For certain drops of salt, your city Rome,
I say ‘your city’, to his wife and mother;
Breaking his oath and resolution, like
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A twist of rotten silk, never admitting
Counsel o’th’ war: but at his nurse’s tears
He whin’d and roar’d away your victory,
That pages blush’d at him, and men of heart
Look’d wond’ring each at others.
CORIOLANUS Hear’st thou, Mars?
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AUFIDIUS Name not the god, thou boy of tears!
CORIOLANUS Ha!
AUFIDIUS No more.
CORIOLANUS
Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart
Too great for what contains it. ‘Boy’! O slave!
Pardon me, lords, ’tis the first time that ever
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I was forc’d to scold. Your judgements, my grave
lords,
Must give this cur the lie; and his own notion,
Who wears my stripes impress’d upon him, that
Must bear my beating to his grave, shall join
To thrust the lie unto him.
1 LORD Peace, both, and hear me speak.
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CORIOLANUS Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.
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Alone I did it. Boy!
AUFIDIUS Why, noble lords,
Will you be put in mind of his blind fortune,
Which was your shame, by this unholy braggart,
’Fore your own eyes and ears?
ALL CONSPIRATORS Let him die for’t.
ALL PEOPLE Tear him to pieces! Do it presently! He
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killed my son! My daughter! He killed my cousin
Marcus! He killed my father!
2 LORD Peace, ho! no outrage, peace!
The man is noble, and his fame folds in
This orb o’th’ earth. His last offences to us
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Shall have judicious hearing. Stand, Aufidius,
And trouble not the peace.
CORIOLANUS O that I had him,
With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe,
To use my lawful sword.
AUFIDIUS Insolent villian!
ALL CONSPIRATORS Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!
[The Conspirators draw, and kill Martius, who falls;
Aufidius stands on him.]
LORDS Hold, hold, hold, hold!
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AUFIDIUS My noble masters, hear me speak.
1 LORD O Tullus!
2 LORD
Thou hast done a deed whereat valour will weep.
3 LORD Tread not upon him. Masters all, be quiet!
Put up your swords.
AUFIDIUS
My lords, when you shall know (as in this rage,
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Provok’d by him, you cannot) the great danger
Which this man’s life did owe you, you’ll rejoice
That he is thus cut off. Please it your honours
To call me to your senate, I’ll deliver
Myself your loyal servant or endure
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Your heaviest censure.
1 LORD Bear from hence his body,
And mourn you for him. Let him be regarded
As the most noble corse that ever herald
Did follow to his urn.
2 LORD His own impatience
Takes from Aufidius a great part of blame.
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Let’s make the best of it.
AUFIDIUS My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three o’th’ chiefest soldiers. I’ll be one.
Beat thou the drum that it speak mournfully;
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
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Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist. Exeunt, bearing the body of Martius.
A dead march sounded.
Cymbeline
Cymbeline is one of the eighteen plays never printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime and first published in the Folio of 1623. On the basis of style and structure, scholars date it about 1610. In 1611, Simon Forman recorded in a commonplace book an account of the plot of ‘Cymbalin’, among several plays he saw at the Globe between April and September, when he died.
Cymbeline is unexpectedly placed in the Folio as the last of the tragedies. Though today the play’s affinities with the other late romances, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, are unmistakable, the Folio editors either struggled to determine the play’s genre or were aware that ‘tragedy with a happy ending’ was recognized by some critics. It is certainly a play in which two central characters die, ghosts appear, Jupiter throws thunderbolts and descends riding upon an eagle, and it lacks overtly comic characters. Dr Johnson’s impatience with its anachronistic mixing of the Rome of the first century BC with sixteenth-century Europe and his notorious reference to the plot’s ‘unresisting imbecility’ reflect his own, and his age’s, lack of sympathy with romantic fictions.
The very incongruities that Johnson scorned are arguably the essence of the play’s vision. The bewildering series of reversals and revelations that permits the play’s three plots to come together in a marvellous conclusion is the apt denouement of what Granville Barker, with fuller sympathy, called the play’s ‘sophisticated artlessness’. In part this is, no doubt, a reflection of a new literary fashion for Italianate tragicomedy represented by such plays as Beaumont and Fletcher’s popular Philaster (1609); but Shakespeare’s use of this experimental form and dramaturgy imbues it with a power that is uniquely his own. Each of the play’s three plot lines – that of Imogen’s love and Posthumus’ jealousy, that of Cymbeline’s long-lost sons and that of Britain’s challenge to the power of Rome – while very different in tone, even perhaps in genre, enacts the same archetypal pattern of innocence-fall-redemption; and each proves the truth of Caius Lucius’ claim: ‘Some falls are means the happier to arise.’ Each originates in Cymbeline’s own misvaluing of a relationship, so that Posthumus and Belarius are exiled from the court, Imogen is threatened with Cloten’s courtship and Britain is isolated from the wider community of the Roman world. In each plot characters move from error to truth, from scepticism to faith, from hatred to love; and each plot, from the individual regeneration of Posthumus, to the royal family reunion and the international reconciliation of Britain and Rome, describes an ever more inclusive circle of harmony.
