Poisoned Shakespeare: Cymbeline’s Fairy Tale Contaminants
Claire Peterson
Contamination characterizes the fairy tale genre. Form and cultural and historical context poison tales with distinguishing qualities. Written versions of the tales contaminate their oral precursors, and even Disney has participated in poisoning consumers of fairy tales by moving them from the page to the screen in aestheticized and anesthetized versions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1957). I will argue that this process of contamination parallels Shakespeare’s characteristic emulation in Cymbeline, a curiously polluted tale of British and anachronistic Roman history with poisoned characters and elements interwoven throughout. In doing so, Shakespeare highlights the simultaneously creative and destructive artistic process, one that pervades both oral and literary realms, most especially the stage, and poisons fiction with reality. The use of contaminating gestures in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is a manifestation of the emulative process: simultaneously creative and destructive, one that confounds and fact with imagination, not to diminish, but to suggest that both can exist within and enrich the flavor of each other.
In his process of contaminating tales, Shakespeare also mixes the oral with the literary. This is demonstrated in the importance of text in the play and also at the meta-theatrical level, with both writing and performance as central to the success of a dramatic work. As Tolkien asserts, “If we pause, not merely to note that such old elements have been preserved, but to think how they have been preserved, we must conclude, I think, that it has happened, often, if not always, precisely because of this literary effect...The things that are there must often have been retained (or inserted) because the oral narrators, instinctively or unconsciously, felt their literary ‘significance’” (11). Shakespeare sustains the fairy tale’s elements because of their literary significance, but also because of their ability to reach across classes, affecting and discussing subconscious desire.
While contemporary audiences are not always as familiar with fairy tales, early modern audiences would have been very familiar with the archetypes that Shakespeare emulates. Many critics argue that Shakespeare, in all his emulative genius, would not have left out fairy tales from the material he borrowed because
"he recognised and utilised the potent emotional dramas such tales encode, too. Fairy tales may initially attract their audiences by benign entertaining, but they maintain rapt listeners by connecting with each member on an individual and emotional level. In drawing on fairy tales, then, Shakespeare was also evoking their rich emotional and personal resonances. This allowed him to add layers of subtle meaning to his plays, and to connect with audience on a private, perhaps subconscious level." (Rawnsley 146)
Cymbeline can be seen as an extreme experiment in the sense that this passage suggests. Shakespeare tests the limits of the genre by incorporating so many fantastical elements into the play, while still incorporating a focus on the historical, if anachronistic, translation of empire. In addition, he uses the fairy tales to pollute the public sphere of the theatre with the private sphere of the fairy tale realm. This is manifested in Cymbeline in the contamination of the private romance with the political dimension that will be discussed later.
Cymbeline follows three interwoven plot lines and the mixing of history, romance, and fairy tales at first appears problematic. The romantic aspects of the play render the events surrounding Imogen and Posthumus’s marriage a special kind of narrative quality in the play because it is with the romance that Shakespeare begins his play. Cymbeline opens with a discussion between the First and Second Gentlemen who provide the summary of the action of the plot in media res. Shakespeare chooses to begin the play with Imogen, the king’s “daughter, and the heir of ‘s kingdom” (1.1.4). Likewise, in the recounting of events at the end of the play—an oral tale within a dramatic within a literary history of empire—it is with Imogen that the story starts again as Iachimo explains to the king, “Your daughter’s chastity--there it begins” (5.6.179). This frames the story around the romance, specifically centralized around Imogen and her sexuality. Iachimo’s oral retelling also mirrors the history of fairy tales intended to teach young women about the world around them.
While the romance begins the play, it is still poisoned by the multiplicity of genre, contributing to a complex but interwoven structure. The Posthumus and Imogen’s romance cannot be separated from their political sphere, nor can it be separated from the discovery of the Arviragus and Guiderius. Because of this intertwining complexity that appears irreconcilably, audiences are invited to practice what Catherine Belsey calls “cognitive dissonance”, detaling that “Many people, and, indeed, many cultures practise cognitive dissonance, believing and not believing at the same time” (86). Shakespeare asks his audience to practice this paradox as well, perhaps to an extreme in the ‘much-ado-about-everything’ of Cymbeline.
This paradox of belief is the foundation for Shakespeare’s play. Audiences of all time periods would accept their unbelief of the performativity of the play, knowing that it is not “real,” but accepting is as a means to appreciate the play and enjoy the dramatic realm. As Belsey acknowledges, “literal belief is not a condition of enjoyment”, in fact, the realm of the stage is especially suited to the enjoyable and illusory aspects of life (86). Shakespeare’s stage is the ideal medium for a mixing of reality and fiction, precisely because it seeks to bring to life in a tangible way the fictive content of storytelling. In order for both contemporary and early modern audiences to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays, they have to allow for a contamination of fiction and reality. This is the experiment of Shakespeare in Cymbeline’s mixing of spheres.
The fantasy elements of fairy tales often lead readers astray. Unfamiliarity with fairy tales creates the present difficulty of appreciating Cymbeline. Because contemporary audiences are more familiar with Disney’s cartoon animated forms, it is easy to forget that these tales stem from oral and literary traditions, one that does not always wield the idealized aesthetic of princesses and gowns. In fact, many fairy tale archetypes are categorized by sinister undertones hidden in fantastical elements and metaphors. It is possible that this is the reason for which the tales have been relegated to the nursery. The association with children perhaps means to some that the tales are devalued, lesser. This disregards the aptitude of fairy tales to discuss both fantasy and reality at the same time, woven within each other.
The quality of fairy tales “allowed [Shakespeare] to connect with his audience on an intimate, perhaps subconscious level” (Rawnsley 141). While the classical source texts utilized by Shakespeare in his adaptation, interpretation, and emulation of history and legend provide a large portion of the material of the plays, it is possible to analyze fairy tales as just as pervasive of an influence on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. It is also possible to see this inclusion of fairy tales as a contaminating gesture, mixing oral stories of the common people with classical, literary sources.
In the fairy tale elements of the play, Shakespeare invites his audience to believe and not believe at the same time, to practice Belsey’s notion of “cognitive dissonance”. This duality does not necessarily value fiction and reality disproportionally, but instead it discusses that the imaginative and the historical can exist simultaneously within each other. As Tolkien asserts, fairy tale fantasy can exists alongside realism:
"Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason: and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were even in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion". (18)
Applied to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, this means that the very presence of fairy tale and historical elements heightens the perception of both genres. In this contamination, Shakespeare comments upon the richness of both together, and a clear distinction is necessary to avoid Tolkien’s “Morbid Delusion.”
