SOURCE: Taylor, Michael. “The Pastoral Reckoning in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 97-106.

[In the following essay, Taylor considers the distinction in Cymbeline between Imogen's fantasy of “pastoral innocence” and her awakening next to the headless corpse of Cloten, whom she mistakes for the body of her husband Posthumus. Taylor calls attention to the hyperbolic language of the play, as well as to the harsh and “unsentimental” pastoral setting in which Imogen finds herself.]

The most astonishing scene in Cymbeline unnerves us with the grotesque spectacle of its heroine waking up in a pastoral setting from a death-like sleep (induced by Dr Cornelius' box of drugs) to the sight of what appears to be her decapitated husband sprawled alongside her. Et in Arcadia ego, with a vengeance! Until this rude awakening, Imogen had imagined herself to be safe in her pastoral sanctuary, far from the corruption of Cymbeline's court, secure in the immediate and excessive affection displayed for her by Arviragus and Guiderius who, despite her male disguise, and despite the fact that they have never met her before, have instinctively and conventionally responded to the ties of blood between them. Horrified now by this change in her situation, Imogen at first concludes that she must be dreaming:

                              I hope I dream,
For so I thought I was a cave-keeper
And cook to honest creatures.

(4.2.297-9)¹

The desired diminution of status from princess to pastoral skivvy has become mysteriously transformed into a nightmare degradation in which the honest creatures of her waking hours have vanished, leaving behind in their place a headless changeling whose reality can be only fleetingly doubted in those blurred moments 'twixt sleep and wake.

Imogen's enumeration of Posthumus' Herculean parts as she then inches her way up to the corpse's headlessness has shaken many critics; as Bernard Harris observes, the whole scene has a ‘comic menace and near-demented ingenuity’.² ‘Dramatically inexcusable’ for Harley Granville-Barker,³ Imogen's final confrontation with Cloten is a notoriously difficult one to bring off in the theatre without arousing a defensive risibility in an audience alarmed by the extent to which Shakespeare has already subjected his heroine to the unspeakable. In remorseless fashion, Imogen's lamentations over the body include a fortiori a prolonged outburst against the callous despoliation that makes the spectacle so remarkably uncomfortable for us:

                              Damned Pisanio
Hath with his forgèd letters—damned Pisanio—
From this most bravest vessel of the world
Struck the maintop. O Posthumus, alas,
Where is thy head? Where's that? Ay me, where's that?
Pisanio might have killed thee at the heart
And left this head on.

(4.2.317-23)

These last three lines in particular must be very troublesome for any actress to make properly affecting, even though the construction ‘might have killed thee’ need not entail the petulant delivery it so frequently calls for in modern usage. Shakespeare seems determined to invest Cloten's remains with a more remarkable potency than their owner ever managed when alive, while still maintaining his essential absurdity even when the cause of it has been so unceremoniously removed. Brainless while alive, Cloten's fate is grim poetic justice: his headless carcass a bizarre rebus for the conduct of his life. In death, his absurdity is infectious. In all the previous confrontations between Cloten and Imogen, Cloten has come halting off, his precarious intellect no match for Imogen's sarcastic tongue and unshakeable dignity; now, in mute triumph, his body, about which he had been so absurdly arrogant (that ‘arrogant piece of flesh’ (4.2.127) as Guiderius describes him), raises up a storm of emotion in Imogen's breast. The fact that she believes the body to belong to Posthumus makes the experience even more damaging to her dignity, especially when, in an excess of grief, she throws herself upon it in an action ironically—dementedly—almost farcically—precipitated by the name of the person (did she but know it) with whose blood she now daubs herself:

This is Pìsanio's deed, and Cloten. O,
Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood,
That we the horrider may seem to those
Which chance to find us. O my lord, my lord!

(4.2.329-32)

In a superfluous piece of commentary, the play's Arden editor cannot conceal his distaste for the extravagance of Imogen's conduct: ‘There seems no escape from the gruesome conclusion that she smears her face with his blood, or is about to do so.’⁴

