[In the following excerpt, Gajdusek traces the multiple incest threats and their symbolic implications in Cymbeline.]

Cymbeline, the succeeding play [to Pericles], is … fundamentally concerned with incest. Posthumus' father had died before his son's birth, his mother while in birth labor, and from the first moments of life their son has been raised as though he were the son of Cymbeline beside Cymbeline's own daughter, Imogen. He is therefore, if not by blood, then by breeding, brother to Imogen. Attacked by her father for her marriage to Posthumus, Imogen explains the cause of her act:

It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus;
You bred him as my playfellow.

Incest is compounded, for Cymbeline urges upon his unacceptably married daughter separation from Posthumus and marriage with Cloten, his new queen's son. In doing so he argues for his daughter's marriage to his own stepson. Acting as though there were no incest transgression because there is no blood relation between Imogen, Posthumus, and Cloten, the participants variously ignore the fact that in many societies their familial relationships are sufficient to fall firmly under the full strength of the incest taboo.

Additionally, the incest threat is not one kept carefully beyond the perimeters of blood relation. When Imogen goes to the forest costumed and disguised as a man, Fidele, she inhabits the cave of Belarius and of Cymbeline's two authentic sons, Arviragus and Guiderius. The brothers are powerfully attracted to the handsome youth she seems to be. As Imogen, she would be sister to the brothers and protected by the incest taboo; as Fidele, her only protection is that of costume and artifice. It is her artificial illusionistic barrier that stands between her and the threat of incest.

One also sees in Cymbeline's rage against his daughter's escape from his will and authority by her own wilful and unacceptable marriage the classical incestuous father-pursuer, who has been described by Otto Rank in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero:

The father who refuses to give his daughter to any of her suitors, or who attaches to the winning of the daughter certain conditions difficult of fulfillment, does this because he really begrudges her to all others, for when all is told he wishes to possess her himself. He locks her up in some inaccessible spot, so as to safeguard her virginity (Perseus, Gilgamesh, Telephus, Romulus), and when his command is disobeyed he pursues the daughter and her offspring with insatiable hatred. However, the unconscious sexual motives of his hostile attitude, which is later on avenged by his grandson, render it evident that again the hero kills in him simply the man who is trying to rob him of the love of his mother; namely, the father.¹

Rank here and elsewhere establishes that the man who in the classical hero paradigm pursues the hero and causes his exposure to the elements is authentically the father-figure and that his intended victim is the son. Such logic of pattern suggests Antiochus in Pericles—the one who pursues Pericles and is responsible for Pericles' being driven into exposure in the open—the incestuous father pursuer, even as in Cymbeline, the king becomes responsible for the exposure and pursuit of his adopted son, Posthumus. Additionally, Cymbeline is implicated with the long sojourn of his own sons in the wilderness. Shakespeare tellingly permits their disappearance to rest in at least the psychological complicity of the father:

2ND Gentleman:
That a king's children should be so convey'd!
So slackly guarded! and the search so slow,
That could not trace them!
1ST Gentleman:
Howso'er 'tis strange,
Or that the negligence may well be laughed at,
Yet it is true, sir.

Cymbeline, in classical paradigm seeming to be the incestuously motivated father, seems to be urging in Cloten the surrogate fulfillment he cannot himself overtly seize, and his hoped-for marriage of Imogen and Cloten seems to be that same mingling of bloods which would endorse and affirm to another generation his bond with his new-false queen.

There is another level on which the story of Cymbeline is a tale of incest. It is the level of biography, for the elements of the story precisely enunciate an hypothetical history of Shakespeare the man. (James Joyce's theory placed in the mouth of young Stephen Daedalus in the Library Episode of Ulysses enunciates it.)² Posthumus, who flies or is banished from his court-home to go south to more intellectual courts where he shines and dazzles all by his radiant wit and courtesy, receives there the slanderous tales and calumny that follow. He has abandoned his wife behind him in the care of his father and under the insistent pressure of his false “brother” who would leap into his bed and displace him in his authority. Real or false adultery, truth or slander as poison in the ear become the questions which metaphor in the play expands, and all are based on the fear of the violation of the incest taboo by the brother-usurper. The story is a speculative history of Shakespeare, the Stratford boy become London wit, the wife-abandoning bard become incest-victim-cuckold who at last returns in disguise to rejoin his own.

