The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works
Page 381
Have more than merited. All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.—O see, see!
LEAR
And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never.
⌈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
Glad of the thing they scowl at.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
And why so?
FIRST GENTLEMAN
He that hath missed the Princess is a thing
Too bad for bad report, and he that hath her—
I mean that married her—alack, good man,
And therefore banished!—is a creature such
As, to seek through the regions of the earth
For one his like, there would be something failing
In him that should compare. I do not think
So fair an outward and such stuff within
Endows a man but he.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
You speak him far.<
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FIRST GENTLEMAN
I do extend him, sir, within himself;
Crush him together rather than unfold
His measure duly.
SECOND GENTLEMAN What’s his name and birth?
FIRST GENTLEMAN
I cannot delve him to the root. His father
Was called Sicilius, who did join his honour
Against the Romans with Cassibelan
But had his titles by Tenantius, whom
He served with glory and admired success,
So gained the sur-addition ‘Leonatus’;
And had, besides this gentleman in question,
Two other sons who in the wars o‘th’ time
Died with their swords in hand; for which their father,
Then old and fond of issue, took such sorrow
That he quit being, and his gentle lady,
Big of this gentleman, our theme, deceased
As he was born. The King, he takes the babe
To his protection, calls him Posthumus Leonatus,
Breeds him, and makes him of his bedchamber;
Puts to him all the learnings that his time
Could make him the receiver of, which he took
As we do air, fast as ’twas ministered,
And in ’s spring became a harvest; lived in court—
Which rare it is to do—most praised, most loved;
A sample to the youngest, to th’ more mature
A glass that feated them, and to the graver
A child that guided dotards. To his mistress,
For whom he now is banished, her own price
Proclaims how she esteemed him and his virtue.
By her election may be truly read
What kind of man he is.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
I honour him
Even out of your report. But pray you tell me,
Is she sole child to th’ King?
FIRST GENTLEMAN His only child.
He had two sons—if this be worth your hearing,
Mark it: the eld‘st of them at three years old,
I’th’ swathing clothes the other, from their nursery
Were stol’n, and to this hour no guess in knowledge
Which way they went.
SECOND GENTLEMAN How long is this ago?
FIRST GENTLEMAN Some twenty years.
SECOND GENTLEMAN
That a king’s children should be so conveyed,
So slackly guarded, and the search so slow
That could not trace them!
FIRST GENTLEMAN
Howsoe‘er ’tis strange,
Or that the negligence may well be laughed at,
Yet is it true, sir.
SECOND GENTLEMAN I do well believe you.
Enter the Queen, Posthumus, and Innogen
FIRST GENTLEMAN
We must forbear. Here comes the gentleman,
The Queen and Princess.
Exeunt the two Gentlemen
QUEEN
No, be assured you shall not find me, daughter,
After the slander of most stepmothers,
Evil-eyed unto you. You’re my prisoner, but
Your jailer shall deliver you the keys
That lock up your restraint. For you, Posthumus,
So soon as I can win th‘offended King
I will be known your advocate. Marry, yet
The fire of rage is in him, and ’twere good
You leaned unto his sentence with what patience
Your wisdom may inform you.
POSTHUMUS
Please your highness,
I will from hence today.
QUEEN
You know the peril.
I’ll fetch a turn about the garden, pitying
The pangs of barred affections, though the King
Hath charged you should not speak together. Exit
INNOGEN
O dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant
Can tickle where she wounds! My dearest husband,
I something fear my father’s wrath, but nothing—
Always reserved my holy duty—what
His rage can do on me. You must be gone,
And I shall here abide the hourly shot
Of angry eyes, not comforted to live
But that there is this jewel in the world
That I may see again.
POSTHUMUS
My queen, my mistress!
O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause
To be suspected of more tenderness
Than doth become a man. I will remain
The loyal‘st husband that did e’er plight troth;
My residence in Rome at one Filario’s,
Who to my father was a friend, to me
Known but by letter; thither write, my queen,
And with mine eyes I’ll drink the words you send
Though ink be made of gall.