Tolkien also alludes to the necessity of considering the entirety of the story instead of breaking it into its individual parts, stating “Such studies are, however, scientific (at least in intent), they are the pursuit of folklorists of anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. A perfectly legitimate procedure in itself--but ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of a story (as a thing told in its entirety) has often led such inquirers into strange judgments” (6). The nine episodes of the Snow White archetype, “origin (birth of the heroine), jealousy, expulsion, adoption, renewed jealousy, death, exhibition, resuscitation, and resolution,” are emulated and contaminated in the events of Imogen’s plot line (Tatar 74). In the spirit of Tolkien’s anti-structural analysis notion, I will not attempt to discuss the tales in terms of a more scientific approach by matching up exactly the skeletons of the plot. Especially because of the contaminated nature of the play, it is necessary to consider Cymbeline as a whole, although it appears disparate.
In order to explore this contamination, it is necessary to identify key elements of the fairy tale that are manifested in Cymbeline. As Belsey asserts in her discussion of the fairy tale connections of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play, “takes its own world of magic seriously, without asking its audience to believe in fairies. Instead, its creatures of fantasy have the effect of deconstructing the conventional opposition between fact and fiction, reality and drama” (86-87). Accepting that this can also be applied to Cymbeline, it requires that the influence of fairy tales upon the play be considered along with the classical source texts. In the Snow White archetype, poison is the key ingredient. To compare the play to a literary version of Snow White, early modern recordings are scarce. Recorded in his 1634 collection of fairy tales The Pentamarone, Giambattista Basile’s “The Young Slave” evidences several literal and metaphorical poisonings that comprise the plot and relate the characters. While the printed tale is not a version that Shakespeare would have access to, the supposition remains that the oral story was a more-widely disseminated precursor. In this early modern version, first printed about thirty years after Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Basile’s emulation of the Snow White archetype demonstrates an interest in the body politic, specifically in regards to poison or contaminants.
In Basile’s tale, Lilla, the sister of a Baron of Selvascura, is playing with her friends in a garden and they have a competition to see who can jump over a rose without hitting it. Lilla is the only girl who is able to jump clean over it. However, one of the leaves falls and she has to swallow it before anyone sees so she can still win the prize (Basile 80). While this exchange seems innocent enough, the “envelope” of adult theme is opened a short while later, three days to be exact, when Lilla realizes she is pregnant. One of the fairies she runs to for help trips and accidentally puts a spell on her daughter Lisa. When Lisa, at the age of seven, appears to have died from a comb getting stuck in her hair, she is put inside seven caskets made of crystal. When Lilla dies, poisoned by “her grief [that] brought her to her grave,” the Baron is left in charge of the seven crystal caskets (80). At the linguistic level, a contamination of Lilla’s name can be read in naming her daughter Lisa, and the ingestion of the leaf simultaneously realizes the theme of contamination and the metaphorization of sexuality characteristic of fairy tales.
Imogen and her various suitors, especially given the layers of possible morals attached to her own plot line within the larger play, closely resemble the warning signs interwoven in fairy tales designed to teach young women about sexual predators. Similarly, Imogen’s apparent death and resuscitation, especially involving a poison or sleeping draft given by the names “Queen,” perhaps paralleling the infamous poisoned apple or contaminated cake in the archetype.
Iachimo’s notion of the Imogen as “one of the fair’st that [he has] looked upon— ” is remarkably similar to the common description of Snow White as the fairest of them all (2.4.31). Further, Posthumus’s subsequent interruption is one of underlying jealousy. He declares that she is “therewithal the best, or let her beauty / Look through a casement to allure false hearts, / And be false with them” (2.4.32-34). Punning on the importance of clothing and appearance as a symbol of character, Imogen’s position as “sole child to th’ King” means that she is especially vulnerable to the manipulation of her father and stepmother for political gain (1.1.56).
Similarly, the importance of Imogen’s physical beauty is emphasized when she encounters her long lost brothers and Belarius in the cave. She is still considered quite beautiful even though she is dressed as a man, and Belarius even mistakes her for a fairy:
"BELARIUS. [looking into the cave]: Stay, come not it.
But that it eats our victuals I should think
Here were a fairy.
GUIDERIUS.
What’s the matter, sit?
BELARIUS.
By Jupiter, an angel—or, if not,
An earthly paragon. Behold divineness
No elder than a boy
Enter Imogen [from the cave, dressed as a man]
IMOGEN.
Good master, harm me not". (3.6.39-44)
Highlighting the mixing of realms that complicates the play, Belarius’s description of Imogen as “an earthly paragon” conflates her with the fairy realm and emphasizes the importance of appearance. In addition, the setting for this scene indicates a metaphorization of female sexuality in the symbol of the cave, mixing public and private spheres, and contaminating family relations.
In “The Young Slave” the Baroness begins “to feel suspicious, and impelled by jealousy and consumed by curiosity, which is woman’s first attribute,” and seeks out the locked chamber while her husband is out hunting. She finds the caskets that inexplicably grew as Lisa did and wakes Lisa up by removing the comb from her hair. Lisa had mistaken the Baroness for her own mother, paralleling the mistake Imogen makes upon seeing the headless body of Cloten as Posthumus. The Baroness beats her until she is unrecognizable, “blackening her eyes and making her mouth look as if she had eaten raw pigeons” (81). The Baroness’s violent actions against Imogen’s appearance can be seen as an attempt to contaminate the image of which she is jealous, polluting the relationship on both literal and figurative levels.
Further, both Lisa and the stepmother, in the form of her aunt, are contaminants to the “natural” family. The antidote is to satisfy the jealousy by ridding her and the father of Snow White with, most appropriately, poison. From the very start of the play, Shakespeare establishes the theme of a contaminated family sphere in the disruption of the King and Queen’s wishes for Imogen’s marriage to Cloten. This is paralleled in the very beginning of the play in the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, the latter who is of lower status than the former. Using physical objects, one that metaphorize female sexuality, the couple attempts to not only broadcast their love to others but keep it in tact.
Arguably, it is this notion of contamination that puts some critics off to the play. I would argue however that contamination is a dysphemistic way of discussing emulation. Shakespeare’s more widely accepted plays often receive praise because they emulate celebrated historical and mythological works. One of the most engaging elements of Shakespeare's Roman plays is their emulative quality. Much of the material that comprises these plays is borrowed from other sources and reworked, or surpassed, in the process of creating the stories for the stage. Overt allusions and the adoption of plot structure of written works such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Ovid's Metamorphoses are central to Shakespeare’s works. From blatant plot thievery and reliance upon the classical texts to more subtle adaptations and allusions, Shakespeare places himself in a long tradition of recycling and refashioning history, myth, and legend. The classical sources provide ample material for emulation, similarly, fairy and folk tales contemporary to Shakespeare are another influence on his works, one that is more difficult to trace due to its largely unrecorded, oral tradition.