There is no escape from this gruesome conclusion except at the text's expense. And however much as civilized readers we would like to spare Imogen and ourselves her necrophilic embrace, we can hardly fail to notice that it seems in some respects no more than fitting that she should suffer such an indignity, the like of which would be unimaginable for Marina and Perdita even during Marina's humiliation in the brothel at Mitylene. Although we may flinch from its painful accumulation of detail, in a powerful way the indignity to Imogen satisfies expectations aroused in us during the course of Shakespeare's treatment of the wager story in Cymbeline, bringing to a suitably grotesque climax an element of punitive behaviour in relationships and towards the self that is more fugitively intimated in Pericles and The Winter's Tale. While it may be true (as so many critics insist) that there has been something of an ‘uneasy conflation’⁵ of history and romance in Cymbeline, or that the play as a whole fails to come together entirely satisfactorily, it is demonstrably true that in the story of Imogen, Iachimo, and Posthumus Shakespeare achieves a potent coherence in which the violation of Imogen's dream of pastoral innocence has an important role to play, as it also has in the play's action as a whole, making it one of those events of special significance in a work of art around which interpretation inevitably clusters.⁶ After some forty lines or so of wild address over the decapitated body, Imogen falls into an exhausted sleep from which she wakens to another, more promising reality as attendant on her civilized Roman master, Caius Lucius. After Imogen's grotesque experience, malicious energy in the play as a whole flags—the scenes which follow act 4, scene 2 record a progressive amelioration: in act 4, scene 3, news of the Queen's fatal illness (we never see her again); in act 5, scene 1, Posthumus' repentance even before he knows Imogen to be guiltless; in act 5, scene 2, Iachimo's similar repentance following his defeat in battle by the disguised Posthumus; in the play's last three scenes, the military triumph of the Britons over the Romans, Posthumus' vision of Jupiter, Cymbeline's refreshed state of mind and his voluntary return to the pax romana.

In structural and emotional terms Imogen's degradation in act 4, scene 2 marks a watershed in the play's action; after it, with almost every wink of the eye some new grace will be born. Pivotally placed, Imogen's experience captures much of the play's accumulated significance, and the greater the interpretative burden the more daring Shakespeare's choice of the grotesque as an appropriate vehicle for this climax to the play's pastoral activity, in which an original dream of innocence—Imogen's—expressed in explicitly pastoral terms, undergoes such a savage assault. Earlier, in Cymbeline's court, with Posthumus banished, and pursued by the preposterous Cloten, Imogen had dreamt of a life exempt from courtly haunt and princely responsibility:

                    Would I were
A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus
Our neighbor shepherd's son.

(1.1.148-50)

Instead of finding herself in a pastoral setting where she might play Flora to Posthumus' Florizel, Imogen finds herself in one where she must play a much more demandingly operatic role in a mad burlesque of sexual passion and shattered idyllic expectations. When Imogen clutches the decapitated body to her, daubs herself with its blood, and falls into an exhausted, dreamless sleep—the sleep of an emotional satiety—the coital sequence suggested by these responses supplies an equivocal, parodic answer to the earnest prayer of Guiderius and Arviragus: ‘Quiet consummation have, / And renowned be thy grave’ (4.2.280-1).⁷

Why at this important juncture does Shakespeare choose to subject his heroine (a heroine as militantly chaste, incidentally, as any in the late plays) to such a literal and symbolic besmirching? Any adequate answer has to take into account the extent to which Cymbeline has from the beginning played fast and loose with the narrative conventions normally governing the lives of young lovers in the romances, especially the one that insists on the narrative sequence that leads them through a troublesome unmarried state to a blissfully married one.⁸ Not for Posthumus and Imogen (or so it seems) the traditional comedic role of their counterparts in the other romances and romantic comedies whose marriage prospects remain conventionally dim until the final scenes, their consummations impeded by a society that Northrop Frye characterizes as ‘irrational or anti-comic’:

The normal action [of Renaissance comedy] is the effort of a young man to get possession of a young woman who is kept from him by various social barriers: her low birth, his minority or shortage of funds, parental opposition, the prior claims of a rival. These are eventually circumvented, and the comedy ends at a point when a new society is crystallised, usually by the marriage or betrothal of hero and heroine.⁹

In the case of Cymbeline, Frye's various social barriers seem already to have been hurdled by the lovers' impetuous marriage—consummated despite Posthumus' low birth, shortage of funds, the opposition of Imogen's father and step-mother and the rival claims, prior or otherwise, of Cloten, the Queen's son and Imogen's step-brother. Just as iconoclastically, however, Cymbeline and his supporters act in shocking defiance of both dramatic and social convention; they refuse to accept the validity of the lovers' contract, using all the arguments mentioned by Frye (with the exception of the hero's minority), as though the marriage itself—usually the holy grail in Shakespearian comedy—were nothing but a minor impediment to Cloten's more authentic courtship. In the enormity of its casualness, Cymbeline's advice to his step-son perfectly conveys this important aspect of his court's aristocratic perversity:

The exile of her minion is too new;
She hath not yet forgot him. Some more time
Must wear the print of his remembrance on't,
And then she's yours.

