Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  Our production was simply staged at The Other Place, with the audience sitting very close to the action, in a rough circle of random wooden chairs. The first scene between Pisanio and Imogen (Act I, Scene 3) took place in what we imagined to be almost a hidey-hole, lit only by one candle, which seemed to symbolise the memory of Posthumus that we were conspiratorially keeping alive. We could talk almost in a whisper. Cries of ‘Imogen’ from the Queen down a corridor somewhere added to the dangerous atmosphere.

  Imogen feels almost competitive with Pisanio in her devotion to Posthumus. As Pisanio describes watching Posthumus’s departure from the shore, Imogen interrupts and tops him every time:

  Thou shouldst have made him

  As little as a crow…

  I would have broke mine eye-strings…

  Nay, follow’d him, till he had melted from

  The smallness of a gnat to air, and then

  Have turn’d mine eye and wept.

  Because she and Posthumus have been brought up together, I imagine their relationship not unlike that of Cathy and Heathcliff. Childhood companions, twin souls sharing secrets, brother and sister suddenly become man and wife. Sexual knowledge opens the Pandora’s box of jealousy, fear of loss, mistrust and ignorance of the opposite sex. They are parted at a vulnerable stage in their development together. Sex has the power to make them strangers to one another, and it is that power that Iachimo exploits when he meets the exiled Posthumus in Rome.

  Imogen betrays early on her suspicions of the ‘shes of Italy’ (of course in this case it is not just her mistrust of other women, but of Italy in general she is showing) and on parting with Posthumus she (again slightly self-dramatisingly) suggests that Posthumus might

  woo another wife

  When Imogen is dead.

  One of the play’s themes is ‘too ready hearing’. Belarius tells how, with little resistance, Cymbeline believed him to be ‘confederate with the Romans’ through ‘two villains, whose false oaths prevail’d / Before my perfect honour’.

  Posthumus (admittedly with quite tangible ‘proof’ contrived by Iachimo) believes Imogen to be unfaithful, and Imogen succumbs to Iachimo’s suggestions of Posthumus’s infidelity with what I found in the playing to be disconcerting speed. She soon realises what she’s done and blames herself with:

  I do condemn mine ears that have

  So long attended thee,

  and, feeling guilty at her momentary lapse of faith, she proceeds to overcompensate Iachimo with her trust, to the point where the next morning, missing her bracelet, and through all the trials that follow, she never once suspects him.

  I found Act I, Scene 6, when Iachimo first visits Imogen, one of the most exciting to play. Interacting with Donald Sumpter as Iachimo, the balance of the scene minutely and importantly altered every night. I had to negotiate subtly, delicately, how much to believe when, and how quickly. Both of us enjoy being unpredictable, but there are rules even to unpredictability. One has to guard against being different for its own sake and thereby destroying the credibility for one’s fellow actor.

  For instance, if Don were to make Iachimo too smarmy, with Imogen’s already strong prejudice against Italians would she not see through him too early on? Likewise I had to give Don/Iachimo just the right ambiguity on ‘How should I be revenged?’ for him to be able to interpret it as a possible lead for his lascivious suggestion. I had to mean ‘What would you know?…You cannot understand the enormity of this betrayal… revenge is so inappropriate’, but say the line in such a way that Iachimo would be able to hear it as ‘I’m at a loss to think of a suitable revenge to match this crime. Have you any ideas?’

  On nights when Don/Iachimo exaggerated his account of Posthumus, the Briton reveller, creasing up at the sighing French lover—crying:

  O can my sides hold, to think that man, who knows… what woman is… will his free hours languish for assured bondage?

  —I would deliver my line: ‘Will my lord say so?’ in an ‘Oh yeah?’ kind of way. If Don played it more delicately, I’d say it with a shadow crossing my face, but an attempt at lightheartedness in my voice.

