Brownlow, F. W. (1977: 139), Two Shakespearean Sequences. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan
The slanders can be achieved because he is able to give not only a description of her bedroom but produce the bracelet he has removed from her arm. It was a gift from her husband – you may remember a similar vaginal symbol of Portia’s ring in The Merchant of Venice. Further, as she lay sleeping while Iachimo was in the room, he observed:
On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops
I’th’ bottom of a cowslip.
(2.2.37–9)
Shakespeare’s mastery here lies in his drawing on and adapting the various dramatic conventions, especially recognition, which have helped him develop the structure of many of his plays. The use of the ‘mole’ as a proof of Imogen’s infidelity draws, for example, on the convention of anagnorisis, or recognition, which usually resolves the complexities of the plot. Here, though, it will produce an incorrect recognition by Posthumus of Imogen’s behaviour. A physical proof of one’s identity, such as a mole, may normally be required for identity in a recognition scene to be assured, as it is in Twelfth Night when Viola and her brother Sebastian are reunited:
VIOLA My father had a mole upon his brow.
SEBASTIAN And so had mine.
(5.1.238–9)
More particularly in Cymbeline, it is a ‘mole’ that provides identity when the King probes for proof that Belarius’ revelation of his lost sons are truly who they are:
CYMBELINE Guiderius had
Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star;
It is a mark of wonder.
BELARIUS 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.
(5.5.364–9)
Of course, it was not ‘Nature’s end’ of proof but the dramatist’s to provide a satisfactory resolution. But in this drama Shakespeare uses the mole as recognition in two ways:
• to exacerbate and to verify Iachimo’s evil story, diverting the plot into a further problematic course
• at the end, to prove the identity of the long-lost sons in order to help resolve the complex narrative.
Further, when Imogen, disguised as the boy Fidele, awakes to find her/himself lying next to the headless body of Cloten, there is no physical proof, such as a mole, to denote the victim’s identity, only Posthumus’ clothes that Cloten had borrowed. Imogen, however, in her anguish searches for physical proof and ironically believes she finds it:
A headless man? The garments of Posthumus?
I know the shape of’s leg: this is his hand:
His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh:
The brawns [muscles] of Hercules: but his Jovial face –
Murder in heaven! How – ? ’Tis gone.
(4.2.308–12)
Shakespeare here again distorts an important element of his comic formula to provide tragic effect in a horrific moment that is clearly not comic. It is neither tragic nor comic, nor is it tragicomic. It is simply the way the drama’s narrative works, playing off different dramatic conventions. It is possible – and is certainly believed to be so by Terry Hands – that the same actor in Shakespeare’s company played both Posthumus and Cloten. This would have added a further dimension to the action, leaving the audience unsure of the relationship between the two characters. Is one the distorted image of the other?
The dirge for Fidele
Earlier, Fidele – the disguised and now drugged Imogen who is assumed to be dead – is laid to rest by Guiderius and Arviragus, while a dirge is sung which has become one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s lyrics. In the context of the movement of the play, however, this song serves the purpose of gradually varying the dramatic tone as the complicated plot moves towards the horror of what is to come: Imogen’s mistaking of the dead Cloten for Posthumus. The dirge begins:
Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task has done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
(4.2.258f.)
Key idea
Perhaps we should note, with Juliet Dusinbere (1975: 182), that Othello is not far away in composition or theme: ‘Posthumus’s decision to write against women in revenge for Imogen’s faithlessness (2.4.183) becomes, in a more passionate man [Othello], the strangling of a wife.’ Posthumus, of course, also instructs Philario to murder her. Further, the bedroom scene, with Iachimo’s desire ‘to kiss’ Imogen, may remind us of Othello’s ‘Once more, and that’s the last’ (Othello, 5.2.19). There are interesting dramaturgical comparisons to be made between these two plays.
It is no wonder that scholars and critical observers become perplexed at this play’s genre but it is a pity if such uncertainty on their part is one of the reasons why the work is not performed or indeed read as widely as some of the other great plays. Perhaps, as Ruth Nevo asserts, tragicomedy is a useful term for it in that its proliferation of motifs draws the audience into its narrative, after what is a difficult opening in which so much information has to be given. Once, however, into its stride, the play twists and turns, demonstrating Shakespeare’s wealth of dramatic experience, drawing on other plays and culminating in the complicated, though well-executed, series of final recognitions in the last act.
Shakespeare’s poems
Cymbeline was probably being written in 1609, the same year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint were published. The Sonnets show the strict discipline of a poetic form and suggest a narrative sequence that had been developed over a number of years from the 1590s onwards. A Lover’s Complaint, whose authorship textual critics now question, is a young woman’s story of her seduction told to a stranger. It was probably written by John Davies of Hereford (c.1565–1618) in imitation of Shakespeare’s style.