In its poisoning of genres, Cymbeline is a tale of what happens when human beings cannot distinguish reality from slander pollutes. The communication that passes between the characters in the form of letters is evidence of a formal contamination of the dramatic realm, confusing them as they search for realism and fact in the wrong places. Posthumus relies too heavily on the physical reality of the ring stolen by Iachimo and the “real” evidence he has of the Italian’s sexual relations with Imogen without considering the possibility of slander. What Posthumus does consider are the reasons behind Iachimo’s possession of the bracelet: “Maybe she plucked it off / To send it to me” (2.4.103-4). However, Posthumus disproportionately values the evidence and allows Iachimo to manipulate him by asking “She writes so to you, doth she?” (2.4.105). In this, audiences understand Tolkien’s problem of “Morbid Delusion”, or characters functioning in a world where they are unable to distinguish the fantasy of slander from the reality of articulated truth. Here, Shakespeare comments upon the distinction between reality and fiction and the danger of mixing the two.
In examining the parallel structure of the archetype and Cymbeline, specifically with respect to Imogen’s metaphorical, or arguably literal, rape, it is possible to understand the dimension of yet another woman in Shakespeare’s tradition of ravished heroines. As Ciara Rawnsley notes in her exploration “Behind the Happily-Ever-After”, Shakespeare’s “All’s Well, then, is a play where extremely ‘adult’ subjects, like pursuing a sex object and losing one’s virginity, are placed inside an ‘envelope’ that seems to involve more child-like narrative expectations. The clash is not between realism and fairy tale, in that case, but as a fairy tale, between adult subjects and child-like narrative expectations.” (149) The concept of “adult” content enveloped in “child-like narrative expectations” is also central to the appreciation of Cymbeline.
Rape, an “extremely ‘adult’ subject,” is placed inside the “envelope” of the Imogen’s bedroom. This is played out in a few distinct layers: the metaphorization of female genitalia in the form of the trunk and the literary contamination of Imogen’s body. Focusing specifically on a self-aware gesture of aligning Imogen with a literary history, Act II Scene II provides a pivotal point of examination in both the play itself and the analysis of fairy tale elements knit into Cymbeline. The imposition of Ovid’s tale of Tereus and Philomel as Imogen’s “bedtime story” intentionally creates confusion about the heroine’s identity, a theme that will continue to develop as Imogen disguises herself as a boy. Ambiguously referring to either the character in the book and/or Imogen when locating “Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up” (2.2.45-46), Along with the comparison of himself to Tarquin, Iachimo aligns Imogen to a literary history of susceptible female heroines, vulnerable to the sexual exploitations of male predators. Participating in the unfortunate victimization of Lucrece, Philomela, and Lavinia (Titus). Here, Shakespeare mixes classical sources into the story of Imogen, perhaps citing the relationship of fairy tales to the discussion of sinister realities.
Even peaceful sleep is contaminated with violence and fairy tale imagery. When “Sleep hath seized [her] wholly,” Imogen calls upon the protection of the gods “From fairies and the tempters of the night” (2.2.7-9). This opening description and Giacomo’s subsequent portrayal functions to establish not only Imogen’s character as a “sleeping beauty”, a subgenre of the Snow White archetype, but also further the comparison of the two heroines. Iachimo’s description of Imogen’s features closely parallels the red and white motif apparent in the Snow White archetype:
"How bravely though becom’st they bed! Fresh lily,
And white than the sheets! That I might touch,
But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagoned,
How dearly they do’t! ‘Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus." (2.2.15-19)
While Iachimo’s description of the sleeping Imogen is subversively violent in its blazon form, it establishes Imogen’s physical appearance as that of a Snow White figure, with skin as white as her sheets, and lips that are the color of rubies. Imogen’s breathing is given an interesting euphemistic ability to contaminate the air, one that “perfumes the chamber thus.” Her breath is not described as sweet at all, but simply “thus”. This introduces a sense of nuanced ambiguity, and, in conjunction with Iachimo’s subsequent blazonry, confuses the sleeping but alive Imogen with a contaminated body. The curious ambiguity of the circumstances of Iachimo’s violation of Imogen’s private sphere must then be interpreted both figuratively and literally, not believed and believed at the same time.
Similarly, Iachimo notes a sense of enclosure while he is describing the coloring of her eyes, “now canopied / Under these windows, white and azure-laced” (2.2.21-22). The “blue of heaven’s own tinct” can be seen as the tint of Imogen’s dead skin and the enclosure can be read as the iconic crystal chest that puts Snow White on display (2.2.23). Here, it is clear that Shakespeare relies upon both the idealization of the female body displayed as well as the coloring that suggests death or disease. Shakespeare emulates the archetypal beauty of Snow White in Imogen’s physical description, yet contaminates it with details that reinforce the literal as well as the figurative aspects of the scene. While the language is intended to be celebratory, it is almost as if Iachimo’s words contaminate or defile Imogen’s innocence precisely because he has invaded her private sphere.
The events of this scene operate as a metaphorical death in the archetype’s plot, transforming the tale’s command made to the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring her lungs and liver back as proof to a more sexually explicit--if not entirely literal rape of Imogen in her sleep, bringing back written or recorded knowledge of her body as proof of her ravishment. Here, Shakespeare contaminates Ovid’s classical source text with fairy tale elements from the Snow White archetype.
In her book Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire, Heather James directly discusses the process of contamination with specific regard to Imogen waking to see Cloten’s headless body and taking it to be Posthumus’:
“The image, which functions similarly to the pit in Titus Andronicus, confounds distinct figures, roles, and genres: Posthumus and Cloten; Aeneas and Priam; imperial origins and decline; early Britain, imperial Rome, and early modern Italy; comedy and tragedy. It confounds these distinctions, moreover, at the very moment that it conjures the specter of a powerful but degenerate female sexuality.” (172)
As she smears her face with blood, Imogen contaminates herself, and along with, the image of her as pure and untainted. The imagery here parallels the description given of Lisa in “The Young Slave” after waking and being severely beaten beyond recognition by the Baroness. This not only emulates the Snow White archetype but also discusses the importance of and contamination of appearance in the play. Lisa no longer appears the niece that she is; Imogen no longer appears to be the same pure female being after smearing her face with blood. The transformation is not only a form of contamination, but also confounds the distinction between identities, and subsequently realistic understanding, in the play.
Just as the jealous Queen in Cymbeline attempts to poison Imogen, the Baroness reacts violently to Lisa and becomes “as bitter as a slave, as angry as a bitch with a litter of pups, and as venomous as a snake” (Basile 81). Here, Basile alludes to the motherly instincts of the Baroness in comparing her to a “bitch with a litter of pups” and also conflates the poisoning quality of jealousy towards Lisa. Central to the Snow White archetype, the relationship between the Snow White figure and her mother or stepmother is generally a tricky one. The stepmother is consumed by jealous upon encountering Snow White—whether that is because of her beauty or her presence alone, the context of the tale will tell. In Cymbeline, it is the political motivation of the Queen that causes her to be jealous of Imogen. She would like her own son Cloten to become heir to the throne. This inextricably links the romance elements of the play with the politics of the historical genre because the conquest for Imogen’s hand is brought into the political sphere.
