragicomedy, Cymbeline has unwisely dishonored Belarius, who in turn has stolen the king's male offspring from the palace (or nest) in order to keep them from becoming tyrants like their father and to avenge his own wounded honor. On the other hand, Belarius—unlike the beetle—does not prevent the boys from growing; instead he educates them in what he understands to be the universal laws of nature.

The pictura of this emblem in the 1534 Wechel edition of Alciati shows an angry eagle at the left, his tongue extended, looking up at the beetle in a tree. … The source of the emblem was Erasmus's adage “Scarabeus aquilam quaerit” (“The beetle seeks the eagle”). Although Erasmus retells an Aesopian fable, he adds the detail that the beetle actually pushed the eggs out of the eagle's nest. The meaning of the fable, he explains, is that no enemy is to be despised no matter how unfortunate.¹⁹ Later, in The Education of a Christian Prince, the Dutch humanist states that in making use of a fable such as the eagle and the beetle, “the teacher should point out its meaning: not even the most powerful prince can afford to provoke or overlook even the humblest enemy. Often those who can inflict no harm by physical strength can do much by the machinations of their minds.”²⁰ Belarius as teacher cannot, of course, fully explain his emblematic argument in Cymbeline at this point, but he does remind the boys that “it is place which lessens and sets off” (III.iii.13), and he suggests that certain responsibilities go with high position. At once Guiderius unconsciously associates himself and his brother with the eagle rather than with the lowly beetle: “Out of your proof you speak: we poor unfledg'd, / Have never wing'd from view o' th' nest; nor know not / What air's from home” (ll. 27-29). The irony of this regal association by the Wild Boy would have been immediately apparent to the educated members of Shakespeare's audience. Belarius later proclaims, “'Tis wonder / That an invisible instinct should frame them / To royalty unlearn'd, honour untaught, / Civility not seen from other, valour / That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop / As if it had been sow'd” (IV.ii.176-181; emphasis added).

And life in the wilderness does indeed bring out the native virtue of the kidnapped princes, as Belarius has hoped it would. He comments on this result in a prayer to Natura:

                                                                                                                        O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature; thou thyself thou blazon'st
In the two princely boys: they are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing below the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet, as rough,
(Their royal blood enchaf'd) as the rud'st wind
That by the top doth take the mountain pine
And make him stoop to th' vale.

(IV.ii.169-176)

Once more there is a close parallel between Belarius's nature imagery and the emblem tradition. Geoffrey Whitney's “Nimium rebus ne fide secundis” (“Be not too confident in prosperity”) in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) has the following subscriptio:

The loftie Pine, that on the mountaine growes,
And spreades her armes, with braunches freshe, & greene,
The raginge windes, on sodaine ouerthrowes,
And makes her stoope, that longe a farre was seene;
So they, that truste to muche in fortunes smiles,
Though worlde do laughe, and wealthe doe moste abounde,
What leste they thinke, are often snar'de with wyles,
And from alofte, doo hedlonge fall to grounde:
Then put no truste, in anie worldlie thinges,
For frowninge fate, throwes down the mightie kings.(21)

In Cymbeline Belarius compares the Wild Boys to the rude wind which makes the pine “stoop to the vale” right after Guiderius has described how he cut off the head of an excessively arrogant Cloten. Thus Cloten is the proud pine which does indeed “hedlonge fall to grounde” when the true heir to Cymbeline's kingdom meets him like the raging wind of fate.

II

Our recognition of the primitive mode through the presence of Wild Men in Cymbeline leads us directly to what may be the principal metaphor of the tragicomedy: the hunt of love. Shakespeare's savage hunters Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius “do” literally for survival what Posthumus, Imogen, Cloten, and even Iachimo do metaphorically throughout the play. In fact, the entire middle section of Cymbeline is devoted to hunts of various kinds—including a war hunt—in the mountains of Wales, and in this focus the play resembles Guarini's Il pastor fido, which contains what Bernard Harris calls a “great central episode of the boar hunt.”²² Although Harris has commented briefly on the presence of hunting imagery in Cymbeline,²³ no one has yet, to my knowledge, analyzed the play specifically in terms of the chase. We should keep in mind, of course, that hunting was the favorite sport of Shakespeare's royal patron, James I.

