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

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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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. George Washington University, The Shakespeare Association of America, Inc., The Johns Hopkins University Press, Folger Shakespeare Library are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Shakespeare Quarterly 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 in the Ending of Cymbe line 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 to- ward 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 pro- vides 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. I 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 con- nection 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 out- set 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. 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 442 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY 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.
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