Natural Bonds and Aristic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline Author(S): Judiana Lawrence Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol

George Washington University The Shakespeare Association of America, Inc.

Natural Bonds and Aristic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline Author(s): Judiana Lawrence Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 440-460 Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870163 Accessed: 11-08-2016 14:56 UTC

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JUDIANA LAWRENCE

YMBELINE, THOUGH ONE OF THE FINEST OF Shakespeare's later plays now on the stage, goes to pieces in the last act": thus George Bernard Shaw justifies his decision to provide a rewritten fifth act for the 1945 pro- duction of the play at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon- Avon. ' Wishing to salvage a great play for the sophisticated modern world- a world no longer subject to a vulgar craving for the easy consolations of poetic justice and happy endings-Shaw could approve of only two features in its concluding act: the vision of Jupiter, which he found to his surprise on rereading the play to be a splendid piece of stage business (but which he cut nevertheless), and the character of Posthumus, who came to life for Shaw when he shed his conventional role of murdering jealous husband and began to criticize, "quite on the lines of Mrs. Alving in Ghosts, the slavery to an inhuman ideal of marital fidelity which led him to this villainous extremity" (p. 63). The remainder of the act, and particularly the concluding recognition scene, required extensive revision:

I have ruthlessly cut out the surprises that no longer surprise anybody. I really could not keep my countenance over the identification of Guiderius by the mole on his neck. That device was killed by Maddison Morton, once a famous farce writer, now forgotten by everybody save Mr. Gordon Craig and myself. In Morton's masterpiece, Box and Cox, Box asks Cox whether he has a strawberry mark on his left arm. "No" says Cox. "Then you are my long lost brother" says Box as they fall into one another's arms and end the farce happily. One could wish that Guiderius had anticipated Cox. (p. 64)

Shaw excises romance and substitutes "realism," quite on the lines of Ar- istotle's insistence that adherence to the laws of possibility and probability is

I Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare (London: Cassell, 1962), p. 62. All further references will be to this edition, and will appear in the text.

I should like to thank Cyrus Hoy and Joseph H. Summers, who read and provided comments on an earlier version of this article.

JUDIANA LAWRENCE, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at St. John Fisher Col- lege, is working on a book-length study of the Shakespearean and romance contexts of Cymbeline.

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 441 a measure of artistic greatness. Aristotle holds that discovery by means of vis- ible signs and tokens, being the least artistic form of discovery, is therefore "mostly used from sheer lack of invention."2 It is possible that "mostly" implies Aristotle's recognition that a dramatist might have reasons other than artistic incompetence for using a stock situation. But be that as it may, in the last act of Cymbeline Shakespeare lays on so many of the staples of romance that the least one can say is that he seems to have wished the audience to recognize them as such. And in fact Shaw's reworking of the ending, together with his justification for providing it, is a valuable aid to understanding this elusive play, because Shaw's removal of the unlikely wonders from the conclusion enables us to see how much more than mere device it actually contains. Neither "straight" romance nor a parody of the mode, the ending of Cymbe- line is a complex and subtle examination of the means and ends of fiction, and it amply rewards a close reading. Of the four late romances, this ending has proved the most difficult to discuss, because while Shakespeare's attitude toward his material in the other three strongly supports romance values, in Cymbe- line the tone balances on a knife-edge between solemnity and farce, between affirmation of and skepticism toward the premises of romance, right up to the concluding lines. Such tension between engagement and detachment, extreme even for Shake- speare, demands both sensitivity to nuance and flexibility of response from the audience, and it is not surprising that Cymbeline has proven to be one of Shake- speare's most enigmatic plays. What I hope to show is that Shakespeare's self- conscious handling of the techniques and values of romance in Cymbeline provides a fascinating insight into his poetics, and in a mode that informs not only his entire canon but also much of the literary output of the Renaissance.

As a standard ingredient of romance conclusions, the recognition of Guiderius so ruthlessly cut out by Shaw is as good a place as any to begin exploring the way in which Shakespeare's ambiguous tone instructs the audience in the connection between feeling and form in romance, and thus lays bare the reasons for this mode's enduring appeal. The moment in question occurs near the end of the last act. The wager plot has been unraveled, Fidele has been identified as Imogen, and Imogen and Posthumus have been reconciled. Guiderius has admitted to chopping off Clo- ten's head in self-defense, and has consequently been condemned to death. Now Morgan steps forward and identifies himself as Belarius, falsely exiled for trea- son twenty years earlier. He reveals that the two young men accompanying him are not his own sons, but the sons of the King, and confesses that he had abducted them in revenge upon his banishment. Clearly Shaw has it wrong: these revelations were never intended to surprise anybody except the characters in the play, since all the identities are known to the audience all along. Shaw's misreading of the scene is more profound than this, however. That the preservation, recovery, and identification of a lost child has intense psychological implications Shakespeare recognized at the outset of his career when he laced a farcical story of mistaken identity with res-

2 Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Har- mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 53.

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onances of self-loss, self-recovery, and rebirth in The Comedy of Errors.3 The significance of name, gender, or occupation for bestowing an identity, together with the loss and recovery of such an identity, continued to preoccupy him, both in comedy and in tragedy, and this preoccupation has lately become the subject of inquiry for several psychoanalytic critics.4 Moreover, Shakespeare's decision, near the end of his career, to begin dramatizing old tales centering on family relationships is not such a new departure as it is sometimes repre- sented as being: Hamlet and King Lear are both old tales and family romances as well as tragedies. Nor is the focusing on protracted recognition scenes in these late plays more than a return, with renewed attention and emphasis, to an old and abiding interest. While awe, joy, and wonder prevail in the restorations and recognitions of Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, however, the tone of the cor- responding scene in Cymbeline is characteristically double. This is because two separate recognition scenes are going forward simultaneously. As the audience on the stage stands entranced by the miraculous and multiple unravelings of plot and identity, the audience in the theatre experiences a strong sense of deja vu. For Belarius is naming and identifying the lost princes not by one, but by three of the oldest devices known to romance: the eyewitness account, the cir- cumstantial evidence of tokens, and the proof positive of a birthmark:

Bel. Be pleas'd awhile: This gentleman, whom I call Polydore, Most worthy prince, as yours, is true Guiderius; This gentleman, my Cadwal, Arviragus, Your younger princely son. He, sir, was lapp'd In a most curious mantle, wrought by th' hand Of his queen mother, which for more probation I can with ease produce. Cvm. Guiderius had Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star, It was a mark of wonder. Bel. This is he, Who hath upon him still that natural stamp. It was wise nature's end in the donation, To be his evidence now.5 (V.v.357-68)

