SOURCE: “Cymbeline and the Languages of Myth,” in Mosaic, Vol. 10, No. 3, Spring, 1977, pp. 105-15.

[In the following essay, Garber observes Shakespeare's use of classical mythology as a unifying force in Cymbeline.]

In many ways, Cymbeline is an experimental play. Like Pericles, it presents audience and reader with a relatively new mode of image-making, which we may perhaps call “realization”: things, objects, and concrete images, which in the tragedies were part of metaphors, are in the romances brought out of the linguistic texture of utterance, and transferred to the dramatic texture of action. As an example of this technique, we might consider the jewel, which is used in the play as a metaphor for a beloved person, and by extension for that person's fidelity and chastity. In the course of the action the jewel as image becomes equated with actual jewels in the dramatic action: the ring Imogen gives to Posthumus, and the bracelet he gives her in return—“she your jewel, and this your jewel,” as Iachimo expresses it (I.iv. 157-8).¹ When, pursuing this pattern, Iachimo steals Imogen's bracelet, Posthumus is persuaded that he has stolen her chastity as well; he then completes his part in the wager by giving his jewel, the ring, to Iachimo.

Now, this taking of things for concepts has an intellectual, as well as a stylistic function—because it accords with one of the central themes of the play, the concept of “seeming”—of taking the outside for the inside. Cymbeline thinks the Queen is “like her seeming” (V.v.65) he says, because she is beautiful and flatters him. Bewitched by external beauty and external language, he almost loses his kingdom. Imogen thinks the body of Cloten, dressed in Posthumus' clothes, is Posthumus himself, and has to learn otherwise. And both Cloten and Cymbeline learn not to take the rustic appearance of Guiderius and Arviragus at face value—Cloten is killed by the young man he calls a “rustic mountaineer,” and Cymbeline, who almost has Guiderius put to death for the murder, instead finally recognizes and accepts him as his son.

Some kinds of “seeming,” of course, are positive—connected with “wonder” and revelation, as for example when the awakened Imogen, finding herself buried in the rural graveyard, exclaims, “The dream's here still. Even when I wake it is / Without me as within me; not imagined, felt” (IV.ii. 306-7). This, of course, is the essence of romance—that imagination should prove true—as Keats says of Adam's dream that “he awoke and found it truth.” “Seeming” thus has two opposing connotations: dream, fantasy, and wonder, on the one hand, and on the other deception, guile, pretense. A major underlying issue of the play is the problem of finding a way to distinguish between the two—and this, I think, we could logically and profitably call a kind of “reading,” on the part of both characters and audience. We have to learn, as Imogen and Cymbeline have to learn, to “read” characters and symbols and actors. Faced with what is essentially a binary opposition—seeming is dream and fiction, or seeming is guile and deception—what I am calling the reader (that is, actor and audience) must participate in an educative choice. Clearly this parallels, in a direct thematic way, the riddle which Jupiter delivers to Posthumus and which is later interpreted by the soothsayer; reading is a function of interpreting experiences and emblems and placing them in the right light. It is striking that Jupiter, king of the gods, delivers the riddle himself, saying as he does so something very suggestive: “Whom best I love, I cross; to make my gift / The more delayed, delighted” (V.iv. 71-2). Experience learned, rather than gifts freely given, ensures a true humanity. Grace, providence, is offered at the end of the play, rather than at the beginning, because the act of unscrambling its complicated relations—between plots, for us, and between disguised truths and disguised persons, for the play's characters—leads toward a condition of achieved and deserved happiness and fruitfulness.

Now this is a long preamble to a tale—because what I would like to suggest here is that this experimental play is perhaps best approached in an experimental way, by taking as one controlling assumption the idea that the play's deep structure has something to do with deciphering “seeming,” with reading the truth behind human actions and motives, behind riddles and dreams—and by relating that assumption to the fairy-tale quality implicit in romance, which for my own purposes I would like to call “providence”: the conviction that everything will come out all right at the end. My purpose is to try to find a way of unifying, and finding order in, a number of central themes and actions in the play.

