⌈To Kent⌉ Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.
Look there, look there. He dies
EDGAR
He faints. (To Lear) My lord, my lord!
KENT ⌈to Lear⌉
Break, heart, I prithee break.
EDGAR (to Lear)
Look up, my lord.
KENT
Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.
EDGAR
He is gone indeed.
KENT
The wonder is he hath endured so long.
He but usurped his life.
ALBANY
Bear them from hence. Our present business
Is general woe. (To Edgar and Kent) Friends of my
soul, you twain
Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
KENT
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me; I must not say no.
EDGAR
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Exeunt with a dead march, carrying the bodies
CYMBELINE
OUR first reference to Cymbeline is a note by the astrologer Simon Forman that he saw the play, probably not long before his death on 8 September 1611. He refers to the heroine as ‘Innogen’, and this name occurs in the sources; the form ‘Imogen’, found only in the Folio, appears to be a misprint. The play’s courtly tone, and the masque-like quality of, particularly, the episode (5.5.186.1-2) in which Jupiter ‘descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle’ and ‘throws a thunderbolt’, suggests that as Shakespeare wrote he may have had in mind the audiences and the stage equipment of the Blackfriars theatre, which his company used from the autumn of 1609; and stylistic evidence places the play in about 1610-11. It was first printed in the 1623 Folio, as the last of the tragedies. In fact it is a tragicomedy, or a romance, telling a complex and implausible tale of events which cause the deaths of certain subsidiary characters (Cloten, and the Queen) and bring major characters (including the heroine, Innogen) close to death, but which are miraculously resolved in the reunions and reconciliations of the closing scene.
Shakespeare’s plot reflects a wide range of reading. He took his title and setting from the name and reign of the legendary British king Cymbeline, or Cunobelinus, said to have reigned from 33 BC till shortly after the birth of Christ. Cymbeline is no chronicle history, but Shakespeare derived some ideas, and many of his characters’ names, from accounts of early British history in Holinshed’s Chronicles and elsewhere. Drawing partially, it seems, on an old play, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (acted 1582, printed 1589), he gives Cymbeline a daughter, Innogen, and a wicked second Queen with a loutish, vicious son, Cloten, whom she wishes to see on the throne in her husband’s place. Cymbeline, disapproving of his daughter’s marriage to ‘a poor but worthy gentleman’, Posthumus Leonatus, banishes him. The strand of plot showing the outcome of a wager that Posthumus, in Rome, lays on his wife’s chastity is indebted, directly or indirectly, to Boccaccio’s Decameron. Another old play, Sir Clyomon and Clamydes (printed in 1599), may have suggested the bizarre scene (4.2) in which Innogen mistakes Cloten’s headless body for that of Posthumus; and IIolinshed’s Ilistory of Scotland supplied the episode in which Cymbeline’s two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, helped only by the old man (Belarius) who has brought them up in the wilds of Wales, defeat the entire Roman army.
The tone of Cymbeline has puzzled commentators. Its prose and verse style is frequently ornate, sometimes grotesque. Its characterization often seems deliberately artificial. Extremes are violently juxtaposed, most daringly when Innogen, supposed dead, is laid beside Cloten’s headless body: the beauty of the verse in which she is mourned, and of the flowers strewn over the bodies, contrasts with the hideous spectacle of the headless corpse; her waking speech is one of Shakespeare’s most thrillingly difficult challenges to his performers. The appearance of Jupiter lifts the action to a new level of even greater implausibility, preparing us for the extraordinary series of revelations by which the play advances to its impossibly happy ending. Cymbeline has been valued mostly for its portrayal of Innogen, ideal of womanhood to, especially, Victorian readers and theatre-goers. The play as a whole is a fantasy, an experimental exercise in virtuosity.
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
CYMBELINE, King of Britain
Princess INNOGEN, his daughter, later disguised as a man named Fidele
QUEEN, Cymbeline’s wife, Innogen’s stepmother
Lord CLOTEN, her son
BELARIUS, a banished lord, calling himself Morgan
CORNELIUS, a physician
HELEN, a lady attending on Innogen
Two LORDS attending on Cloten
Two GENTLEMEN
Two British CAPTAINS
Two JAILERS
POSTHUMUS Leonatus, a poor gentleman, Innogen’s husband
PISANIO, his servant
FILARIO, a friend of Posthumus
Caius LUCIUS, ambassador from Rome, later General of the Roman forces
Two Roman SENATORS
Roman TRIBUNES
A Roman CAPTAIN
Philharmonus, a SOOTHSAYER
JUPITER
Ghost of SICILIUS Leonatus, father of Posthumus
Ghost of the MOTHER of Posthumus
Ghosts of the BROTHERS of Posthumus
Lords attending on Cymbeline, ladies attending on the Queen, musicians attending on Cloten, messengers, soldiers
Cymbeline, King of Britain
1.1 Enter two Gentlemen
FIRST GENTLEMAN
You do not meet a man but frowns. Our bloods
No more obey the heavens than our courtiers
Still seem as does the King.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
But what’s the matter?
FIRST GENTLEMAN
His daughter, and the heir of ’s kingdom, whom
He purposed to his wife’s sole son—a widow
That late he married—hath referred herself
Unto a poor but worthy gentleman. She’s wedded,
Her husband banished, she imprisoned. All
Is outward sorrow, though I think the King
Be touched at very heart.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
None but the King?
FIRST GENTLEMAN
He that hath lost her, too. So is the Queen,
That most desired the match. But not a courtier—
Although they wear their faces to the bent
Of the King’s looks—hath a heart that is not