Harvard ENGL E-129 - Lecture 10: Cymbeline

this it's I love this play I think this play is completely fabulous let's talk about it from the point of view of how it relates to Pericles how it relates to history and genre and also look at some specific elements within the play did let me first ask you whether reading Cymbeline was easier for you because we had discussed Pericles where there can you see points of connection between Pericles and Cymbeline yes and I think the thing it made Pericles such an easy to read was the narrator in between the scenes aha and that really helps all of that story to knit and flow where's this story I had to be paying pretty careful attention to characters names and what they were saying and whether the action was okay good good any other kind of primary responses am I alone in the room in my admiration for this work can I see a general show of hands of people who are inclined to like it very good it's the this this is thank you okay you actually want to say something good cool out of all the plays I was kind of perplexed as to why it was called Cymbeline because he seems like one of the characters that was police prevalent throughout the play why is the play called Cymbeline for similar reasons I think - why Henry the fourth part one and Henry the fourth part - were called Henry the fourth rather than Prince Hal who is the main character of those plays in those cases it is the name of the ruling King and this is to a certain extent a history play and so it's a little bit about the reign of king Cymbeline I think that's why it has the title that it has but we've seen it also titles are rather erratic in this period that sometimes they seem to fit the play very well and sometimes less well what would you have call the play if you were Shakespeare the first thing that came to my mind was that it should have been about are named after posts houmous posthumous a hosta --mess and imogen mm-hmm because it seemed more about their relationship and the surrounding events that happened because of it mm-hmm well the the love the love comedies that we have mostly don't bear the names of I mean as you like it isn't called Rosalynn in Orlando or Twelfth Night isn't called viola and Orsino or Olivia and Sebastian or whatever it is that tend to have different kinds of names if it's a comedy but this is this is very demonstrably a tragic comedy it has tragic elements that has comic elements it has historical elements maybe we should start by kind of collecting what some of these things are because one of you shouldn't recognize in this play many things that are familiar to us from the world of fairy tale of Rome as the wicked stepmother the the boys who've been stolen away and turn out to be the king's sons and so forth it's a kind of collection of these tropes or generic cliches but maybe we should kind of go through just to begin with and kind of count out the the ways in which the play might be called a history play the ways in which it might be called a tragedy the ways in which it might be called accommodate what are its historical elements yes I'd say first of all the the conflict or the relationship between Rome and Britain oh good okay where's war between Rome and Britain the question what's what's at issue between them Britain was supposed to be paying that a certain amount of money to reintroduce Julius Caesar had had conquered Britain and now Augustus Caesars is on the scene and he's looking for his money okay so they don't want to give it to them we have Augustus we have money I'm going to use it assign not recognizable to them and we have Cymbeline in ancient Britain and the question is whether or not you should pay the tribute now Cymbeline is an ancient king of Britain King Cymbeline the this this little history about Julius in August's tells us a number of things it tells us that there's Rome but it also tells you about a particular moment in the history of Rome if it's the time of Augustus what time is it in Christian time it's the time of the birth of Christ so it's very over determined in terms of its temporal setting that it's about a crisis between Rome and Britain we have the sense of the ancient Heritage's of each and you have not quite mentioned but not really in the background either with all this language about about sacrifice and about you know humble birth and noble birth and discovery and so forth you have not very hidden this other story of a miraculous discovery and something that was thought to be dead and is not dead and that I mean this whole kind of notion of the Christian narrative is somewhere back in the the prehistory of this but it's a it's a history play in that it focuses on the question of Britain what is the capital of Britain in this ancient world what Lud's town yes indeed Lud's town which is the pre London Bloods town and the excuse me the the remember that with a history play we always have the least three time periods we have the time which it's set time' which is written time in which it's performed so if this is the time at which it's set what can be said about the history of the time in which it is written absolutely of growing nationalism and who's on the throne in england James and what's James's interest in nationalism here uniting England Scotland creating Britain recreating Britain so that the continuum that began so to speak with this story of King Lear with the dissolution of the kingdom and it's breaking up into three parts like England Scotland and Wales for example here we go back into ancient Britain and we find the founding moment of the notion of Britain and we find yes we're behind you yeah I just have an interruption question to her James was very interested in uniting England and Scotland but why not Wales why was he not well he's a Scot right I know but just ignore Wales well sorry well the the the his negotiation was about the the the unification of England and Scotland this is correct I can't actually tell you maybe Larry or milk and