It is often said that Cymbeline is highly disunified; that it has too many plots, too many characters, too many literary styles, too much of everything. But let us see what we can find in the play's deep structure that offers some congruence, some order, among the following rather peculiar and discrete subjects or themes: 1) the image of boxes, chests, and trunks; 2) the loss—and later recovery—of children by parents; 3) the adoption—and later loss—of children by parents; and 4) the question of sacrifice. Let us begin our investigation with the more concrete and tangible elements, and move rather gingerly along toward the more implicit and speculative; let us begin, therefore, with the box or chest, and therefore with the scene in which Iachimo hides himself in Imogen's bedchamber, Act II, sc. 2.

You will remember that Iachimo, having offered Imogen one temptation—to believe that Posthumus has been false to her—proceeds, after the failure of this first temptation, to a second and more devious one. Failing to appeal to her lack of faith, he smoothly switches his approach (somewhat in defiance of realism), and convinces her that it has all been his little joke, a way of testing her to confirm his sense of her virtue. Imogen, won over, now agrees to help him, by storing for him a trunk which contains—he claims—jewels and plate bought as presents for the Roman emperor. Significantly, in view of subsequent events, Imogen volunteers that she will “pawn mine honor for their safety” (I.vi. 194), again equating jewels and her chastity. Even more interestingly, perhaps, she decides to keep them in her bedchamber. The stage is set for that astonishing scene in which Iachimo hides himself in the trunk, emerges once Imogen is asleep, and takes notes on the appearance of the room and of her body.

The scene is worth our closest attention. Imogen retires to bed, and reads there until she falls asleep. The book she has been reading, we discover, is Ovid's Metamorphoses, a core text for the romances, and the story she has chosen is “the tale of Tereus,” the story of how Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law. In a way, then, Imogen has been reading a tale very similar in structure to what happens to her in this scene: a man she doesn't want invades her room and—in a way—rapes her. Obviously Iachimo does not violate her physically, but he does violate her privacy and her nakedness, and he also takes away with him the bracelet Posthumus has given her as a sign of their mutual love and fidelity.

We may notice, also, that the scene has other mythological details. Iachimo compares his silence, as he steals toward her, to that of Tarquin, another noted rapist; and the walls of the room are painted, in high Renaissance manner, with images of Cleopatra at Cydnus, when she met Mark Antony, and of Diana bathing. Cleopatra, of course, is an emblem of beauty and fertility, but Diana, the goddess of chastity, is even more interesting, because when Diana bathed she was spied upon by Actaeon, who was thereupon turned into a stag, destroyed by his own hounds, and ultimately metamorphosed into a flower. Iachimo is clearly an Actaeon figure here, spying on Imogen, later hunted, finally restored to pardon.

But the emergence of Iachimo from the trunk in Imogen's chamber has always seemed to me an inescapably sexual and Freudian image.² We know that boxes and chests, to Freud, symbolize the womb—and this play does nothing to make that association less marked. Imogen has, perhaps oddly, perhaps appropriately, chosen as bedtime reading a story about a rape. We may remember that Iachimo propositioned her directly, and we are therefore free to think whatever we please about the degree to which she subconsciously wanted, or did not want, or speculated upon, his proposal. What I think is not open to question is that the presence of Iachimo, in the larger enclosed box of her chamber, himself contained in another box or trunk, constitutes a metaphorical sexual intrusion, whether imagined by her or by Shakespeare. In any case, our salacious imaginations here need not go unsupported by fact—because of what Iachimo says when he emerges from the trunk. First, removing her bracelet, he comments that “this will witness outwardly / As strongly as the conscience does within” (II.ii. 35-6), calling our attention once again to the inside-outside issue, the matter of disguise and “seeming.” But even more tellingly we then hear him say, noting certain details of her body, that “This secret / Will make him think I have picked the lock and ta'en / The treasure of her honor” (II.ii. 40-2). In this pregnant phrase we have the whole scenario in little; the “treasure of her honor” is made equivalent to the treasure in the trunk; the trunk itself is directly compared to her chastity, supposed to be locked, but unlawfully entered by Iachimo.

To this point, I have suggested what we might call a Freudian reading of the scene. Box or trunk corresponds to womb, honor, chastity, both are violated by Iachimo, and the whole scene may in fact be a kind of dream, inspired by her real-life temptation by him, and her literary explorations, which so resemble those of Chaucer's dreamers. I find this a persuasive reading of the scene, and yet I think that we might go one step further, and look at the scene from the point of view of myth, rather than psychology. And if we do that, what do we find? We find that Imogen has agreed to accept a box, which is supposed to contain precious things, like gold and plate, but which in fact contains Iachimo—that is, guile and lust. And once we view the scene in this way we have something entirely new to contend with, because the delectable box full of good things, which produces pestilence and sin, can only remind us—and must remind us, finally—of Pandora, a peerless lady, beautiful and bejeweled, who opened a box (in some versions a jar), or tempted a man to open it; from the box, of course, issued all the sins and evils of the world, leaving in the bottom only hope.