  In playing Imogen in most of her other scenes, I had the sensation of driving through like a steamroller, raging at her father, overriding Pisanio, letting off volleys of insults at Cloten and the Queen. There was an element of the boxing-ring as I entered the horseshoe-shaped arena at The Other Place, or later The Pit in the Barbican, for a two-hander, head-on contest with Cloten or the King and usually come off best, if only verbally. Here with Iachimo, on the other hand, Imogen is off-footed from the start. She begins with outrage at the intrusion of a stranger, and, instantly, on learning that he comes from Italy and from Posthumus, she is thrown into the opposite mood of ecstatic excitement. ‘Change you, madam?’ is Iachimo’s knowing understatement and Shakespeare’s stage direction, all in one.

  This volatility of Imogen’s mood where Posthumus is concerned is the key both to her credulity and her over-quick forgiveness of Iachimo. From this point, the unconditional warmth and charm she extends to Iachimo as a fellow adorer of Posthumus is misinterpreted by Iachimo.

  As in The Winter’s Tale and Othello, a woman showing open friendship for a man other than her spouse is misunderstood by a misogynist onlooker or a frightened husband through his ignorance of the complex range of a woman’s feelings.

  Iachimo can undermine Imogen’s and Posthumus’s faith in one another by the same means that Iago can manipulate Othello. The thing you most prize you most fear losing. Living with that fear, in a world where propaganda perpetuates suspicion between the sexes, can become so unbearable that you break under the strain. You begin to want to believe the worst, in order to alleviate the pressure. I am sure this is why Posthumus is driven to say to Iachimo in Act II, Scene 4:

  No swearing:

  If you will swear you have not done’t, you lie,

  And I will kill thee if thou dost deny

  Thou’st made me cuckold.

  Loss of faith in Imogen leads Posthumus to his famous diatribe against her entire gender (Act V, Scene 4). It is significant that Imogen’s reaction to the same emotion earlier on, in Act III, Scene 4, is not an equivalent railing against Posthumus and all men, but an echo of the prevailing misogyny of the world, placing the blame firmly in the female camp:

  …some jay of Italy

  Whose mother was her painting, hath betray’d him.

  Our incidental score consisted of wind-chimes, suspended oil drums, the inside of a piano, stamping feet and human calls, all arranged expertly by Ilona Sekacz. It provided atmospheric percussion throughout the play. In the bedroom scene (Act II, Scene 2) a couple of delicate strokes on a wind-chime instantly conjured up a hot night cooled by a breeze and evoked (for me anyway) the cricket-singing that Iachimo speaks of.

  Imogen is reading in bed. A sudden kick of an oil drum makes her jump out of her skin: ‘Who’s there?’ Her woman Helen enters and Imogen asks, ‘What hour is it?’

  And Helen’s answer, ‘Almost midnight, madam’, was delivered in such a way as to suggest this is unusually late for Imogen still to be reading. When Helen settles Imogen down for a sleep and is about to blow out the candle, I played up Imogen’s nervousness by sudden fitful rhythms on:

  Take not away the taper, leave it burning

  and

  if thou canst awake by four o’th’ clock, I prithee call me.

  This is followed by Imogen’s prayer for protection against the ‘tempters of the night’, and, as if for added security, I kissed Posthumus’s bracelet, so soon to be slipped from my arm by Iachimo, just as she describes herself as having done next day in Act II, Scene 3. All of this signals a certain disquiet in Imogen that could spring from a deep-down unease about her earlier behaviour with Iachimo.

  Iachimo has crept into Imogen’s chamber and is hovering over her sleeping form. Taking my cue from Iachimo’s speech, ‘one kiss! Rubies unparagon’d, / How dearly they do’t’, and tempted to play on the fin
e line separating seeming-guilt and innocence, I returned Iachimo’s kiss in my sleep. I justified the kiss by thinking of her later admission that she dreams of Posthumus every night. Neither Iachimo nor the audience are to know for sure at this point whether it’s the kiss of the actual Iachimo or the dreamed-of Posthumus that she is returning so sweetly. Again the proximity of the audience in this studio production gave the scene an almost voyeuristic edge, and for this reason I found the scene to be the ultimate in passive vulnerability.