(2.3.41-4)

Not much spirit of noblesse oblige here: stripped of its fatuity (if that were possible) Cloten's version of what it is to be a nobleman (the obsession later of Belarius' moral reflections)—‘it is fit I should commit offense to my inferiors’ (2.1.26-7)—epitomizes the values of Cymbeline's court.

Cymbeline begins then in the manner of Pericles; both plays open with the unsavoury spectacle of wayward kings disregarding moral or social norms, victimizing representatives of the younger generation, committing offences to their inferiors. (The general resemblance is made keener by the suggestion of incest in Cloten's courtship of his step-sister.) In vivid contrast, the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus institutionalizes (or seems to do so) the larger virtues each possesses; yet even before we experience Posthumus' later weakness on his banishment to Italy—even (for that matter) before we meet either Imogen or Posthumus—the sense we have of the abnormality of the situation, of there being something posthumous about the action of a romance beginning where most end, infects even the play's opening conversation, a piece of explicatory dialogue between the two Gentlemen in which the First Gentleman—for the benefit of his conventionally ignorant colleague (and of ourselves)—extols the superior virtues of the newly married couple at the expense of the King's party. He does so in a verse typical of Cymbeline—one that has a ‘hard corrugated texture … [caused by] the persistent recreation of feelings of a particular kind of physical pain’.¹⁰ The play's opening lines, ‘tantalizingly elliptical’ in Nosworthy's phrase,¹¹ make only tortuous sense, but are then followed by the crystal-clear exposition that the First Gentleman provides for the Second, as though he were at the same time mocking his own introductory style:

                              She's wedded,
Her husband banished, she imprisoned. All
Is outward sorrow, though I think the King
Be touched at very heart.

(1.1.7-10)

To swing from one linguistic extreme to the other within the space of a few lines seems appropriate for a play throughout blown stylistically between the opposing winds of fairy-tale and case-history. If the semantic complexity of the First Gentleman's opening speech reflects the moral difficulty of living in a court so Janus-faced, then his later use of the hyperbole of punishment in his description of Posthumus reveals a more subtle difficulty; like the other courtiers, the First Gentleman cannot mould his language to the disposition of his subject without the use of punitive metaphor:

I do extend him, sir, within himself,
Crush him together rather than unfold
His measure duly.

(1.1.25-7)

This is the first of several instances in the play where the extreme worth of an object—something or someone beyond beyond, as Imogen says (3.2.56)—forces the eulogizer beyond (or rather beneath) conventional hyperbolic expression to draw extravagance from a darker area of the mind. If Cloten is ‘a thing / Too bad for bad report’ (1.2.16-17) then Posthumus and Imogen often seem to be things too good for good report, hence their superiority can only be conveyed in a strange hyperbolic exploitation of the vocabulary of bad report dominated by the imagery of forcible restraint—merit crushed in order to be unfolded duly. The lovers express their love for each other in terms equally punitive: Posthumus will drink down the words of Imogen's letters ‘Though ink be made of gall’ (1.1.101); rather than marry again were Imogen to die before him (itself a morbid notion) he would ‘cere up my embracements from a next / With bonds of death’ (1.1.116-17); in his eyes, the bracelet he gives Imogen on parting from her ‘is a manacle of love; I'll place it / Upon this fairest prisoner’ (1.1.122-3). Imogen is similarly afflicted. She can afford to ignore her father's anger, she says, because ‘a touch more rare / Subdues all pangs, all fears’ (1.1.135-6)—‘a touch more rare’ is a fine phrase meaning (as Dowden tells us) ‘a more exquisite pain’, the pain, that is, of the enforced absence of her new husband whom she later describes as ‘My supreme crown of grief’ (1.6.4). Later still, she talks of the ‘med'cinable’ griefs that ‘physic love’ (3.2.34); and it is she who has to drink the gall of Posthumus' letter. ‘The paper / Hath cut her throat already’ (3.4.32-3) Pisanio observes in a typical metaphor. Love's affliction becomes self-infliction for Imogen—or imagined self-infliction—when she responds to Pisanio's description of Posthumus' embarking for Italy with

I would have broke mine eyestrings, cracked them but
To look upon him till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle.

