ACT 5 SCENE 4
Lines 1–306: Cymbeline knights Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus for their valor and service in battle, wishing that the “poor soldier” who helped them (Posthumus) could be found and likewise rewarded. Cornelius, the doctor, enters to tell Cymbeline that the Queen is dead, and that she confessed before dying that she hated Innogen, that she never loved Cymbeline, and was plotting to kill him slowly with poisons so that Cloten could become king. Cymbeline says that he was utterly deceived by her, and that her beauty was the cause. Innogen (as Fidele), Caius Lucius, the Soothsayer, Iachimo, and Posthumus (disguised as a Roman) are brought in as prisoners. Lucius begs only that his page (Innogen) be freed, to which Cymbeline agrees, taking the “boy” into his service, and offering Fidele any “boon” he can give. Innogen has seen Iachimo wearing her ring, and talks aside with Cymbeline, during which time Belarius and the two boys express amazement to each other that Fidele is alive again. Innogen questions Iachimo about the ring, and he confesses at length everything that he has done. Posthumus, revealing his own identity, comes forward to attack Iachimo, and admits remorsefully to being the cause of Innogen’s death. Innogen rushes to him but he spurns her, thinking her to be an insolent page boy intruding on his grief. Pisanio then steps forward to tell everyone that the page is in fact Innogen in disguise, and Innogen curses Pisanio for trying to poison her. Cornelius remembers that the Queen had also confessed to giving Pisanio what she thought was poison, hoping to kill him, and that Pisanio was innocent of what the compound really was, thinking it medicinal. Reunited at last, Posthumus and Innogen embrace.
Lines 307–571: Cymbeline and Innogen lovingly reunite, and Cymbeline questions Cloten’s disappearance. Pisanio tells of Cloten’s leaving for Milford Haven in pursuit of Innogen and Posthumus, and Guiderius finishes the story. Cymbeline, filled with regret because he still admires the young warrior, has no choice but to sentence him to death for killing a prince. Belarius intercedes, telling Cymbeline that the young man is “better than the man he slew,” confessing that he is the banished Belarius, disguised as Morgan, and that the young men with him are Cymbeline’s sons, whom he raised these twenty years. Cymbeline is at first incredulous, but upon seeing the star-shaped birthmark he remembers upon Guiderius’ neck, all doubt is removed, and, overcome with joy, he pardons Belarius and is tearfully reunited with his sons. The boys and Innogen now realize why they felt such a natural bond with each other. Innogen has Caius Lucius freed, and Posthumus, after forgiving Iachimo, calls upon the Soothsayer to interpret the strange tablet he found in his jail cell. The prophecy relates to what has just taken place; to Posthumus finding Innogen again, and to Cymbeline’s sons being “jointed” back onto the royal family tree, ensuring the continued stability of the realm. “Pardon’s the word to all,” Cymbeline declares, and even promises to continue paying the tribute to Rome as a sign of mutual respect. All go in together to celebrate and to make offerings to the gods who have ensured that everything has ended in “peace.”
CYMBELINE
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can occur only when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF CYMBELINE: AN OVERVIEW
Shakespeare had dealt with overt fantasy onstage before Cymbeline, but with this play he seems to ask a different sort of imaginative engagement from his audiences. Like Pericles and The Winter’s Tale before it, Cymbeline has long been seen as what Ben Jonson described as “some mouldy tale,”24 piling coincidence, misrecognition, revelation, and confusion one on top of the other until the effect seems almost farcical, and has thus been largely neglected in the theater. There has, however, been a long-running parallel tradition of practitioners and audiences deriving bounteous rewards from the play in performance, taking the effort to see past what at first glance seem shortcomings, and to revel both in the comic opportunities the play’s structure affords, and in its truly tender emotional core. Cymbeline is a virtuoso piece of dramatic management, and while it introduces more plot threads than a five-act narrative seems designed to bear, and while we are openly invited to laugh at the absurdity of so many threads reconvening at the end, we are simultaneously invited to marvel silently at the skill of the authorial puppet master and to succumb to the unfeigned tenderness of the dramatic conclusion.