Belarius' confident transformation of happy accident into providential design comes close to anticipating Maddison Morton's farcical parody of romance identifications, but Shakespeare's way with ancient devices and naive forms is never simply to kill them with ridicule. Fully conscious of addressing an audience "born in these latter times, / When wit's more ripe," he invites us not to be so blinded by our own sophistication that we reject out of hand the shaping fantasies of our collective imagination. He wishes, rather, that we should em- ploy that sophistication to the profitable end of recognizing ourselves. But while

3 The Comedy of Errors, I.ii.32-40; I1.ii.37-40; V.i.401-7. 4 See, e.g., C. L. Barber, "The Family in Shakespeare's Development," in Representing Shake- speare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 188-202. 1 All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

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the highly-charged moments of recognition in the concluding scenes of Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest concentrate on the restoration of lost identities and on the location of those identities in family relationships, in Cymbeline Shakespeare makes the most of the romance details themselves. It is how Gui- derius is identified that engages the stage audience's attention, and therefore the blatant fictiveness of Belarius' discovery of nature's end in the donation of the mole must be duly appreciated by the audience in the theatre. We relish the image of a provident nature carefully stamping the crown prince with a unique testimonial to his identity, as if nature has known that the day would come when it would be necessary, not merely to establish who the prince is, but to save his neck from the fate to which he had already consigned his would- be usurper. Cymbeline's response to the restoration of his sons is redolent of the same kind of ironic awareness: "O, what, am I / A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother / Rejoic'd deliverance more" (V.v.368-70). On two previous occasions Shakespeare has parents use similar terms in expressing their joy at the restoration of lost children. For the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors it is perfectly natural to compare the finding of her twin sons to the act of giving them birth, for not only were they born on the same day, but they were also separated and lost shortly afterwards in the same shipwreck:

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons, and till this present hour My heavy burthen ne'er delivered. (V. i.401-3)

And Pericles' words, "O, come hither / Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget" (V.i. 194-95), are more accurate than Cymbeline's when Pericles refers to himself rather than to her mother as Marina's begetter. By transfiguring the incest of Antiochus and his daughter into the restoration of Pericles' own identity through the agency of Marina, moreover, Pericles' words also make explicit the powerful symbolic values of the strange and apparently simple old story. Cymbeline, by contrast, has given no indication until this moment of grieving over the loss of his sons; and he has given ample proof of a callous indifference to his daughter's feelings. Likening the recovery of all three to the birth of triplets lacks conviction and merely sounds faintly ridiculous. It is "typical" of Shakespeare's handling of such moments, but at the same time it underscores the fact that what we have here is not quite true to type. This ironic self-consciousness can be detected throughout, particularly in Shakespeare's handling of fabulous history, thwarted love, and the pastoral retreat. As the climactic final scene approaches, however, one's sense of an effect being exaggerated beyond normal expectations becomes more insistent. Posthumus' dream vision (IV.iv) restores to him, albeit only temporarily, the family he has never known:6

Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire and begot A father to me; and thou hast created A mother and two brothers. (V. iv. 123-25)

6 A point made by Meredith Skura in "Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics," in Representing Shakespeare, p. 212.

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We thus have two recognition scenes, one after another. And yet that is not all, for these two moments are themselves foreshadowed on two earlier occasions. The first is Imogen's encounter with her brothers in their mountain cave, a partial recognition that achieves completion with her words in the last scene:

0 my gentle brothers, Have we thus met? 0, never say hereafter But I was truest speaker. You call'd me brother, When I was but your sister; I you brothers, When we were so indeed. (V.v.374-78)

So, too, with the second foreshadowing, when the disguised Posthumus fights alongside his brothers-in-law in the battle against Rome, a foreshadowing also clarified in the last scene, this time by Arviragus:

You holp us, sir, As you did mean indeed to be our brother; Joy'd are we that you are. (V.v.422-24)

Why this multiplicity of recognition, this insistence upon the bonds of kinship? The answer I propose is twofold, and it accounts, I believe, for the way in which the ending of Cymbeline is both a resounding conclusion to the story and a resonant exploration of the fictiveness of endings. In the first place, recognition of the bonds of kinship has a thematic significance. As in Shakespeare's other romances and in their Greek models, such recognition clarifies the psychological and ethical importance of human connectedness. This theme is writ large in the ending of Cymbeline: not only the King and his family, but all the participants in the action are identified and their true natures recognized, so that all obscured and threatened relationships may be revealed and restored. There is even room for a penitent Jachimo in this expansive and all-embracing sequence. There is not room, however, for the Queen and Cloten; although they too are revealed in their true natures, they are incapable of suitable relationships with the others in the play, and Shake- speare removes them, permanently, from the concluding restorations. But there is also another kind of connectedness that Shakespeare invites us to recognize in the ending of Cymbeline, namely the relationships among its component parts by means of which it achieves coherence as a work of art. When all the characters except the dead Queen and Cloten are gathered on the stage after the battle, they form the points of an emblematic web of relationships-of kinship, marriage, and service-that not only links them to each other but that also serves, with an economy astonishing even for Shakespeare, to link the various strands of the plot and, finally, to link plot and theme. The plot is set in motion by the various attempts of the Queen, of Cloten, of Ia- chimo, and of Belarius to sever the links that join the King to his children and his subjects, his daughter to her husband, and England to Rome. It is resolved when all attempts at disintegration fail and the vital relationships are re-established. There is even the suggestion of an ultimate-and involuntary-bond

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 445 that joins all of humanity, including the Queen and Cloten, in the brotherhood of mortality. Imogen perceives this particular bond most clearly. When Ar- viragus asks "Are we not brothers?" she replies

So man and man should be, But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike. I am very sick. (IV. ii. 3-5)