(1.3.17-19)

Lovers in Shakespeare's plays do not usually talk of love's experience in this way except in problem comedies like Troilus and Cressida or tragedies of love like Romeo and Juliet. Do the lovers in Cymbeline linger in punitive terms over their love for each other simply because they have been forced to undergo the punishment of separation at that point in their lives when their counterparts in the other romances begin their hard-won freedom together? It hardly seems an adequate explanation. When Imogen describes Posthumus as ‘My supreme crown of grief’ (which follows the interesting ambiguity of her ‘a wedded lady / That hath her husband banished’ (1.6.2-3)), the phrase is a metonym not so much for Posthumus himself as for the punishment he cannot avoid inflicting on her by his banishment from Cymbeline's court—the ‘pangs of barred affections’ (1.1.82) in the Queen's hypocritical words. Yet Imogen's elliptical construction gives the phrase the force of an accusation (or even self-accusation), especially as it follows ‘O, that husband’, the traditional resigned or despairing cry of long-suffering wives of neglectful husbands (a class Imogen is about to join).

Neither the perilous situation in which Imogen and Posthumus find themselves at the beginning of the play, nor the irony of subsequent events, justifies the extravagant language each uses to and about the other, each the other's supreme crown of grief more mysteriously than can be explained by the circumstances of their separation. And as in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare allows us the occasional fleeting insight into his characters' pasts to suggest more complicated psychic disturbances than at first seems to be the case. The impression we have of something hyperbolically and unnaturally over-ripe, where (as the First Gentleman says of Posthumus) spring has become autumn, and where value can be expressed only in punitive terms, suggests a deeper malaise, hinted at perhaps by Imogen when surprised by Iachimo's description of Posthumus' frivolous behaviour in Rome:

                              When he was here
He did incline to sadness, and ofttimes
Not knowing why.

(1.6.61-3)

Shakespeare begins The Merchant of Venice with a better-known and more elaborate confession of the same mysterious ailment. Antonio rejects the explanations for his melancholy suggested by his friends, Salerio and Solanio; he suffers neither from unrequited love nor from a fear for his argosies at sea. As far as we can determine, like Jaques in As You Like It, he suffers obscurely from the melancholy of being human—it is Antonio he grieves for. It may well be Posthumus Posthumus grieves for (if ‘sadness’ here goes beyond the merely serious); as Imogen has indicated, his inclination to it pre-dates Cymbeline's harsh verdict on their marriage. What Imogen remembers about Posthumus has an ironically lurid light thrown on it by what Posthumus remembers about Imogen in parallel circumstances an act later (act 2, scene 5). Both memories surface under the pressure of Iachimo's accusations, both seem spontaneous and involuntary, each tells us something unexpected about the person concerned:

Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained
And prayed me oft forbearance—did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warmed old Saturn—that I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow.

(2.5.9-13)

These lines come in the middle of a soliloquy of great power and subtlety; one that George Steiner in After Babel chooses as his paradigm for the untranslatability of the ‘complete semantic event’¹² in great poetry. To exhaust the significance (the meaning even) of such a complex speech, he argues, would involve us in ever-widening circles of legitimate application up to and including what he calls the ‘informing sphere of sensibility’ (p. 7) with the problem of ‘infinite series’ (p. 7) becoming an increasingly daunting one. We do not have to journey too far down the road to infinity, however, to notice how Posthumus' memory of Imogen exposes her innocence in an equivocal manner peculiar to Cymbeline. As opposed, say, to the sinless sensuality of the lovers in The Winter's Tale,¹³Cymbeline makes much of the treacherous eroticism of its lovers' innocence, with Imogen cast as the play's Isabella whose ‘modesty may more betray our sense / Than woman's lightness’ (Measure for Measure, 2.2.169-70). Posthumus couches his recollections of Imogen's modesty in words that convey how dangerous to itself it is: ‘pudency so rosy’ suggests the erotic image that warms old Saturn far more readily than, in this context, the more paradoxical one of a chastity as cold as unsunned snow. Posthumus remembers Imogen in terms that recall Iachimo aroused by her erotic vulnerability as she lies sleeping before him, whose encomium on her beauty comes to a climax with a description of the intimate detail which for Posthumus will clinch the argument for her betrayal of him:

                                        On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' th' bottom of a cowslip. Here's a voucher
Stronger than ever law could make. This secret
Will force him think I have picked the lock and ta'en
The treasure of her honor.