Curiously, the play’s title character goes relatively undiscussed in Parker’s exploration of the westering of empire. Instead of focusing on Cymbeline, the discussion is centralized around Posthumus. Although he is undoubtedly similar to Virgil’s Aeneas, the play’s title begs the question of why it is not entitled Posthumus. As the romance of the play seems more prominent a feature than the translation of empire, that the play is not entitled Posthumus begs the question of why its title character seems so absent. In discussing the archetype, “To account for the remarkable narrative stability and cultural durability of ‘Snow White,’ most critics point to the tale’s powerful staging of mother/daughter conflicts. Bruno Bettelheim defines those conflicts as oedipal and asserts that they are ‘left to our imagination’ because ‘the person for whose love the two are in competition is never mentioned” (Tatar 75). Shakespeare emulates the importance of the relationship between Imogen and the Queen, however, he contaminates the notion of Cymbeline as absent. At the end of the play, the focus is still on the King, who has the power to do homage to the Romans and the stature to have the last word. However, his voice is collective. Although he states, “my peace we will begin” is “We” that had been “dissuaded by our wicked queen” (5.6.459, 464). It is possible to see this as a complication of the title character’s prominence in the story, drawing attention again to the wicked stepmother figure and her significance in the story.
The resolution of Cymbeline looks curiously like the happy ending of “The Young Slave”, when the marriage between Posthumus and Imogen is accepted. It closely parallels the actions of the Baron, who “gave his niece a handsome husband of her own choice” (Basile 83).
In Cymbeline, “‘All is outward sorrow’” at the opening of the story, but its close it attuned to the harmony of peace and happiness; and the play thus satisfies the essential conditions of “Romantic Comedy,” or more properly of Shakespearean “Tragi-Comedy,”--life’s commingling of tears and laughter, sorrow and joy; joy triumphant in the end” (Shakespeare viii).
This description presents the play as much simpler that is actually is, as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is characterized by complex and arguably irreconcilable contradiction in its layers of historical and mythological parallel. Not even temporality is protected from contamination in Shakespeare the play, and the mixing of genres is also celebrated. Imogen and Posthumus’s relationship is in a state of perpetual discord contaminated by the discrepancy in social position, described as the king’s daughter who “hath referred herself / Unto a poor but worth gentleman” (1.1.6-7). In this backwards translation of power, Shakespeare explores the translation of people through class, a concept that is interestingly discussed in Patricia Parker’s “Anachronistic Cymbeline”, noting that the central anachronism of the play is the translation of empire backwards. While this does not at first appear to connect to the romance plot line of the play, upon second glance, it mirrors the gesture of Imogen marrying someone who is beneath her stature in social status.
Patricia Parker’s “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline” addresses Shakespeare’s later Roman play, considering the work as a romance, one linked with epic history and discussing the central anachronism that upsets the play. Parker relies on G. Wilson Knight’s recognition and discussion of the political and historical aspects of the play in his work The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1948). His “original perception [is] that in this play we have to do with history and romance at once” (Parker 207). This allows her to argue that “the evocation of a specific imperial text in Cymbeline’s romance plot not only adds to the sense of ‘much ado about everything’ this late Shakespearean romance is notorious for but makes its central anachronism something very different from either bungling error or historical oversight” (190). Again, the contamination, in this instance of genre and temporality, is seen to be not a mistake, but rather an intentional decision on Shakespeare’s part.
The incongruous nature of the text due to its “looking back”, Parker argues, is not what some scholars have proclaimed is merely “a quaint blunder to be ascribed to poetic license, to carelessness, or to a distorted sense of history,” but rather, Shakespeare’s temporal disjunction in the form of anachronistic elements is intentional (190). She instead proposes Cymbeline as “a markedly different perspective on this crossing of times, one that would involve deliberate achronicity” (190). This “looking back” invites audiences to do the same. What they will find in Cymbeline is the mixing of fairy tales and history and the contamination of reality with imagination.
While Parker’s discussion of the similarities of Virgil’s epic and Shakespeare’s imperial romance is thorough, some elements of her argument are unclear. Though it may not have been her intention to trace all three plot lines, Parker seems to focus mainly on the romance plot line of the play, while recognizing the anachronistic struggle for tribute to be paid to Rome. Though she discusses the brothers in terms of their location in pastoral Wales, their events appear to constitute a lesser part of the play’s three intertwining chains of events, and in turn Parker deemphasizes their role in relationship to the rest of the play and its characters, reinforcing a notion of Imogen and Posthumus’ relationships as the more prominent story line.
Another question that arises from Parker’s argument is the tension between the intuitive central character of Cymbeline and the person her criticism implies is actually the focus. Although Parker points out that Shakespeare participates in “the familiar Virgilian instance of imitatio with a difference”, she does not discuss in detail this emulation on the level of the emendation of the soothsayer’s prophecy from Act IV Scene 2 to Act V Scene 5 (192). The original prophecy becomes contaminated by its revision. Shakespeare gestures towards the emulative (contaminant) process of stories. It is important to note that the soothsayer is instructed to “Read, and declare the meaning,” which differs from the original speaking of the prophecy (5.6.435). The emendation of the soothsayer’s prophecy to fit the circumstances at the end of the play is a curious parallel to the alteration of tales across time periods and cultures, especially in terms of their transcription from oral to literary tales.
Unlike Tolkien, who determines that “To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatists as Shakespeare,” the assertion that the dramatic space is one that necessitates duality means that fairy tale elements are just as adaptable to the stage as histories and tragedies (17). Cymbeline, though it is much-ado-about-everything, is not framed as a dream, but is presented as real. Tolkien discusses the distinction of truth and fiction in terms of how the story is framed: “It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that is should be presented as ‘true.’ […] since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’ it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or illusion” (5) This demonstrates that fairy tales and fantasy can indeed exist dually with reality if their presentation is a realistic one. Though Tolkien does not see the stage as an adequate frame for fairy tales, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline presents fiction within the historical frame of the translation of empire. The stage, like Tolkien’s notion of fantasy, has a simultaneous familiarity and “arresting strangeness” because of its visual presentation blended with the imaginative realm (16). It is the contamination across genres that asks audiences to consider what it means to mix fairy tales with history and fairy tale.
In all of its rich and irreconcilable complexity, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline cannot be entirely reduced to the archetypal structure of Snow White and the paralleled physical appearance that connects the two heroines “Upon a time” (5.6.153). However, Shakespeare invites audiences to consider the effect of the experimental play in the form of contaminating genres, classical and folk, and reality with imagination. What the fairy tale elements in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline are concerned with is not with asking audiences to believe in the impossible disjunction of the play, but instead to enjoy the flavor of the elements that contrast and enrich the others.
Works Cited
Basile, Giambattista. “The Young Slave.” The Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. 80-83. Print.
Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus, eds. Cymbeline. The Norton Shakespeare. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2008. 1229-1320. Print.