he'll you said no probably notice about the history of Wales at this period do you well I think one of the reasons was I don't know a lot about it but one of the reasons is probably practical heck of a lot easier to unite Scotland in england in some ways than to actually subdue wells which was historically impossible to bring under reign and can you say why that is well geography right partly right so it's mountainous its it's also as always in shakespeare the place of poetry somehow the welsh woman whom mortimer marries in richard ii and only sings in welsh and so forth is the prince of wales that it's it's it's another place it's in the comic world of city country city or court forest court it's the wild place it's the place of where anything can happen it is in this play also that kind of place of transformation in which image and goes dressed as a boy she goes into this again this mask like the mas quue like mask court mask like terrain of the the cave and where she discovers her heritage without knowing that it's there and so forth it's it's this interior world this world of no rank rather than rank it's what the the anthropologist victor turner calls a liminal world or a liminal place a place on the edge or the threshold it's a place of non differentiation male-female high-low everybody is noble but don't say that they're noble don't know that they're noble and so forth so Wales functions here in the comic world as this place of potential transformation or discovery whatever in the historical world it functions as the place then against which this reunification can to a certain extent be happening and when something whether it when is I there are a murder or a discovery it's going to take place somehow in Milford Haven it's going to take place in the world of whales but the soldiers are either Romans or Britons you get that structure that you often get in a Shakespearean history play like Antony and Cleopatra where the army of Britain enters that one door in the army of where Oh Matt the other door you have generals on both sides and so forth and you have a rank as well as law in these and and and you have not only ranking law you also have laws which are going to be overturned walls that are going to be suspended the you ought to be paying capital punishment for this but in fact everybody's pardoned by the end also be pardoned so so we have the the so T James just go back to King James he's interested in the unification the reunification of Britain and the recovery of that heritage he's also interested in dynasty in family dynasty in and and here we have story of the king who is both the father and the mother what am I but mother to the birth of three remember that image from Pericles that we had the the I'm great with whoa and will deliver weeping that image of Pericles as a king who is also a mother here to the King at the moment of the discovery of his lost children imagines himself Aeneas what you might think of very strange frames phrase what am I the mother of the birth of the birth of three but James is talked about himself as both the mother and the father of his kingdom that he is the the total parent here and what is recovered is a family of two sons and a daughter which happens to be also the structure of James's family so that that that what's being repeated on the stage is partly the structure that is historically consonant with the time period in which the play is itself imagined for a modern audience ethically audience contemporaneous with us what would you say about what the history side of the play has to offer New Yorker tell you anything about this yes characters come from different periods of history yes and that's unique well so it has that the the deliberate anachronism quality that we have learned to see often functions in Shakespearean history plays in in in modern productions as a way of signifying that this particular war is the sign of all wars whenever we talked about how how the soldiers might be judged soldiers and other productions for other plays might be dressed in Civil War garb or in Revolutionary War Garber and Vietnam fatigues or something like that that there is something honorable about the ancient Roman Augustinian period as opposed to the kind of Machiavellian aspects of Renaissance of yokomo absolutely yes so that we have easily is both Rome and contemporary Italy in this period and so you get the Machiavellian villain here a particularly sleazy version of it and not ultimately it tremendously I mean at a successful theatrical character but ultimately somebody who does you know give up he's rather than than with Iago falling silent he apologises all over himself says that it's his fault and so forth he wasn't Noble he behaved badly and so on so that you have that that this what seems too anachronistic in the pier in within the context of the play this contemporary to Shakespeare's time theatrical cliche the cliche of the Machiavelli and plotting Italian figure yes it's just at the beginning with the Sons with his wife dying Cymbeline seems to be you know inept I have an inept in dealing with his daughter right now with his the Queen and it's hard to reconcile the greatness with all of the ineptness so so the question is I do not know how to reconcile I see I see okay it's true that that Cymbeline as a character seems to be intact at the beginning to be over borne by this just kind of stereotypically wicked queen / stepmother / / stage mother because she's very very focused on this son Clutton he seems then to be completely nonplussed when good news comes his way we never see him except at the very very end assume any kind of what we would now call leadership should that make us feel as if the play is not a model of good kingship that's a good question how do people feel about this anybody want to recuperate Cymbeline as a character I don't know if this is pushing it but it does seem as though simoleans country and government has been hijacked by forces that are maybe