Marcelle Thiébaux identifies the significance of the literary convention of the hunt as follows:

Metaphorically and symbolically … the chase becomes an imperative Journey by which a mortal is transported to a condition charged with experience: a preternatural region where he may be tested or placed under an enchantment; a transcendent universe; or the menacing reaches of the self. The act of the chase may reflect not only the compulsion arising from within his own nature to undergo change, but also an external force that imposes this necessity on him: that is, the god. For we are frequently aware of some power outside the hunter himself, with which his own will is made to coincide, both of these, driving, luring, compelling him.²⁴

In Shakespeare's tragicomedy, the deity is very close indeed, and, not surprisingly, he finally appears to the hero and to the audience in the dream vision. As many students of Cymbeline have pointed out, the doctrine of the incarnation must in some way inform the play as a whole, since the Nativity of Christ was the only “historical” event of real importance to occur during the reign of Cymbeline.²⁵ And, if the Nativity is indeed the hidden center of the play, then a morally fallen world must be properly prepared for such an event. The wilderness, which iconographically represents the fallen world, is an obvious setting for both physical and metaphysical hunts during a period of such preparation. This is so because the Wild Men who inhabit the wilderness are instantly recognizable symbols of postlapsarian humanity. According to Genesis 3:21, “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them” after the Fall.

Thiébaux tells us that four distinct types of metaphorical hunts occur in literature, although they frequently change and even dissolve into one another: “The sacred chase, the mortal chase, the instructive chase, and the amatory chase.”²⁶ The quarry of a sacred chase lures the hero to a direct confrontation with a god (or a goddess, in the case of Actaeon), and may cause his conversion and/or his death. In the mortal chase, the hunter is led by the quarry as psychopomp from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In the instructive chase, the protagonist undergoes an initiation of some sort, during which he passes “from a condition of ignorance to one of knowledge or self-knowledge.”²⁷ And, finally, in the amatory chase the hunter is lured by the quarry into the nets of a passionate love. All of these forms of hunting occur in Cymbeline, with the peculiar twist that in every instance the character thinks he is on one kind of chase, only to discover in the end that he has been on an entirely different type of hunt. In all cases, the ultimate quarry is love: love of God, love of knowledge, love of beauty, love of a spouse, or even ordinary lust for power.

To begin with a literal chase, the three Wild Men in Cymbeline must of course hunt for their food. But Belarius insists that they do this in the courtly form of a ritualized sport, thus bringing the chivalric rules of the chase and all of its attendant metaphorical meanings into the play. In Act III, scene iii, Belarius exhorts the Wild Boys to the chase with the shout, “Now for our mountain sport, up to yond hill!” (l. 10). Arviragus, however, yearns for military pursuits instead and complains that “Our valour is to chase what flies” (l. 42). He would much rather face a worthy foe in battle than kill a deer for supper, although hunting was actually considered an ideal way to train the best fighting men.²⁸ Belarius cuts off the boys' discontent with a reminder of the ritual nature of their hunt and with a satirical comment on the sinister aspects of a refined life at court:

                                                                                                              But up to th' mountains!
This not hunter's language; he that strikes
The venison first shall be the lord o' th' feast,
To him the other two shall minister,
And we will fear no poison, which attends
To place of greater state. I'll meet you in the valleys.

(III.iii.73-78)

The whooping music of horn and hounds then becomes an integral part of the theatrical performance, prompting occasional interpretations by Belarius, who remains on stage: “Hark, the game is rous'd!” (l. 98) and, finally, “The game is up” (l. 107).

This literal chase—to the astonishment of the hunters—ends as a sacred chase, since divinity hunts down men with as much persistence as men hunt for deer. Thus, while the Wild Men pursue a stag on the mountain top, the true quarry takes shelter in their deserted cave. When the hunters return home carrying their deer, Belarius announces ceremoniously, “You, Polydore, have prov'd best woodman, and / Are master of the feast: Cadwal and I / Will play the cook and servant: 'tis our match” (III.vii.1-3). But the weary Guiderius replies, “There is cold meat i' th' cave, we'll browse on that” (l. 11; emphasis added). With his use of the word “browse,” Guiderius transforms the successful hunters themselves into three deer, who are then captured or captivated by their mysterious intruder. When Imogen, disguised as the page Fidele, suddenly emerges from the cave to face them, the startled Belarius exclaims, “Behold divineness / No elder than a boy” (ll. 16-17). This seems to be an obvious allusion to Amor or Cupid, the winged hunter of men. Such an unexpected confrontation with the “divine” beauty of Imogen-Fidele has an instant civilizing effect on the Wild Men, who piously invite her to share their humble meal.

Of course I do not mean to imply here that Imogen is a type or personification of Christ; rather I believe she is a soul figure on her own painful quest for love in the wild mountains of Wales, and—in this most Platonic of Shakespeare's plays—her beauty and goodness seem to reflect for many of the characters in Cymbeline something of the sacred quality of the Love-god soon to be born. For example, when Arviragus first looks at Imogen, he understands at once the essence of Christ's ethical teaching: “He is a man, I'll love him as my brother” (III.vii.44). Further echoes of the Christian myth occur when Imogen-Fidele sickens, apparently dies, and is resurrected. Moreover, she has previously called herself “Th' elected deer” (III.iv.111), which can refer to Christ as the quarry of man's desire but is also a frequent symbol of the human soul pursued by God.²⁹

As for the wild hunters, they see Imogen as a winged creature untimely brought to earth. “The bird is dead,” mourns Arviragus (IV.ii.197). Then, after a brief funeral ceremony for both Imogen and the beastly Cloten, who has been judged unworthy of the new era to come and executed by Guiderius, the three Wild Men go off on another type of hunt. This patriotic war hunt takes place on the battlefield, where they chase after the invaders of their native land and at last reveal their true princely mettle to the courtly world.

