Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

In this single act, act 5, as we will see, Coriolanus simultaneously gains and loses. He gains humanity, and he loses life. He ceases to be the automaton, the soulless engine, the little god, and he becomes at once a fuller human being and a doomed one.

This is the paradox of tragedy, that to be human is to suffer, and that to be aloof from suffering is to turn one's back on humanity, and to be merely a thing, a tin god.

Conolanus is also, very centrally, a play about language. Again and again in Coriolanus the hero is urged to use his eloquence to win over the common people to his cause—and again and again his language fails.

Volumnia urges him to take part in what is essentially a stage play before the people, and Coriolanus argues that acting is dishonest.

He distrusts fiction and playing, and he finds the role of actor both dishonorable and difficult: “I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them” (2.2.65–66). He prefers wounds to words:

He has not yet made his peace with language, and as always in Shakespeare language ...

Coriolanus replies by rejecting the entire concept of language as power: “I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word” (3.3.90, 94-95).

When Coriolanus rejects politics-as-usual, the commoners reject him, and banish him from the city. His response is characteristic: “I banish you…. There is a world elsewhere” (3.3.127, 139). Banishment in Shakespeare is always highly fraught, whether it is Romeo's banishment from Verona or Bolingbroke's banishment from England, but for Coriolanus the experience is especially destabilizing. (Unlike those other cases, where the banished character temporarily departs from the play, here the play's action follows the banished hero.) His “I banish you” is a gesture of alienation, not only from Rome but also from the world of human interaction and language.

all the family kneels as well, until, in what is perhaps Shakespeare's most poignant stage direction,

[He] holds her by the hand, silent

The reaching out of the hand, so vital a gesture in King Lear, again in Coriolanus becomes a gesture

of humanization. From this point he will again begin to speak.

In the fourth act, when he is banished from Rome, Coriolanus undergoes a process of stripping similar to that experienced by major characters in other Shakespearean tragedies. Once a man who had everything—mother,

wife, child, public honors, even, briefly, the consulate—he swiftly becomes, like Lear, a man without anything; like Edgar, a man in costume, in disguise. And like the disguised Edgar, he has no name.

5.6.85–92

The traditional belief in many cultures, that when you know someone's real name you have power over them, is enacted here in this drama, this tragedy of the name. In reaffirming the filial bond, in giving in to his mother's plea, and

to the voice(s) of Rome in her voice, Caius Martius Coriolanus finds his fate, his name, and his death. For the death that overtakes him resembles the sparagmos of ancient Greek tragedy, the ritual tearing to pieces

This is what they accomplish for us, all these tragic figures with their titanic strengths and their titanic weaknesses—pride, stubbornness, vanity, and ambition on the one side, and on the other side radical insecurity, self-doubt, lack of self-knowledge, a fear of being merely human, of the bare, forked animal, of the boy of tears.

What Shakespeare accomplishes so brilliantly in Coriolanus is to make his bluntest, least self-reflective, and most heedless tragic hero live the riddle—and then solve it.

Cymbeline

Play 34

ART HISTORY, part romance, part revenge tragedy, and part satire, incorporating pastoral themes and lyric songs of an unusual beauty, Cymbeline, King of Britain is a curious play, presenting one of Shakespeare's most complicated and hard-to-summarize plots. A quick glance at its twists and turns reveals how close complexity can come to absurdity.

Many of this play's improbabilities come from Shakespeare's use of the conventions of the romantic genre, which we have already seen well illustrated in an early play, The Comedy of Errors, in which a shipwreck sunders a family that is then humorously and coincidentally reunited by the end of the play.

In the course of this hectic dramatic action—one editor counted twenty-four separate reversals and recognitions in the final scene—the play also offers a visitation from a descended god, a soothsayer with a riddling prophecy, and two of the most beautiful of Shakespeare's songs, “Hark, hark, the lark” and “Fear no more the heat o' th’ sun.”

But the play is, manifestly, also a history, a narrative of ancient Britain and ancient Rome.