even smarter than he is I'm not sure at least for the time being the evil stepmothers certainly as build is a very intelligent woman and it's it's a contemporary production of that play might might play on that issue for some of us who feel that the government in this country has been hijacked and that better times are coming what he but for the end of the play he actually says you know I it's my fault I should have been taken in but on the other hand she was beautiful and she was persuasive if there's a whole kind of defense of the Queen or of his here is why he was taken in by her at the same time that he says I should have seen through it and so on but but plainly the the authority is in the wrong place at the beginning that this this woman whom we see right through from vegan as we see that she wants to learn how to use poison too - poison little animals and even Cornelius the physician is able to say to us I know what she's up to and so I've actually substituted a drug that you may be familiar to you if you've read Romeo and Juliet drug that's done to to make it possible for people to assimilate death but not really to be dead because I don't trust her so how is it that every everybody in the audience and everybody on the stage except Cymbeline doesn't see through her why do we have any respect for him at all to me because what it comes out in the end I mean that that she'd really been deceiving him by Freddie she wanted to kill him and she I figured what else it was something else a couple of bad things that use everything but having an affair with somebody else yeah I mean you know there's a string of things I mean you know she's particularly evil I mean oh she's nothing no redeeming well and then on her deathbed we're told that she says I never loved you and I only wanted this video that's it for my son line of pretty pretty nasty stuff there and the fact that he didn't see any of this I mean is pretty good and I think in the beginning there is I remember aren't there little snippets to where people are making fun of him as well as cloten because there people are making fun of the son the first and second Lord extremely yeah I mean they're popping these little things and I think there's some little things against him - I mean that the court seems to have lost all respect for him - right right well they see this topsy-turvy ascendancy of the queen up now of course we've seen these evil Queens before we're in one of their players of ours have we we encountered an evil queen inna waiting I mean if you think of her as evil well maybe we we that's not really a word that we deliberately applied to her but but if you look at the difference between Lady Macbeth or Goneril say or even in Vilonia where the mother is so dominant over the son and has ambitions for the son and once to present himself in a way that is going to have advancement where I described her as a kind of stage mother to you but that this Queen seems much more cartoon like that this there is much less sense of her psychic plausibility and remember we talked last week about Pericles and about how it moves into the direction of allegory or of a kind of sublime kind of cartoon that it's it's and she's not named yesterday that's right that's right she is she's the queen and so she is a type and she is she the everybody else has a name she is a kind of cutout figure and everything that we learned subsequently about her from her propensity for poisoning to her deathbed confession presumably if we imagine that this is a Christian death somehow that she she needs to die die driven so she needs to say what the truth is nonetheless that oh this blurting out of this whole list of things first she said this and then she said that and so forth has an almost comic quality to it at the same time it becomes as a real surprise in the front to Cymbeline yes says it symbol Eden's response to being told these terrible things with oh well she looked so pretty good well it was message in which she says he says she that was the that was the extent of his response yes to touch him deeply we find that for you thank you very much so much happens in this play act 5 scene 5 I will say this is that this is after her her first she confessed she never loved you only affected greatness got by you not you married your royalty was wife to your place M hoard your person is if you were in a creative writing class and somebody were to say well here's what here's the motivation for the character that you think this was way overkill dial it back dial it back sir so this this is not in other words designed to be mimetic or to be verisimilitude this isn't about what people would really say to other people or how it might be this is really something else this is really bringing the unconscious into the conscious that everything is kind of being blurted out at this point and he says himself you know almost delicate fiend who is it that can read a woman is there more more Asura and worse and then we have this whole business about the poisoning and so forth mine eyes were not at fault for she was beautiful mine ears that heard her flattery nor my heart that thought her like her seeming well of course that theme of seeming as I point out in the chapter that I asked you to read is all over this play it had been vicious to have mistrusted her I would have been wrong to have doubted her blood or no yet oh my daughter that it was falling in me thou may assay and prove it in the healing heaven mend also even at this point it sort of I can't fix this I give up and of course heaven has been busy mending things up to this point but this play is everything but the kitchen sink this play has every possible twist and turn in it now there were and again I probably put this 20 years out to you and when I asked you to read there were people at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century who felt that these late plays of Shakespeare's especially Pericles and Cymbeline we're a sign that this the