In contrast to the earlier sacred chase of the Wild Men, the courtier Cloten embarks on a chasse d'amour which soon becomes a mortal chase. Lusting to “penetrate” Imogen, as the hunter penetrates the stag with his arrow or lance, Cloten first unsuccessfully attempts to gain access to her bedchamber through bribery: “'Tis gold / Which buys admittance (oft it doth) yea, and makes / Diana's rangers false themselves, yield up / Their deer to th' stand o' th' stealer” (II.iii.66-69). When Imogen runs away from the court, the frustrated poacher says, “I will pursue her / Even to Augustus' throne” (III.v.101-102).

But soon afterward, Cloten meets Guiderius in the mountains, where the vicious hunter from court becomes the Wild Boy's prey in a mortal hunt. As Thiébaux points out,

The encounter with the quarry or the struggle to which the quarry has conducted the hero may result in the dissolution of his former or human identity, perhaps the loss of his life. The hunter himself becomes the hunt's object; he, not the quarry, is sacrificed. Failing to survive the crisis to which the hunt has brought him, he is annihilated in the act.³⁰

Guiderius lops off the arrogant Cloten's head with his victim's own sword, only to find the head ludicrously empty. Thiébaux informs us that in literature, “Details of the quarry's dismemberment may correspond to the hero's conquest of [a] former self, which he is now enabled to cast from him.”³¹ Although, in this case, the casting away of the empty head is performed by the Wild Boy, the dismemberment of Cloten does clearly resemble the “breaking up” of a deer after the hunt, since cutting off the quarry's head was part of the established ritual. Indeed Turbervile's Booke of Hunting (1576) states that after the prince slits open the animal's belly, “we vse to cut off the Deares heades. And that is commonly done also by the chiefe personage. For they take delight to cut off his heade with the woodknyues, skaynes, or swordes, to trye their edge, and the goodnesse or strength of their arme.”³² The brains were then usually given to the hounds as a reward, but of course Cloten had none to spare.³³

Iachimo, the second poacher in the play, also sets off in pursuit of “ladies' flesh,” although he is really on a hunt for the riches he hopes to gain by seducing Imogen and winning his wager with Posthumus. But once again the hunter becomes the hunted. After scheming his way through flattery into Imogen's bedchamber, Iachimo ignores the warning iconography of Diana bathing, which is depicted on a bas-relief over the fireplace. He continues to the bed, where he boldly gazes down on beauty bare. However, to his astonishment, the sight of the sleeping princess makes him acutely aware of his own evil and of its ultimate results for his soul: “I lodge in fear; / Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here” (II.ii.49-50). Many commentators have pointed out Iachimo's likeness in this scene to the voyeuristic hunter Actaeon. Since this myth was frequently employed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth to warn courtiers against excessive “presumption,” as Leonard Barkan has shown,³⁴ Shakespeare may well have intended a similar warning against intrusion on the privacy of Princess Elizabeth when he evokes the image of Actaeon profanely peeking at the royal Diana in Cymbeline. But there are also Platonic suggestions in this scene of the moral effect of beauty on the beholder. Although Iachimo is not at once punished, as is Actaeon, or even deflected from his wicked plot, he is indeed subtly changed by the experience. At the end of the play, he admits to Cymbeline that “I was taught / Of your chaste daughter the wide difference / 'Twixt amorous and villainous” (V.v.193-195), a lesson in feeling he had not expected to learn.

Imogen herself sets out for the wilderness at first on an amatory hunt for her banished husband. Then Pisanio makes her aware that she is also the quarry for another hunter when he shows her the letter from Posthumus ordering her murder for adultery. Her first reaction is despair: “Prithee, dispatch,” she cries out to Pisanio. “The lamb entreats the butcher. Where's the knife?” (III.iv.97-98). At this moment, she closely resembles the medieval iconographic figure of “the driven soul” as a “harried stag” pursued by the vices of wrath and jealousy (Posthumus), envy and greed (Iachimo), and vanity and lust (Cloten).³⁵ She turns at bay to face Pisanio, who refuses to obey his master's written order to kill her. “Why hast thou gone so far,” she asks, in the language of the hunt, “To be unbent when thou hast ta'en thy stand, / th' elected deer before thee?” (III.iv.109-111). Convinced of her innocence, Pisanio suggests that she disguise herself as the boy Fidele and continue alone on her love hunt for Posthumus in Wales. Imogen is not like the fleeing wounded stag of Emblem 47 by Hadrianus Junius, which has an inserted Petrarchan motto: “De diulimi struggo, et di fuggir mi stanco,” or “I am consumed with anguish, and I exhaust myself with flight”. …³⁶

