The incompetent father who happens to be a monarch. The scheming queen. The cross-dressing heroine. The enraged jealous husband. The clever villain. The deterioration of the roman empire. The reunification of the family unit. These tropes and archetypes are all things Shakespeare experimented with during his 30-something year career as a playwright. However, if you wracked your brain, you might have some difficulty thinking of a play in which all these things play a part. There’s a good reason. The little-known play called Cymbeline, is the only one, and it’s rarely performed.
The play was written around 1611, shortly before The Tempest, and like the Bard’s other final plays, it falls under the category of Romance or Tragicomedy. Among the romances, though, it’s an odd bird. Tina Packer of Shakespeare and Company perhaps put it best when she explained that Shakespeare, likely aware of his coming retirement and impending mortality decided to try a compile all the themes and character tropes he had explored over his career into one play. Scholars are often critical of the play for this reason. George Bernard Shaw had such a hatred for the play’s “infantile joys” within the final act that he took it upon himself to rewrite it. All in all, Cymbeline is seen as being too complex to follow and too messy to stage
That being said, Cymbeline’s virtues far outweigh its faults. The play is loaded with some of Shakespeare’s most powerful and enchanting late verse, and Shakespeare creates a variety of flawed and interesting characters. Among these magnificent embodiments of humanity the character of Imogen, perhaps Shakespeare's most compassionate and fiery romantic heroine.
While the play is titled after her father, the king of Roman-ruled Britain, it is undoubtedly his daughter Imogen who drives the play forward. When she marries her childhood friend Posthumous against her father’s wishes, her new husband is exiled. While abroad, Posthumous brags of his beloved wife’s grace and chastity, causing the Roman troublemaker Iachimo to brag that he could sway the virtuous Imogen away from her marriage vows. Iachimo is of course unsuccessful in his seduction, but he sneaks into a chest being placed in Imogen’s room and sneaks out while she sleeps. There, he notices a mole on her breast, and takes the bracelet Posthumous gave her in order to falsely prove to her husband her faithlessness. Iachimo returns, Posthumous swears death on Imogen, who is fighting against both her step mother’s attempts of murder and her step brother’s attempts of rape. She dresses as a boy and flees. She finds her long-lost brothers living in the mountains, and is reunited with her husband who recognizes his faults. Thrown in is the King’s refusal to pay tribute to Rome, a dream sequence, and the mistaking of a headless body for someone very much alive. It’s a complex plot that would likely seem contrived and overly sentimental if another playwright had written it, but Shakespeare claimed the story first, and how lucky we are that he did.
The Shakespearean canon is filled with iconic lines and dramatic scenes so poignant that they have etched themselves permanently within out psyche; Hamlet with the skull of Yorick, Lady Macbeth washing her hands, Henry at Agincourt. For me, among the flurry of the usual iconic scenes I keep close to my heart, is Act II of Cymbeline. In her bed chamber, Imogen sleeps peacefully. Iachimo emerges from the trunk in the corner. He likens her to Aphrodite, and admires her even as he deceives her. The scene is a tense one, largely because he seems to briefly consider forcing himself on her, but he chooses deception instead of violence, and crawls back into the chest after noting her reading choice of Ovid’s infamous tale of rape: “She hath been reading late. That tale of Tereus; here the leaf’s turned down where Philomel gave up. I have enough.”
Beautiful too, is Imogen’s pain and rage when she discovers her husband’s wish to have her killed. In here speech to her husband’s servant, Pisanio, who is to do the deed, she says that Posthumous’ sin “wilt lay the leaven on all proper men.” Causing the “goodly and gallant” to be “false and perjured from thy great fall.” She pushes Pisanio to commit the act, “when thou see'st him,” she says, “a little witness my obedience: look! I draw the sword myself: take it, and hit the innocent mansion of my love, my heart; fear not; 'tis empty of all things but grief; thy master is not there, who was indeed the riches of it.” Her words reflect her broken heart and her obedience but also her anger and strength. Strength and anger are usually things left to the men, but Shakespeare gives Imogen these layers and characteristics, presenting her as being just as complex as any of his previous heroes.
Imogen may be the driving force behind the play, but the other characters are similarly complex. Iachimo, is not the usual Shakespearean villain, and while he is the reason for much of the play’s conflict, Shakespeare manages to write him as a strange force operating between moral shades of gray. For me, the late romances are the very best of Shakespeare’s work because their characters are not so much either good or evil, but rather faulty and sympathetic human beings. In Cymbeline, this is most evident. With the exception of the queen and her son Cloten, Cymbeline’s characters, however flawed manage to come across as being worthy of sympathy and redemption.
To be sure, the romances are known for their flawed and sympathetic characters, from Prospero to Leonatus to Pericles himself. However, something sets Cymbeline apart in this regard. The humanity of its characters adds a bitter-sweetness to the final act. While the ending may be a happy one, it arrives with a sort of melancholic ache. Imogen is reunited with her husband who realizes his folly, but there is a sense that the naïve young Imogen at the beginning of the play is gone, and that her pain has given her a new view of the world and of the faults men. The king, who had previously refused to pay his tribute to Rome, comes around and does so in the final act, but the audience still has a sense that the Roman empire is crumbling, and that drastic change is around the corner. Imogen’s brothers Arviragus and Guiderius, will rule and take over the kingdom when their father dies, but in doing so, they leave behind the idyllic life they led in the woods.
In Cymbeline, everything ends. We grow up. We repent. We forgive. We leave the woods behind. Perhaps it was the changing world of the early 17th century that led Shakespeare to write Cymbeline. Perhaps it was his recognition of the beauty of the human condition and the complexities of human nature. Perhaps he saw in his daughters what he depicted in Imogen. Whatever the reason, I am profoundly grateful.