As has often been noted, ethical romance approaches as closely as possible to the vision of tragedy, but only in order to deny that vision the more emphatically. The danger that Shakespeare's romances avoid is not merely death as such; it is the greater danger that emotional ties cannot last the duration of our lives. It can be argued that most tragedies, especially those by Shakespeare, also avoid this danger, if not death. Only Macbeth and Timon die severed from all bonds of feeling, and even Timon is not quite solitary, for his railings against humanity and his epitaph are efforts, albeit negative and incomplete, at com- munication. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare's imagery characteristically supports his action. An elaborate web of relationships serving double duty as a means of joining the characters in bonds of loyalty and faith, on the one hand, and of connecting the various strands of the plot, on the other, finds expression in a cluster of images that play upon the paradox that bondage is freedom. Except for Robin Moffet's essay, "Cymbeline and the Nativity," I have not come across any previous discussion of this paradox,7 and yet it is a typically Shakespearean example of poetic means used toward the dramatic end of both illuminating and unifying the action of the play. The first instance occurs at the Queen's expense, when she exercises her hypocrisy on Imogen: "You're my prisoner, but / Your jailer shall deliver you the keys / That lock up your restraint" (I.i.72-74). The Queen may well intend her own brand of irony here, for she is preparing two sets of "keys": either marriage to her son Cloten, or death by poison. We soon discover, however, that she, at least, will do no harm: the physician Cornelius has substituted the real key, medicine, for her poison, explaining that its effects will be only a temporary bondage:

there is No danger in what show of death it makes, More than the locking up the spirits a time, To be more fresh, reviving. (Iv. 39-42)

Under the cover of friendship the Queen intends enmity, and thus Cornelius pays her back in kind: "She is fool'd / With a most false effect; and I the truer, / So to be false with her" (11. 42-44). What is true of the false effect of the Queen's poison is also true of other kinds of bondage. Immediately after the Queen has spoken the words quoted above, Imogen and Posthumus are left alone together just long enough to ex-

I Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 207-18. Moffet argues that the cluster of images associated with debts, prisons, bondage, and liberty points to the nativity of the Savior "who will redeem men from an unpayable debt and free them from the darkness of error and bondage to sin" (p. 214).

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 446 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY change gifts: Imogen's is a ring, and her husband's is a bracelet which he puts on her arm with the words "It is a manacle of love, I'll place it / Upon this fairest prisoner" (11. 122-23). While the choice of words gives a hint of Pos- thumus' possessiveness, it also reminds us that Imogen is literally the Queen's prisoner. It thus dramatizes how involuntary the one kind of imprisonment is, and how freely chosen is the other. The pattern established at the outset with Imogen's double imprisonment- literal and involuntary on the one hand, figurative and freely chosen on the other-recurs throughout. Everybody is party to a binding contract, or cove- nant, or relationship, and these bonds all define human freedom paradoxically in the very image of restraint: "Our cage / We make a choir, as doth the prison'd bird, / And sing our bondage freely" (III.iii.42-44). Although Arviragus, who speaks these words, intends them as a reproach to Belarius for having confined himself and his brother in the false freedom of a brutish nature, both the action and the imagery of the play as a whole establish another meaning for the free celebration of bondage.

III

This meaning is faithful to the spirit of romance, a form of literature con- ducive to a hopeful mood. If bonds of kinship, love, and loyalty are to serve as a stay against chaos, chance, or loneliness, they must be shown to endure these vicissitudes. And the bonds endure as we freely elect to embrace them. The play defines two kinds of human freedom, the freedom of choice and the freedom, when the correct alternative is chosen, from fragmentation. When Posthumus, like Imogen earlier a literal prisoner, says "Most welcome, bondage! for thou art a way, / I think, to liberty" (V.iv.3-4), he speaks more truly than he knows, for these words, like those of Arviragus quoted above, resonate beyond the immediate circumstances. Posthumus believes that his imprisonment will lead to his execution, and he has come to desire death as a just punishment and therefore a liberation from guilt:

My conscience, thou art fetter'd More than my shanks or wrists. You good gods, give me The penitent instrument to pick that bolt, Then free for ever! . . . (V.iv.8-1 1)

Posthumus, however, is already free from fragmentation, for he has earlier re- established his marriage bond upon his realization that no extremity of circumstance-neither Imogen's infidelity nor her death-has the power to sever it. Like every character shown in the action' of making a crucial choice, however, Posthumus is only in partial possession of the facts; indeed, he is twice deceived by appearances, since Imogen has neither been unfaithful nor been murdered. Posthumus' ultimate choice in favor of Imogen is thus intuitive rather than informed, as is Pisanio's decision to disobey his master, and the princes' de- termination to join in the battle against the Romans. In choosing their alle- giances, these characters function in a moral universe with a hierarchy of values. Ultimately the allegiance of each is to that bond with others that most nearly defines his own self and thus makes that self a whole person. For Posthumus, this means keeping faith with Imogen; for Pisanio, it is his refusal to obey his master's command to murder her; for the princes, it is their decision to prove

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 447 their valor in battle rather than seek refuge in the mountains as Belarius urges them to do. Posthumus himself invokes this moral framework when he addresses his absent servant, who he believes has carried out his unjust command: "O Pisanio, / Every good servant does not all commands; / No bond, but to do just ones" (V.i.5-7). The identities so elaborately clarified in the last scene of the play therefore have not simply been bestowed upon the characters assembled there by their names, position in society, or nationality. They have been achieved in the course of the action as each has elected to be defined-in the sense both of "explained" and of "limited"-by allegiance to just bonds. Cloten is the only solipsist (even his mother schemes for him rather than for herself); and this, the action makes emphatically clear, is to be nothing. As Guiderius points out, killing Cloten has merely made literal what has been figuratively true all along: "This Cloten was a fool, an empty purse, / There was no money in't. Not Hercules / Could have knocked out his brains, for he had none" (IV.ii.113-15). Headless, and dressed in another's clothes, Cloten's ultimate fate is emblematic of his lack of identity, his ultimate achievement the inverse of what he had intended. As an ethical romance, then, Cymbeline affirms human connectedness. And the expansiveness of the play mirrors the multiplicity of the links that, when recognized and freely chosen, liberate individual characters from the prison of solitary, and thus partial, identity. The numerous and elaborately orchestrated recognitions of the concluding scene gather together a full array of possible connections, ranging from the most intimate kinship in the nuclear family to the most distant relations between nations. They show that bondage is freedom, because the links that join us to each other are the keys that unlock each of us from the prison of solitary confinement in ourselves. At the conclusion of Cymbeline everyone is recognized, not simply for what he is, but rather for what he has become, in a family so extended as to include all of humanity.