The earliest account we have of Cymbeline onstage—in fact, the earliest writing we have on the play at all—comes in the form of a private memorandum of 1611 by the astrologer Simon Forman, jotted into one of his eclectic notebooks. Forman died on September 8 that year, and this entry comes after accounts of having seen Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale at the Globe in April and May, making it highly probable that he also saw Cymbeline there that summer. He provides little in the way of performance detail, being more concerned with cataloging the play’s plot intrigues one after another:
Remember also the story of Cymbeline King of England, in Lucius’ time, how Lucius came from Octavius Caesar for tribute, and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of 3 outlaws, of the which 2 of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but 2 years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons 20 years with him in a cave.25
Forman jumbles the plot order, mentioning these events before the wager plot, which, some have argued, merely illustrates the play’s difficulty, while others have felt he deliberately rearranged things in order to afford a primacy to the Roman and British dynastic plot (the play has often been seen as a Jacobean panegyric). The other significant detail is that Forman calls the heroine Innogen, against the Folio’s Imogen, suggesting strongly that this reflects what he heard onstage that day. The rest of the play’s early public performance history is obscure, though we do know that it was performed at Whitehall on January 1, 1634, before Charles I, and, according to the Master of the Revels, was “well liked by the King.”26
Shakespeare’s plays came to be performed mainly in heavily adapted versions from the Restoration into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Cymbeline was no different, being reworked into Thomas D’Urfey’s The Injured Princess, or The Fatal Wager in 1682, performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and revived in 1720 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A rare production of Shakespeare’s text was undertaken at the Haymarket Theatre in 1744 by Theophilus Cibber, which was revived two years later at Covent Garden, starring Lacy Ryan as Posthumus and the great actor-manager David Garrick’s longtime stage partner Hannah Pritchard as Innogen.
Next came William Hawkins’
adaptation, which retained the play’s title but largely gutted the text to make way for Hawkins’ own verse and a cast of renamed characters. Perhaps most significant of all was the rearrangement of the plot to bring it into line with neoclassical sensibilities about dramatic unity, somewhat missing the point of Shakespeare’s sophisticated and experimental narrative structuring.
The most significant and influential of the eighteenth-century adaptations, however, was Garrick’s. Fittingly, the text Garrick produced for his 1761 production was remarkably actor friendly, as well as being very faithful to the Shakespearean original. The more substantial alterations he made were to conflate or omit many prose passages, especially in the early Cloten scenes, and to transpose certain scenes for the sake of continuity of action, as well as entirely omitting the scene of Posthumus’ imprisonment in Act 4, including the vision episode. Still, critical judgments of the time lasting into the twentieth century commented on the efficacy and stageworthiness of Garrick’s version. Garrick himself took the role of Posthumus to great acclaim alongside Miss Bride as Innogen, Thomas Davies as Cymbeline, and Charles Holland as Iachimo. Contemporary reviews of the production reflect heavily upon the particular aesthetic sensibilities of the age, with one anonymous reviewer sniping at the “great deal of Shakespear’s [sic] irregularity”27 on display in Cymbeline, choosing to fix on the verse-speaking abilities of the cast rather than anything the production might have yielded as an interpretation of the text. A review from the following year though speaks out in defense of the play, attributing its oddities to Shakespeare’s native genius, and praising both Garrick’s performance as Posthumus and Shakespeare’s writing of the part:
It is very strange that so admirable a piece as this play should have remained so long unacted; but at least Mr Garrick, to whose taste we owe so many excellent revived pieces, has brought it to the stage. In Shakespeare’s plays we are not to look for an observance of the unities, his genius soared above restraint … Mr Garrick’s Posthumus was admirable: he entered into the spirit of that fine-drawn character and displayed great power of acting. It is a character that gives the actor a fine opportunity to express the feelings of his soul; the transmissions of the passions were exquisitely represented by him.28
Garrick’s revival restored the play’s stage fortunes somewhat and his adaptation became the orthodox text over the next forty years for producers at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In 1787 the great female tragedian Sarah Siddons gave her Innogen in London with her brother, John Philip Kemble, as Posthumus, a role in which Kemble was to appear twenty-six times between 1785 and 1817. It was said of Kemble’s first Innogen, Mrs. Jordan, that “she could act only the disguise of the character,”29 whereas Siddons rose to meet the “variety of manner and expression”30 required. However, aspects of Siddons’ performance met with critical displeasure; the power and grandeur of her style—cultivated in performances of tragedy—were seen to overbear upon “the softness, delicacy, affectionate tenderness, and interesting distress”31 of Innogen. And it was Kemble, as well as the grandiosity of his set designs, that really held the critics’ attention: “Mr Kemble was, by a thousand degrees, the best Posthumus of my time. It was a learned, judicious, and in the fine burst upon Iachimo at the close, a most powerful effort.”32