At this point, Imogen's amatory hunt is transformed into an instructive chase, during which she is initiated into some of the mysteries of love. First she learns to understand the powers of her own beauty for either good or evil. When they encounter her beauty in masculine disguise, the Wild Men immediately vow to befriend her, offering all they have; but Cloten, who has seen her in female clothing, literally loses his head over her, since he desires not to serve beauty but to possess it selfishly. She learns, in addition, to love deeply—to love not only Posthumus, despite his now obvious imperfections, but all suffering mortality as well, no matter what their social rank or their degree of sinfulness. The princess in disguise soon discovers that, although “man's life is a tedious one” (III.vi.1), she can enjoy serving as a cook for humble but good savages: “Gods, what lies I have heard! / Our courtiers say all's savage but at court; / Experience, O, thou disprov'st report” (IV.ii.32-34). And she observes in a similar vein that empires “breed monsters” while “sweet fish” are found in small rivers (IV.ii.35-36), another instance of hunting imagery. The comment is also a satirical reminder to the audience of the dangers inherent in King James's ambitious dreams of founding a new Augustan empire in Britain. Most significantly, however, in mistaking the dead Cloten for her beloved Posthumus, she learns that all men are essentially alike and all are to be pitied in the end.

When Imogen takes medicine for her love sickness in Act IV, scene ii, she continues to behave like the pierced stag which traditionally seeks for dittany to cure its wound. Otto van Veen based his emblem of the remedy-seeking stag on earlier emblems by Symeoni (1562) and Camerarius (1595). Under the motto “No help for the louer,” the verse reads,

The hert that wounded is, knowes how to fynd relief,
And makes by dictamon the arrow out to fall,
And with the self-same herb he cures his wound withall
But love no herb can fynd to cure his inward grief.(37)

After taking the drug, prepared as poison by the Queen but made harmless by Cornelius, Imogen falls into a counterfeit death. She later awakens to confront not only real death lying beside her but also the first victim of her own beauty, Cloten. Although love is a positive force for good, at the same time it can be mortally dangerous. Thinking that she has at last found her own quarry, Posthumus, the grief-stricken Imogen daubs her face with the dead man's blood. The scene may indeed be “grotesque,” as Taylor and others complain, but it is also entirely appropriate to the primitive world of this play. By smearing her face with her quarry's blood, Imogen performs a familiar hunter's initiation rite called “blooding.” According to tradition, the hunter of wild beasts is ritually daubed after his first kill with the blood of his victim, thereby acquiring its spirit as well as a heightened awareness of the close interrelationship between the hunter and the hunted. For example, in Shakespeare's “Venus and Adonis,” when the divine huntress Venus sees her slain “deer” Adonis, she “stains her face with his congealed blood” (l. 1122). William Faulkner describes a similar rite of “blooding” more literally in his stories “The Bear” and “The Old People.”

The irony in Cymbeline is that the dead man is not Posthumus at all but the would-be rapist Cloten. Nevertheless, Imogen's heartbreak over the bleeding corpse of her hated pursuer is, when properly performed, a very moving dramatic experience for the audience. Her embrace of the corpse appears to symbolize on a metaphysical level the soul's incredible fusion with the gross body. It is a visual stage emblem of the shocking love union between beauty and the beast which lies at the heart of all human existence and which also lies behind the mystery of the divine incarnation so soon to take place.

In contrast to Imogen, her husband Posthumus deliberately sets out right from the beginning on an instructive chase when he consents to the unholy wager with Iachimo. He initiates a metaphoric hunt for forbidden knowledge about the nature of love. Instead of having faith in his bride's sworn love for him, he wants public proof of it, which is theologically analogous to demanding proof from God that he is to be saved. According to St. Paul in Ephesians 5, the union of matrimony is directly comparable to the redemptive union of Christ with his congregation; both are mysteries and both must be taken on faith. Therefore, when the profane hunter Posthumus impiously seeks to penetrate the sacred mystery of Imogen's love, he is permitted only false knowledge of infidelity and a bloody scrap of cloth to indicate falsely his quarry's death. Like Cloten, Posthumus has understood love only as a simple matter of sexual possession rather than as a holy lure to self-sacrifice.

Although Posthumus's subsequent conversion at the sight of the bloody token sent by Pisanio is often criticized as too sudden and unconvincing, it is in fact another venerable convention in the literature of the hunt and is certainly not intended by the dramatist to be analyzed in terms of realism. In Cymbeline the shock of seeking a death symbol—the bloodsoaked veil which separates life from death—enlarges the hero's capacity to love uncritically in imitation of a forgiving Christ, and once again the hunter becomes the hunted. As Arthur Kirsch has said of the hunter Silvio, who accidentally wounds his loving pursuer Dorinda in Il pastor fido, “Her suffering by his hand transforms him, and the arrow he has loosed upon her leaves its shaft in his heart. He is the happy prey of his own hunt.”³⁸ But Posthumus's repentance does not immediately bring him happiness. Instead it drives him to begin a new chase, this time a mortal hunt, which—after his capture by the British—transmogrifies into yet another unexpected sacred chase. It is significant that Posthumus's deliberate search for a death of atonement leads him directly in Cymbeline to a vision of divinity.