The clarification of individual identity, however, is only one of several clar- ifications that illuminate, and are illuminated by, the ending of Cymbeline. As characteristic of romance as the recognition and reunion of friends, lovers, or family members is the interpretation of a riddling oracle, and this, too, Shake- speare has provided. Indeed, there are two riddles to be interpreted: the soothsayer's dream vision and Jupiter's oracle, which also appears in a dream but extraordinarily enough remains behind, inscribed on a table with decorative covers, when Posthumus awakes. Again, however, it is not the fact that Shake- speare uses this staple of romance literature, but the way in which he puts it to use that is worthy of note. For just as the audience in the theatre is invited to recognize the symbolic value of the identities being established in a literal sense on the stage, so are we required to reflect on the two dream visions and to give them an interpretation that extends beyond the interpretations of Phi- larmonus, the soothsayer, with which the play concludes. We should begin by noting that Shakespeare deviates from standard practice with respect to the timing of the oracles' appearance. Usually an oracle initiates the action, as in the two works that seem to have been Shakespeare's models for Cymbeline: Sidney's Arcadia and Heliodorus' Aethiopica. In the Old Ar- cadia, for example, Sidney begins ab ovo with Duke Basilius' decision to con- sult the oracle at Delphos to find out whether the rest of his life will be just

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 448 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY as happy as before. This, of course, is asking for trouble, and Sidney as narrator berates the Duke for the vanity of his desire to know the certainty of things to come, "wherein there is nothing so certain as our continual uncertainty."I The oracle, as usual, is riddling and ambiguous, forecasting what seems to be such a dire sequence of events for the coming year that Basilius resolves to retreat with his family to a solitary place, far from harm. Basilius' efforts are, of course, in vain, and in fact they serve to bring about the very consequences they were designed to avoid. The oracle in the Aethiopica, on the other hand, forecasts a happy ending. It is spoken by the Pythia at Delphi about one-fifth of the way into the story- Heliodorus begins in medias res, a procedure also adopted by Sidney when he revised the Arcadia-and the narrator's comment is characteristic of the self- consciousness of late-Hellenistic romance:

When the god pronounced these words all present were baffled and at a loss to know what the oracle signified. Everyone interpreted it in a different sense, each giving the oracle the meaning he desired. But no one caught its true meaning. Oracles and dreams generally are judged only by subsequent events.9

From its position so near the beginning we understand the oracle's structural significance: it is a riddle that contains its own solution-as all good riddles do-and as such it encapsulates the form of all narratives, of whatever length and in whatever mode. Narrative takes our experience of time as events both remembered and anticipated, and imparts to this experience the illusion of significance. It does so by providing a consonance among the various events the author chooses to recount so that we have, instead of mere chronology, a plot- the author taking care to relate beginning to end. 10 It is this ultimate connection that the oracle encapsulates. Both riddle and solution, beginning and end, it serves a function analogous to that of the two proverbs with which the narrators of both Frederyke of Jennen and Decameron, 11.9, the two sources of the wager plot in Cymbeline, begin their accounts. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the oracle's wording provides for the irony of peripeteia, that reversal of expectations which brings about an outcome unexpected yet not arbitrary, and which Shakespeare uses with such stunning effect in the witches' oracular prophecies to Macbeth. If peripeteia in a tragedy like Macbeth means a reversal from great expectations to crushing defeat and annihilation, the opposite is, of course, the case in romance where the worst returns to laughter. Here we can see a further purpose for the use of an oracle. In addition to providing us with the bearings of a plot structure and the promise of an outcome consonant with the beginning, the oracle explicitly claims divine authorship for the plot. What seems to be chance and coincidence to the characters as they are buffeted by events turns out to be, when viewed in retrospect, an end-directed design. We may interpret the oracle's words according to our desires, but their final significance is that Fortune is Providence. All the multifarious and apparently chaotic happenings

8 The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clar- endon, 1973), p. 5. 9 An Ethiopian Romance, trans. Moses Hadas (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), p. 66. 10 In my discussion of narrative form, I am deeply indebted to Frank Kermode's suggestive treatment of the subject in The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966).

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 449 in the Aethiopica prove, ultimately, to have been governed by a divine plan to unite the princess of Ethiopia with a prince of Greece-indeed, with no less a personage than a descendant of Achilles and thus, through his mother, a descendant of the gods themselves.

In Cymbeline, the divine prophecy is also confirmed by events. In fact, as Carol Gesner has pointed out, the entire climax of the play closely resembles Heliodorus' practice in the Aethiopica.11 Once again, however, Shakespeare's deviations from the pattern of romance are more striking than his emulations. The oracle not only does not initiate the action; it appears on the scene only slightly prior to the final denouement, as does the interpreter Philarmonus. And what is more, Philarmonus' interpretive powers are taxed not by one but by two entirely different divine communications: his own dream, and the tablet left behind by Jupiter in the later dream vision of Posthumus. Before trying to account for the belated arrival of these two messages, let me first examine their contents and the manner of their interpretation. The inscription on the tablet, when Posthumus first reads it, seems characteristically impenetrable:

"When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embrac'd by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopp'd branches, which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty." (V.iv. 138-44)

This, Posthumus concludes, is "or senseless speaking or a speaking such / As sense cannot untie" (11. 146-48). Philarmonus' dream, on the other hand, positively invites interpretation. On the night before the battle he fasts and, thus purified, prays to the gods for a message. They send him a vision, the meaning of which seems almost certain:

I saw Jove's bird, the Roman eagle, wing'd From the spungy south to this part of the west, There vanish'd in the sunbeams, which portends (Unless my sins abuse my divination) Success to th' Roman host. (IV. ii. 348-52)

The Romans lose the battle, however, and these two prophecies can only be interpreted correctly in the final moments of the play when events have confirmed one possible meaning rather than another. By the time Philarmonus is called upon to interpret the written oracle, he has achieved the insight that only hindsight can provide. All identities have been established, and Cymbeline's whole family has been united-he with his lost sons, his daughter with her lost husband. Moreover, overwhelmed by good fortune, Cymbeline has pardoned Belarius and freed his Roman prisoners. And Posthumus has pardoned

" "Cymbeline and the Greek Romance: A Study in Genre," in Studies in English Renaissance Literature, 12, ed. Waldo F. McNeir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 105- 31.