There are two other important incest situations in the play. When Iachimo visits the court of Cymbeline to try the chastity of Imogen, he comes as brother-like friend of Posthumus. His role is that of the Italian villain and the usurping brother. The proof of this in part lies in a short and formal exchange between Imogen and Iachimo:

IACHIMO:
                                                  only for this night;
I must aboard to-morrow.
IMOGEN:
O, no no.
IACHIMO:
Yes, I beseech; or I shall short my word
By lengthening my return. From Gallia
I crost the seas on purpose and on promise
To see your grace.
IMOGEN:
I thank you for your pains:
But not away to-morrow!
IACHIMO:
O, I must, madam.

The short interchange is the basis upon which Shakespeare's succeeding play, The Winter's Tale, is built, and here, as there, it enunciates the threat of latent incest between the brother-like friend and the too-willing-to-accommodate wife. Imogen, who readily agrees to “pawn mine honour” for the safety of Iachimo's nonexistent jewels for the Emperor, has too readily placed honour in fealty to worldly treasure. The trunk for which she so readily commits her honor holds in reality the physical body of the lecherous would-be adulterous brother-like friend to her husband. The Emperor receives no value from such lies and from discrepant forms whose insides and outsides do not agree. The echo of Iachimo against the hypothesis of Will Shakespeare's own incestuous brother is strong, especially since Imogen remarks as the scene between them begins and just before Iachimo is announced: “Blest be those / How mean so'er, that have their honest wills.” It is but an almost predictable additional delight that the lecherous Iachimo notes that Imogen fell asleep as

She hath been reading late
The tale of Tereus: here the leaf's turn'd down
Where Philomel gave up …

Iachimo's role in Cymbeline is also parallel to that of Boult in Pericles. He is anxious “to get ground to [Posthumus'] fair mistress”; he patiently toils to “bring from thence [England] that honour of hers.” Like Boult, he is dedicated to deflating inhuman or godlike abstractions and bringing down to earth whatever has been too radically detached from it. In this sense he also is allied with the other incestuous gentlemen of the play who labor to address divinity in the flesh and to destroy its human pretensions to transcendence. Whatever firm or unfirm faith Posthumus may have in absence from Imogen, he is still incestuous Posthumus who has in marriage brought divine Imogen to bed. Posthumus' long Italian sojourn throughout the body of the play has troubled many critics; they have looked upon his prolonged absence as a dramatic fault. It is a psychic necessity for the husband of the “divine” Imogen to be absent. This daughter, like Marina and Perdita, must remain chaste until she has effected her father's rescue from the spell of incest. Posthumus, who is her legal sexual possessor as well as her incestuous brother-lover, must be radically detached from her until redemptive and purgative rites have cleansed the participants of the incest spell.

The real incest threat of the story is metaphorically given … as the threat of the triple power of the great goddess. The false queen—who is in the play called “devilish,” “crafty devil,” and “delicate fiend,” and who bears a son-agent called “devil, Cloten”—attempts to join herself through her son to the king's daughter, Imogen, who is in the play described as “heavenly angel,” “goddesslike,” “an angel,” “angel-like,” “divine,” made by “the gods” and as bestowing gifts “of the gods.” The drama is pointedly a battle of angels. Were the Cloten-Imogen marriage to be accomplished, the mingling of bloods would make Imogen mother-wife-daughter, the three-in-one synthesis fled with such horror. The mother's blood through her son would join the father's blood in his daughter, and insofar as Cloten would be Cymbeline's surrogate, Imogen's husband would at once be father-son-husband as she would become daughter-mother-wife to accomplish the unholy trinity of incest. This danger of incest is forestalled, as it is in Pericles, by the daughter of a king who is able to translate the terms of trinitarian incest wholly to the abstract and metaphoric level by moving the dilemma of life to the potential of art through internal incest that refuses to descend to biological process. When Imogen becomes Fidele, the necessary inversions and abstractions begin: real woman becomes illusionistic boy. To effect the redemptive translations, the dead must be brought to life, masculine kingship must be rescued from the death-womb of the mother goddess, and the abstract incest rites must be expressed as mirror images of the reality that is by such spiritual inversion mastered and controlled. All this does, as it did in Pericles, happen.