But first the forces of evil must be overcome. Searching the battlefield for his own death in penitential exchange for the presumed death of Imogen, Posthumus easily defeats the evil Iachimo in a dumb show, after which he helps the three Wild Men turn back the invading forces of Rome. He tells others of the latter event in hunting language, since battles were also considered a form of the chase.³⁹ The Wild Boys, as Posthumus reports, halted the British retreat with the cry, “‘Our Britain's harts die flying, not our men: / To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards; stand, / Or we are Romans, and will give you that / Like beasts which you shun beastly’” (V.iii.24-27). Accordingly, the British ceased running and began, Posthumus says, “to grin like lions / Upon the pikes o' th' hunters” (ll. 37-38). The enemy then flew from the fury of the Wild Boys like “Chickens, the way which they stoop'd eagles” (l. 42). However, Posthumus himself is unable to find his own quarry—that “ugly monster” death (V.iii.70)—on the battlefield.

Still grimly determined to complete a mortal hunt, he resumes his Roman armor in order to attract British revenge against an invader: “Fight I will no more, / But yield me to the veriest hind that shall / Once touch my shoulder” (V.iii.76-78). In another of Shakespeare's imaginative reversals of the chase, the hunter Posthumus consciously agrees to become the quarry of the hind. But once again the hero fails to find death, even after he is captured by the British. Instead, like Imogen, he only sleeps. His ensuing dream vision, reuniting him with his deceased family and with his divine Creator, spectacularly encompasses three different worlds at once: his own, the underworld, and the heavens. As I have argued elsewhere, the descent of Jupiter in Act V, scene iv, would probably have been interpreted by an alert Jacobean audience as an implicit reference to the historical descent of the Christian deity, who could not otherwise be mentioned or personified on a public stage in England.⁴⁰ Thus Posthumus's hunt, unconsciously a sacred chase from the very beginning, ends with an astonishing theophany and with an unmistakably Christian answer to his instructive chase for forbidden knowledge of love and salvation. According to Jupiter, “Whom best I love I cross, / To make my gift, / The more delay'd, delighted” (V.iv.101-102). This statement suggests that the true quarries of God's love hunt and those who share with Christ the agonies of the cruel capture and crucifixion of the “elected deer” on Calvary, the ultimate consummation of the sacred chase.

Before man's redemptive quarry can be born in Bethlehem, however, the major characters in Cymbeline must complete their hunts for love in the wilderness and help bring a momentary peace to the world. According to the motto of an emblem by Shakespeare's Dutch contemporary Otto van Veen, “The chasing goeth before the taking.” The verse states, in words much like those of Shakespeare's Jupiter, that,

Before the deer bee caught it first must hunted bee,
The Ladie eke pursu'd before shee bee obtaynd,
Payn makes the greater woorth of ought thats thereby gayned,
For nothing easily got we do esteemed see.(41)

The idea, says the emblematist, derives from Pindar. Van Veen's pictura illustrates the divine hunt of love in which Cupid and his hounds of desire eagerly pursue a deer in flight, the symbol of an anguished human soul. …

III

Finally, the great denouement scene (Act V, scene v) of Cymbeline begins with a heraldic tableau which makes striking use of the Wild Man topos and helps bring the tragicomedy to a happy close. After winning his war against the Romans, thanks to Belarius and the two Wild Boys, Cymbeline places the Wild Men next to him onstage with the words, “Stand by my side, you whom the gods have made / Preservers of my throne” (ll. 1-2). Now, Husband tells us that Wild Men began appearing in heraldry as supporters of family shields at the end of the fourteenth century and soon became popular figures in this role.⁴² The coat of arms of the Earls and Dukes of Atholl (now Murrays but descended from the Stewart family or the royal house of Scotland) is an excellent example of the two characteristic uses of the Wild Man in heraldry. First, he appears as an emblem within the coat of arms. Husband suggests that through this use of the figure, “The two hundred or more European families who incorporated the wild man in their coats-of-arms may … have wished to … display their hardiness, strength and fecundity.”⁴³ Second, he appears as a supporter of the shield, probably as a type of protective talisman.⁴⁴ Thus, by surrounding himself with the Wild Men who have almost single-handedly saved both the king and Britain from the Romans, Cymbeline draws to himself their strength, their fertility, and their loyalty. Furthermore, Shakespeare has here literalized the king's heraldic metaphor “Preserves of my throne,” since the two Wild Boys are actually Cymbeline's true sons and will indeed transmit his royal succession to the future of Britain. Therefore, despite the previous criticism of the British court we have noted in passing and the implied warnings to the monarch of dangerous corruption in his palace, Shakespeare is careful to end his tragicomedy on a note of Jacobean affirmation. As Frances Yates has suggested, a compliment to James I, who also had two sons and a daughter, may well be intended in the play.⁴⁵