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 450 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY lachimo. It is at this moment of universal rejoicing that Posthumus remembers the tablet bestowed by Jupiter and requests its interpretation from the Roman soothsayer. Now we hear for the first time that the soothsayer's name is Phi- larmonus, lover of harmony, a name whose significance Posthumus anticipates when he makes his request (I italicize the crucial words):

Post. Good my lord of Rome, Call forth your soothsayer. As I slept, methought Great Jupiter, upon his eagle back'd, Appear'd to me, with other spritely shows Of mine own kindred. When I wak'd, I found This label on my bosom, whose containing Is so from sense in hardness, that I can Make no collection of it. Let him show His skill in the construction. Luc. Philarmonus! (V.v.425-33)

With characteristic self-consciousness and subtlety, Shakespeare anatomizes the psychology of interpretation. The three nouns I have stressed are all syn- onyms of meaning, and all of them imply a gathering together. There is, however, a progression in their connotations from the relative lack of coherence in "containing"-where mere proximity gathers on one sheet of paper an apparently arbitrary and disparate number of words-through the greater delib- eration suggested by "collection"-presuming a collector with some principle of selection in mind-to the play on two senses of "construction"-the construing of an already predetermined meaning, or the creating, by an imaginative interpreter, of meaning from apparent nonsense. The phrase "his skill in the construction" supports either sense of "construction" and, I believe, means both. Philarmonus assumes a meaningful connection between the oracle and the events that have just occurred, and consequently finds one. But is the harmony pre-existent, or constructed then and there? How can we find the concord of this discord? The question is an open one. On the one hand, our skepticism has been aroused by Philarmonus' earlier misinterpretation of his own dream; there he had clearly constructed the meaning from his own desire. But on the other hand, there is a conceptual link between the concluding events and the wording of the oracles. Both of the oracles speak of the reunification of what had been separated: in the one, "shall . . . be embrac'd" and "shall . . . be joined," and in the other, the flight of the eagle from south to west in order to vanish in the sunbeams "and so unite" with them. The root meaning of harmony is joining, and Shakespeare's wordplay penetrates not only the interpretation of oracles, but also the very structure of romance itself, enacting as it does the reunification of families, friends, and nations after separation and loss.

Where Philarmonus seems to be forging links rather than construing them is in his etymologies. Connecting "lion's whelp" to "Leonatus," and "mulier" to "tender air," requires some force. But Philarmonus hammers it out:

Thou, Leonatus, art the lion's whelp; The fit and apt construction of thy name,

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Being Leo-natus, doth import so much. [To Cymbeline.] The piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter, Which we call mollis aer, and mollis aer We term it mulier; [to Posthumus] which mulier I divine Is this most constant wife, who, even now, Answering the letter of the oracle, Unknown to you, unsought, were clipt about With this most tender air. (V.v.443-52)

There is something exquisitely droll about deriving the meaning of the oracle's homely English phrases from these double translations, first into Latin, then back again into English. Shakespeare may have had the concluding scene of Greene's James IV in mind, where Sir Cuthbert Anderson first explains the action in terms of an emblematic beast fable:

A tender lion's whelp, This other day, came straggling in the woods, Attended by a young and tender hind, In courage haught, yet tired like a lamb.

After further elaboration, involving threats to the lion's whelp from a fox and a wolf, Sir Cuthbert produces Queen Dorothea, who immediately proceeds with identifications:

I am the whelp, bred by this lion up, This royal English king, my happy sire: Poor Nano is the hind that tended me. My father, Scottish King, gave me to thee, A hapless wife . . .2

Shakespeare imitates Greene's naive technique of effecting a sense of clarification-first by obscuring events in a riddle, and then by solving the riddle to the eminent satisfaction of all concerned. In Cymbeline, however, the provision of two oracles, together with the revised interpretation of the first and the quaint wording of the second, reveals that in the matter of clarifying divine intention, as in other matters, Shakespeare's artlessness is deliberate. Moreover, the de- tour through Latin in interpreting Jupiter's tablet is another instance of har- monious joining, since it prefigures the union of Britain and Rome in which the action culminates: "Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together" (V.v.479-81).

VII

Thus from the end of IV.ii, when Philarmonus first tells of his dream and confidently assumes that it portends a Roman victory, and when Lucius responds with "Dream often so, / And never false" (11. 352-53), it becomes increasingly difficult to accept the action simply at face value. Subtly, and by means of numerous small hints, Shakespeare invites his audience to view their experience of the climax of his story from two perspectives simultaneously. The first is

12 Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, The Revels Plays, ed. Norman Sanders (London: Methuen, 1970), V.vi.119-22, 136-40. None of the editors of the six editions of James IV that I have consulted (Grosart, Dyce, Churton Collins, Dickinson, and Lavin, in addition to Sanders) have noted the relation of the passage to Cymbeline.

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 452 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY the perspective of the participants in the action, who gradually discover, with increasing joy and wonder, that their experience has not been the nightmarish succession of evils through which it seemed they were helplessly stumbling, but a divinely-ordained trial designed by an awe-inspiring father-figure who at last reveals himself in thunder and lightning, but who speaks comforting words: "Whom best I love, I cross; to make my gift, / The more delay'd, delighted" (V.iv. 101-2). Some critics identify this perspective with that of the whole play, and consequently interpret the vision of Jupiter as Shakespeare's version of the injunction in Proverbs iii. 11: "My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither be wearied of his correction: for whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth." Thus for G. Wilson Knight, who goes farthest in this direction, the vision illuminates not only Cymbeline but all of Shakespeare's last plays:

So, within a plot variously concerned with the building up and dispelling of de- ceptive appearance, we find, at its heart, this vivid revelation of a kindly Providence behind mortality's drama. . . . It is our one precise anthropomorphic expression of that beyond-tragedy recognition felt through the miracles and resurrections of sister-plays and reaching Christian formulation in Henry VIII. 13

According to this view, the vision ratifies the play's tragicomic form. Coming as it does at the lowest ebb of Posthumus' fortunes, while he awaits the desired consummation of a poetically just death-"For Imogen's dear life, take mine . . . / And cancel these cold bonds"-the vision discloses instead the prospect of that other consummation devoutly to be wished, that Posthumus' sufferings have been instructive rather than meaningless, that throughout the action Heaven has been ordinant, and that all shall be made well by ending well. With the appearance of Jupiter, however, the perspective of the audience in the theatre begins to diverge decisively from that of the characters in the play. Our sense that we have been watching a drama that scrutinizes itself, a romance about romance, has been subliminal until now, because Cymbeline is not simply a pastiche of romance plays: it is also the thing itself. But with Jupiter's blatant revelation of himself as the agent of averted tragedy, Shakespeare reverses his emphasis and brings to the forefront of the audience's consciousness what has been submerged until now. To borrow the terminology of gestalt psychology, we begin to focus on the ground instead of the figure. From being immersed in the specific adventures of particular characters, our perspective suddenly widens to a contemplation of the order embodied in the play, and then, beyond that, to an awareness of our own craving for an order that transfigures experience.

VIII

It is perhaps for this reason that, until fairly recently, the vision has been regularly excised from productions of the play. The reason usually given is that Shakespeare could not have written the doggerel spoken by Posthumus' dead relatives. 4 Since Knight's persuasive demolition of disintegrationist arguments about the structure of Cymbeline, however, it has been possible to produce the

1' The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1947), p. 202. 14 J. Dover Wilson, in his prefatory note to J. C. Maxwell's New Cambridge edition of the play, was still strenuously denying it to Shakespeare in 1960.

