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In Cymbeline in particular this translation of rhetorical language into material elements in the action—and on the stage—has a powerful cumulative effect.
this dark fairy tale of a play,
Like this.
The dream's here still. Even when I wake it is Without me as within me; not imagined, felt. 4.2.308–309
So “seeming” has two opposing theatrical connotations: dream, fantasy, and wonder on the one hand, and deception, guile, pretense, and trickery on the other. A major underlying issue in Cymbeline is the question of how to distinguish between them, and this is accomplished by acts of reading and interpretation, including the deciphering of riddles, dreams, prophecies, and signs.
The most vivid onstage moment in the play is the scene in which Iachimo hides in Imogen's bedchamber, secreting himself into a convenient trunk.
So scary.
The reign of Cymbeline is a crucial moment, a crossroads in British history and in Christian history. Recognition of the historical specificity only hinted at obliquely in the text may help to explain why the “right” answer appears to be for the King of Britain to pay tribute to Rome. His queen had urged him to assert national independence. But there is biblical precedent. Christ is born in Bethlehem because of a command given by the emperor:
the Pharisees, hoping to trick him, ask of Jesus, “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” he answers, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's” (Luke 20:22,
No messenger arrives to announce a miraculous birth. But the call to sacrifice and the promise of “peace / To all our subjects” suggest that the end of Cymbeline is millennial and transcendent. The Pax Romana is at hand.
Cymbeline is full of mythological detail and of Christian references and intimations, yet its
spirit remains that of tragicomedy and romance. All the rebirths and regeneration of the play are part of this pattern.
The Winter's Tale
Play 35
HE WINTER'S TALE was first performed in 1611, and was then replayed, at the request of King James, in 1612 and again in 1613.
The resonances of The Winter's Tale—a very great play—are poetic and mythic, political and ethical, not narrowly historical or personal.
The “winter's tale” of this play's title is both literal and proverbial. The phrase meant something like “fairy
tale,” or a diverting entertainment, largely for the amusement of women, children, and the old. A mid-sixteenth-century author wrote of “old wives fables and winter tales” (John Olde, Walther's Antichrist, translation 1556) as if they were versions of the same, and Lady Macbeth belittles her husband's lack of resolution by observing scornfully that “these flaws and starts, / … would well become / A woman's story at a winter fire” (3.4.62–64).
“A sad tale's best for winter. I have one / Of sprites and goblins” (2.1.27–28).
It will be left, in this romance as in others of Shakespeare's late period, for the second generation to prove all too literally what
these two kings fail to understand. For the instantaneous jealousy of Leontes seems to associate him, too, with this eagerness to blame women and adulthood for all their problems, and to wish instead to be “boy eternal.”
Certainly readers and spectators are quick to notice the extreme rapidity with which Leontes falls into his jealousy—a fall so rapid that it seems sharply stylized, at the same time that its emotional intensity is very real.
To generations of Shakespeare-watchers the jealous Leontes has called to mind the jealous Othello, equally convinced of his wife's infidelity on little evidence except his own propensity for self-comparison and self-doubt.
Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift, Hours minutes, noon midnight? And all eyes Blind with the pin and web but
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings If this be nothing. 1.2.287–298
he creates a universe that is entirely solipsistic. He denies the reality of the world, the reality of the stage (“The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / … If this be nothing”). He thus creates a mental world of total egoism, total self-involvement, in which there is “nothing” left but Leontes himself: no external objects, no systems of value or communication are permitted to stand.
“Exit, pursued by a bear” announces what is, arguably, the most famous of all Shakespearean stage directions. This is testament, surely, to the Jacobean love of spectacle, evidenced by the Bear Garden on the bank of the Thames, and the popular pastime of watching bearbaiting (a favorite with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I).
