Furnished with a mind so rare
I did not try to embarrass him by asking when he himself had last looked at Cymbeline, and in any case, smug as he was with that been-there-done-that complacen- cy peculiar to his profession, the man of law had a point. Viewed impartially, the play looks at first like a heap of old hooey, and Dr Johnson was doubtless right to describe its plot as 'unresisting imbecility'. Shakespeare indeed seems to have gone out of his way to cobble together the hoari- est clichés of fairytale with the most egre- gious strokes of melodrama. A miserable princess, secretly married to a man of whom her father disapproves, flees from the machinations of her wicked stepmother (probably a witch, certainly handy with the Poisons) whose oafish son has been eyeing UP our heroine. There is a ludicrous episode involving a trial of her fidelity, when her would-be seducer (Italian, natch) smuggles himself into her bedroom con- cealed in a trunk. Add to this a headless body, a game of bowls, a mock funeral, a battle, a vision of Jupiter astride an eagle and a final recognition scene in which half the cast discovers that the other half are the people they have spent the past five acts searching for, and you have the perfect Knickerbocker Glory, the veritable Nessel- rode Pudding, of theatrical nonsense. By Shakespeare, what's more. Did not George III, that royal repository of practi- cal wisdom, once observe that most of Shakespeare was 'sad stuff, only one must not say so, what!' Cymbeline makes his Point for him to an almost embarrassing degree. Nobody in the play uses one word where a dozen will do, and the verse is frequently so knotty and clotted that the relevant page of Dr Nosworthy's Arden edition, with its extensive footnotes and variant readings, might usefully be beamed up on a special screen above the stage dur- ing performances, like the surtitles with which Covent Garden now favours us. Assuming Cymbeline is ever performed since the RSC, so careful of Shakespeare on our behalf, long ago decided to commit this olla podrida of Bardic tricks to the scrapheap for scholars to pick over, while the company pursued that all-out-bums-on- seats policy which has since brought it such critical acclaim.
Forgive my clumsy irony. You see, it was a Stratford production of Cymbeline by the young Peter Hall in 1959 which ensured my lifelong devotion to this fathomlessly astounding charivari, Shakespeare's ulti- mate test of our faith in his powers. Peggy Ashcroft was an Imogen you'd have followed all the way to Milford Haven, where she goes in search of her husband Posthumus, a girl (the actress herself must have been about 45) whose resounding integrity justified Coleridge's belief in her as the most adorable of Shakespearean heroines. I was 12 years old, and I recall, during the audacious tragicomic dénoue- ment with its underlying pulses of reunion and forgiveness, absolutely longing for the story never to end.
And the story, the romance, the fiction is what matters here. Because Shakespeare so mischievously-litters the drama with hints from earlier plays, much time has been wasted by its detractors in wanting the work to be something else entirely. Why isn't Cymbeline himself, a king having trou- ble with his daughter, more like Lear? Why is Posthumus, fancying himself cuckolded by Imogen, not enough of an Othello? And 'On your application you put down "twenty three" as your lucky number. Could you explain and give three examples?' why, when Imogen herself wanders off into the wild wood, doesn't she become the Rosalind of her own Arden?
Well, as Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, 'Tarry a little, there is something else.' Lots, actually. Underneath 'the folly of the fiction' which so baffled poor John- son, there lies a dynastic allegory designed to flatter peace-loving James 1 and humour his court full of new-made aristocrats, snobbishly insecure, with flattering fables of gentility. Stendhal wanted to make a ballet out of Cymbeline, and what a splendid opera the whole lavish farrago might become! How sonorous, say, Wagner's setting of the Vision Scene, with Jupiter thundering, 'Whom best I love I cross to make my gifts / The more delayed delighted' How deft the duet Donizetti might spin from villainous Iachimo's wheedling temptation of Imogen, and how ardent Verdi's baritone scena for the anguished Pisanio!
On a far deeper level Cymbeline touches a peculiar strain of mystical Britishness in Shakespeare which makes Henry V's tub- thumping seem as subtle as a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts. Imogen, escaping to Wales, enters a world of primal Celtic enchantment, where magic is worked with the aid of flowers and streams and severed heads to the holy dirge of 'Fear no more the heat o' the sun', that quintessentially pagan poem so popular at Christian memorial services. Again and again the play's verse lines reach out towards this same incantatory rapture, from Iachimo's erotic absorption with the slumbering Imogen, 'On her left breast/ A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops/ I' th' bottom of a cowslip' to Posthumus's joy- ous 'Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die.'
If we can no longer confront Cymbeline as Shakespeare's boldest challenge to that matter-of-fact, humdrum literalness in which humanity spends most of its time, a play whose baroque beauty offers us heal- ing wonder as a remedy for ignorance and fear, then our modern imaginations must be mean and shrivelled indeed. We need Cymbeline more than it needs us. Tennyson realised that, and they buried his copy with him. He is enjoying it in Heaven — with Dame Peggy as Imogen, of course.
Jonathan Keates
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