Cymbeline Read Online Free

closes, it is perhaps of interest that 1610 was the only year, of this period, in which all the European states were at peace. Lastly, Cymbeline’s final submission to Rome, even after he has won the war against the Romans, might have had some topical value in view of James’s efforts to enter into friendly negotiations with Papal Rome … the audience must have made a complex identification: the peace is both the peace of the world at the time of Christ’s birth, in which Britain participates, and also its attempted re-creation at the very time of the play’s performance, with Jacobus Pacificus—who was a figure of Augustus—on the throne. 23
    In the politically devolved Britain of the twenty-first century, G. Wilson Knight’s slippage, in the passage quoted earlier, from “England” to “Britain” looks sloppy. And it certainly would not have made sense to Shakespeare and his original audiences, for whom 1603 was a turning point, as Queen Elizabeth of England was succeeded by King James VI of Scotland and I of England, with his project to unite the two nations into a new “Britain.”
    In summary, then: as well as being a pastoral fantasy and a fairy story, complete with wicked stepmother and poison (which, thanks to an honest-hearted physician, turns out to be mere sleeping potion),
Cymbeline
is a play about the Romans in Britain, under the auspices of the god Jupiter. The title in the Folio contents list is “Cymbeline King of Britain.” Shakespeare’s other King of Britain was Lear, who made the mistake of dividing his kingdom in three.
Cymbeline
may have been placed among the tragedies by the editors of the Folio because it traverses the same elevated ground of national history and destiny. But whereas the disarray of the divided nation in
Lear
is a negative example, perhaps intended to make the play’s original audience feel relief that King James had recently united the thrones of Scotland and England, the resolution of
Cymbeline
is altogether positive: “Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.”
    Cymbeline was supposed to have been king of Britain in the year when Christ was born; at that time, the Roman emperor was Augustus. Shakespeare’s audience would have known that Augustus was the Caesar to whom Cymbeline agrees to pay tribute money, despite the miraculous victory of the British when Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus (otherwise known as Morgan, Polydore, and Cadwal) hold the road against apparently insurmountable odds. The end of the play heralds an “Augustan peace,” in which Britain is imagined as the equal of Rome. Milford Haven in Wales is a vital location and point of reference in the play. The more historically and politically literate members of Shakespeare’s original audience would have recalled that it was the port where Henry Tudor—the Richmond of
Richard III
and the future King Henry VII—landed in 1485, the year that brought the Wars of the Roses to an end and established the Tudor dynasty that turned the tables on modern Rome and began to establish an image of their nation as the divinely chosen Christian successor-empire to that of Augustus.
    Imagine King James watching the play: he would have seen himself as a composite version of Cymbeline and Augustus, both a British king and a neo-Roman emperor. From the point of view of characterization, the part of King Cymbeline is astonishingly underwritten. His interior life is never opened to us, as is that of Lear or, in this play, Princess Innogen. All he seems to do in the long closing scene is ask questions, express amazement, and pronounce benediction. This makes sense if he is intended to offer an oblique representation of James, King of Britain. It would not do to inquire too closely into the monarch’s interior life. Instead, Cymbeline is the ideal spectator: during a court performance, the King would have been sitting at the focal point of the hall. In a production that