James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Parker, Patricia. “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline.” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. George M. Logan, Gordon Teskey. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1989. 189-207. Print.
Rawnsley, Ciara. “Behind the Happily-Ever-After: Shakespeare’s Use of Fairy Tales and All’s Well That Ends Well.” Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 2 (2013): 141-158. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
Shakespeare, William, Jenny E. Burdick, and Gollancz. The Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Bigelow, Smith, 1909. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.
Tolkien, J. R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. West Chester University, March-April 2005. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
In his process of contaminating tales, Shakespeare also mixes the oral with the literary. This is demonstrated in the importance of text in the play and also at the meta-theatrical level, with both writing and performance as central to the success of a dramatic work. As Tolkien asserts, “If we pause, not merely to note that such old elements have been preserved, but to think how they have been preserved, we must conclude, I think, that it has happened, often, if not always, precisely because of this literary effect...The things that are there must often have been retained (or inserted) because the oral narrators, instinctively or unconsciously, felt their literary ‘significance’” (11). Shakespeare sustains the fairy tale’s elements because of their literary significance, but also because of their ability to reach across classes, affecting and discussing subconscious desire.
While contemporary audiences are not always as familiar with fairy tales, early modern audiences would have been very familiar with the archetypes that Shakespeare emulates. Many critics argue that Shakespeare, in all his emulative genius, would not have left out fairy tales from the material he borrowed because
"he recognised and utilised the potent emotional dramas such tales encode, too. Fairy tales may initially attract their audiences by benign entertaining, but they maintain rapt listeners by connecting with each member on an individual and emotional level. In drawing on fairy tales, then, Shakespeare was also evoking their rich emotional and personal resonances. This allowed him to add layers of subtle meaning to his plays, and to connect with audience on a private, perhaps subconscious level." (Rawnsley 146)
Cymbeline can be seen as an extreme experiment in the sense that this passage suggests. Shakespeare tests the limits of the genre by incorporating so many fantastical elements into the play, while still incorporating a focus on the historical, if anachronistic, translation of empire. In addition, he uses the fairy tales to pollute the public sphere of the theatre with the private sphere of the fairy tale realm. This is manifested in Cymbeline in the contamination of the private romance with the political dimension that will be discussed later.
Cymbeline follows three interwoven plot lines and the mixing of history, romance, and fairy tales at first appears problematic. The romantic aspects of the play render the events surrounding Imogen and Posthumus’s marriage a special kind of narrative quality in the play because it is with the romance that Shakespeare begins his play. Cymbeline opens with a discussion between the First and Second Gentlemen who provide the summary of the action of the plot in media res. Shakespeare chooses to begin the play with Imogen, the king’s “daughter, and the heir of ‘s kingdom” (1.1.4). Likewise, in the recounting of events at the end of the play—an oral tale within a dramatic within a literary history of empire—it is with Imogen that the story starts again as Iachimo explains to the king, “Your daughter’s chastity--there it begins” (5.6.179). This frames the story around the romance, specifically centralized around Imogen and her sexuality. Iachimo’s oral retelling also mirrors the history of fairy tales intended to teach young women about the world around them.
While the romance begins the play, it is still poisoned by the multiplicity of genre, contributing to a complex but interwoven structure. The Posthumus and Imogen’s romance cannot be separated from their political sphere, nor can it be separated from the discovery of the Arviragus and Guiderius. Because of this intertwining complexity that appears irreconcilably, audiences are invited to practice what Catherine Belsey calls “cognitive dissonance”, detaling that “Many people, and, indeed, many cultures practise cognitive dissonance, believing and not believing at the same time” (86). Shakespeare asks his audience to practice this paradox as well, perhaps to an extreme in the ‘much-ado-about-everything’ of Cymbeline.
This paradox of belief is the foundation for Shakespeare’s play. Audiences of all time periods would accept their unbelief of the performativity of the play, knowing that it is not “real,” but accepting is as a means to appreciate the play and enjoy the dramatic realm. As Belsey acknowledges, “literal belief is not a condition of enjoyment”, in fact, the realm of the stage is especially suited to the enjoyable and illusory aspects of life (86). Shakespeare’s stage is the ideal medium for a mixing of reality and fiction, precisely because it seeks to bring to life in a tangible way the fictive content of storytelling. In order for both contemporary and early modern audiences to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays, they have to allow for a contamination of fiction and reality. This is the experiment of Shakespeare in Cymbeline’s mixing of spheres.
The fantasy elements of fairy tales often lead readers astray. Unfamiliarity with fairy tales creates the present difficulty of appreciating Cymbeline. Because contemporary audiences are more familiar with Disney’s cartoon animated forms, it is easy to forget that these tales stem from oral and literary traditions, one that does not always wield the idealized aesthetic of princesses and gowns. In fact, many fairy tale archetypes are categorized by sinister undertones hidden in fantastical elements and metaphors. It is possible that this is the reason for which the tales have been relegated to the nursery. The association with children perhaps means to some that the tales are devalued, lesser. This disregards the aptitude of fairy tales to discuss both fantasy and reality at the same time, woven within each other.
The quality of fairy tales “allowed [Shakespeare] to connect with his audience on an intimate, perhaps subconscious level” (Rawnsley 141). While the classical source texts utilized by Shakespeare in his adaptation, interpretation, and emulation of history and legend provide a large portion of the material of the plays, it is possible to analyze fairy tales as just as pervasive of an influence on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. It is also possible to see this inclusion of fairy tales as a contaminating gesture, mixing oral stories of the common people with classical, literary sources.
In the fairy tale elements of the play, Shakespeare invites his audience to believe and not believe at the same time, to practice Belsey’s notion of “cognitive dissonance”. This duality does not necessarily value fiction and reality disproportionally, but instead it discusses that the imaginative and the historical can exist simultaneously within each other. As Tolkien asserts, fairy tale fantasy can exists alongside realism:
"Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason: and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were even in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion". (18)
Applied to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, this means that the very presence of fairy tale and historical elements heightens the perception of both genres. In this contamination, Shakespeare comments upon the richness of both together, and a clear distinction is necessary to avoid Tolkien’s “Morbid Delusion.”
Tolkien also alludes to the necessity of considering the entirety of the story instead of breaking it into its individual parts, stating “Such studies are, however, scientific (at least in intent), they are the pursuit of folklorists of anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. A perfectly legitimate procedure in itself--but ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of a story (as a thing told in its entirety) has often led such inquirers into strange judgments” (6). The nine episodes of the Snow White archetype, “origin (birth of the heroine), jealousy, expulsion, adoption, renewed jealousy, death, exhibition, resuscitation, and resolution,” are emulated and contaminated in the events of Imogen’s plot line (Tatar 74). In the spirit of Tolkien’s anti-structural analysis notion, I will not attempt to discuss the tales in terms of a more scientific approach by matching up exactly the skeletons of the plot. Especially because of the contaminated nature of the play, it is necessary to consider Cymbeline as a whole, although it appears disparate.