There are 154 poems in the sonnet sequence, the first 126 addressed to a young man of high social status; the next ones, from 127 to 152, are addressed to a dark lady, an unfaithful mistress of the narrator, and involve a rival lover. The final two poems concern Cupid and Diana. Some regard the Sonnets as autobiographical, but there is no firm evidence to suggest that they are. Shakespeare created characters and narrators in his plays, so why not in his poems? In form, they differ from the Italianate Petrarchan sonnet in that the 14 lines are divided not as eight and six but as four quatrains and a concluding couplet. This form, as we saw in Chapter 5, has come to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet.
In the Sonnets and in the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare demonstrates his dexterity as a poet. Venus and Adonis (1593) was written while the theatres were closed because of plague. It became a very popular work, making his name prior to the fame to come with the plays. It is a dramatic poem in which Venus detains Adonis from the hunt, proposing that they should make love:
‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’
(lines 229–34)
With such ‘steamy’ lines of sexual innuendo the poem probably secured its success. The animal and landscape imagery predominates, as bantering between the two characters takes place. Adonis repels love:
‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it,
Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it…’
(lines 409–10)
The poem presages many elements of the later plays, from Much Ado About Nothing to Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well and also the Sonnets as, for example, in Venus’s reference of mo
rtality being defeated by posterity:
What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
Seeming to bury that posterity,
Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?
If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.
(lines 757–62)
But Adonis leaves her for the hunt and is killed by a boar.
The Rape of Lucrece (1594) has a dark theme as the title implies, in Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece, for which, as The Argument preceding the poem records, ‘with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls’. As with Venus and Adonis, we find presaged within it much to be found in later dramas. Read the following lines, for example, and think about issues we’ve discussed during our journey through the plays:
Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud,
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?
Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud,
Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts?
Or kings be breakers of their own behests?
But no perfection is so absolute
That some impurity doth not pollute.
(lines 848–54)
The Rape of Lucrece is written in what is known as rhyme royale, with a seven-line stanza ababbcc in contrast to the six–line stanza ababcc of Venus and Adonis.
These are both dramatic poems written by a young enthusiastic poet, displaying a tight control of his medium. The sonnet sequence, not published until 1609 but composed over time while he was writing many of his plays, is similarly disciplined. It may be tempting to consider these poems as ones that Shakespeare had been writing on and off and forming into a sequence for his own intellectual amusement and enjoyment, away from the pressure of getting his plays on to the stage. Such a view, however, maybe regarded as reductive, in a similar way that some of the biographical identification theories can be regarded as distracting. Jonathan Bate has his own speculations over the identities of the various characters possibly related to the lovers’ ‘tryst’, but referencing the final couplet of Sonnet 152 he is prompted to ask, ‘Does love come from the “I” or the “eye”, is it a “truth” or is it a “lie”?’ (Bate, J. [1998: 53]).
‘We will never know whether…the sonnets are knowing imaginings of possible intrigue…their reticence on this matter is essential to their purpose: we must be denied knowledge of the original bed deeds, because the sonnets are interested not so much in who lies with whom as in the paradoxes of eyeing and lying.’
Bate, J. (1998: 58), The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador
Although scholarship now generally considers the publication of the Sonnets to have been authorized, the poet W. H. Auden wrote in the 1960s, ‘Of one thing I am certain: Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published’ (Auden, W. H. [1964: xxxvi]). It is an interesting quote, whatever the circumstances of their publication. That first publication did not attract at the time the same level of success that was seen with the earlier publications of the narrative poems.
There is a lovely little poem ‘To the Queen’ which was found only at the end of the last century and is not included in the Arden edition but is readily available in other editions. Written as an epilogue to a Court performance in 1599, it plays on the ‘dial of time’, a familiar theme that we have encountered. The Passionate Pilgrim is an unauthorized anthology of 19 poems published by William Jaggard in 1599. It claims to be ‘By W. Shakespeare’ and thereby was trading on his name and success presumably to make the publisher some money. It opens with two of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 138 and 144, which must have been in private circulation at the time, and contains two further sonnets and a poem from Love’s Labour’s Lost. These last three had been published in quarto in 1598: Poem 5, Sir Nathaniel’s ‘If love make me foresworn, how shall I swear to love?’ (4.2.106–20), and Poem 3, Longaville’s ‘Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye’ (4.3.59–72), together with Poem 16, which in the comedy is Dumaine’s ‘ode that I have writ’, ‘On a day – alack the day! –’ (4.3.98f.). Although they were attributed to Shakespeare when first published (1598/9), his involvement with any of the other poems is uncertain. What is known is that Shakespeare was unhappy about their publication.
Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and Turtle (1601) has perplexed critics because of its obscurity. Some see it in relation to a poem by Robert Chester, Love’s Martyr, pertaining to Elizabeth I and the death of a courtier, although relatively recent scholarship has suggested that it concerns a real-life event referring to the execution of a Catholic widow, Anne Line, who had received a Catholic priest into her home. The historian Michael Wood believes it to be a poem that ‘may take us nearer to Shakespeare’s feelings about a real event of his time than anything else he wrote’ (Wood, M. [2003, 2005 p/b: 259]).
Key idea
The Sonnets were published in 1609, the same year that Cymbeline was first performed. If some people categorize this as an inferior play, they are, I believe, misguided. Shakespeare knew how to write a sonnet. He knew how freely to experiment with his dramatic structure. He knew his business. He knew how to write a play. Cymbeline may be something of an enigma because it resists clear definition. That resistance is possibly its strength.
27
The Tempest (1611) and the collaborative plays: Henry VIII (1613); The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–14); Pericles (1608); and The Shakespeare Apocrypha
The Tempest is often regarded as Shakespeare’s last play, which leads some to read into it what they like to think were Shakespeare’s final thoughts about his profession. It may not, however, have been his final play: Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio may have followed. Although in some ways a problematic play, The Tempest shows Shakespeare returning to a neoclassical model, but one which includes a masque. With the earlier collaborative play Pericles, he uses a sprawling narrative structure to good effect. In Henry VIII he and his co-writer, John Fletcher, adeptly use the form of the masque, which had become a new fashion in the aristocratic class of Stuart London. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on a story from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. There are also a number of other plays over which there is speculation that Shakespeare had a hand in their composition.
On 29 June 1613 the thatched roof of the Globe Theatre caught fire during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play Henry VIII. The wooden building was burned to the ground. There were no fatalities but one man’s breeches were reported to have caught fire, only to be quenched by a bottle of beer. The fire is often taken to mark the symbolic end of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. However, within a year a new theatre had been erected, with a tiled roof, but less than three years later Shakespeare was dead. He was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on 25 April 1616, where, if you visit, you can see the place where he lies and read the doggerel versed inscription, which tradition has it was written by him:
Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Scientific investigation has recently revealed that there may be some truth to the old story that Shakespeare’s skull was once stolen from his grave. It is still, nevertheless, his last resting place. On the wall to the left is a bust, which is the most contemporary likeness we have of him, although it is somewhat crude and stiff.
Henry VIII
It is perhaps ironic that the Globe fire broke out during a play about Henry VIII. Henry was the tyrannical, self-obsessed, ruthless, psychotic monarch who had been responsible for much of the religious and social turmoil in sixteenth-century England. It may be that some unpleasant personality traits were exacerbated following a severe blow to his head after a fall from his horse. The end, how
ever, of what he began, it could be argued, came, ironically enough, with the execution in 1649 of the monarch himself, Charles I, but certainly Henry left a legacy of intolerance and bitterness that has continued for centuries. But, despite all that, Henry VIII, whom Erasmus referred to in the early years of his reign as ‘a universal genius’, promoted education and began the forging of a national identity which to a limited extent continues to the present day. Often, however, lionized by future generations, in Shakespeare’s play Henry is less vividly characterized than some of those about him: the Duke of Buckingham, Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Katherine. The structure of the play works, as Ralph Berry (1985: 128–41) has pointed out, like a masque and does not provide an opportunity for the wider historical perspective found in the other history plays by Shakespeare.
Spotlight
Holbein’s famous painting of Henry – standing erect with legs astride and large codpiece symbolizing the King’s masculine power and virility – helps establish the iconic image of this self-centred king. Shakespeare, however, chooses to provide a different focus. In the play he presents a series of vignettes or ‘staged pieces’ that concentrate on the characters surrounding the King rather than on the monarch himself. This is no more so than with Katherine of Aragon (spelled with a K in the text), who in Act 2, Scene 4 comes for judgement before the tribunal presided over by the two cardinals Wolsey and Campeius; they are charged with determining the legality of her marriage to the King.
The stage directions are more detailed generally throughout this play than is usual in Shakespeare’s Folio text, as, for example, in Act 2, Scene 4 with the entry of the King, the Cardinal, nobles and officials, which give an indication of the play’s great theatricality, which productions have continued to exploit over the centuries. Particularly in the nineteenth century, they allowed for great pageants and ornate stage designs to be created. Despite this theatrical emphasis, the play is a historical drama whose subtitle is All is True.
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 34