INTRODUCTION
“AND VIEWED HER IN HER BED”
Many commentators have observed how fitting it is that
The Tempest
is printed at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Its reflections on art, together with the resemblance of Prospero to a dramatist and his island to a theater, where a play is staged within the play by actors who are spirits, make it seem like a Shakespearean showpiece, a summation of his art. Far fewer commentators have considered how equally appropriate it is that
Cymbeline
is printed at the end of the First Folio. Though entitled
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
, it ends not with multiple deaths but with family reunion and political reconciliation. “Pardon’s the word to all” as revelations pile in upon one another, each of them “a mark of wonder,” while a nation is restored to peace: the play could equally well have been classed as a comedy or a British history. The stylistic experimentation almost serves as an ironic epilogue to the Folio’s tripartite division into comedies, histories, and tragedies: tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,
Cymbeline
would have been Polonius’ favorite work in the canon. Furthermore, in a manner analogous to the wittily extreme variations on classical motifs in Baroque art, both the narrative arc and the characterization revisit and revise, in a highly self-conscious manner, an array of favorite Shakespearean motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.
For Shakespeare, the material provided the opportunity to reach back to some of his earliest work. As in
Titus Andronicus
, a copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
is brought onstage as a prop. It is Innogen’s bedtime reading: “She hath been reading late, / The tale of Tereus. Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up.” The allusion marks the moment at which Innogen is betrayed. An eyewitness account of a performance of the play in 1611 makes much of this scene, in which the machiavellian Iachimo emerges from a trunk. Watching for the plot, what Dr. Simon Forman seems to have remembered most vividly was Innogen’s bedchamber:
Remember also the story of Cymbeline king of England, in Lucius’ time, how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlaws, of the which 2 of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but 2 years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons 20 years with him in a cave. And how [one] of them slew Cloten, that was the queen’s son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Innogen the king’s daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter, and how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others, to be presented to the king. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep, he opened the chest, and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, etc. And in the end how he came with the Romans into England and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Innogen, who had turned herself into man’s apparel and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven, and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her 2 brothers were, and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love’s apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, etc.
“
Viewed
her in her bed … and after accused her”: whereas in
Titus
Lavinia’s quoting of Philomel’s tragic tale is the means to the revelation of her own rape, Iachimo can destroy
“AND VIEWED HER IN HER BED”
Many commentators have observed how fitting it is that
The Tempest
is printed at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Its reflections on art, together with the resemblance of Prospero to a dramatist and his island to a theater, where a play is staged within the play by actors who are spirits, make it seem like a Shakespearean showpiece, a summation of his art. Far fewer commentators have considered how equally appropriate it is that
Cymbeline
is printed at the end of the First Folio. Though entitled
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
, it ends not with multiple deaths but with family reunion and political reconciliation. “Pardon’s the word to all” as revelations pile in upon one another, each of them “a mark of wonder,” while a nation is restored to peace: the play could equally well have been classed as a comedy or a British history. The stylistic experimentation almost serves as an ironic epilogue to the Folio’s tripartite division into comedies, histories, and tragedies: tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,
Cymbeline
would have been Polonius’ favorite work in the canon. Furthermore, in a manner analogous to the wittily extreme variations on classical motifs in Baroque art, both the narrative arc and the characterization revisit and revise, in a highly self-conscious manner, an array of favorite Shakespearean motifs: the cross-dressed heroine, the move from court to country, obsessive sexual jealousy, malicious machiavellian plotting, the interrogation of Roman values.
For Shakespeare, the material provided the opportunity to reach back to some of his earliest work. As in
Titus Andronicus
, a copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
is brought onstage as a prop. It is Innogen’s bedtime reading: “She hath been reading late, / The tale of Tereus. Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up.” The allusion marks the moment at which Innogen is betrayed. An eyewitness account of a performance of the play in 1611 makes much of this scene, in which the machiavellian Iachimo emerges from a trunk. Watching for the plot, what Dr. Simon Forman seems to have remembered most vividly was Innogen’s bedchamber:
Remember also the story of Cymbeline king of England, in Lucius’ time, how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlaws, of the which 2 of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but 2 years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons 20 years with him in a cave. And how [one] of them slew Cloten, that was the queen’s son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Innogen the king’s daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter, and how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others, to be presented to the king. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep, he opened the chest, and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, etc. And in the end how he came with the Romans into England and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Innogen, who had turned herself into man’s apparel and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven, and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her 2 brothers were, and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love’s apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, etc.
“
Viewed
her in her bed … and after accused her”: whereas in
Titus
Lavinia’s quoting of Philomel’s tragic tale is the means to the revelation of her own rape, Iachimo can destroy
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