If we take, for a moment, this view of the scene in Imogen's bedchamber, we can assimilate the other boxes and containers of the play to the myth as well. The Queen, too, has a box or casket; we know that boxes are female symbols, and so we should not be surprised that both women in the play are associated with them. But the Queen's box, of course, is an object very similar to Iachimo's trunk. Pisanio, persuading Imogen innocently to take it, says, “My noble mistress, / Here is a box; I had it from the Queen. / What's in't is precious.” (III.iv. 188-90). Again a container, supposed to contain something miraculous and healthful, and again opened in the presence of Imogen, turns out to be not something of value, as expected, but rather a cause of sickness and disease. Once again Imogen's action, in opening or having opened the precious box, almost destroys her. We may perhaps here recall what we have already observed about seeming: this box is something which seems to be what it is not, just as the Queen, so beautiful, so flattering, seems to Cymbeline to be what she is not. In both cases, the experiment, by not being deadly, becomes instructive; seeming and appearance are themselves seen through.

To our list of boxes and chests we may now add the cave in which the king's young sons are brought up. Both cave and trunk conform to the same basic literal and symbolic description; literally, both are enclosures, containers; symbolically, both are emblems of the womb, of birth, containing something which will come forth. In the two court boxes, then, we have objects which promise the opposite of what they perform—boxes, like Pandora's, which set loose upon an unsuspecting and to some extent Edenic populace a world of sin and experience, and almost of death. On the other hand, in the cave we have a box-like structure which contains more than its exterior promises. As Belarius points out,

                                                  'Tis wonder
That an invisible instinct should frame them
To royalty unlearned, honor untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valor
That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop
As if it had been sowed.

(IV.ii. 176-81)

Out of the humble cave, the humble box, or mythic container, or womb, comes real value, real wealth, real royalty.

We may notice that our analytic method here has in fact been to posit another binary opposition, in terms of the value of the box or chest. A box—in the terms of Cymbeline—may be either handsome, and full of evils, or humble, and full of unsuspected wealth. The binary method isolates a relation, and breaks it down into constituent parts, alternative possibilities. We have gotten this far with the help of the Pandora myth, which clearly exposes the dangers of a seductive outside and a diseased or evil inside, and it is perhaps time for us to acknowledge that the Pandora myth is in fact a portion of a larger mythological pattern which is even more directly germane to our concerns here. Pandora was given as a gift—a deliberately tempting gift—by Jupiter to Prometheus, and the Pandora story is of course another myth in which an uxorious male permits a willful female to take something, or open something, she isn't supposed to, and therefore brings down sin and death upon the world. It is not, of course, Prometheus himself who is weak enough to permit this, but rather his brother Epimetheus—not forethought, but afterthought, who permits the violation of a sacred prohibition. For Renaissance mythographers, Prometheus was seen, as one writes, to “clearly and elegantly signifie Providence”³ and it is Prometheus and the stories associated with him which seem to me to loom as a hidden and unifying presence behind so much of the play.

Let me say at once that I am not proposing an intentionalist argument. It is not my concern, nor do I think it necessary to speculate here, on whether Shakespeare deliberately designed his play to evoke the figure of Prometheus, although we may wish to note similarities between some patterns in Cymbeline and the Prometheus story, particularly as it was presented by contemporary mythographers. I would suggest, instead, that the myth of Prometheus represents a mediating deep structure, a generative structure which underlies the play and shapes it below the level of conscious response. Claude Lévi-Strauss articulates this distinction clearly in his well-known statement on the structuralist reading of myths: “I thus do not aim to show how men think in myths but how myths think in men, unbeknownst to them” (“comment les mythes se pensent dans les hommes, et à leur insu”).⁴ In this connection, it is most interesting to observe that Posthumus, the chief internal reader in Cymbeline, raises an issue very like that of deep structures when he receives the riddle, and tries to decode it. He struggles but finds that it is beyond his comprehension, yet he senses a hidden bond between himself and the text:

'Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue, and brain not … [but]
                                                  Be what it is,
The action of my life is like it.