Cymbeline early in the play, under the powerful influence of his diabolic queen, is described as a death force. Imogen refers to her father as one who “like the tyrannous breathing of the north / Shakes all our buds from growing.” At the play's end, he is the one to say “Pardon's the word to all,” bestowing life on the otherwise death-condemned. When Caius Lucius formally demands Rome's tribute of Cymbeline, it is noteworthy that the Queen and her son, Cloten, seize the initiative for reply and in extended usurpation of the king's power of reply lay down the lines of denial that Cymbeline follows. At the end of the play, with Cloten and the Queen both dead, Cymbeline restores the tribute. The restoration of the tribute is a troubling factor, rendering almost meaningless the many lives so savagely butchered in battle, but it underlines two facts: that the queen's power overbearing and influencing the king meant war and a reign of death, and that tribute paid is an acknowledgement paid by one side to another that forestalls the necessity for conflict. Tribute has been paid and must continue to be paid to forestall subsequent war and to keep psychic health.

When Imogen escapes the court to become Fidele, Cloten follows, pursuing in the disguise of Posthumus. In his role of pursuer, would-be-raper of one whom he has in part through his “fearful … siege” driven into exposure in the wilderness, Cloten becomes double for Cymbeline himself. Decapitated by Cymbeline's own son, Guiderius, Cloten is the father-king overthrown by his son-successor rival, while at the moment of the Cloten murder Fidele sleeps back in the cave of the sons, who feel more than they should for her as boy or as brother. What we are witnessing in Act IV, scene II, is the fully accomplished ritualized metaphor of the incest myth. The murder of the father figure—not only the double for Cymbeline but also the royal prince who stands for patrus (however in the toils of goddess demon possession)—is accomplished in “the ninth hour of the morn,” and so the moment propitious for birth becomes the moment of death, forcing the great antitheses radically and uroborically together. It is accomplished after Cloten has called Guiderius the triple social outlaw, “robber … lawbreaker … villain,” and Guiderius has challenged Cloten as the triple subhuman creature, “Toad … Adder, Spider.” And its accomplishment, the taking of the masculine “father” head in an encounter upon the highroad, is immediately followed by the journey back to the cave to enact metaphorically the incestuous possession of the queen-wife-sister. The myth of Oedipus underlies the action.

It is Guiderius who throws Cloten's “clotpoll” into the creek to be carried to the sea—“down the stream, / In embassy to his mother,” and it is Arviragus who examines the murder of the impure man as a sacrifice necessary for the restoration to life of the pure woman: “to gain his [Fidele's] colour / I'ld let a parish of such Clotens blood.” Cloten first comes upon the stage in this play, in the second scene of the first act, described by a lord as one whose acts make him “reek as a sacrifice.” The ritualized return of the male head, overthrown and thrown down to the sea-mother, the diabolic queen (Hecate), is a scarcely veiled metaphor of ritual uroboric death—the placing of the head in the hole-womb of death—the same act that created D. H. Lawrence's strenuous acculturated revulsion in his poem “Snake.” It is not accidental that it is precisely as Guiderius announces having sent Cloten's clotpoll down the stream to his mother that the solemn music is heard announcing the supposed death of Imogen. If the masculine head is associated with the upper centers and the sleeping woman in the cave (womb) associated with lower, then the supposed death of one (the illusionistic Fidele) at the moment of the real death of the other (the acknowledged Cloten) suggests a fundamental relation of one with the other that the return of the son's head to the sea-mother metaphorically and ritually enacts. That the woman in the womb/cave is associated with seeming and illusion while being dedicated to fidelity and purity suggests indeed that the inversion so strikingly manifest in Pericles—symbolized by the virgin Marina in the brothel—is here also taking place.