In fact, the possibilities are very high that Shakespeare was indeed flattering the court in the heraldic moments of Act V, scene v, since about one-fourth of all Scottish noble families employed Wild Men in their coats of arms. There are seventeen such devices illustrated in the plates accompanying Wood's The Peerage of Scotland, and many of these families were closely associated with the life of King James.⁴⁶ However, I believe the most likely specific candidate for the honor was Alexander, seventh Lord Livingston, who was created the Earl of Linlithgow by King James “at the baptism of Prince Charles on December 25, 1600.”⁴⁷ Lord Livingston was also one of the commissioners appointed by Parliament to negotiate the union between England and Scotland.

Since we know that the three rustics who defended a narrow lane against invading Danes in the legendary past of Scotland were ancestors of the Hay family, the parallel heroism of Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus dramatized in Cymbeline seems to be an obvious compliment to Lord John Hay, a courtly favorite of the king, as Glynne Wickham has argued.⁴⁸ The iconographical problem here is that there are absolutely no Wild Men in the Hay coat of arms. Nevertheless, it seems that Alexander Livingston, Earl of Linlithgow, was married to Lady Helenor Hay, daughter of the 7th Earl of Errol. Through this union, a female member of the Hay family did acquire a new coat of arms with one Wild Man as emblem above the shield and with two Wild Men as supporters, thus giving us the necessary three Wild Men seen in the play. … Moreover, one of the charters granting the Livingstons more land in Scotland and dated 13 March 1600, “makes honourable mention of the great care and fidelity bestowed by the Lord Livingston and his lady in the education of the King's children, and the expence incurred in maintaining them and their servants.”⁴⁹

This fact appears to throw some light on Belarius's saucy demand that the king “pay me for the nursing of thy sons” (V.v.323). He then delivers the Wild Boys to their father with glowing praise:

Here are your sons again, and I must lose
Two of the sweet'st companions in the world.
The benediction of these covering heavens
Fall on their heads like dew, for they are worthy
To inlay heaven with stars.

(ll. 349-353)

According to Wood, the Livingstons primarily had the care of Princess Elizabeth, and “they discharged that trust so much to the satisfaction of King James VI [of Scotland], that, when they delivered her safe at Windsor, in 1603, they obtained an act of approbation from the King and council.”⁵⁰ In Cymbeline, Imogen is restored to her father at the same time that he recovers his lost sons.

The venerable figure of the wild soldier Belarius as a true defender of Britain in this final heraldic tableau of the play has a contemporary iconographic counterpart as well. The image of a Wild Man labeled “A Britaine” dominates the emblematic title-page … of John Speed's The History of Great Britaine (1611). The ancient savage towers over the other four soldiers representative of Britain's military ancestry: a Roman, a Saxon, a Dane, and a Norman. Here again James is reminded of the native worth of his people, who—if they are welcomed at court—can help to preserve the throne and maintain peace in the land. Although the Wild Man in cultural history was originally a lawless figure like Caliban, by Shakespeare's time he was also a positive heraldic figure who could be trusted to maintain law and order. Indeed two of them were used in 1610 as part of the pageant offered by the city of Chester to honor Prince Henry. Instead of behaving in a primitive and lustful manner, these Wild Men essentially performed the role of St. George in pantomime. They fought against evil by engaging in battle with “an artificial Dragon, very liuely to behold,” who pursued “the Sauages entring their Denne, casting Fire from his mouth, which afterwards was slaine, to the great pleasure of the spectators, bleeding, fainting, and staggering, as though he endured a feeling paine, euen at the last gaspe, and farewell.”⁵¹ In religious iconography, the Wild Man also faces the dragon as a symbol of the natural strength and fortitude available to defeat evil. … To take one example, he performs this function in a spandrel on the porch entrance of St. Michael's in Peasenhall, Suffolk. … Or we can see him poised as a guardian pinnacle, in conjunction with a crowned lion representing the monarchy, on the battlements of the north porch of St. Mary's in Mendlesham, Suffolk. …