playwright had really lost it that he that what happened to the Shakespeare that we loved this is just over the top this is not the shakes he's the Shakespearean his dotage the Lydon straight she felt this way other people have felt that this is this was really these with the heights these were the the greatest achievement of Shakespearean drama I don't think that we need to make a comparative judgment necessarily about this play in order to admire what it does do which is to mobilize very skillfully many of the standard tropes of romance remember we talked about romance last time and will will mark out what some of those standard behaviors and and and and activities are and to mobilize them together with some poetry of transcendent power in order to create a series of narratives of loss and discovery and unification at every possible level now you remember that we talked last time about the gap in the play of Pericles how long the gap was not again do you remember 14 years 14 years so that or what we what we decided was that this allowed the infant babe Meena born at sea to grow up to become a articulate and marriage of a woman and to point toward the all-important theme of renewal through marriage and progeny which was balanced in that play by seasonal renewal and change and so forth what happens to that gap in this play is there a gap in the middle of the play it's already happened it's already happened exactly and it's it's already happened to produce the same thing that is to say babies now turn into adults articulate active and marriage able this the only way two sons are in the background of the narrative that we have here and their return is forms the same kind of reunion motif we saw with marina and Pericles and taissa in that play what about Imogen where does she fit into this structure she's reborn in the sense that she recovers from this this drug which is supposed to oh yes well she goes through the death and rebirth syndrome map she also goes who that gender transformation of being a boy for a while and brightly revealing herself as a woman again the two kinds of so life death male-female two kinds of transformative activities that happen to her yes please she was rejected by her father and then reclaimed so that would be another written thing right and that if if you know Shakespeare's comedies at all you know as you like it for example what makes the romance and as you like it possible is the exile from the court by the of the daughters by the angry father by Duke Frederick in this case to because they this is this is a this is a play very interestingly in fact begins with very such high praise of someone that you really think it ought to be a woman I mean I'm very struck by the praise of posthumous at the beginning and the end of the play that nonpareil very you know that you look at the very beginning of the play first you get the the whole narrative they get the exposition and and it's a very complicated exposition so you get it you get it with these two gentlemen talking with one another very often we've seen this in Shakespearean opening scenes characters who may not return to the rest of the the dramatic action who are there partly to who are who are secondary characters who are there to tell you what the past was like you saw that for example if you remember in Atman Cleopatra we're Philo and Demetrius are talking about the infatuation on the part of Antony for Cleopatra so here we get what's the matter his daughter has purpose to his daughter in the air of Kingdom only purpose to his wife sole son a widow that late he married has referred herself on to a poor but worthy gentleman she's wedded her husband vanished she imprisoned all his outward sorrow though I think the king be touched at very heart so here you've got an awful lot of action being encapsulated in this first sentence or two the now we're gonna have the narrative immediately of the loss and why so says the second gentleman first gentleman he that has missed the princess is the thing too bad for a bad report that's continent and he then has her I mean that married her a lot good man and therefore banished is a creature such as to seek through the regions of the earth who won his like there would be something failing in him that should compare I do not think so fair an outward and such stuff we in and as a man but he this kind of description of the unparalleled personage is very often one that one encounters it with the lady the beautiful lady whom the man is going to go off and and seek and so from the very beginning it seems to me there's a lot of unbalance in this play the and it and this is rhetoric about the the unparalleled posthumous will return at the end of the play as well that that the the the the ordinary rhetorical balance of gender display seems almost from the very beginning to be disturbed Imogen herself now some of you will have a Norton Edition which insists that her name ought to be in urgent with two enemies and pointing toward the fact that the historical woman's name was indigent and that the two ends could look like an M in old typography and so forth but obviously the name of Imogen first of all became a very popular name at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century we have it in Imogene today but there are people named image and lots and lots of them and the fact that her name is somehow like image also became interesting to people her her the Imogen as an ideal female was a great favorite character on the late Victorian early 20th century stage that this that the the popularity of the name was connected to the popular Norma's popularity of this plan of this character at that time that somehow she is and this is a trouser roll again remember that this is that these boys parts and what boys were playing the parts of women in Shakespeare's time but by the time this play is now put on the stage in the Victorian period it's an opportunity to see and actress actresses legs the and and the this is