In order to explore this contamination, it is necessary to identify key elements of the fairy tale that are manifested in Cymbeline. As Belsey asserts in her discussion of the fairy tale connections of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play, “takes its own world of magic seriously, without asking its audience to believe in fairies. Instead, its creatures of fantasy have the effect of deconstructing the conventional opposition between fact and fiction, reality and drama” (86-87). Accepting that this can also be applied to Cymbeline, it requires that the influence of fairy tales upon the play be considered along with the classical source texts. In the Snow White archetype, poison is the key ingredient. To compare the play to a literary version of Snow White, early modern recordings are scarce. Recorded in his 1634 collection of fairy tales The Pentamarone, Giambattista Basile’s “The Young Slave” evidences several literal and metaphorical poisonings that comprise the plot and relate the characters. While the printed tale is not a version that Shakespeare would have access to, the supposition remains that the oral story was a more-widely disseminated precursor. In this early modern version, first printed about thirty years after Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Basile’s emulation of the Snow White archetype demonstrates an interest in the body politic, specifically in regards to poison or contaminants.
In Basile’s tale, Lilla, the sister of a Baron of Selvascura, is playing with her friends in a garden and they have a competition to see who can jump over a rose without hitting it. Lilla is the only girl who is able to jump clean over it. However, one of the leaves falls and she has to swallow it before anyone sees so she can still win the prize (Basile 80). While this exchange seems innocent enough, the “envelope” of adult theme is opened a short while later, three days to be exact, when Lilla realizes she is pregnant. One of the fairies she runs to for help trips and accidentally puts a spell on her daughter Lisa. When Lisa, at the age of seven, appears to have died from a comb getting stuck in her hair, she is put inside seven caskets made of crystal. When Lilla dies, poisoned by “her grief [that] brought her to her grave,” the Baron is left in charge of the seven crystal caskets (80). At the linguistic level, a contamination of Lilla’s name can be read in naming her daughter Lisa, and the ingestion of the leaf simultaneously realizes the theme of contamination and the metaphorization of sexuality characteristic of fairy tales.
Imogen and her various suitors, especially given the layers of possible morals attached to her own plot line within the larger play, closely resemble the warning signs interwoven in fairy tales designed to teach young women about sexual predators. Similarly, Imogen’s apparent death and resuscitation, especially involving a poison or sleeping draft given by the names “Queen,” perhaps paralleling the infamous poisoned apple or contaminated cake in the archetype.
Iachimo’s notion of the Imogen as “one of the fair’st that [he has] looked upon— ” is remarkably similar to the common description of Snow White as the fairest of them all (2.4.31). Further, Posthumus’s subsequent interruption is one of underlying jealousy. He declares that she is “therewithal the best, or let her beauty / Look through a casement to allure false hearts, / And be false with them” (2.4.32-34). Punning on the importance of clothing and appearance as a symbol of character, Imogen’s position as “sole child to th’ King” means that she is especially vulnerable to the manipulation of her father and stepmother for political gain (1.1.56).
Similarly, the importance of Imogen’s physical beauty is emphasized when she encounters her long lost brothers and Belarius in the cave. She is still considered quite beautiful even though she is dressed as a man, and Belarius even mistakes her for a fairy:
"BELARIUS. [looking into the cave]: Stay, come not it.
But that it eats our victuals I should think
Here were a fairy.
GUIDERIUS.
What’s the matter, sit?
BELARIUS.
By Jupiter, an angel—or, if not,
An earthly paragon. Behold divineness
No elder than a boy
Enter Imogen [from the cave, dressed as a man]
IMOGEN.
Good master, harm me not". (3.6.39-44)
Highlighting the mixing of realms that complicates the play, Belarius’s description of Imogen as “an earthly paragon” conflates her with the fairy realm and emphasizes the importance of appearance. In addition, the setting for this scene indicates a metaphorization of female sexuality in the symbol of the cave, mixing public and private spheres, and contaminating family relations.
In “The Young Slave” the Baroness begins “to feel suspicious, and impelled by jealousy and consumed by curiosity, which is woman’s first attribute,” and seeks out the locked chamber while her husband is out hunting. She finds the caskets that inexplicably grew as Lisa did and wakes Lisa up by removing the comb from her hair. Lisa had mistaken the Baroness for her own mother, paralleling the mistake Imogen makes upon seeing the headless body of Cloten as Posthumus. The Baroness beats her until she is unrecognizable, “blackening her eyes and making her mouth look as if she had eaten raw pigeons” (81). The Baroness’s violent actions against Imogen’s appearance can be seen as an attempt to contaminate the image of which she is jealous, polluting the relationship on both literal and figurative levels.
Further, both Lisa and the stepmother, in the form of her aunt, are contaminants to the “natural” family. The antidote is to satisfy the jealousy by ridding her and the father of Snow White with, most appropriately, poison. From the very start of the play, Shakespeare establishes the theme of a contaminated family sphere in the disruption of the King and Queen’s wishes for Imogen’s marriage to Cloten. This is paralleled in the very beginning of the play in the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, the latter who is of lower status than the former. Using physical objects, one that metaphorize female sexuality, the couple attempts to not only broadcast their love to others but keep it in tact.
Arguably, it is this notion of contamination that puts some critics off to the play. I would argue however that contamination is a dysphemistic way of discussing emulation. Shakespeare’s more widely accepted plays often receive praise because they emulate celebrated historical and mythological works. One of the most engaging elements of Shakespeare's Roman plays is their emulative quality. Much of the material that comprises these plays is borrowed from other sources and reworked, or surpassed, in the process of creating the stories for the stage. Overt allusions and the adoption of plot structure of written works such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Ovid's Metamorphoses are central to Shakespeare’s works. From blatant plot thievery and reliance upon the classical texts to more subtle adaptations and allusions, Shakespeare places himself in a long tradition of recycling and refashioning history, myth, and legend. The classical sources provide ample material for emulation, similarly, fairy and folk tales contemporary to Shakespeare are another influence on his works, one that is more difficult to trace due to its largely unrecorded, oral tradition.
In its poisoning of genres, Cymbeline is a tale of what happens when human beings cannot distinguish reality from slander pollutes. The communication that passes between the characters in the form of letters is evidence of a formal contamination of the dramatic realm, confusing them as they search for realism and fact in the wrong places. Posthumus relies too heavily on the physical reality of the ring stolen by Iachimo and the “real” evidence he has of the Italian’s sexual relations with Imogen without considering the possibility of slander. What Posthumus does consider are the reasons behind Iachimo’s possession of the bracelet: “Maybe she plucked it off / To send it to me” (2.4.103-4). However, Posthumus disproportionately values the evidence and allows Iachimo to manipulate him by asking “She writes so to you, doth she?” (2.4.105). In this, audiences understand Tolkien’s problem of “Morbid Delusion”, or characters functioning in a world where they are unable to distinguish the fantasy of slander from the reality of articulated truth. Here, Shakespeare comments upon the distinction between reality and fiction and the danger of mixing the two.