But we must also recall that the Wild Man, however strong and fertile, still remained for theology a symbol of fallen humanity. According to Bernheimer, since the Wild Man was not created wild by God but fell from grace and descended into brutishness as the result of his own actions, “the state of wildness was not usually regarded as irrevocable, but as amenable to change through acculturation.”⁵² Thus we find that the Wild Man and his vegetable counterpart the Green Man were also permitted inside English churches from the very earliest times. The great cathedrals of Ely, Exeter, and Norwich, for example, are extraordinarily rich in Green Man iconography, with roof bosses in the gates and cloisters at Norwich serving as sorrowful reminders of still unredeemed nature, even within the church itself.⁵³ Therefore, inside many churches, the Wild Man and the uncrowned lion seem to represent that aspect of fallen nature which must be overcome and controlled by the word of God, especially when they appear together on the stems of baptismal fonts. … Above them, on the exterior of the basin, are generally carved the four Evangelists and their symbols, as representations of the saving power of the Gospels. …

For this reason, the Wild Men in Cymbeline must—for their own salvation, as well as for that of the kingdom—be removed from the cave of ignorance (called a “prison” by Guiderius, in what appears to be a Platonic allusion to the prison of the body or nature) and be reintegrated with a now purified court and with its formal religious celebrations. Their redemption is indeed essential to the redemption of Cymbeline's entire kingdom. In Shakespeare's dramatic context, the Wild Boys may symbolize the true defenders of the reformed church in Jacobean Britain, since they almost single-handledly drive off the “Roman” invaders of the island kingdom, rescue the captured ruler, and are finally revealed as the rightful heirs to the English throne.

Thus Shakespeare's primitive Wild Men—Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus—serve three thematic functions in Cymbeline. First, their wholesome (if violent) lives within nature are an implicit negative criticism of the dangerous excesses of a luxurious life at court. Secondly, their ritual vocation of hunting both underlies and informs the major strands of action within the play. And, thirdly, they are positive heraldic supporters of both a reformed Church and a reformed State; hence—by extension—they are supporters of the dual functions of James I, sovereign of what he hoped would soon become the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Notes

1. ShS [Shakespeare Survey], XXXVI (1983), 97. Taylor argues rather unconvincingly that there is always some sort of “reckoning” in the pastoral mode, which helps to explain this “gruesome” scene. Although it is true that pastoralism includes the sad truth that “All greenness comes to withering,” we do not ordinarily witness the kind of savagery in pastoral poetry that we see in Cymbeline and, for that matter, in King Lear. Moreover, the opposing modes of pastoralism and primitivism may occur together in the mixed dramatic genre of tragicomedy, as is iconographically clear from the title page of The Workes of Ben Jonson.

2. All quotations from Cymbeline are from the Arden Shakespeare, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London, 1979).

3. G. M. Pinciss also has pointed out the presence of Wild Men in Cymbeline. However, since he insists that the play is written in the pastoral mode, he sees the savages as merely symbolic of the natural in contrast to the art of the court. See “The Savage Man in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Renaissance English Drama,” in The Elizabethan Theatre 8, ed. George R. Hibbard (Port Credit, Ont., 1982), pp. 69-89.

4. See Some Versions of the Pastoral (London, 1950).

5. See Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (New York, 1973), p. 7.

6. The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York, 1980), p. 13.

7. “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximilian E. Novak (London, 1972), p. 21.

8. Husband, The Wild Man, pp. 2-3.

9. Derek Traversi notes that Cloten is “a court parody of the truly ‘natural’ man, enslaved to his base passions.” See Shakespeare: The Last Phase (Stanford, Calif., 1955), p. 49.

10. They may therefore have a partly Celtic origin in the myth of Perceval of Wales, who was called “le valet sauvage” by Chrêtien de Troyes. According to Richard Bernheimer, “the very fact that a man was brought up in the woods may confer upon him a certain incorruptible quality which alone enables him to resist temptations to which others succumb, and thus attain aims inaccessible to them.” See Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 19.

11. As the type of educated Wild Man unjustly thrust into the wilderness, Belarius seems to derive topically from the biblical Ishmael: “and he will be a wild man, his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him” (Gen. 16:12).

12. Margaret Mann Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study With Translations (Cambridge, Eng., 1964), p. 134.

13. See Andrea Alciati, Emblemata cum commentariis (1621; rpt. New York and London, 1976), pp. 203-206. All translations of Alciati's emblems in this essay have been graciously provided by Virginia W. Callahan.

14. Husband, The Wild Man, p. 3.

15. See Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto, 1979), p. 140.

16. In “Shakespeare, Lyly, and Aesop,” N & Q [Notes and Queries], CLXVIII (January-June, 1935), 312.

17. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latin & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, Ill., 1944), I, 535.

18. Alciati, Emblemata, p. 709.

19. Phillips, Erasmus, p. 262.

20. See Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (New York, 1936), p. 147.

21. (Leyden, 1586), p. 59.

22. “‘What's past is prologue’: ‘Cymbeline’ and ‘Henry VIII,’” in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London, 1966), p. 212.

23. Ibid., p. 216.

24. The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature (Ithaca and London, 1974), pp. 57-58.

25. See Homer D. Swander, “Cymbeline: Religious Idea and Dramatic Design,” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Ore., 1966), pp. 248-262.