In the final scene, all comes together. Cymbeline, the least informed figure on stage, faces one discovery after another (one critic counts twenty-five), but all the others also acquire knowledge that redeems the tragic potentialities of the play, and everything of value is restored. Confusion and loss are replaced by clarity and gain; families and nations are reunited and at peace. The comic order, as the soothsayer says of his vision, ‘at this instant / Is full accomplished’. And if here we hear an echo of Christ’s ‘consummatum est’, perhaps it is because the achievement of harmony in the play serves in some measure as a secular analogue to the ‘rarer action’ of salvation history. It can hardly be coincidental that the best known fact about the early British king Cymbeline was that he ruled at the moment of the Incarnation.
On 1 January 1634, the play was performed at court for Charles I, and it was ‘well liked by the king’. From the Restoration onwards, Cymbeline has remained a play better liked in the theatre than in the study. Distressed by inadequate productions of Cymbeline he had seen, George Bernard Shaw notoriously altered the last act. His Cymbeline Refinished (1937) eliminates Jupiter descending on his h
oly eagle, cuts out the heroic actions of Guiderius and Arviragus, and in general recreates the characters and relationships in the manner of Ibsen. His aim was partly critical of what, in his habitual vein of Bardoclastic provocation, he called the ‘tedious … sentimentality’ of the fifth act, but his more serious challenge was to theatre companies to have the courage to stage the full text of it, including Posthumus’ vision. He offered his rewriting as an alternative only to the truncated texts, not the full one.
The Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
CYMBELINE
King of Britain
CLOTEN
son to the Queen by a former husband
POSTHUMUS Leonatus
a gentleman, husband to Imogen
BELARIUS
a banished lord, disguised under the name of Morgan
GUIDERIUS
son to Cymbeline, disguised under the name of Polydore, supposed son to Morgan
ARVIRAGUS
son to Cymbeline, disguised under the name of Cadwal, supposed son to Morgan
PHILARIO
friend to Posthumus, Italian
IACHIMO
friend to Philario, Italian
Caius LUCIUS
general of the Roman forces
PISANIO
servant to Posthumus
CORNELIUS
a physician
Philarmonus, a SOOTHSAYER
Roman CAPTAIN
Two British CAPTAINS
FRENCHMAN
friend to Philario
TWO LORDS
of Cymbeline’s Court
TWO GENTLEMEN
of the same
TWO GAOLERS
QUEEN
wife to Cymbeline
IMOGEN
daughter to Cymbeline by a former Queen
Helen, a LADY
attending on Imogen
apparitions
Lords, Ladies, Roman Senators, Tribunes, a Dutchman, a Spaniard, Musicians, Officers, Captains, Soldiers, Messengers and other Attendants.
Cymbeline
1.1 Enter two Gentlemen.
1 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’s.
2 GENTLEMAN But what’s the matter?
1 GENTLEMAN
His daughter, and the heir of’s kingdom (whom
He purpos’d to his wife’s sole son – a widow
5
That late he married) hath referr’d herself
Unto a poor but worthy gentleman. She’s wedded,
Her husband banish’d; she imprison’d, all
Is outward sorrow, though I think the king
Be touch’d at very heart.
2 GENTLEMAN None but the king?
10
1 GENTLEMAN
He that hath lost her too: so is the queen,
That most desir’d 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 at the thing they scowl at.
2 GENTLEMAN And why so?
15
1 GENTLEMAN
He that hath miss’d 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 banish’d) is a creature such
As, to seek through the regions of the earth
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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.
2 GENTLEMAN You speak him far.
1 GENTLEMAN
I do extend him, sir, within himself,
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Crush him together, rather than unfold
His measure duly.
2 GENTLEMAN What’s his name and birth?
1 GENTLEMAN
I cannot delve him to the root: his father
Was call’d Sicilius, who did join his honour
Against the Romans with Cassibelan,
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But had his titles by Tenantius, whom
He served with glory and admired success:
So gain’d the sur-addition Leonatus:
And had (besides this gentleman in question)
Two other sons, who in the wars o’th’ time
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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) deceas’d
As he was born. The king he takes the babe
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To his protection, calls him Posthumus Leonatus,
Breeds him, and makes him of his bed-chamber,
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 minister’d,
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And in’s spring became a harvest: liv’d in court
(Which rare it is to do) most prais’d, most lov’d;
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,
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(For whom he now is banish’d) her own price
Proclaims how she esteem’d him; and his virtue
By her election may be truly read
What kind of man he is.
2 GENTLEMAN I honour him,
Even out of your report. But pray you tell me,
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Is she sole child to th’ king?
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 103