In examining the parallel structure of the archetype and Cymbeline, specifically with respect to Imogen’s metaphorical, or arguably literal, rape, it is possible to understand the dimension of yet another woman in Shakespeare’s tradition of ravished heroines. As Ciara Rawnsley notes in her exploration “Behind the Happily-Ever-After”, Shakespeare’s “All’s Well, then, is a play where extremely ‘adult’ subjects, like pursuing a sex object and losing one’s virginity, are placed inside an ‘envelope’ that seems to involve more child-like narrative expectations. The clash is not between realism and fairy tale, in that case, but as a fairy tale, between adult subjects and child-like narrative expectations.” (149) The concept of “adult” content enveloped in “child-like narrative expectations” is also central to the appreciation of Cymbeline.
Rape, an “extremely ‘adult’ subject,” is placed inside the “envelope” of the Imogen’s bedroom. This is played out in a few distinct layers: the metaphorization of female genitalia in the form of the trunk and the literary contamination of Imogen’s body. Focusing specifically on a self-aware gesture of aligning Imogen with a literary history, Act II Scene II provides a pivotal point of examination in both the play itself and the analysis of fairy tale elements knit into Cymbeline. The imposition of Ovid’s tale of Tereus and Philomel as Imogen’s “bedtime story” intentionally creates confusion about the heroine’s identity, a theme that will continue to develop as Imogen disguises herself as a boy. Ambiguously referring to either the character in the book and/or Imogen when locating “Here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up” (2.2.45-46), Along with the comparison of himself to Tarquin, Iachimo aligns Imogen to a literary history of susceptible female heroines, vulnerable to the sexual exploitations of male predators. Participating in the unfortunate victimization of Lucrece, Philomela, and Lavinia (Titus). Here, Shakespeare mixes classical sources into the story of Imogen, perhaps citing the relationship of fairy tales to the discussion of sinister realities.
Even peaceful sleep is contaminated with violence and fairy tale imagery. When “Sleep hath seized [her] wholly,” Imogen calls upon the protection of the gods “From fairies and the tempters of the night” (2.2.7-9). This opening description and Giacomo’s subsequent portrayal functions to establish not only Imogen’s character as a “sleeping beauty”, a subgenre of the Snow White archetype, but also further the comparison of the two heroines. Iachimo’s description of Imogen’s features closely parallels the red and white motif apparent in the Snow White archetype:
"How bravely though becom’st they bed! Fresh lily,
And white than the sheets! That I might touch,
But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagoned,
How dearly they do’t! ‘Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus." (2.2.15-19)
While Iachimo’s description of the sleeping Imogen is subversively violent in its blazon form, it establishes Imogen’s physical appearance as that of a Snow White figure, with skin as white as her sheets, and lips that are the color of rubies. Imogen’s breathing is given an interesting euphemistic ability to contaminate the air, one that “perfumes the chamber thus.” Her breath is not described as sweet at all, but simply “thus”. This introduces a sense of nuanced ambiguity, and, in conjunction with Iachimo’s subsequent blazonry, confuses the sleeping but alive Imogen with a contaminated body. The curious ambiguity of the circumstances of Iachimo’s violation of Imogen’s private sphere must then be interpreted both figuratively and literally, not believed and believed at the same time.
Similarly, Iachimo notes a sense of enclosure while he is describing the coloring of her eyes, “now canopied / Under these windows, white and azure-laced” (2.2.21-22). The “blue of heaven’s own tinct” can be seen as the tint of Imogen’s dead skin and the enclosure can be read as the iconic crystal chest that puts Snow White on display (2.2.23). Here, it is clear that Shakespeare relies upon both the idealization of the female body displayed as well as the coloring that suggests death or disease. Shakespeare emulates the archetypal beauty of Snow White in Imogen’s physical description, yet contaminates it with details that reinforce the literal as well as the figurative aspects of the scene. While the language is intended to be celebratory, it is almost as if Iachimo’s words contaminate or defile Imogen’s innocence precisely because he has invaded her private sphere.
The events of this scene operate as a metaphorical death in the archetype’s plot, transforming the tale’s command made to the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring her lungs and liver back as proof to a more sexually explicit--if not entirely literal rape of Imogen in her sleep, bringing back written or recorded knowledge of her body as proof of her ravishment. Here, Shakespeare contaminates Ovid’s classical source text with fairy tale elements from the Snow White archetype.
In her book Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire, Heather James directly discusses the process of contamination with specific regard to Imogen waking to see Cloten’s headless body and taking it to be Posthumus’:
“The image, which functions similarly to the pit in Titus Andronicus, confounds distinct figures, roles, and genres: Posthumus and Cloten; Aeneas and Priam; imperial origins and decline; early Britain, imperial Rome, and early modern Italy; comedy and tragedy. It confounds these distinctions, moreover, at the very moment that it conjures the specter of a powerful but degenerate female sexuality.” (172)
As she smears her face with blood, Imogen contaminates herself, and along with, the image of her as pure and untainted. The imagery here parallels the description given of Lisa in “The Young Slave” after waking and being severely beaten beyond recognition by the Baroness. This not only emulates the Snow White archetype but also discusses the importance of and contamination of appearance in the play. Lisa no longer appears the niece that she is; Imogen no longer appears to be the same pure female being after smearing her face with blood. The transformation is not only a form of contamination, but also confounds the distinction between identities, and subsequently realistic understanding, in the play.
Just as the jealous Queen in Cymbeline attempts to poison Imogen, the Baroness reacts violently to Lisa and becomes “as bitter as a slave, as angry as a bitch with a litter of pups, and as venomous as a snake” (Basile 81). Here, Basile alludes to the motherly instincts of the Baroness in comparing her to a “bitch with a litter of pups” and also conflates the poisoning quality of jealousy towards Lisa. Central to the Snow White archetype, the relationship between the Snow White figure and her mother or stepmother is generally a tricky one. The stepmother is consumed by jealous upon encountering Snow White—whether that is because of her beauty or her presence alone, the context of the tale will tell. In Cymbeline, it is the political motivation of the Queen that causes her to be jealous of Imogen. She would like her own son Cloten to become heir to the throne. This inextricably links the romance elements of the play with the politics of the historical genre because the conquest for Imogen’s hand is brought into the political sphere.