26. Thiébaux, The Stag of Love, p. 58.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 49.

29. See Michael J. B. Allen, “The Chase: The Development of a Renaissance Theme,” Comparative Literature, XX (1968), 306-307.

30. Thiébaux, The Stag of Love, p. 57.

31. Ibid.

32. (1567; rpt. Oxford, 1908), p. 134.

33. See Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Some Courtier Topoi in Cymbeline,” RenP [Renaissance Papers] (1982), 97-112. This essay discusses the significance to the play of Alciati's Emblem 189. Under the motto “Mentem, non forman, plus pollere” (“The mind, not the form, matters”), Alciati depicts a fox holding an empty head in his paws. According to the verse, “A fox entering the property room of a stage manager, came upon a human head polished by a craftsman, so elegantly fashioned that it seemed only to lack breath, and to be alive in other respects. When that one took the mask into his hands, he said: ‘O what a head is this! but it has no brains.’” The source is an adage of Erasmus based on one of Aesop's fables.

34. See “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance, X (1980), 334-335.

35. Thiébaux, The Stag of Love, p. 44.

36. Emblemata (Antwerp, 1565), p. 53. Junius's verse (translated for the author by Roger T. Simonds) reads as follows: “Why, Stag, pierced by the Cretan reed [= arrow], / do you give free rein to headlong flight? / This is the lover's luck, whom flight stirs up: / Too grievous a wound drives him out of his mind.” See also The Heroical Devises of M. Claudius Paradin (1591). Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints # 391 (Delmar, N.Y., 1984), pp. 354-355: “A Hart stroke thorough with an arrow, & eating of a branch or leafe of Dictanus (which is an hearbe growing abundantly in Candia, or the Iland of Crete, which being eaten of a hart, his wounds are immediately healed) with this inscription, Esto tienne su remedio, y non yo, that is, the heart here hath helpe, but my wounde is incurable, may bee a figure or simbole of love that can never he healed: alluding to that verse of Ovid in his Metamorphosis, wherein Phoebus bewraieth his love toward Daphnes:

    Wo to me that haggard love,
                        which sets our mindes on fire,
    Cannot be healed by hearbes or rootes,
                        nor druggie potions dire.

37. Amorum Emblemata or Emblemes of Love (Antwerp, 1608), p. 154.

38. Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville, Va., 1972). p. 12.

39. See Thiébaux, The Stag of Love, pp. 49-50.

40. See “Jupiter, His Eagle, and BBC-TV,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter X, no. 1 (December 1985), p. 3. Both Dante and Petrarch used Jupiter as a symbol of the Christian deity, who is still often evoked euphemistically as “Jove” in upper-class English speech.

41. Amorum Emblemata, p. 131.

42. Husband, The Wild Man, p. 186.

43. Ibid., p. 185.

44. See Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 177-178.

45. Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London, 1975), pp. 41-61.

46. See John Philip Wood, The Peerage of Scotland, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1813). Among these families, Walter Stewart, Lord Blantyre, had a coat of arms supported by both a lion and a Wild Man. He “was bred up along with King James VI of Scotland under George Buchanan,” and he later became a commissioner for the treaty of union with England (I, 213). Edward Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, with two savages supporting his shield, was sent in 1600 to England by James “to congratulate Queen Elizabeth on her suppression of the Essex rebellion” (I, 515). On the accession of James to the English throne, Bruce accompanied his sovereign south where he became a privy-councillor and master of the rolls for life. Perhaps the most exotic of the Scottish peers, with two Wild Men as supporters of his shield, was Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar, Viscount of Kenmure, who was something of a Wild Man himself. After Sir Robert had made a reputation by plundering his neighbors' cattle, burning their houses, and even taking them prisoner on occasion, James VI sent out a force to arrest him. But “he deforced his Majesty's officers, making the principal eat the warrant.” His father and friends managed to obtain a pardon for him, after which he became one of the king's gentlemen of the bedchamber. Later, at a royal tournament, “Sir Robert Gordon was one of the three successful champions to whom prizes were delivered by Princess Elizabeth” (II, 126-127). It seems likely that any of these noble families could have felt honored by Shakespeare in the heraldic tableau of Act V, scene v, and perhaps the dramatist hoped they would all see themselves celebrated as preservers of the king's throne.

47. Ibid., II, 127.

48. See “Riddle and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline,” in English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th Birthday (Oxford, 1980), pp. 112-113.

49. Wood, The Peerage of Scotland, II, 127.

50. Ibid.

51. Quoted by Robert Hillis Goldsmith, “The Wild Man on the English Stage,” MLR [Modern Language Review], LIII (1958), p. 485.

52. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, p. 8.

53. See Kathleen Basford, The Green Man (Ipswich, 1978), p. 19.

The research for this paper was done while the author held an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers in 1982. An early version of the essay was read that same year at the meetings of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in Atlanta, Ga.