(V.iv.115-9)

Or, as Imogen says, “the dream's here still.” A correspondence between patterns is sensed and accepted, without ever being rationalized, proven, or explained. In a similarly adventurous spirit of inquiry, let us approach the story of Prometheus.

Of all the details of the Prometheus myth with which we are generally familiar, perhaps the most familiar of all is the fact that Prometheus made man out of clay, and then, incurring Jupiter's displeasure, gave him fire. It was to punish him for this that Prometheus was given the double edged gift of Pandora, the lady of “all gifts,” who was as beautiful and jewel-decked as Imogen, and as guileful as the fictive or “snowy” Imogen painted to Posthumus by Iachimo. Prometheus was thus an artist and creator figure, and the Renaissance recognized him as such. He was also viewed as a believer in nurture as well as nature, a philosopher of hard primitivism; the men to whom he was so generous were weak and naked, in need of help, in need of culture and instruction. What he achieved for them was to transform men from the brutish state, by teaching them arts and sciences and bringing them to a condition of civilization. This is the radical meaning of the gift of fire: a confrontation with primitivism which brought man from the cave to the court, from wilderness to civility, from savagery to nobleness. As one Renaissance mythographer reports, “By Prometheus may be meant a wise Father, who begets a stupid and foolish Sonne.”⁵

Some myths tell us that man was ungrateful to Prometheus, and rejected him; others suggest that man was given eternal life by him and lost that, too. In any case, the actions of Prometheus earned him the hatred of Jupiter because he gave man the gifts of fire, civilization, and ceremonial sacrifice. And for this series of kindnesses to man, Prometheus was bound to a rock in the Caucasus, there to be pecked at perpetually by an eagle. Not unnaturally, then, we may link this generosity of Prometheus toward man to the question of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, without necessarily—as yet—adducing any direct connection, beyond the fact, which can again be expressed in binary terms, that the play is indeed full of children who need nurture, and children who need nature. “How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!” (III.iii. 79) Belarius says of the boys in the cave, and these sparks of nature are a human fire which Cloten altogether lacks. He lacks nature, they lack only nurture, and do not even lack that entirely, since Belarius has “trained them up in arts.” Belarius, of course, as a humble parent who takes in a kingly son in disguise, follows a pattern at once pastoral and Christian, and one which is not distinct from the question of sacrifice. Most of the young people of the play—not only the boys, but also Imogen and Posthumus—share a common characteristic: they have lost or been separated from their parents. Only Cloten suffers no emotional sundering from his adoring mother, the Queen, and only Cloten therefore fails to achieve a reunion in maturity—a reunion which is a kind of rite of passage, underscoring the fact that such separations from parent and child are a kind of fortunate fall. This is one kind of beneficial seeming, illusion, in which Cloten never takes part, and perhaps it is therefore fitting that Cloten himself becomes the sacrificial victim, the man who dies because he denies civilization, because he lacks Promethean fire.

At first glance, as we have said, the question of sacrifice seems to have little or nothing to do with the business of dangerous boxes full of poison, and only a little to do with parents and children. But the more we look at it, the more, I think, it will appear germane, both to the twinned themes of seeming and providence, and to the figure of Prometheus who may hover somewhere in the background of the play's mythos.

Let us start with what might seem to be a trivial example, yet again expressed in the form of a binary opposition, this time a pun. Very early in the play, in fact as early as the second scene, we observe the comic and ludicrous figure of Cloten engaged in bragging about his accomplishments as a warrior. In the first line of the scene, one of his attendant lords counsels him, “Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice” (I.ii. 1-3). Soon afterward, we receive further testimony to Cloten's oderiferous nature, when we hear him again boasting of his skill and position in II.i. He calls himself a gentleman, disingenuously laments that he is as noble as he is, and rues the fact that on that account he has had to abandon the prospect of a duel. “Would he had been of my rank,” he complains, and the second lord comments, aside to the audience, “To have smelled like a fool” (II.i. 16-17). The word “rank,” thus acquires a punning set of meanings—smell or stink, on the one hand, and position in society on the other. Cloten's rank is itself rank, it smells, it lacks sweetness and health. And Cloten, who reeks as a sacrifice, will himself become a sacrifice, slain by Guiderius, his head cut off and floated down the river toward the sea.