  If there are hints of Imogen’s unease in the bedroom scene, they grow to full-blown dread in the following scene with Cloten (Act II, Scene 2). We know she has both the guts and the wit to stick up for herself and make mincemeat of Cloten any day of the week, but this time she goes a bit too far with her insults and tips Cloten over into a maddened vengeful rage. Cloten can be dismissed as a fool, and I laughed at his ‘I’ll be revenged ’, but it was a laugh tinged with fear of a more dangerous man beneath. The loss of her bracelet has unnerved her.

  Is she possibly nagged by some unformed notion of having done something wrong? Whatever she has done doesn’t deserve Posthumus’s order to Pisanio to kill her.

  Second Metamorphosis: The Franklin’s Housewife

  I am almost a man already.

  At last comes a release, both for Imogen and for the actress playing her. In Act III, Scene 2, she receives a letter from Posthumus inviting her to meet him at Milford Haven. I sat on the bottom step in the aisle six inches away from the nearest member of the audience, who could read the letter over my shoulder. I didn’t sit there for long. As soon as I understood that Posthumus would be arriving imminently at Milford Haven, I leapt up—‘O, for a horse with wings!’—and almost took flight. This speech provides an all-too-rare opportunity for vein-bursting joy. The danger for me is that exhilaration runs away with me and my tongue runs away with the words—though it is important that Pisanio gets no chance to stem the tide and interrupt. To avoid detection in her escape from the palace to Milford Haven, Imogen dresses as a ‘franklin’s housewife’ (a franklin was a landholder of free, but not noble, birth). It is an impulsive solution intended

  for the gap

  Which we shall make in time, from our hence-going

  And our return, to excuse.

  But after the events on her arrival in Wales, that return becomes out of the question. She won’t go back. She speaks of ‘the perturb’d court… whereunto I never purpose return’, and when Pisanio suggests, ‘If you’ll back to the court…’, she jumps in on him with ‘No court, no father, nor no more ado…’

  Maybe subconsciously she knew from the beginning that she was initiating a final break. Here on a Welsh hillside, humbly dressed, she learns of Posthumus’s intent to kill her for her supposed adultery. The news itself as good as kills her at first. She begs Pisanio to obey Posthumus’s orders as without Posthumus in her heart there’s no point to her life.

  She doesn’t believe that Posthumus actually thinks she’s false. Her honour is beyond question: ‘I false? Thy conscience witness.’

  As she constructs it, he has fallen for someone else and falsely accuses her just to get her out of the way. She not only confronts literal death by Pisanio’s sword, but a death of faith:

  All good seeming,

  By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought

  Put on for villainy.

  But Imogen doesn’t feel suicidal for long. The confrontation brings out the fight in her. At this point, things tended to get dangerous. The advantages of the small space here became disadvantages. I found it hard to contain the size of Imogen’s emotions within that little wooden ‘O’. I wanted to yell from the Welsh mountain tops. When Jim as Pisanio threw his sword away and when I cast Posthumus’s love-letters aside, quite often they landed at the audience’s feet. Both had to be retrieved during the action, and it’s hard to conjure up in one’s imagination the loneliness of a clearing in a wood near Milford Haven while grovelling among Hush Puppies and handbags! From this point of view things improved in the larger Pit when we transferred to London.

  Until this point, Imogen has identified herself with Britain to such an extent that when Iachimo (in Act I, Scene 7) plants doubts in her mind as to Posthumus’s fidelity, she says, ‘My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.’

  The word ‘Britain’ also encapsulates a set of values for her. Values that she has learnt from childhood and which she also sees in Posthumus. In her book, Cymbeline has also ‘forgot Britain’ by banishing Posthumus:

  It is your fault that I have lov’d Posthumus:

  You bred him as my play-fellow.