Cloten has moved systematically towards fulfillment of his desire, a desire that epitomizes and gathers together the incest themes of the story. As he does so, he moves systematically and progressively further from the real artificiality of the court and towards the unreal masks (or illusions) practiced in nature. He has taken over, so he believes, Posthumus' friend and servant, Pisanio, to be his own; he has then assumed Posthumus' clothes; and he subsequently moves to rape-possess Posthumus' wife (his “garment”). The closer he gets to fulfillment of his incestuous desire, the further he is divorced from his own identity and given increasingly radical and extreme devices of concealment of identity. He first goes forth in the clothes of another, he then is decapitated, rendered faceless, identityless, and at last he is fully mistaken for another, become Imogen's perfect love in death, headless Posthumus. The movement of the physical, carnal, real Cloten to the unreal illusion of Posthumus is one accomplished as the physical real is in a rite of death judged insignificant and meaningless: Cloten is placed on the bier of death beside the supposed dead Fidele since “Thesites' body is as good as Ajax'.” Having moved into the totality of illusion with the burial sepulchre, housing an illusionisitic Posthumus (Cloten) beside an illusionistic Fidele (Imogen), there is the possibility created for the icon of illusionistic incest of Cloten-Posthumus with the girl. The necessary terms for it are established as the brothers decide to lay the body of Cloten “By good Euriphile, our mother.” The suggestion is made by Guiderius but amended by Arviragus who suggests, “Save that Euriphile must be Fidele.” (italics mine) The cross relations here are intricate. Arviragus and Guiderius have throughout been carefully represented as almost reciprocals of one another: Cadwal (Arviragus) strikes life into Belarius' speech, while Polydore's (Guiderius') spirits fly out into Belarius' story. One brother decapitates Cloten and throws the head down to the sea while the other goes to the cave to bear back up the body of apparently dead Fidele in his arms. Together with Belarius they now reconcile in burial the mother with the sister-daughter that is Fidele-Imogen, even as they reconcile the head of Cloten, which has been thrown down into the water to be returned to his dark sea-mother, with the body which is placed beside the good mother, Euriphile. The double burial quite obviously is an attempt to synthesize paternal head (masculine upper center) with the feared womb of the sensual mother (feminine lower center) and the physical body (masculine lower center) with the spiritual mother (feminine upper center). This perfection of synthesis is seen as Belarius reacts to Guiderius' murder of Cloten and also to Arviragus' sense of Cloten as a sacrifice for “Poor sick Fidele.”

                                                                                          O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
In these 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 enchafed, as the rudest wind,
That by the top doth take the mountain pine
And make him stoop to the vale.

Roughness and gentleness reconciled in them allow them to be at once invisible wind (an abstract force)—which as zephyr carefully guards the violets head—and yet the rude physical force that acts in violence to overthrow the pine (even as Cloten was overthrown), taking its high head and returning it to the low vale. Belarius additionally sees the boys as agents of nature's force that acts through them in metaphor to repudiate the pride of the earth-disdaining pine while protecting the head of the lowly violet. They are seen as functionally returning what has abandoned its source to its source. The return to sources is intriguingly an incest suggestion.

The mirror act of incest is perfected as Imogen-Fidele becomes the triple feminine incestuous threat, mother-daughter-wife. As Fidele illusionistically becomes Euriphile, she becomes additionally the mother; illusionistic “brother,” she is actually sister. In being illusionistic brother, she becomes illusionistic son to Euriphile and Belarius, actually being illusionistic daughter of an illusionistic mother and father. Beside the supposed (illusionistic) body of Posthumus, she is illusionistic wife. She is therefore become the illusionistic triple goddess. In the apostrophes of her brothers and in the funeral rite, she is in fantasy reborn as that confused incest force which dissolves all identities in itself, the sister-mother-daughter who as bride to the supposed Posthumus becomes metaphoric illusionistic lover.