(2.2.37-42)

Nosworthy remarks: ‘In the French versions of the wager-story the mole is likened to a rose and to a violet, but Shakespeare's flower analogy is almost certainly coincidental.’¹⁴ Coincidental it may be, but Shakespeare's choice here of a flower more simple and demure than either the rose or the violet emphasizes the corresponding delicacy and demureness of Imogen's sensuality, and hence her power to more betray men's sense than woman's lightness. Iachimo's fervid response to the charms of innocent abandonment is followed by its vulgar counterpart in the next scene (act 2, scene 3) where Cloten calls for an aubade from the musicians to awaken Imogen—in his greasy terminology, ‘If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too’ (2.3.13-14). He sees the performance of the song's words and music as a sexual invasion though, unlike Orsino, he would not want the appetite to sicken and so die as a result (except in the punning sense that Orsino probably did not have in mind). The song's lyrics, however, are as remote from Cloten's intentions as the cowslip from Iachimo's arousal:

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,
          And Phoebus gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
          On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
          To ope their golden eyes.
With every thing that pretty is,
          My lady sweet, arise,
          Arise, arise!

(2.3.19-27)

The song's conventional pastoralism hardly squares with Cloten's lubricious expectations of its effect on Imogen; for that matter, it barely corresponds to Cloten's introduction of it as ‘a wonderful sweet air with admirable rich words to it’ (2.3.16-17). His fanciful transfiguration of its nature does square, however, though on a far more moronically brutal level, with similar transformations of innocence on the parts of Iachimo and Posthumus and is one of the ways in which Shakespeare builds up a network of associations between them in our minds.

‘Pudency so rosy’, ‘crimson drops / I' th' bottom of a cowslip’, ‘chaliced flowers’: images to warm the libidos of old Saturn, Iachimo, Posthumus, and Cloten. And Posthumus is not as much the odd man out on this list as he ought to be, considering that, until his banishment, he has had every reason to expect the provocative image to give way to the reality it advertises. Between wedding and banishment, however, the image retains its provocation for him because of the frequency with which Imogen restrains him from his lawful pleasure—she ‘prayed me oft forbearance’. Appropriately enough, Iachimo squeezes the final equivocation out of Imogen's attitude in the last scene of the play: ‘He spake of her as Dian had hot dreams, / And she alone were cold’ (5.5.180-1). Exploiting yet another ironic parallel with Cloten, Britain's absurd, bungling Iachimo, Posthumus' experience seems to confirm Cloten's vulgar opinion of love-making in which ‘a woman's fitness comes by fits’ (4.1.5-6). The inclination to sadness that Imogen remembers about Posthumus may therefore not be unconnected with what Posthumus remembers about Imogen's chaste behaviour, no matter how rosily managed (a management, by the way, that Pisanio describes as ‘More goddess-like than wife-like’, 3.2.8). Such an inference need not go beyond the complete semantic event, even though it may go beyond the more usual interpretation of the lovers' recollections which sees them as having only a limited application—Imogen's rosy pudency functioning simply as a kind of pathetic fallacy emphasizing Posthumus' savagery. Yet well within the informing sphere of sensibility lies the important connection that we make between Posthumus' prurient recollection of Imogen's sexual attractiveness and the relative ease with which he believes Iachimo's account of her fallen condition. As Geoffrey Hill says: ‘there is a kind of naivete which asks to be devoured and a natural partly unconscious collusion between the deceived and the deceiver: between, for instance, Posthumus and Iachimo, Imogen and Iachimo, Cymbeline and the Queen.’¹⁵

Homer Swander has shown that Posthumus asks insistently (and deserves) to be devoured by Iachimo:¹⁶ the collusion (if that is the right word) between Imogen and Iachimo is far more problematic. According to Angelo in Measure for Measure, no blame can possibly be attached to Isabella for the fact that her superior virtue has ensnared his lust. Angelo recognizes the injustice of calling someone a temptress who all unknowingly tempts; besides, a virtuous man, as he says (2.2.166-8), should be fortified in his virtue by Isabella's example, not carnally stimulated. But the play—Isabella herself—clouds the issue:

That is, were I under the terms of death,
Th' impression of keen whips I'ld wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I'ld yield
My body up to shame.

(2.4.100-4)

Isabella's militant defence of her purity does not escape the Viennese obsession with the carnal—no one in the play does (as the Duke himself discovers in his demeaning encounters with Lucio)—and in this quotation Isabella is obviously overwhelmed by what F. R. Leavis calls the ‘sensuality of martyrdom’¹⁷ which as much reveals the imperfect submergence of the woman in the ecclesiastic as encourages the concupiscence of Angelo's thoughts.