The early nineteenth century saw numerous performances of Cymbeline, and laid the foundations for an era of unprecedented appreciation on both stage and page for the story’s heroine, Innogen. Arguably it was Helen Faucit who helped establish this image for the theatergoing public with her famous portrayals of the role in 1838 and 1843, in two productions staged by one of the great actors of the day, William Charles Macready. Macready had in fact acted in several productions of the play between 1811 and 1837, usually playing Posthumus, although he did take on the role of Iachimo three times, once in the 1843 revival in a text again heavily excised (the prison scene went, as did many of Cloten’s “indecorous” moments). Commentators at the time noted the surprising levity and recklessness he brought to the part, while James R. Anderson’s largely ineffective Posthumus nonetheless made an interesting foil in the wager scene through his stiff conservatism: “he marked out the growing indignation at the levity of Iachimo, carefully managing the curling lip and darkened brow.”33 The contrast between the two men and the daring of Macready’s performance brought about a vivid reappraisal of the dynamics of the scene for a reporter of the Spectator, who noted “a veil of voluptuous wantonness over the repulsive incident of a man, wagering on the virtue of his wife” and saw Anderson’s Posthumus as “merely a rash boaster, and Iachimo a licentious profligate inflamed with wine, both acting on a hasty impulse.”34
Faucit’s Innogen, however, captured the public imagination above all other facets of the production, her inherent grace and dignity and physically delicate form lending her a great sympathy in the part with audiences. She even played the role again in 1864 at the age of forty-seven at Drury Lane, and, probably in the same year, at Edinburgh, in a cast that featured an up-and-coming Henry Irving in the role of Pisanio. In a review of the Drury Lane production, one critic recorded how Cymbeline was still largely unfamiliar stage fodder, but that Faucit demonstrated the unique depth and beauty of Innogen as an overlooked gem in the pantheon of Shakespeare’s great characters:
But that unconscious propriety of Imogen, that innate virtue which guards her as a shield and enfolds her as a garment, that purity of soul which speaks in her slightest movements … There is something so inimitably picturesque in Miss Faucit’s acting that one constantly longs to see each successive attitude fixed in a photograph, and bound into a volume to form a psychological illustration to the play … To appreciate to its full extent the value of Miss Faucit’s triumph it is necessary to recur to the fact that to the multitude Cymbeline is not a known play.35
The play’s nebulous status again led to its decline from the repertoire after the 1860s, the only other major Victorian production being a then-established Henry Irving’s at the Lyceum in 1896, starring Ellen Terry as Innogen. It was a portrayal that was to be as significant as Faucit’s in cementing the character as one of the greats. A surviving private correspondence between Terry and Shakespeare’s most notorious antagonist, George Bernard Shaw, allows unique insights into her preparation for, and his opinions on, the role and the play:
Imogen is an impulsive person, with quick transitions, absolutely frank self-expression, and no half affections or half forgivenesses. The moment you abuse anyone she loves, she is in a rage; the moment you praise them she is delighted.36
Shaw’s influence on Terry’s interpretation seems to have been active and strong, though it is difficult to gauge the tone. Shaw is fastidiously precise about the way moments “ought” to be played in the sheaves of advice he sent to her, while Terry’s responses are often brief and apparently deferential. We cannot know, however, how much she actually took on board and how much is intended to placate an eccentric, overbearing, and probably somewhat intimidating friend:
Yes, yes, yes, I see what you mean about the “headless man” bit; and the “5 bars rest” in the Cave Scene is of course all wrong. I see it now, and will try and try at it. Delightful. Difficult to undo all the wrong things which have been practised quite carefully, but I shall delight to try at it.37
Shaw wrote a now infamous review of the production which he used as a springboard to attack Shakespeare’s artistry in general, the character of Innogen, and Henry Irving’s inability to play anything other than himself (even though, oddly, he praised his Iachimo in this production). Shaw, ever the contrarian, was impressed with Terry’s rejection of the sentimental Innogen whose “virtuous indignation is chronic” in favor of a more naturalized “innocent rapture and frank gladness.”38 He also blasted Irving for “disembowel[ing]”39 the text, though arguably showed far greater presumptuousness in his rewrite of the play’s final act in 1937, which was performed in place of Shakespeare’s in a staging that year at London’s Embassy
Theatre. In 1945 Shaw revisited Irving’s production—which, he claimed, did much to ruin his view of Cymbeline as a piece of drama—to justify dispensing with the original ending:
Irving, as Iachimo, a statue of romantic melancholy, stood dumb on the stage for hours (as it seemed) whilst the others toiled through a series of denouements of crushing tedium, in which the characters lost all their vitality and individuality, and had nothing to do but identify themselves by moles on their necks, or explain why they were not dead.40
The play was certainly among the least performed in the canon during the twentieth century, although there were several other notable productions in the fifty years following Irving’s, usually emphasizing the play’s folktale, mythical dimensions, its niche popularity lying in its perceived escapism from any weighty human realities. Frank Benson staged three productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1909, 1920, and 1922, and Sybil Thorndike played Innogen in Ben Greet’s 1918 production at the Old Vic. Iden Payne’s production in Stratford featuring Joyce Bland, Godfrey Kenton, and Donald Wolfit as Innogen, Posthumus, and Iachimo, respectively, ran concurrently with the Shavian version at the Embassy in 1937, and Michael Benthall produced the play at the Old Vic in 1956—with greater critical success than his Stratford production seven years earlier—in a very stripped-down setting, with a young Barbara Jefford as Innogen. Benthall continued the long stage tradition of cutting the vision scene in the prison, and excising many of the lines in the denouement reiterative of plot and smacking too heavily of absurd coincidence. Jefford was universally praised for her Innogen, and Mary Clarke noted how well her youthful vigor served the part.41
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