The bear's victim cried out for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. What difference did his name and rank make to the bear? There is no such thing as rank in the Bohemia to which the audience is now introduced,
The Queen, Hermione, is of course only thought to be dead; she chooses to withdraw into obscurity, out of life and its rhythms. In this she is rather like Thaisa and those other mothers in Shakespeare's plays who, losing their husbands and children, seclude themselves in religious sanctuaries as abbesses or nuns.
Time in its various guises—barren time, fruitful time, redemptive time—is clearly a central topic for The Winter's Tale, and the concept is emblematized, and brought to life, in the figure of Time, the Chorus who introduces act 4.
Shakespeare the playwright here returns to the awkward device, used in Pericles, of bisecting his play with a major gap in time. By now it is clear that the pattern of Shakespearean romance requires a mature second
generation, a marriage, and a redemptive union—hence the need for many years to pass between the original act of disruption and the final consensus.
The presence of Time, the Chorus, is not nearly as intrusive or distracting as may first appear; the play is framed by time, and is in effect itself a kind of hourglass, waiting to be turned once more, and to begin anew.
Autolycus seems in a way to be all role, no essence. It is difficult to isolate his “true” nature out of the mass of fictions;
Why does the play need and welcome a contrary spirit like Autolycus?
The long and celebrated sheepshearing scene, act 4, scene 4, is focused on that mainstay of pastoral, the debate—a format we saw both employed and gently mocked in Shakespeare's other major pastoral play, As You
Like It. In this case the debate takes a very familiar form, that of “Nature and Art”—which is the greater, which the lesser?
The fifth act of The Winter's Tale, masterful in its architecture and capacious in its mythmaking, in effect stages the family reunion three times, in three successive scenes, one seasonal or cyclical, the second narrative or reported, and the third ekphrastic or apocalyptic, the statue come to life.
Paulina draws the curtain. “Prepare,” she says, “[t]o see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death” (5.3.18–20).
a shift from the autocratic, wrathful, and almost tragic male rule of the King to the collective and collaborative female “magic” of the women,
the astonishing phenomenon with which this play closes, the statue that comes to life, is a strong and apt figure for the transformative power of drama in general and of Shakespearean drama in particular.
the statue of Hermione is the extraordinary emblem of Shakespearean craftsmanship—a blend of nature and of art, awakened by the faith of the Shakespearean audience, the same power that centuries later Coleridge would call the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but here dramatized and set before our eyes.
The Tempest
Play 36
HAKESPEARE'S POWERFUL late romance The Tempest has been addressed by modern critics from two important perspectives: as a fable of art and creation, and as a colonialist allegory.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's most compelling “revenge tragedies,” turned, at the last moment, toward forgiveness.
But there is something troubling about this idealized picture of a Renaissance man accommodated with arts and crafts, dominance and power, in a little world, a little island, that he takes and makes his own. Many critical observers, especially in the later twentieth century, have seen Prospero as a colonizer of alien territory not his own, a European master who comes to an island in the New World, displaces its native ruler, enslaves its indigenous population (in this case emblematized by Caliban), and makes its rightful inhabitants work for him and his family as servants, fetching wood and
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Although it takes the form of an extended scene of instruction between Prospero and Miranda, father and daughter, the play is fundamentally built on the continuous contrast between Prospero's two servants, Ariel and
Caliban, mind and body, imagination and desire or lust. If Ariel is imagination personified, surely Caliban is something like libido (sexual desire) or id (basic human drives).
In one way we might say that The Tempest is macrocosmic: Caliban is a spirit of earth and water, Ariel a spirit of fire and air, and together they are elements harnessed by Prospero, here a kind of magician and wonder-worker closely allied to Renaissance science.
Caliban's name is a variant of “cannibal” (deriving from “Carib,” a fierce nation of the West Indies), and Shakespeare's play owes
much to Montaigne's essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), which draws trenchant and unflattering comparisons between the supposedly civilized Europeans and the native islanders.
Colonialist readings have gained force in the last fifty years by analogy with the historical events of postcolonialism,