In Cymbeline imperfect submergences abound. However innocent the lovers, we cannot help but see them as sexual objects designed to provoke the conspiracy of suggestiveness that gives them their ambivalent and attractive power. How much more attractive (and no less ambivalent) must be Imogen's appeal for us, when we hear not only from Iachimo how beautiful she is, but share with him in the actual vision of her loveliness, the naked extent of which will be determined only by the tact or bravado of the particular production in which she appears.¹⁸ The moral precariousness of the moment is heightened when Iachimo bends to kiss her: ‘But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagoned, / How dearly they do't!’ (2.2.17-18).¹⁹ Her lips in fact ‘do’ nothing, as she is asleep, but it is difficult to keep this in mind given the whispered fervour of Iachimo's remarks, all of which, incidentally, stress the magnetic power of Imogen's unconscious form—drawing the taper's flame to it—exuding a heady perfume. When Iachimo reports back to Posthumus, his description of Imogen's bedroom not only cruelly prolongs and as cruelly substantiates the claim made by his narrative, but recaptures the erotic cosmopolitanism of the trappings we have already seen with our own eyes: the tapestry of ‘silk and silver’ depicting Cleopatra's meeting with Antony where, in a mamillary image, ‘Cydnus swelled above the banks’ (2.4.71); the andirons shaped like ‘winking Cupids’ (turning thereby a blind eye on the proceedings); the cherubim sporting wantonly on the ceiling; and, in the near-oxymoron of the voyeur, the carving of ‘Chaste Dian bathing’ on the chimney over the fireplace. Typical of the ‘naïvety that asks to be devoured’ (as well as, more obviously, of the irony of the event) is the detail that Iachimo does not bother to repeat to Posthumus (it does not help to prove his presence in the bed-chamber), the fact that Imogen has fallen asleep while reading Ovid's account in the Metamorphoses of Tereus' rape of Philomela: fallen asleep over the very page ‘Where Philomel gave up’ (2.2.46). And, as we have seen, in the centre of all these seductive trappings, the cynosure, the goddess Imogen herself, whom Iachimo (like Milton's Satan) has already worshipped in his hushed recitation of her lovely parts, a devotional exercise we may well recall when listening to Imogen's catalogue of the headless corpse's Herculean ones.

In the light of this eventful history, it would be more accurate to view Imogen's grim experience with Cloten's body as a manifestation of a particular kind of symbolically appropriate pastoral reckoning than as the climax of a destructive counter-movement to the pastoral tradition as such. In recent years, Shakespeare's treatment of the pastoral convention has received much critical attention, most of it concentrating on the innovative and unconventional in his handling of traditional literary attitudes. But by Shakespeare's time, the pastoral experience itself in literature had lost much of its traditional sweetness; beneath its ‘superficial loveliness ranked the wretchedness of man’,²⁰ its nostalgia and idealization in the service of satire and moral allegory. In the opening chapter of The Oaten Flute, Renato Poggioli observes that Shakespeare and Cervantes are typically more complex in their response to the pastoral tradition than any of the other writers with whom he more centrally deals. In As You Like It, for instance, Poggioli notes that Corin's inability to provide the hospitality sought for in Arden by Rosalind and Celia ‘is unique in the whole bucolic tradition’, and that As You Like It as a whole and this episode in particular ‘show that there are Arcadias where man may be as churlish as the wind’.²¹ Although Poggioli confuses Corin with Corin's master (Corin actually says ‘But what is, come see / And in my voice most welcome shall you be’; As You Like It, 2.4.81-2), he nonetheless places the emphasis correctly on Shakespeare's unsentimental version of a traditional idyllic setting. Even though the pastoralism of the last plays is similar to that of the romantic comedies in its stress on the therapeutic function of a benign environment, it is clear that, to use Poggioli's terminology, the emphasis in the romances is on the pastoralism of innocence rather than on the pastoralism of happiness. The pastoral experience in Cymbeline and The Tempest is particularly harsh: innocence (rather than happiness) has to be renewed on a daily basis in a spirit of absorbed self-abnegation in a more formidable landscape than the traditional locus amoenus of Greek pastoral. Of this landscape in Cymbeline, Rosalie Colie writes: ‘it is unmitigated hard pastoral, a rocky difficult terrain training its inhabitants to a spare and muscular strength sufficient to wrest their nutriment from its minimal, ungenerous, exiguous resources.’²²