There is nothing wrong with calling Cymbeline an experiment, unless by that we mean to undercut its standing as a play worth reading, staging, remembering, and discussing. For this is a play that tackles, and to a large extent solves, an intriguing set of problems about the relationship between political stories and psychological stories, between the state or polity and the subject, and between the political fiction and the dream.

Cymbeline can usefully be considered a myth of national origin, a play at once historical and romancelike by its very nature and purpose.

Cymbeline as a foundation myth culminates in the revelation that the spirit of the founder lives on in the present monarch, James I, who—like King Cymbeline—was

was celebrated as a peacemaker, and who regarded himself, famously, as the heir to the Roman tradition, as well as the successor to the legendary Brutus, the first ruler of Britain.

Cymbeline at the beginning of his play is neither a good father nor a good king, but by the end he has come to closely resemble James: he is statesmanlike; he pays tribute where tribute is due; and he is, as James proclaimed himself to be, a “loving nourish-father,”

Yet if Cymbeline is a foundation myth, it is also a family romance, embodying the fantasy of being freed from one's family and discovering that

one is a member of a family of higher standing. Often, in fairy tales or pastoral romances, the orphaned or adopted child is discovered to be a prince or princess—or a wizard, to recall Harry Potter, the most recent family romance.

The family romance is, in essence, the personal or psychological equivalent of the foundation myth or myth of national origin. Both ask, and try to answer, fundamental questions of identity, individual and cultural: Who am I? Who are we? How did I, or we, get to be who and what we are? As so frequently in Shakespeare, the political reading and the psychological

reading are not only analogous, but intertwined.

The play's spectators thus find themselves in a world full of historical anachronism. The Britons of Cymbeline are ancient Britons, some living in Luds Town (London), some in the forests and caves of Wales, but the Romans seem simultaneously to be living in the time of Augustus

Caesar and that of early modern Italy. Iachimo is presented as a devious and scheming Italian,

Lucius, the Roman general, is equally clearly a figure who might appear in Antony and...

Cloten is not a noble savage but the opposite, a savage noble. Despite his courtly opportunities, he remains a boor, and as such he is the contrary of the King's sons, brought up in rustic Wales, but with the natural manners of the (ideal) court and nobility.

Great men That had a court no bigger than this cave, … … … …. Could not outpeer these twain. 3.7.79–84

Posthumus's only visible action is to agree to the wager with Iachimo that tests Imogen's chastity. It is a swaggering, boys-will-be-boys wager (based on a well-known episode in The Decameron of Boccaccio, and on a sixteenth-century pamphlet called “Fred-eryke of Jennen”) that leads to separation and loss, and almost to tragedy. From an actor's point of view, Posthumus is a fairly thankless role.

Imogen, on the other hand, is a brilliant part, and it justly became a favorite of actresses and audiences in succeeding centuries. Shakespeare's first cross-dressed woman since Viola, and the first and only woman disguised as a boy in one of his Jacobean plays, Imogen resembles both the inventive, disguised heroines of the comedies (Rosalind, Viola, Portia) and also the virtuous and muselike Marina, a quintessential figure of the romance genre. Like Marina, Imogen is described repeatedly in images of divinity.

Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 4.2.263–264

Given the unfamiliarity of many modern readers and audiences with Cymbeline, it is important to

emphasize the degree to which the play—and especially its heroine—was admired in past years.

The nineteenth century's adoration of Imogen may be summed up by Algernon Swinburne's comments in A Study of Shakespeare (1880):

The very crown and flower of all her father's daughters, —I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine, —woman above all Shakespeare's women is Imogen.

Imogen/Fidele's double identity as woman and boy, Briton and Roman, resurfaces in the climactic political scene of the play (5.6),

a scene not unlike the revelation scene in Twelfth Night in the way it manages the surprising disclosure of gender and the discomfiture of the supposed boy's male patron.

Myths are the dreams produced by a culture.

The settings of Cymbeline range from Britain and Rome, familiar loci from the history plays, to a “green world” of magic, music, caves, and hills that is the world of Wales.

One of the most intriguing things about the way Cymbeline unfolds as a poetic plot is how metaphor is transformed into onstage reality.