Emmitt Imogen spends a good deal of the time in her costume as Fedele so that it's it's a kind of AA Janu part in which her appearance as a boy with all of and notice how successful is her masquerade as Fedele it successful as a boy kind of but they they they read her in a different way don't they but what did what do the the boy is immediately see about her beautiful absolutely and somehow they feel a recognition they feel a kinship they the one of the boys says to the father I've only met this boy once but actually if I have to choose between your death and the death of this boy I choose your death yeah that they again the the whether one wants to look at it in fairy tale terms in psychoanalytic terms in terms of the believability of it that something is happening here that is not meant to merely replicate conscious human utterance and conscious conscious human behavior everybody that they see and they don't see they recognize her and they don't recognize her they don't recognize explicitly that Fedele the faithful one the page is a girl but they see it's like viola in Twelfth Night they see the fresh complexion they see the timorousness no no a deed you seem kind of sickly you should stay at home don't go to the battle don't go hunting stay here and cook the you know it's it's a boy but it's a young boy and so to stay at home the the everything but you seem like a girl is said to him/her and this this we feel like you're brothers yes yes it's like you're my brothers it's the recognition that is not quite a recognition is very powerful in that scene one can imagine it now I've not seen this production in New York but one can imagine it played for laughs or one can I mean to you that would be one way to outsmart it so to speak would be it's like that moment in much ado about nothing we're a Beatrice says to Benedict says what can I do to help you out and Beatrice says kill Claudio and the audience is extremely struck by this and you can play that line for laughs as a way of trying to deal with the fact that this is a disconcerting observation yes the poison the not the father but I mean who is the father did ya he's the kidnapper she comes upon him I mean they've been living in the woods I mean they're depicted as semi animals essentially and suddenly you get this she comes in from a court right it's a very strange the way it suddenly goes that they're all equal and that they're just as articulate just as bright just as in ever said essentially semi savages play absolutely full of wonderful embodied literary cliches and again Shakespeare is better than anybody I know we're taking something that can be read as part of a narrative and putting it on the stage giving it a different kind of valence so this is a tradition in the pastoral of the noble savage of the person who brought up not in the court but in the country has all the natural grace is ness of a civilized person because they're not contaminated by the court very often such noble savages turn out to be highborn after all so you got a car to fur here you have have both the they're not spoiled by the contamination of the wicked city remember the brothel and in Pericles or what would be the contaminating elements about the wicked city or cities in this play and what we learn from bellarius from from Morgan as his his Welsh name is costs great harm to each other this is a cliche so what's bad about the court again it's it is flattering its closing its lying it's its betrayal it's set up so he was set up to take the fall about something so so he flees with a because he's been accused of something he flees with the two sons to the country and he has has persuaded the nurse you riffle a what does it mean what's the etymology of you riffling love yes okay okay we'll come back to that the he's persuaded this this nurse to kidnap the boys for which he marries her very much like again for those of you who know Twelfth Night the promise that sir Toby belch makes in Twelfth Night that he will marry the lady waiting gentlewoman Mariah for the device that she performs on his behalf so so this this trope of the trick performed by the the lower born lady the gentleman marries her as a result she conveniently does and is not present in this structure in which we again have these maternal fathers once again both with Cymbeline and also with Valerius slash morgan we have a father with a memory of the mother the mother it's a good mother not a bad mother but she's dead so the good mother is dead the bad mother is alive this is the same kind of split that you see in Hamlet with a good father is the dead father that is old Hamlet the living father is Claudius the sexual rival and the political rival in this case we have the one story of Cymbeline and he is wicked very powerful poisoning child hating wife and and the other we have the good mother who commits an act that looks like a bad act kidnapping after all and who dies but who's kidnapping actually turns out to be a good thing because she preserved them alive she preserved them away from the wicked court and in fact it's a medial state it's a liminal state that's going to return to they gonna return better to the court they're gonna return having performed a noble action having done what Knights do that is to say done some feat that will return them to the court and remember Cymbeline's and bloom once about this when he's the thinks that good areas his older son is this is Polydor Polydorus then is the welsh name of good arias Polydor all gifts he thinks that this that that the killing by Polydor of cotton is going to to cost him his life then it when he discovers that it's his son and this is in fact you know a justified murder rather than a or any good area it says well I don't care I'm glad I did it he was a bad guy and you know I'd do it again I'm glad it was he didn't kill me there's there's there's none of no Craven about these characters all they're noble spiritually noble they're naturally noble and and when it is discovered