But this is only one of the connotations that sacrifice acquires in the course of the play. After that first reference to Cloten reeking as a sacrifice, the subject is not mentioned, directly at least, until the play's final scene, when suddenly we hear Cymbeline mention it not once but twice. His sons and daughter have been restored to him, the story of Belarius has been told, peace has been made with the Romans, and now Cymbeline proposes:

                                                  Let's quit this ground
And smoke the temple with our sacrifices.

(V.v. 397-8)

At this point the riddle is read, the soothsayer interprets it, and the king observes “This has some seeming”; now he consents in gratitude to give tribute to Caesar, and his closing lines, which are also the closing lines of the play, constitute another call to sacrifice:

                                                  Laud we the gods,
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars. Publish we this peace
To all our subjects.

(V.v. 476-9)

The peace is to be ratified with sacrifice, and the issue of sacrifice now also acquires a double value in the play. Cloten is an obnoxious—and a noxious—sacrifice, who represents purgation; Cymbeline proposes sweet-smelling sacrifices which represent gratitude and thanks. In fact, of course, the whole issue of sacrifice occupies a much larger part of the play's concerns than the linking pun on “rank” would suggest, because it too is related to seeming, as the two kinds of sacrifice we have noticed will testify: purgation, getting rid of something bad, gratitude, welcoming something good.

By this time, it should not surprise us to recall that Prometheus, the spirit of providence and forethought, was also a crucial arbitrating figure in the decision about men's sacrifice to the gods. Having decided that men should sacrifice to them and share the sacrificial victim, the gods asked Prometheus to devise a way to apportion the sacrifice. Prometheus, the story tells us, took an ox, and divided it into two bundles. Into one he put the bones, invitingly wrapped up in a package of hide and fat. In the other he placed the edible portions, the flesh and the entrails, but hid them in the ox's stomach. Jupiter, given his choice of bundles, unhesitatingly took the bundle of fat, and was furious to discover that he had nothing but bones. From that time men were permitted to keep the best part of the meat for themselves, and sacrificed only the bones, skin, and fat. Again Prometheus aids men and civilization, through a device of seeming.

In this fable we have another apparently far-fetched tale which nonetheless does reflect, if obliquely, upon Cymbeline. The choice between the appetizing-looking bundle containing dross, and the humble bundle containing things of value, is yet another version of the inside-outside pattern we saw in the trunks and boxes, and in the children of nature versus the children of nurture. Cloten, the false son, is a nobly dressed sacrifice without intrinsic value, while the apparently lost boys, the true sons, are returned, and are replaced on the sacrificial altar, as Abraham replaced Isaac, by an acceptable but expendable sacrifice of gratitude.

Moreover, this question of sacrifice, and its relationship to the pattern of “seeming” and of parents and children, connects in a useful and satisfying way with another question the structure of the play invites us to ask—the question of why Shakespeare chose Cymbeline to write about at all. As man and king, Cymbeline seems singularly ineffectual and unheroic, always hovering on the edge of the action, absent from the play for long intervals, and subjugated throughout to his wicked Queen. Why then choose him as the eponymous figure of a play which is otherwise unhistorical in its concerns? Clearly, because of the time period in which he lived. Spenser puts the matter straightforwardly:

Next him Tenantius reigned, then Kimbeline;
What time th' eternall Lord in fleshly slime
Enwombèd was, from wretched Adam's line
To purge away the guilt of sinfull crime.

FQ II.x. 50

Cymbeline, of course, was the king who ruled England at the time of the birth of Christ. Once we have noted this, we can begin to pull together a whole series of subsidiary issues, like the question, much vexed in the play, of whether or not Cymbeline should pay tribute to Rome, and the conjunction of Britain and Rome at all.

We may think it odd, initially, that the right answer to the tribute question seems to be to pay it, rather than to follow the Queen's advice and assert the independence of Britain. But biblical example, of course, leads us in a more adroit direction. Christ is born in Bethlehem because of a command given by the Emperor: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed” (Luke 2:1); when the Pharisees, hoping to trick him, asked of Jesus “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?”, he answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's” (Matt. 22:21); Paul admonishes the Romans to “Render … to all their dues; tribute where tribute is due” (Rom. 13:7). We are not told of these Christian associations explicitly in the play—no messenger arrives to announce a miraculous birth—but the call to sacrifice, and the promise of “peace / To all our subjects” suggests that the end of Cymbeline is millennial and transcendent. The Pax Romana is at hand.