Curiously, the play’s title character goes relatively undiscussed in Parker’s exploration of the westering of empire. Instead of focusing on Cymbeline, the discussion is centralized around Posthumus. Although he is undoubtedly similar to Virgil’s Aeneas, the play’s title begs the question of why it is not entitled Posthumus. As the romance of the play seems more prominent a feature than the translation of empire, that the play is not entitled Posthumus begs the question of why its title character seems so absent. In discussing the archetype, “To account for the remarkable narrative stability and cultural durability of ‘Snow White,’ most critics point to the tale’s powerful staging of mother/daughter conflicts. Bruno Bettelheim defines those conflicts as oedipal and asserts that they are ‘left to our imagination’ because ‘the person for whose love the two are in competition is never mentioned” (Tatar 75). Shakespeare emulates the importance of the relationship between Imogen and the Queen, however, he contaminates the notion of Cymbeline as absent. At the end of the play, the focus is still on the King, who has the power to do homage to the Romans and the stature to have the last word. However, his voice is collective. Although he states, “my peace we will begin” is “We” that had been “dissuaded by our wicked queen” (5.6.459, 464). It is possible to see this as a complication of the title character’s prominence in the story, drawing attention again to the wicked stepmother figure and her significance in the story.
The resolution of Cymbeline looks curiously like the happy ending of “The Young Slave”, when the marriage between Posthumus and Imogen is accepted. It closely parallels the actions of the Baron, who “gave his niece a handsome husband of her own choice” (Basile 83).
In Cymbeline, “‘All is outward sorrow’” at the opening of the story, but its close it attuned to the harmony of peace and happiness; and the play thus satisfies the essential conditions of “Romantic Comedy,” or more properly of Shakespearean “Tragi-Comedy,”--life’s commingling of tears and laughter, sorrow and joy; joy triumphant in the end” (Shakespeare viii).
This description presents the play as much simpler that is actually is, as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is characterized by complex and arguably irreconcilable contradiction in its layers of historical and mythological parallel. Not even temporality is protected from contamination in Shakespeare the play, and the mixing of genres is also celebrated. Imogen and Posthumus’s relationship is in a state of perpetual discord contaminated by the discrepancy in social position, described as the king’s daughter who “hath referred herself / Unto a poor but worth gentleman” (1.1.6-7). In this backwards translation of power, Shakespeare explores the translation of people through class, a concept that is interestingly discussed in Patricia Parker’s “Anachronistic Cymbeline”, noting that the central anachronism of the play is the translation of empire backwards. While this does not at first appear to connect to the romance plot line of the play, upon second glance, it mirrors the gesture of Imogen marrying someone who is beneath her stature in social status.
Patricia Parker’s “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline” addresses Shakespeare’s later Roman play, considering the work as a romance, one linked with epic history and discussing the central anachronism that upsets the play. Parker relies on G. Wilson Knight’s recognition and discussion of the political and historical aspects of the play in his work The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1948). His “original perception [is] that in this play we have to do with history and romance at once” (Parker 207). This allows her to argue that “the evocation of a specific imperial text in Cymbeline’s romance plot not only adds to the sense of ‘much ado about everything’ this late Shakespearean romance is notorious for but makes its central anachronism something very different from either bungling error or historical oversight” (190). Again, the contamination, in this instance of genre and temporality, is seen to be not a mistake, but rather an intentional decision on Shakespeare’s part.
The incongruous nature of the text due to its “looking back”, Parker argues, is not what some scholars have proclaimed is merely “a quaint blunder to be ascribed to poetic license, to carelessness, or to a distorted sense of history,” but rather, Shakespeare’s temporal disjunction in the form of anachronistic elements is intentional (190). She instead proposes Cymbeline as “a markedly different perspective on this crossing of times, one that would involve deliberate achronicity” (190). This “looking back” invites audiences to do the same. What they will find in Cymbeline is the mixing of fairy tales and history and the contamination of reality with imagination.
While Parker’s discussion of the similarities of Virgil’s epic and Shakespeare’s imperial romance is thorough, some elements of her argument are unclear. Though it may not have been her intention to trace all three plot lines, Parker seems to focus mainly on the romance plot line of the play, while recognizing the anachronistic struggle for tribute to be paid to Rome. Though she discusses the brothers in terms of their location in pastoral Wales, their events appear to constitute a lesser part of the play’s three intertwining chains of events, and in turn Parker deemphasizes their role in relationship to the rest of the play and its characters, reinforcing a notion of Imogen and Posthumus’ relationships as the more prominent story line.
Another question that arises from Parker’s argument is the tension between the intuitive central character of Cymbeline and the person her criticism implies is actually the focus. Although Parker points out that Shakespeare participates in “the familiar Virgilian instance of imitatio with a difference”, she does not discuss in detail this emulation on the level of the emendation of the soothsayer’s prophecy from Act IV Scene 2 to Act V Scene 5 (192). The original prophecy becomes contaminated by its revision. Shakespeare gestures towards the emulative (contaminant) process of stories. It is important to note that the soothsayer is instructed to “Read, and declare the meaning,” which differs from the original speaking of the prophecy (5.6.435). The emendation of the soothsayer’s prophecy to fit the circumstances at the end of the play is a curious parallel to the alteration of tales across time periods and cultures, especially in terms of their transcription from oral to literary tales.
Unlike Tolkien, who determines that “To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatists as Shakespeare,” the assertion that the dramatic space is one that necessitates duality means that fairy tale elements are just as adaptable to the stage as histories and tragedies (17). Cymbeline, though it is much-ado-about-everything, is not framed as a dream, but is presented as real. Tolkien discusses the distinction of truth and fiction in terms of how the story is framed: “It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that is should be presented as ‘true.’ […] since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’ it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or illusion” (5) This demonstrates that fairy tales and fantasy can indeed exist dually with reality if their presentation is a realistic one. Though Tolkien does not see the stage as an adequate frame for fairy tales, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline presents fiction within the historical frame of the translation of empire. The stage, like Tolkien’s notion of fantasy, has a simultaneous familiarity and “arresting strangeness” because of its visual presentation blended with the imaginative realm (16). It is the contamination across genres that asks audiences to consider what it means to mix fairy tales with history and fairy tale.
In all of its rich and irreconcilable complexity, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline cannot be entirely reduced to the archetypal structure of Snow White and the paralleled physical appearance that connects the two heroines “Upon a time” (5.6.153). However, Shakespeare invites audiences to consider the effect of the experimental play in the form of contaminating genres, classical and folk, and reality with imagination. What the fairy tale elements in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline are concerned with is not with asking audiences to believe in the impossible disjunction of the play, but instead to enjoy the flavor of the elements that contrast and enrich the others.
Works Cited
Basile, Giambattista. “The Young Slave.” The Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. 80-83. Print.
Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus, eds. Cymbeline. The Norton Shakespeare. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2008. 1229-1320. Print.
James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Parker, Patricia. “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline.” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. George M. Logan, Gordon Teskey. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1989. 189-207. Print.
Rawnsley, Ciara. “Behind the Happily-Ever-After: Shakespeare’s Use of Fairy Tales and All’s Well That Ends Well.” Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 2 (2013): 141-158. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
Shakespeare, William, Jenny E. Burdick, and Gollancz. The Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Bigelow, Smith, 1909. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.
Tolkien, J. R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. West Chester University, March-April 2005. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.