Innogen’s reputation simply by looking at her. His removal of the bracelet from her arm is a symbolic violation of her chastity. In Shakespeare’s other rape story, the poem of
Lucrece
, Tarquin presses violently down on his victim’s breasts, but here Iachimo merely watches and reports, noting in particular an identifying mole on her left breast. It is the eyes of a spectator that do the undressing here, not the tearing hands of a Tarquin. When Iachimo himself alludes to the rapacious emperor—“Our” Tarquin, a fellow Roman—he rewrites the night scene of
Lucrece
in a lyrical mode: “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” The sibilance seems tender rather than sinister: “Softly press” suggests not only stealth, but also a lover’s touch. And “wounded” grossly understates the severity of Tarquin’s deed. This has the effect of sublimating the image of rape—Philomel gives up as in a dream, not in brutal reality as on the stage of
Titus
, thus making it easier for the audience to put itself in the position of Iachimo. To note and to wonder at the beauty of the sleeping Innogen does not seem to do any harm. Yet “yellow Iachimo” does work harm, and it takes all the play’s twists and turns, including an apparent death and an actual physical violation when Posthumus strikes Fidele/Innogen, to undo that harm.
The audience, then, is forced to confront its own complicity in Iachimo’s deed. His gaze is ours. Shakespeare makes the point by means of the chimneypiece in the bedroom. While in the room, Iachimo records “the contents o’th’story.” In his subsequent narration to Posthumus he reveals them:
The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves; the cutter
Was as another nature dumb, outwent her,
Motion and breath left out.
The gaze is fixed on the naked Diana bathing: Iachimo and with him the audience stand in the position occupied in Ovidian mythology by the hunter Actaeon, who is metamorphosed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds as punishment for his desiring gaze upon the goddess of chastity. Shakespeare uses this reference to introduce the motif of auto-destructive sexual desire. The poetry almost makes us forget that we never saw the chimneypiece: what we witnessed was the sleeping figure of Innogen, as mediated through the language of Iachimo’s gorgeous but prurient soliloquy.
The art of the chimneypiece, like that of Hermione’s statue in
The Winter’s Tale
, is said to have outdone nature. A few lines earlier, Iachimo has reported that the tapestry in the chamber told the story of Mark Antony meeting Cleopatra at Cydnus; here Shakespeare echoes back his own recent play in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra at Cydnus as being so desirable that “but for vacancy” the air would have joined the people of the city in going to gaze on her. The fictive chimneypiece recapitulates and goes beyond this: the artist’s figures seem on the verge of speech and movement, they are “likely to report themselves,” and though they are “dumb” they seem to make nature seem dumber. The air has vacated nature and entered the artwork. When we associate Diana with Innogen, the goddess seems to step down from the chimneypiece and become embodied on stage in the form of a lovely boy actor. The image effects in the audience’s mind what
The Winter’s Tale
feigns to deliver in performance: the metamorphosis of art into life. This is late Shakespeare at his most sophisticated and self-consciously inventive.
Simon Forman’s report reveals how much detail an attentive spectator could grasp in a complex Shakespearean drama—though he does seem to have momentarily muddled Cloten and Posthumus, just as Innogen/Fidele does. The account also suggests that Shakespearean playgoers worried little about the plot’s dependence on frequent coincidences.
Lucrece
, Tarquin presses violently down on his victim’s breasts, but here Iachimo merely watches and reports, noting in particular an identifying mole on her left breast. It is the eyes of a spectator that do the undressing here, not the tearing hands of a Tarquin. When Iachimo himself alludes to the rapacious emperor—“Our” Tarquin, a fellow Roman—he rewrites the night scene of
Lucrece
in a lyrical mode: “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” The sibilance seems tender rather than sinister: “Softly press” suggests not only stealth, but also a lover’s touch. And “wounded” grossly understates the severity of Tarquin’s deed. This has the effect of sublimating the image of rape—Philomel gives up as in a dream, not in brutal reality as on the stage of
Titus
, thus making it easier for the audience to put itself in the position of Iachimo. To note and to wonder at the beauty of the sleeping Innogen does not seem to do any harm. Yet “yellow Iachimo” does work harm, and it takes all the play’s twists and turns, including an apparent death and an actual physical violation when Posthumus strikes Fidele/Innogen, to undo that harm.
The audience, then, is forced to confront its own complicity in Iachimo’s deed. His gaze is ours. Shakespeare makes the point by means of the chimneypiece in the bedroom. While in the room, Iachimo records “the contents o’th’story.” In his subsequent narration to Posthumus he reveals them:
The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves; the cutter
Was as another nature dumb, outwent her,
Motion and breath left out.
The gaze is fixed on the naked Diana bathing: Iachimo and with him the audience stand in the position occupied in Ovidian mythology by the hunter Actaeon, who is metamorphosed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds as punishment for his desiring gaze upon the goddess of chastity. Shakespeare uses this reference to introduce the motif of auto-destructive sexual desire. The poetry almost makes us forget that we never saw the chimneypiece: what we witnessed was the sleeping figure of Innogen, as mediated through the language of Iachimo’s gorgeous but prurient soliloquy.
The art of the chimneypiece, like that of Hermione’s statue in
The Winter’s Tale
, is said to have outdone nature. A few lines earlier, Iachimo has reported that the tapestry in the chamber told the story of Mark Antony meeting Cleopatra at Cydnus; here Shakespeare echoes back his own recent play in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra at Cydnus as being so desirable that “but for vacancy” the air would have joined the people of the city in going to gaze on her. The fictive chimneypiece recapitulates and goes beyond this: the artist’s figures seem on the verge of speech and movement, they are “likely to report themselves,” and though they are “dumb” they seem to make nature seem dumber. The air has vacated nature and entered the artwork. When we associate Diana with Innogen, the goddess seems to step down from the chimneypiece and become embodied on stage in the form of a lovely boy actor. The image effects in the audience’s mind what
The Winter’s Tale
feigns to deliver in performance: the metamorphosis of art into life. This is late Shakespeare at his most sophisticated and self-consciously inventive.
Simon Forman’s report reveals how much detail an attentive spectator could grasp in a complex Shakespearean drama—though he does seem to have momentarily muddled Cloten and Posthumus, just as Innogen/Fidele does. The account also suggests that Shakespearean playgoers worried little about the plot’s dependence on frequent coincidences.
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