  With those words it seems she is saying, ‘You taught me my values and now you’re reneging on them. It’s up to me and Posthumus to carry the flag for all that is good about Britain until you come to your senses and see through that wicked Queen who has led you up the garden path.’

  Now through the trauma of Act III, Scene 4, Imogen manages to extricate her belief in Posthumus from her belief in herself, and both from her belief in Britain:

  Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day? Night?

  Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume

  Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t:

  In a great pool, a swan’s nest: prithee think

  There’s livers out of Britain.

  In that moment, the ‘strain of rareness’ she had earlier rather chest-thumpingly declared in herself becomes real. She becomes larger.

  Having given up her royal identity, she next gives up her sexual identity. Unlike Rosalind and Portia, Imogen does not volunteer to disguise as a boy. It is Pisanio who advises, ‘You must forget to be a woman’, and unusually, in Imogen’s case, maleness does not bring with it authority, but rather it means she must ‘change command into obedience’, as Pisanio puts it.

  She is already well along the road to forgiving Posthumus, not a little thanks to Pisanio’s constancy. Pisanio’s proposal is that she travel to Italy in the service of the Roman general Caius Lucius, where she can at least be near Posthumus, and who knows what might happen then? The Princess who has barely stepped outside her castle bedroom jumps at his suggestion:

  O, for such means,

  Though peril to my modesty, not death on’t,

  I would adventure.

  The musical movement of this scene is so clearly indicated by Shakespeare that we just had to surrender to his ‘stage directions’ and, provided we didn’t dodge the full force of the emotions, we could then ride it out, so to speak. To begin with, each character describes how the other should be behaving:

  Wherefore breaks that sigh

  From th’ inward of thee?

  and

  Put thyself into a ’haviour of less fear [etc.].

  Imogen says nothing after reading Posthumus’s letter, and Shakespeare gives Pisanio eight lines aside to cover her silence, beginning with:

  What shall I need to draw my sword? the paper

  Hath cut her throat already.

  Then Imogen’s white-hot anger takes over the scene, leaving Pisanio winded and gasping, until, exhausted, she allows him to speak. He begins tentatively, and she still manages to rush in and contradict him until, after insisting that ‘some Roman courtesan’ has caused Posthumus’s treachery, Jim/Pisanio forgot his servant status, grabbed me by the shoulders and fairly shook me on the line ‘No, on my life.’ This shocked me first into bewilderment—‘Why, good fellow, what shall I do the while?’—then determination, rejecting all idea of returning to court, and then giving Pisanio the cue, ‘I am most glad you think of other place…’

  In a quieter, more compliant, frame of mind Imogen takes on his plan. The scene ended with Pisanio handing me back Posthumus’s bundle of letters and a quiet, serious ‘I thank thee’ from a finally lucid Imogen.

  I am baffled and disappointed that Shakespeare doesn’t reward Pisanio for what I feel to be the most virtuous conduct of all. In his final acts, Shakespeare often leaves the odd e
nd untied so I think he just forgot about Pisanio in the tangle of other plots.

  I felt for Pisanio who, as a servant, risks great punishment in disobeying orders. He knows Imogen is true without needing proof. He has been ordered by his master to kill her. He refuses. He thinks on his feet and formulates a plan to save the situation. He was given the power to kill and he didn’t use it. Compare his lines in Act III, Scene 2—

  If it be so to do good service, never

  Let me be counted serviceable

  —with a war criminal’s ‘I was only carrying out orders.’ Surely the woman who went against her King/father’s orders when she thought him corrupt would approve of Pisanio’s attitude. I felt this so strongly I even changed a line in the final scene in Act V since no one acknowledges Pisanio’s role in the happy outcome of events. I addressed ‘And you relieved me to see this gracious season’ to Pisanio rather than to Belarius.

  Pisanio’s virtue comes from his sense of honour—

  How look I,

  That I should seem to lack humanity

  So much as this fact comes to?