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 453 scene in the mind's eye at least, if not in the live theatre, confident that Shake- speare meant it to be in the play. And to visualize the vision in this way is to become aware of an even subtler form of dramatic irony than that in Shake- speare's earlier use of the play within the play-an irony that first enables us to see the vision as part of the structural pattern of defeated expectations so integral to Cymbeline, and one that then enables us to become aware of the psychological consolations to be derived from the vision. The pattern has already been established by the time Jupiter appears: for the second time in close succession, a character has prayed for divine intercession and received a vision in a dream. We have just seen events overturn Philar- monus' interpretation of his vision, and naturally this prepares us for a repetition of the pattern when Posthumus prays for a liberating death and subsequently falls asleep. This time, however, the vision itself defeats our expectations. First, accompanied by solemn music, Posthumus' dead relatives appear complaining to Jupiter in quaint fourteeners about the injustice of Posthumus' sufferings. After cataloguing his undeserved misfortunes, the ghosts demand the god's help and threaten action if he fails to comply:

Peep through thy marble mansion, help, Or we poor ghosts will cry To th' shining synod of the rest Against thy deity. (V.iv.87-90)

The ghosts' aggrieved tone of injured merit contrasts precipitously with Pos- thumus' penitent awareness of overwhelming guilt, both in his prayer and in his earlier soliloquies before and after the battle. The transcendent realm to which Posthumus has prayed for his just deserts turns out at first, then, to be that primitive layer of childhood consciousness in which we are never respon- sible for harm and ever deserve the best treatment. The appearance of Jupiter confirms our sense that Shakespeare is here inviting us to contemplate the psychology that produces romance rather than to view the god as a manifestation of the kindly Providence behind mortality's drama. Jupiter is, of course, quite literally a deus ex machina, with all that the term implies of fictitious last-minute deliverance. But he is also firmly a part of Posthumus' dream. Indeed, he is a vision within a vision, appearing in response to the ghosts' threatening demands, and as such several times removed from the audience's actuality. As the stage directions make clear, the supreme Roman deity could hardly behave more typically: "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees" (V.iv.92). Jupiter's fictitiousness has already been underscored by the father-ghost, Sicilius Leonatus, who stresses the god's other characteristic attributes:

No more, thou Thunder-master, show Thy spite on mortal flies: With Mars fall out, with Juno chide, That thy adulteries Rates and revenges. (V.iv.330-34)

Knight concedes that "the Euripidean remark on Jupiter's matrimonial diffi-

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culties . . . may seem ill-judged," and so it would be if we were to take Jupiter and his role in the play as a serious revelation of providential order. 15 Instead, however, the faintly satirical depiction of Jupiter should be con- trasted with Cleomines' and Dion's reverential comments on the oracle at Del- phos in The Winter's Tale, particularly Cleomines'

But of all, the burst And the ear-deaf'ning voice o' th' oracle, Kin to Jove's thunder, so surpris'd my sense, That I was nothing. (III.i.8-1 1)

So also with the resurrection of Hermione, an event both literal and symbolic, real and magical at once. By comparison, Jupiter descending amid thunder and lightning on the back of an eagle is so literally a god from the machine that if it did not recall Euripides to Shakespeare's first audience, the event must surely have recalled the epiphanies in naive old plays like The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes-or "the new triumph of stage-flying" and other marvels concurrently being produced in the court masques by Inigo Jones.16

The tone in which Shakespeare presents Jupiter and his oracle thus goes a long way toward explaining the latter's late arrival on the scene: like the god's actual appearance, the timing of his arrival reinforces the audience's detachment. For its encapsulating function to be effective, an oracle should occur near the beginning of the action. The two divine messages in Cymbeline arrive so late as to be post-gnostications rather than prophecies. Several commentators have noted that Jupiter's intervention does not affect the outcome of the plot, except insofar as the eventual interpretation of his oracle encourages Cymbe- line, although the victor, to "submit to Caesar, / And to the Roman empire, promising / To pay our wonted tribute" (V.v.460-62). Bullough concludes that "it looks like an afterthought, perhaps to emulate the vision in Pericles, most probably to cater for the current love of the masque." '7 It s6ems hardly likely, however, that Shakespeare would have been con- strained to insert clumsy afterthoughts at this late stage in his career. He used prophecy as an effective structural device in the history plays, most notably in Richard 11, where the doom-laden prognostications of one character after another contribute to one's sense of the inevitability of the unfolding events. And perhaps most impressive of all are the witches' equivocal oracles in Macbeth. Here, as Frank Kermode points out, the entire action becomes a protracted peripeteia based on the prophecies' ambiguity. ' And in The Winter's Tale, Apollo's oracle initiates the turn in the action from winter to summer and from loss to recovery. Clearly, Shakespeare had little to learn about the importance of the timing of a prophecy. Consequently, the delayed appearance of the two visions in Cvmbeline is likely to be another instance of his giving a conventional

'5 Knight, note on p. 185. 16 Dover Wilson's phrase in the note cited above. 17 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), 37. 18 Kermode, p. 53.

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 455 device an unconventional twist. And the effect is once again to make us aware of the poetics of his fiction. Instead of preparing for the peripeteia and thus fulfilling their oracular function, the two divine communications coincide with the unexpected turn of events. As a consequence, they themselves become a part of the pattern of defeated expectations. The delayed appearance of Jupiter complicates the audience's sense of his benevolence, moreover, since he arrives on the scene apparently as much to quell the threatened rebellion of Posthumus' dead relatives as to show a continuing interest in the latter's own well-spent trials. Shakespeare goes out of his way, in other words, to stress both the god's very human characteristics and his theatricality. As Jupiter's eagle is a piece of stage machinery, so his intervention is a plot mechanism-a mechanism, moreover, that not only gives assurance of a happy ending, but also personifies the spectacular contrivance that generally brings such endings about.

Toward the end of Cymbeline, in short, Shakespeare focuses as much on the nature of reversal and defeated expectations in the drama as on the events that embody these structural devices. Not only the oracles but every aspect of the conclusion become finely-managed instances of peripeteia. In the battle between the Romans and the British, for example, Shakespeare doubles the effect of the device of peripeteia when we first see the unexpected British victory enacted in dumbshow and then hear Posthumus recount it in a vivid epic narrative (the style of which, incidentally, heightens the event's theatricality). Fur- thermore, Shakespeare provides a symbol for the reversal of expectations in the "strait lane" which first serves to facilitate the rout of the British and then becomes the means to their victory when it enables an old soldier to intervene:

Athwart the lane, He, with two striplings . . .

