CYMBELINE

Nobly doomed!

We’ll learn our freeness of a son-in-law.

Pardon’s the word to all.

ARVIRAGUS (to Posthumus) You holp us, sir,

As you did mean indeed to be our brother.

Joyed are we that you are.

POSTHUMUS

Your servant, princes. (To Lucius) Good my lord of

Rome,

Call forth your soothsayer. As I slept, methought

Great Jupiter, upon his eagle backed,

Appeared to me with other spritely shows

Of mine own kindred. When I waked 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.

LUCIUS

Philharmonus.

SOOTHSAYER

Here, my good lord.

LUCIUS Read, and declare the meaning.

SOOTHSAYER (reads the tablet) ‘Whenas a lion’s whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped 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.’

Thou, Leonatus, art the lion’s whelp.

The fit and apt construction of thy name,

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 clipped about

With this most tender air.

CYMBELINE

This hath some seeming.

SOOTHSAYER

The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline,

Personates thee, and thy lopped branches point

Thy two sons forth, who, by Belarius stol’n,

For many years thought dead, are now revived,

To the majestic cedar joined, whose issue

Promises Britain peace and plenty.

CYMBELINE

Well,

My peace we will begin; and, Caius Lucius,

Although the victor, we submit to Caesar

And to the Roman empire, promising

To pay our wonted tribute, from the which

We were dissuaded by our wicked queen,

Whom heavens in justice both on her and hers

Have laid most heavy hand.

SOOTHSAYER

The fingers of the powers above do tune

The harmony of this peace. The vision,

Which I made known to Lucius ere the stroke

Of this yet scarce-cold battle, at this instant

Is full accomplished. For the Roman eagle,

From south to west on wing soaring aloft,

Lessened herself, and in the beams o‘th’ sun

So vanished; which foreshowed our princely eagle

Th’imperial Caesar should again unite

His favour with the radiant Cymbeline,

Which shines here in the west.

CYMBELINE

Laud we the gods,

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils

From our blest altars. Publish we this peace

To all our subjects. Set we forward, let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together. So through Lud’s town march,

And in the temple of great Jupiter

Our peace we’ll ratify, seal it with feasts.

Set on there. Never was a war did cease,

Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.

⌈Flourish.⌉ Exeunt ⌈in triumph⌉

THE TEMPEST

THE King’s Men acted The Tempest before their patron, James I, at Whitehall on I November 1611. (It was also chosen for performance during the festivities for the marriage of James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine during the winter of 1612- 13.) Shakespeare’s play takes place on a desert island somewhere between Tunis and Naples; he derived some details of it from his reading of travel literature, including accounts of an expedition of nine ships taking five hundred colonists from Plymouth to Virginia, which set sail in May 1609. On 29 July the flagship, the Sea-Adventure, was wrecked by a storm on the coast of the Bermudas. She was presumed lost, but on 23 May 1610 those aboard her arrived safely in Jamestown, Virginia, having found shelter on the island of Bermuda, where they were able to build the pinnaces in which they completed their journey. Accounts of the voyage soon reached England; the last-written that Shakespeare seems to have known is a letter by William Strachey, who was on the Sea-Adventure, dated 15 July 1610; though it was not published until 1625, it circulated in manuscript. So it seems clear that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest during the later part of 1610or in 1611. It was first printed in the 1623 Folio, where it is the opening play.

Though other items of Shakespeare’s reading—including both Arthur Golding’s translation and Ovid’s original Metamorphoses (closely echoed in Prospero’s farewell to his magic), John Florio’s translation of essays by Michel de Montaigne, and (less locally but no less pervasively) Virgil’s Aeneid—certainly fed Shakespeare’s imagination as he wrote The Tempest, he appears to have devised the main plot himself. Many of its elements are based on the familiar stuff of romance literature: the long-past shipwreck after a perilous voyage of Prospero and his daughter Miranda; the shipwreck, depicted in the opening scene, of Prospero’s brother, Antonio, with Alonso, King of Naples, and others; the separation and estrangement of relatives—Antonio usurped Prospero’s dukedom, and Alonso believes his son, Ferdinand, is drowned; the chaste love, subjected to trials, of the handsome Ferdinand and the beautiful Miranda; the influence of the supernatural exercised through Prospero’s magic powers; and the final reunions and reconciliations along with the happy conclusion of the love affair. Shakespeare had employed such conventions from the beginning of his career in his comedies, and with especial concentration, shortly before he wrote The Tempest, in Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline. But whereas those plays unfold the events as they happen, taking us on a journey through time and space, in The Tempest (as elsewhere only in The Comedy of Errors) Shakespeare gives us only the end of the story, concentrating the action into a few hours and locating it in a single place, but informing us about the past, as in the long, romance-type narrative (1.2) in which Prospero tells Miranda of her childhood. The supernatural, a strong presence in all Shakespeare’s late plays, is particularly pervasive in The Tempest; Prospero is a ‘white’ magician—a beneficent one—attended by the spirit Ariel and the sub-human Caliban, two of Shakespeare’s most obviously symbolic characters; and a climax of the play is the supernaturally induced wedding masque that Prospero conjures up for the entertainment and edification of the young lovers, and which vanishes as he remembers Caliban’s plot against his life.