It is to this frugal landscape which makes ‘tanlings’ of her abducted brothers in the summer and ‘shrinking slaves’ (4.4.29-30) of them in the winter that Imogen comes in her traditional search for a pastoral sanctuary. She finds it—or thinks she does—in Belarius' ‘pinching cave’ (3.3.38), that ‘cell of ignorance’ (l. 33) in Guiderius' contemptuous words, whose symbolically low threshold ‘bows’ the brothers each morning ‘To a morning's holy office’ (l. 4). Despite the love that Imogen wins instinctively from her unknown brothers, she must share with them the life of ‘hardness’ that ‘ever / Of hardiness is mother’ (3.6.21-2). We might contrast, at this point, the different kinds of preparatory tutelage offered in similar circumstances in As You Like It and Cymbeline. In As You Like It, Rosalind encourages Celia at the beginning of their journey to Arden with jocular references to the necessity for her as the taller of the two to disguise herself as a man whereby her ‘hidden woman's fear’ (1.3.15) will be overlaid by a ‘swashing and a martial outside’ (1.3.115-16). In Cymbeline, Pisanio also urges Imogen to ‘forget to be a woman’ (3.4.155); but his lengthy exhortation on the importance of her transvestism for her survival substitutes the doleful for the jocular. He seems overwhelmed by the inevitable degradation of her experience:

                                        Nay, you must
Forget that rarest treasure of your cheek,
Exposing it—but O, the harder heart!
Alack, no remedy—to the greedy touch
Of common-kissing Titan, and forget
Your laborsome and dainty trims, wherein
You made great Juno angry.

(3.4.160-6)

In a manner typical of Cymbeline, Pisanio views Imogen's exposure to the elements as yet another sexual violation in which the sun becomes some hulking commoner intent on defiling a refined aristocrat, one who, typically again, has in all innocence angered Juno with her ‘laboursome and dainty trims’. (We may see at times, incidentally, some faint justification for Cloten's angry dismissal of Imogen as ‘this imperceiverant thing’, 4.1.13.) If Imogen follows Pisanio's grim prescription she should, he believes, ‘tread a course / Pretty and full of view’ (3.4.147-8). The naïve pastoralism of this metaphor, like Cloten's aubade and Iachimo's cowslip, contrasts vividly with Pisanio's extended description of the sexual degradation Imogen first has to suffer. And this too, as we have seen, is typical of Cymbeline. As soon as Imogen discovers Posthumus' murderous intentions towards her she leaps naïvely to be devoured. Convinced that Posthumus has been ‘betrayed’ by ‘some jay of Italy’ (3.4.49), ‘some Roman courtesan’ (l. 124), she offers herself up to Pisanio's sword in an ecstasy of sacrifice:

                    Look,
I draw the sword myself. Take it, and hit
The innocent mansion of my love, my heart.

(ll. 66-8)

A little later she says: ‘The lamb entreats the butcher’ (l. 97).

In Cymbeline the lovers' renewal of innocence is completed only after a rigorous purging of their sexual frailty. Imogen's grotesque experience with Cloten's body is therefore part of a pattern of erotic punishment in which both lovers suffer for the naïvety of their expectations. In an ambiguous manner peculiar to Cymbeline, Imogen, in Pisanio's words, is ‘punished for her truth’ (3.2.7); and part of that punishment—as Imogen herself half realizes—entails ‘peril to my modesty, not death on't’ (3.4.153). The lovers' punitive behaviour towards each other is brought to an appropriate climax in the play's last scene in a manner reminiscent of Pericles' initial rejection of his daughter, Marina. Imogen, still disguised as Fidele, attempts to interrupt another (this time the last) of Posthumus' outbursts of self-detestation and lamentation over Imogen's fate. Making the opposite of Imogen's mistake over Cloten, Posthumus spurns Imogen's intervention:

Shall's have a play of this? Thou scornful page,
There lie thy part.
                              [Thrusts her away; she falls]

(5.5.228-9)

The stage direction here is from the Pelican edition; Nosworthy in the new Arden edition has ‘[Striking her: she falls]’ which seems to me closer to the savage spirit of the sequence. That blow brings to a climax and to an end the thwarted relationship between the lovers, the naïvety that asks to be devoured, the collusion between the deceived and the deceiver. When Posthumus next speaks some thirty or so lines later (apart from his Cymbeline-like bewilderment ‘How come these staggers on me?’, 5.5.233), he uses the play's most famous pastoral metaphor as the lovers embrace: ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul / Till the tree die’ (5.5.263-4). So this reconciliation is also part of the play's pastoral reckoning. Posthumus is now mature enough—and Imogen too—for him to be able properly to fulfil Jupiter's prediction: ‘He shall be lord of Lady Imogen’ (5.4.107).