Made good the passage, cried to those that fled, "Our Britain's harts die flying, not our men. To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards. Stand,

Stand, stand!" (V.iii. 18-3 1)

Posthumus, meanwhile, seeks death, yet it evades him: "I, in mine own woe charm'd, / Could not find death where I did hear him groan" (11. 68-69). And lest we fail to appreciate that his fate is a reversal of the tragic outcome he seeks, the process is repeated in the next scene where, now dressed as a Roman and led in as a prisoner of the British, Posthumus like Philarmonus attempts to strike a bargain with the gods, praying for absolution and a poetically just death in exchange for repentance. Instead, of course, he falls asleep and receives the vision of his relatives' ghosts complaining to Jupiter, and Jupiter's promise of a "full fortune" and the riddling oracle. Nor is this the end of the pattern of reversals experienced by Posthumus. "Ready long ago" for death, he now encounters a philosophical jailer who evidently has experience only of conventional responses to the prospect of hang- ing. The jailer offers conventional consolations: "But the comfort is, you shall

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 456 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY be call'd to no more payments, fear no more tavern-bills, which are often the sadness of parting, as the procuring of mirth" (V.iv. 157-60). The conversation between Posthumus and the jailer is an exercise in cross-purposes the ironies of the hangman being neutralized by those of his equally ironic prisoner, while the former's echoing of some of the best-known lines from Hamlet provides the audience with a further, and more profound, ironic awareness. To Posthu- mus' confident assertion that he does indeed know the way he will be going in the sleep to which the hangman is about to conduct him, the latter responds:

Your death has eyes in's head then; I have not seen him so pictur'd. You must either be directed by some that take upon them to know . . . or jump the after- inquiry on your own peril; and how you shall speed in your journey's end, I think you'll never return to tell one. (V. iv. 178-84)

The hangman's and his prisoner's contrasting perspectives on the subject of death read like a dialogue between the Hamlet of "To be or not to be," pausing to consider whether the sleep of death might not be worse than the calamity of living, and the Hamlet of "If it be now, 'tis not to come . . . the readiness is all." In Hamlet, three acts of the tragedy lie between the two perspectives; here, their juxtaposition intensifies the sense of incongruity between expectation and event that Shakespeare dramatizes so repeatedly as to make it seem the subject, indeed the very essence, of Cymbeline's conclusion. The ironies of peripeteia continue with the arrival of a messenger who commands the Jailer to knock off his prisoner's manacles a most literal cancel- lation of Posthumus' "cold bonds"-and to bring him to the King. Posthumus expects the metaphorical liberation he has prayed for; the jailer, expecting am- nesty, registers the dumbfounded astonishment shortly to be shared by all concerned: "I'll be hanged then" (1. 195). The two dozen or more revelations of the final scene have been variously admired and deplored: admired for the technical virtuosity of their timing, deplored for their blatant unreality. I have already tried to show how, in his affirmation of the liberating bonds of love, faith, and trust, Shakespeare's virtuosity in this scene is much more than a matter of superb timing in the un- raveling of his plot. At the same time, however, I would argue that the pattern of overturned expectations, already so firmly established, continues to further the audience's awareness of Shakespeare's technique-the long and sustained series of surprises experienced by the characters finding their echo in the audience's amazement, as at a particularly protracted juggling act, that the artist can carry it on for so long. Each of the revelations overturns somebody's understanding of the truth. Cymbeline has no sooner rejoiced in the British victory and rewarded its three chief agents than he hears of his Queen's death and, what is worse, of her death-bed confession that she had planned to poison both his daughter and himself. He has been deceived by her beauty and cleverness, and his justification that "it had been vicious / To have mistrusted her" (V.v.65-66) seems singularly inept, since she had failed to deceive anyone else of any consequence. Cymbeline further indicts himself, and defeats the expectations of the Roman general Lucius, by condemning his prisoners to death. This enables Lucius to behave with predictable Roman nobility, first by stoically accepting his fate, and next by pleading for the life of his page, Fidele. With an arbitrary

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.97 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL BONDS AND ARTISTIC COHERENCE 457 alacrity, Cymbeline grants this request, and, apparently half-recognizing the youth, offers also to allow him whatever favor he wishes. Lucius is certain what this will be: "I do not bid thee beg my life, good lad, / And yet I know thou wilt" (11. 101-2), but alas, his confidence in fair play receives a second shock, for the boy's attention is fixed elsewhere and his master's life "must shuffle for itself." There follows one of the most extraordinary among the numerous reversals that Shakespeare provides.for our delectation, for Imogen now demands of Jachimo that he reveal from whom he had the ring he is wearing. (Meanwhile, since the focus of attention has shifted to Imogen-Fidele, Belarius and the princes have to revise their opinion that she has died.) Thus challenged, Jachimo launches into a mock-heroic parody of Posthumus' earlier epic narrative style:

Upon a time-unhappy was the clock That strook the hour!-it was in Rome-accurs'd The mansion where!-'twas at a feast-O would Our viands had been poison'd, or at least Those which I heav'd to head! (V.v. 153-57)

All is hyperbole, exclamation, digression. For every step forward in his account, Jachimo takes two sideways with parenthetical deviations. As Granville- Barker astutely remarks, the spider must unweave his web, and indeed the whole speech is in part an elaborate undoing of his former lies and deceptions. '9 But it is more; it is also a hilarious re-formation of his Jago-like lineaments into the aspect of a buffoon. In the first two acts, lachimo is a serious threat to the lovers: shrewd, daring, quick-witted, and versatile, he can turn the situation to his advantage in a flash, his glittering verbal facility and astute insight into human psychology working together to give him a commanding hold over his victims. Now, however, we see.him reduced, with fine poetic justice, to an image of the rattling tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence, the earlier esthete and connoisseur transmogrified into a theatrical ham.

What is more, it is lachimo, chastened yet not subdued, who voices the ambiguity of art's relationship to nature that is otherwise implicit in the tone and structure of the play. He first does so in II.iv, when he describes the statues in Imogen's bedchamber to Posthumus, and attempts to claim the superiority of art: "The cutter / Was as another Nature, dumb; outwent her, / Motion and breath left out" (11. 83-85). This desire to outdo nature, and by implication truth, resurfaces in the final scene. But what had earlier been dangerous de- ception is now reduced to an exaggeration' that contradicts itself. In his account of the wager-scene, lachimo recalls how he and his fellows had praised their mistresses

For beauty that made barren the swell'd boast Of him that best could speak; for feature, laming The shrine of Venus or straight-pight Minerva,

19 Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), I, 491.