In this context we may think yet again of Jupiter's “Whom best I love I cross, to make my gifts / The more delayed, delighted.” In fact under this same heading we can fittingly consider all the many rebirths and regenerations the play contains: the apparent rebirth of Imogen, who has been laid on the ground as a tragic sacrifice, and who wakes to a transformed world in which dream and reality are one, “without me as within me; not imagined, felt”; and the stylized but parallel rebirth of Posthumus, whose name declares his fatherless state, but who offers himself as a sacrifice: “For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though / 'Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life; you coined it” (V.iv. 22-23)—creation as craftsmanship again. Having offered himself in this way, Posthumus falls asleep, and is reunited with parents and brothers in a dream. We may also appropriately consider, among the play's rebirths, the return of Guiderius and Arviragus, which restores fertility to the land, and branches to the cedar tree; and even the song, “Hark, hark, the lark,” with its insistent refrain, “My lady sweet, arise, / Arise, arise” (II.iii. 27-28). Early in the play the incomparable Imogen is compared to the sole Arabian tree—that is, to the tree where the phoenix perches—and the phoenix is of course yet another emblem of regeneration and rebirth, rising from its own ashes; a rebirth, perhaps significantly, out of fire. And to this list of apparent deaths and rebirths we may wish to add the example of Prometheus, who was for Renaissance mythographers transparently a pagan anticipation of the figure of Christ: a godlike being, chained to a rock and tortured for his kindnesses to man.

Cymbeline as a play seems continually to return to the question of birth and rebirth, in the landscape, in the kingdom, and in the human spirit. It posits the necessary progression from a raw state of nature to a civilized state of nurture, and it defines those conditions not by location or external appearance—the beautiful Queen, the suit of clothes—but rather by a quality of human fire, sparks of nature, which distinguishes itself under stress: for the boys and Posthumus, the heat of battle; for Imogen, the moment when she joins the Roman army to fend for herself. In Cymbeline we have, as well, a play which continually engages the question of “seeming”—that is, of choosing between a fair outside and a fair inside—as Imogen does in learning to love the boys in the cave, calling them “brothers” long before she knows this to be a literal truth—and as Cymbeline does not do, in trusting his Queen because she is beautiful and flattering, and trusting Cloten because he is the Queen's son. Like all the romances, Cymbeline is also a play of providence, of divine forethought, and of the supernatural become natural, the godlike in many guises descending to earth. As Pisanio says, “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered” (IV.iii. 46); incidentally it is Pisanio, too, who speaks of “forethinking” (III.iv. 169), though this is hardly a crucial clue to the whole.

What does seem to me crucial is for us to recognize a basic correspondence of theme and concern among the disparate details of this complex and lovely play. Beyond that, it is interesting to contemplate through them what may perhaps be a buried pattern of creation myth, embodying the several details of fall, hardship and nurture, fire and sacrifice, and the descended god. It seems to me very likely that in turning away from mimesis and toward epiphany and transcendence in the romances, Shakespeare was also turning, at the same time, toward creation myths, as well as tales of metamorphosis. Prometheus, after all, was preeminently an emblem of the humanistic artist as redeemer; an artist who, like Shakespeare, endowed his creatures not only with external shape but with inspiration; with the sparks of nature, and with Promethean fire.

Notes

1. References are to The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, Sylvan Barnet, general editor (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

2. As I have argued in Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 144-5.

3. Arthur Gorges, trans., The Wisedome of the Ancients (De sapientia veterum), by Francis Bacon (London, 1619), p. 124.

4. Le Cru et le cuit (Plon: Paris, 1964), p. 20. The English translation, by John and Doreen Weightman, is published by Harper & Row: New York, 1969. The translation given here, however, is that of Jonathan Culler, in Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 50. Culler's book is perhaps the most useful general treatment of structuralism and its influences upon literary study. See also Robert Scholes, Structuralism: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), and Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970). A provocative reading of Shakespearean drama from a structuralist perspective is offered in René Girard, “Lévi-Strauss, Frye, Derrida, and Shakespearean Criticism,” Diacritics 3, iii (1973), pp. 34-38, and perceptive criticism which has affinities to structuralist method can also be found in Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), and Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

5. Alexander Ross, Mystogogus Poeticus (London, 1647), p. 225.