Jupiter's way of putting it—courtly and zestful—anticipates a future for the lovers purged of all their sexual misconstructions and hesitancies. Posthumus' dense arboreal metaphor, however, goes beyond the assertion of mere swaggering lordship to provide us with a vision of married life as an entwining mutuality in which the spiritual (Imogen as Posthumus' soul) and the erotic and fructuous (Posthumus as the tree and Imogen as the fruit of it) merge in a complicated, slightly ambiguous union. The density of the metaphor matches the subtleties of the lovers' history. Some 150 lines later, when Posthumus next speaks, his last words in the play measure the extent to which he has achieved the authoritative maturity erroneously thrust upon him by the First Gentleman in the opening scene. All traces of that corrugated verbal texture have now vanished: like Leontes in the final scene of The Winter's Tale Posthumus has earned the right to speak with compelling clarity. Confronted with a penitent, kneeling Iachimo, Posthumus provides Cymbeline with his model for bringing the conflict between the Romans and the British and the play itself to an end:

                              Kneel not to me.
The pow'r that I have on you is to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you. Live,
And deal with others better.

(5.5.417-20)

Cymbeline is suitably impressed:

                              Nobly doomed!
We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law:
Pardon's the word to all.

(5.5.420-2)

Pardon to all and the new harmony between Britain and Rome mark the happy outcome envisioned in pastoral terms by the Soothsayer in which the ‘majestic cedar’ (5.5.456) of Britain is made whole. The play's pastoral reckoning, therefore, embraces not only the lovers' punishment and reward but also the British failure and recovery on the political and diplomatic fronts in which, as the appropriate last word for a pastoral vision, the play's last, lingering word—peace—is the word to all.

Notes

1. References to Shakespeare are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, general editor Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1969).

2. ‘“What's past is prologue”: Cymbeline and Henry VIII’, in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 8 (1966), p. 225.

3. Prefaces to Shakespeare, second series (1930), p. 340.

4. James Nosworthy (ed.), Cymbeline, the new Arden Shakespeare (1955), p. 143.

5. See Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972), p. 178.

6. See Frank Kermode's discussion of such events in his Genesis: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 15 ff.

7. Although ‘consummation’ meaning ‘ending’ has by far the longer history, the OED records the first use of ‘consummation’ as the ‘completion of marriage by sexual intercourse’ in 1530.

8. The Comedy of Errors and Othello are the only other plays by Shakespeare to begin in this way—one a tragedy of sexual jealousy, the other an untypical early comedy that presents the unromantic marriage between Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus with cool and disdainful objectivity.

9. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965), p. 72. The phrase ‘an irrational or anti-comic society’ occurs on p. 74.

10. F. C. Tinkler, ‘Cymbeline’, Scrutiny, 7 (1938-9), 6.

11. New Arden Cymbeline, p. 3.

12. 1975, p. 7.

13. The phrase is S. L. Bethell's in The Winter's Tale: A Study (1947), p. 31.

14. New Arden Cymbeline, p. 53.

15. ‘“The True Conduct of Human Judgement”: Some Observations on Cymbeline’, in The Morality of Art. Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by His Colleagues and Friends, ed. D. W. Jefferson (1969), p. 25.

16. See his two important articles, ‘Cymbeline and the “Blameless Hero”’, ELH, 31 (1964), 259-70, and ‘Cymbeline: Religious Idea and Dramatic Design’, in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, eds. W. F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon, 1966), pp. 248-62.

17. ‘The Greatness of Measure for Measure’, in The Common Pursuit (1952), p. 169.

18. The first paperback edition of the new Arden Cymbeline featured Iachimo on its cover, notebook in hand, an insouciant feather in his cap, taking down Imogen's particulars as she lies in an abandoned manner, sleeping half naked, just behind him. The illustration is an engraving from Bell's 1774 edition of Shakespeare.

19. Some critics have argued that ‘how dearly they do't’ refers to how beautifully Imogen's lips kiss each other. This seems to me a strained interpretation.

20. S. K. Heninger, Jr., ‘The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 254.

21. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 38.

22. Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), p. 295.