The ritualized metaphor of life-begetting sexuality is phrased in its mirror inversions upon the tomb-bier of death: Fidele is found seemingly unconsciously lying upon, lying on top of the body of the supposed Posthumus in an embrace of love-death that makes her (Imogen) seem the masculine lover of the headless decapitated unmanned body beneath her. Before apparently expiring (dying) on the body of her supposed beloved, she has mingled blood with the corpse-beloved: “Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood,” thereby fulfilling Arviragus' intention of restoring sickly Fidele to life with the blood of Cloten. The daughter-sister-wife has in mask become the son-brother-husband and, in the aspect of an embrace of love, in semblance and place of death, she possesses the aspect of her beloved husband in the form of the body of her enemy. What happens as a result is the real mingling of the blood of Cloten and the body of Imogen, a metaphor of the denied actual adulterous incest consummated in inverted illusions.

Since it becomes apparent that victory over the incest spell is accomplished by the fashioning of an abstract virtual (or reversed) image of accomplished incest, the questions may well be raised whether art itself is not that surrogate abstract activity towards which the incestuous psyche of man is therapeutically impelled, and whether all artists are not men in whom the universal incest problem has cried out for imperative resolution. A work of art, like incest, exemplifies stopped time, and is the product of a sensibility turned back upon itself and begetting upon its own nature a child in metaphor. It is the crystal coffin (of fairy tales) in which the princess (life) sleeps until awakened by the touch of the daring prince. It is an uroboric construct of feeling and thought impressed upon a sensual medium by a creative conceptualization seized by a sensualized imagination. In being a Grecian Urn or chamber of life-in-death, it inverts and parodies the death-in-life state of one in the incest spell and is the mirror image or parody of the incest spell that it masters.

One could speculate that an achieved work of art is the sought and possessed metaphoric equivalent for the desired incestuous object. The artist has loved his sensual terms—all arts, unlike philosophies, are enacted in sensual media—and in demonstrating his devotion to, his sensitive response towards, and his respect for these, he has fulfilled himself. To the extent to which he fulfills his medium, he is himself fulfilled. Insofar as his medium is an abstraction or illusion of life, it can acknowledge the unacceptable and name the unnamable. That is to say it can metaphorically look upon and demonstrate an incest both culturally and personally unacknowledgeable, the “horror” mastered. Thus it is Perseus' shield, and it allows the victim to become hero as that which cannot be confronted in actuality can be faced in its image and mastered there. Since incest is the one sin that carries with it a traditional iconography declaring it unnamable, unmentionable, the unspeakable “horror,” the sin that cannot be acknowledged, the devices and medium of art, which are essentially non-denotative and non-discursive, provide in their very nature the possibility of becoming the mirror that reveals the unseen, becoming the emblem that names the crime. Acknowledged within the mirror inversions of art, the incest state, incest fear, or incest spell is perhaps mastered, or at least proven responsive to the artist's control.

The result of the intricate metaphoric constellations in Cymbeline is ultimately the regeneration of the father-king who suffers like Pericles under the spell of incest cast by his diabolical queen of incest and death. In Pericles, the king-father metaphorically sexually loved by his chaste and goddess-like daughter is begotten by her as she becomes the abstract generative force and he the womanized child. In Cymbeline, the king at the end acknowledges himself “a mother to the birth of three” as he is restored by his children to his identity and power. Imogen's act in throwing herself on the body of Cloten—and so in metaphor taking incestuous possession of the three males he subsumes in himself (Cymbeline, Posthumus, and himself) as she has assumed her triple identity—is exactly paralleled by the actual physical achievement of Belarius and the two brothers in the battle in the lane. There in a “strait pass … damm'd / With dead men hurt behind, and cowards living / To die with lengthen'd shame” these three cry “Stand, stand” to the backwards flying “souls.” “With their own nobleness,—which could have turned / A distaff to a lance” they made cowards stand like men in the narrow strait pass. The story but barely conceals a sexual transformation of the inert and slain into living erect and vital men who become “the life o' the need.” Impotence is translated to phallic potency and the legend of “A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys” becomes the tale of how the lane was mastered and taken. It but carelessly attempts to hide the trinitarian power that stems the retreat (when men turn into a retreating tide in a lane) as that of the phallic and testicular trinity. This action, one effected by those who could turn distaff to lance, feminine to masculine, restores the father king to his power on the throne.

