Alan's Reviews > Cymbeline

"Cymbeline" I considered a difficult play to stage until a surprisingly coherent version at the Huntington Theater, in 1991, directed by Larry Carpenter. My grad school classmate Peter Altman ran the Huntington back then. But reading it under the Trumpster makes all Iachimo’s lies problematic; our context changes the register of the play, disenchants it. Wonder about the Boston Shakespeare Project production, the matinee on Boston Commons today, 3 Aug 19, directed by my favorite director of all, Fred Sullivan of the Gamm and Trinity Square in Pawtucket and Providence. His comedies are especially effective, but I shall miss this because of prior commitments.


So many Shakespeare villains articulate truths, like Iago, and here, the clod Cloten, whose assault on the married Imogen gave me the title to my book on Shakespeare and popular culture, which I called "Meaner Parties."* Cloten says of her marriage to Leonatus,
“It is no contract, none;
And though it be allowed in meaner parties…to knit their souls,
On whom there is no more dependency
But brats and beggary, in self-figur’d knot,
Yet you are curbed…by the consequence of a crown…”(II.iii.116ff)
He refers to canon law’s accepting, in York Minster's Dean Swinburne’s "Of Spousals," handshake marriages—as long as there were witnesses to the vows spoken along with the ring or token. By the way, three centuries before DeBeers, engagement and marriage rings weren't distinct; both could be military or wax-sealrings.
I first read Swinburne’s Of Spousals--written in 1604, published in 1680's-- in the Harvard Law School Library Treasure Room. (My brother, who went to Harvard Divinity, said Swinburne’s book had been in the Divinity Library, which did not have ample funds to protect it.) I applied Swinburne and Lawcourt studies to plays with handfast marriages: MFM, All's Well, and Cymbeline.
A couple scenes prior to Cloten here, Iachimo comes to England with a letter of endorsement, part of a bet, from Posthumus Leonatus (I.vi). Posthumus had been exiled to Italy by Cymbelene for displacing the new queen’s execrable son Cloten in Imogen’s affection—in fact, marrying her.

As in Merchant of Venice, where Shylock compares his daughter and his ducats, his dearest possessions, Posthumous compares Imogen’s gift ring and herself; to Iachimo’s taunt, “I have not seen the most precious diamond that there is, nor you the lady,” Posthumus rejoins, “I praised her as I rated her: so do I my stone.” Iachimo even refers to Imogen as “she your jewel” to accompany the diamond, “this your jewel”(I.iv.153).
Having set up so close a comparison—indeed, an identity— between the token jewel and the lover jewel, no wonder Posthumus falls apart when Iachimo brings back the bracelet he’d stolen from Imogen. Posthumus’s friend Philario notes he is “Quite beyond the government of patience!”(II.iv.150)—rather like a certain new Supreme Court judge.
Later confessing to King Cymbeline’s inquiry, “How came it yours?” about the diamond on his finger, Iachimo blurts out that he defamed Imogen with token evidence,
“that he could not / But think her bond of chastity quite crack’d,/ I having taken this forfeit”(V.v.206). Posthumus need not have so concluded had he not merged token and person so strongly in his own mind.
But Renaissance marriage-court records fill with rings and bracelets betokening contract, whereas in fact it was the words accompanying the token, the vow, that counted in law. What we call domestic courts were then in church, canon courts like Deacon Swinburne’s in York Minster (the room still exists, with three judge chairs on a raised dias, now used as a vestry).
Shakespeare’s plays feature tokens and vows. Cymbeline could have learned how to run a ring court from the King of France in All’s Well. And of course Twelfth Night boasts the most rings of the Bard’s plays. (See my “Early Modern Rings and Vows in TN,” in Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays (NY: Routledge, 2011), ed. James Schiffer. Note: I quote from my old Harrison edition, which uses Iachimo, not Jachimo, but I quote a bit from Wells and Taylor, Compact edition, 1992.

[I shall add on birds in the play, Ruddock (euro-Robin) and Puttock (bird of prey) and others.]

* "meaner" in Elizabethan usage, lower status "parties" (in the legal sense)...average Joes and Jo's.