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Postures beyond brief nature ... (V.v. 162-65)

The claim that Italian women are more beautiful than goddesses actually implies, in Jachimo's tortuous exaggeration, that brief nature lames the beauty of Venus and Minerva, whose beauty, since it is immortal, is beyond brief nature. If art transcends nature in duration and symmetry, moreover, it always falls short in the crucial respect that makes mortality infinitely precious. "Motion and breath left out" suggests that art, when it strives to outdo nature, succeeds only in imitating death. We may recall Paulina's words to Hermione as statue in The Winter's Tale:

Stir; nay, come away; Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him Dear life redeems you. (V.iii. 101-3)

Unlike sculpture, the art of the drama requires the motion and breath of living actors, a circumstance that seems to have struck Shakespeare as doubly ambiguous. Art turns into nature as the audience watches, yet only partially, and only for a time. The postures of the play, like those of painted or sculpted figures, may transcend brief nature; but the life of their design requires the appreciation and interpretation of a living audience. But in addition to turning his character around and glancing at aesthetic con- cerns, lachimo's narrative also serves to further the self-reflexiveness of the concluding scene in another way. lachimo's garrulity, which forces from Cymbeline the impatient "I stand on fire: / Come to the matter" (11. 168-69) and "Nay, nay, to th' purpose" (1. 178), is a miniature version of the romance form's penchant for cliff-hangers. Not only does it unweave a section of the plot, then; it also becomes an emblem of the whole structure of the play. As one surprise succeeds another and revelations-cum-reversals build toward their climax, we note that Cymbeline is most frequently the butt of the joke. His ignorance is more extensive than anyone else's, and so is his kingly conviction, at any given moment, that he is right. Thus he pronounces three death- sentences-on the prisoners-of-war, on Guiderius, and on Belarius-only to have to unsay them again immediately afterwards. Among Shakespeare's numerous rulers, Cymbeline shares with King John the dubious distinction of deviating the farthest from the paradigm, articulated in the image of the great chain of being, in which the monarch embodies the principle of order in the state. Cymbeline's weakness serves a different function in each of the three modes that constitute the totality of the play. In the potential love-tragedy, he is the wintry destructive force that "like the tyrannous breathing of the north / Shakes all our buds from growing" (I.iii.36-37). In the potential historical tragedy, his abdication of power to his queen parallels the similarly catastrophic weakness of Henry VI and King Lear. And in the comical-pastoral plot, his inability to recognize slander for what it is gives rise to the general corruption of court life from which Belarius seeks refuge in nature. At the conclusion, however, and with considerable humor as well as skill, Shakespeare turns the weakness of his king to excellent account: Cymbeline's actions now form the climax that draws the three plots so satisfactorily, and so self-consciously, to their con-

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clusion. As much as he has failed to embody order heretofore, Cymbeline now succeeds in embodying peripeteia. Like Jachimo, but at even greater length, he is forced by circumstance to undo his former errors: first in his judgment of the Queen, next in his attitude to his daughter's marriage, after that in his former assessment of Belarius and his present assessment of Guiderius, and, finally and resoundingly, in his defiance toward Rome. To see such nonentity transfigured into Philarmonus' "radiant Cymbeline, / Which shines here in the west" (V.v.475-76) is quite on a par with Bottom's "most rare vision," which persuades us of the metamorphosis of an ass into something resembling a holy fool who can, if only momentarily, catch a glimpse of the divine.

XII

The ending of Cymbeline thus fosters both assent to the aims of ethical romance and a critical analysis of its means. As Shakespeare multiplies defeated expectations, the audience discovers that nothing is to be expected but the unexpected. We find ourselves in a position analogous to that of Fabian in Twelfth Night when he comments "If this were played upon a stage now, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction." But Cymbeline eschews such explicit self-consciousness; all is implication and innuendo. As a consequence, both Dr. Johnson and George Bernard Shaw, missing the innuendo, have in fact condemned the play as improbable fiction-apparently forgetting not only Fa- bian's remark, but Shakespeare's constant awareness that it is the planned order of fictions that distinguish them from fact, and that it is precisely for their order that we need fictions. Theseus and Hippolyta's famous exchange on the subject of imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream voices the tension inherent in all fiction-that its coherence is both suspect and desired-in a skeptical state- ment and affirmative counterstatement. Theseus says that the poet borrows a local habitation and a name for airy nothings and things unknown, and thus gives the appearance of reality to the unreal. In reply, Hippolyta suggests that the imagination may nevertheless have a value which is more real than the realities from which it borrows:

But all the story of night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy, But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-27)

Shakespearean drama repeatedly expresses an awareness of this tension. It also expresses an awareness that the shaping imagination is as much subject to the laws of its own order as our bodies are subject to gravity. What makes fictions infinitely desirable-their freedom from the incoherence and boredom of our daily lives-also places them in bondage to the rigidities of pattern and design. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare takes this awareness a step further. Perceiving that the romance mode (fiction par excellence) achieves its aim-demonstrating a triumph over chance and change-by means of a plot full of chance events and changed perceptions, he triumphs in analogous fashion over both the unreality of the mode and its rigid form. And in doing so he achieves a characteristically paradoxical success. He shows that liberty comes, not from the avoidance or disguise of fictitiousness and rigid patterning-he had done that

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before-but from an overstrict adherence to the law of this particular writ. The fiction is more, not less, improbable than usual. The patterning of the plot, with its multiple averted dangers, its disguises, its recognitions, and its defeated expectations, is even more vastly elaborated and reduplicated than in most of Shakespeare's works. Even the sources are numerous, demonstrating both the widespread appeal of the romance form and Shakespeare's complete mastery of it. The playful echoes of his own work, as much as anything in this play, are indications of Shakespeare's mastery: mastery of the design of averted tragedy, to be sure, but even more, a self-transcendence suggested in Schlegel's definition of irony: "It is the freest of all liberties, for it enables us to rise above our own self; and still the most legitimate, for it is absolutely necessary. " 20 Shakespeare himself, in the context of the love-poem that is Sonnet 76, and speaking of his love in terms of his art, most movingly voices his own artistic preferences and aims:

So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.

In Cymbeline, what is new is the play's tone: ironic, playful, elusive. But the creativity that this manifests, like the stories and themes the play draws from, still tells what has already been told. And in its way of doing so, it rewards whoever pauses to listen.

20 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 131.

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