The restoration of the king to his power and out from under the spell of incest-death is told by another metaphor, that of the sun. From the play's beginning Imogen has been associated with the sun. “She shines not upon fools, lest the reflection should hurt her,” we are told. Posthumus' supposed faithlessness is likened to hiding from “the radiant sun.” Such references in the play are many and various but consistent. Belarius celebrates the cave in which he has brought the king's sons to live as he says,

                                                                                Stoop, boys: this gate
Instructs you how to admire the heavens, and bows you
To the morning's holy office: the gates of monarchs
Are archt so high, that giants may jet through
And keep their impious turbans on, without
Good morrow to the sun …

Accordingly, the first words of the two brothers as they emerge from the cave and into the play are “Hail Heaven!” The cave metaphor is carefully developed: the womblike cave enforces upon those who sleep there in its darkness the humble adoration of its opposite. The alternative image of giants jetting through courtly gates suggests the potent sexual meaning of the monarch's gate. Such courtly gates, far from nature and one's humble relation to it, leave man the unbalanced servitor of lust and pride. It is the device of the low cave, however, which forces proud men to stoop and to acknowledge appreciatively and anew as they emerge the sunny heavens above to which they return. As man accepts his home in Nature, the sexual womb from which he came and to which he goes, he is liberated to his manhood: the allegory of the cave.

Sight and light continue to order the play: it is faithful Pisanio, who tries to protect Imogen, who will not shut his eyes—“I'll wake mine eyeballs out first”—and it is Imogen who to the queen “was as a scorpion to her sight.” It is also the queen, who hopes to replace herself and her issue on the throne of the king, who wishes that “night [darkness] … may forstall him of the coming day,” but it is victorious Cymbeline at the end, freed by his radiant and sun-adoring (Apollonian) children, who is described as “radiant Cymbeline / which shines here in the West.” Cloten's serenade to Imogen, the stepbrother's song, begins, “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, and Phoebus gins arise,” and concludes, “My lady sweet, arise; arise, arise!” suggesting the transfiguration of all things through the sun, the lady herself emulating it. The Queen and Cloten both endorse, arguing as they do for power and matrilineal succession, the feminine usurpation of Apollonian powers. The one other song sung for Imogen is sung by her true brothers, and begins, “Fear no more the heat o' the sun,” and concludes its first stanza, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers come to dust,” suggesting in the metaphor of death the extinction of light in dark, of Apollonian consciousness in the vast unconsciousness of death. Cloten's serenade elevates Imogen, her brother's dirge brings down her power tenderly, laying her to rest in the earth. This passing of the power of the sun from Imogen must take place before the father can become at last “radiant Cymbeline.” That the obsequies for Imogen are really for her as Fidele but explains that she has invested herself with masculine power and it is this Imogen, Imogen-Fidele, who is being restored to her “mother” earth (Euryphile, the mother in Nature), becoming her. Masculine power was seized by the feminine as Cymbeline fell under the spell of his witch queen; her son's serenade urges the continuation of that inversion which places Apollonian authority in the woman's hands. The image of the sun/son mastered by the womb-mother is an icon of incest. The true brothers' death dirge, however, suggests the redemptive death that, in returning the feminine son/sun (Fidele) to dust, restores nature to natural cycle and destroys incest fear.

Notes

1. Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Vintage, 1959, p. 80.

2. Joyce's theory, expressed in the Scylla and Charybdis or Library episode of Ulysses affirms: “the theme of the false or usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare what the poor is not, always with him.” (p. 209) Joyce studies how Shakespeare chooses his characters for his histories out of his own family: he describes how “Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.” (p. 209) Earlier, Joyce indicted incestuous Ann: “If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame.” (p. 189) (James Joyce, Ulysses, New York: The Modern Library, 1946.)