Enter Queen
QUEEN
Be brief, I pray you.
If the King come, I shall incur I know not
How much of his displeasure. (Aside) Yet I’ll move him
To walk this way. I never do him wrong
But he does buy my injuries, to be friends,
Pays dear for my offences. Exit
POSTHUMUS
Should we be taking leave
As long a term as yet we have to live,
The loathness to depart would grow. Adieu.
INNOGEN Nay, stay a little.
Were you but riding forth to air yourself
Such parting were too petty. Look here, love:
This diamond was my mother’s. Take it, heart;
She gives him a ring
But keep it till you woo another wife
When Innogen is dead.
POSTHUMUS
How, how? Another?
You gentle gods, give me but this I have,
And cere up my embracements from a next
With bonds of death! Remain, remain thou here
He puts on the ring
While sense can keep it on; and, sweetest, fairest,
As I my poor self did exchange for you
To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles
I still win of you. For my sake wear this.
He gives her a bracelet
It is a manacle of love. I’ll place it
Upon this fairest prisoner.
INNOGEN O the gods!
When shall we see again?
Enter Cymbeline and lords
POSTHUMUS
Alack, the King!
CYMBELINE
Thou basest thing, avoid hence, from my sight!
If after this command thou fraught the court
With thy unworthiness, thou diest. Away.
Thou’rt poison to my blood.
POSTHUMUS
The gods protect you,
And bless the good remainders of the court!
I am gone.
Exit
INNOGEN
There cannot be a pinch in death
More sharp than this is.
CYMBELINE
O disloyal thing,
That shouldst repair my youth, thou heap’st
A year’s age on me.
INNOGEN
I beseech you, sir,
Harm not yourself with your vexation.
I am senseless of your wrath. A touch more rare
Subdues all pangs, all fears.
CYMBELINE
Past grace, obedience-
INNOGEN
Past hope and in despair: that way past grace.
CYMBELINE
That mightst have had the sole son of my queen!
INNOGEN
O blessed that I might not! I chose an eagle
And did avoid a puttock.
CYMBELINE
Thou took’st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne
A seat for baseness.
INNOGEN
No, I rather
added
A lustre to it.
CYMBELINE
O thou vile one!
INNOGEN
Sir,
It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus.
You bred him as my playfellow, and he is
A man worth any woman, over-buys me
Almost the sum he pays.
CYMBELINE
What, art thou mad?
INNOGEN
Almost, sir. Heaven restore me! Would I were
A neatherd’s daughter, and my Leonatus
Our neighbour shepherd’s son.
Enter Queen
CYMBELINE
Thou foolish thing.
(To Queen) They were again together; you have done
Not after our command. (To lords) Away with her,
And pen her up.
QUEEN
Beseech your patience, peace,
Dear lady daughter, peace. Sweet sovereign,
Leave us to ourselves, and make yourself some comfort
Out of your best advice.
CYMBELINE
Nay, let her languish
A drop of blood a day, and, being aged,
Die of this folly.
Exit with lords
QUEEN
Fie, you must give way.
Enter Pisanio
Here is your servant. How now, sir? What news?
PISANIO
My lord your son drew on my master.
QUEEN Ha!
No harm, I trust, is done?
PISANIO
There might have been,
But that my master rather played than fought,
And had no help of anger. They were parted
By gentlemen at hand.
QUEEN
I am very glad on’t.
INNOGEN
Your son’s my father’s friend; he takes his part
To draw upon an exile—O brave sir!
I would they were in Afric both together,
Myself by with a needle, that I might prick
The goer-back. (To Pisanio) Why came you from your
master?
PISANIO
On his command. He would not suffer me
To bring him to the haven, left these notes
Of what commands I should be subject to
When’t pleased you to employ me.
QUEEN
This hath been
Your faithful servant. I dare lay mine honour
He will remain so.