and we'll see this next week with with waiter tale as well when it's discovered that in fact their natural nobility is paired with an actual nobility when hierarchy and nature come together here you have the pastoral return Valerius himself is another cliche of a pastoral character that is the courtier exiled from court the court here who leaves the coda wicked Court and goes into the countryside in order to escape it's it's it's wickedness and in this case to escape from from the threat to him but he is he's paired here with this notion of the lost kidnapped children who will return and and and keeps us in the picture so to speak explains to us from the beginning who they actually are and that their nobility seems natural so I've forgotten where we started with this what was owed about about their being the describes are like well it's not as if they're kind of gnawing bones I think we don't quite have a sense of them as as as well they are uncouth I mean they're uncouth in the sense of unlearn it yes also in his little explanation of things says how hard it is to hide the sparks of nature it seems to me as an implication as a genetic quality here that's gonna triumph as well exactly exactly these boys little know that they're the sons King nor simile knows they're alive that that so so he's going to give us this outside inside thing again they behaved nobly even though they don't know that they're knowable there and he keeps saying to them no but we're just country folk and we have no expectations and so forth and they are Restless notice that they are Restless that this this will also happen in in the pastoral that they want to they want action they want to go to war they want to grow up they want to get out of this moment of the cave I mean what could be more womb like the cave the the motherly father the protection away from the world and so forth they want to get back into the world and they do so both because of the war that is impinging but also because of the arrival of cotton in their neighborhood and what what amounts to a kind of slaying of the monster or slaying of the giant if this were a real romance that is safe it we're Spencer or some other kind of prose romance rather than a dramatic romance Clutton would be even more inhumanly monstrous than he is as it is he he's described as you know fitting himself he's got these somebody else's clothes on he doesn't know how to fight they they joke about him and so forth he's about as monstrous as a human being can be and especially he's not a good Prince he doesn't behave in a princely way so that would arias is killing of him which again is a motivated killing he's provoked and the cutting off of his head and the putting of the head in the stream flowing down to Lud's town is a kind of nightly challenge it's a kind of approving of himself and it's that we could say to be speak in total cliche it turns the boy into a man but this is the moment of proving himself as a soldier as a warrior as not a child that catapults them back into that world of war against the father's wish and and thence back and and and and this again that the idea that bellarius says to them I was in danger in the court I really should go back again readers of Twelfth Night may remember that a very similar thing happens with the captain and Sebastian in Twelfth Night were again Orsino and the cap captain were at odds with one another once in a sea fight I gave him harm it is dangerous for me to go back but ultimate and so I won't go back but ultimately he his love for Sebastian the affection for Sebastian leads him back into this place of danger so also here another adoptive parent or relation is led back into the danger of the real world we could say by the love that he bears to these children that rather than stay behind and save his own skin he will go back with them but we so this is just to give you some sense of the of the place of the pastoral in this play what is the place of the comedy per se what are the comic elements in the play I mean a the dramatic comedy like romantic comic elements in the blood we've touched upon some of them but we haven't named them as comic sorry is smuggled into the into the bedroom AHA Imogen and wakes up and and and makes note of everything that's in there and what do you see that would comedy it's the reason well it's it's part of this part of this gamble part of this wager yes and and because it's part of the wager it's it's you know it's it's it's a play on the the infidelity or the belief infidelity by by the husband and and and the it's a comment on human nature well it's the we could say it's a romance or tragic consequence of what looks like a comic exchange this is a kind of boys thing there all the guys are together the stage erection explains that maybe the Spaniard and the Dutchman are mutes and and don't have speaking parts and may actually be part of the scenery they don't have speaking parts in the scene at all maybe they're drunk maybe who knows what but but the the the other participants the the the Frenchmen the Italian Giacomo or Giacomo and posthumous the Briton are having this kind of conversation about my girls better than your girl or a ladies or unfaithful or whatever it is and they lead escalates very quickly into a kind of war but it's a it's a merry war again to use the phrase from from much ado it seems to be a kind of verbal war about about who's lady is faithful whether ladies are ever faithful and the ends with this wager that they wear again somebody keeps trying the French may keep saying I'm trying to say it's enough for any let's not go any further let's not pursue this but posthumous and yokomo are engaged in this wager and the result is this the the bedroom scene I want us to look at the bedroom scene very closely in a minute but let's just other name some things about to play there are like a Shakespearean romantic comedy but we've talked a little bit about the cross-dressed Imogen the the plucky heroine who has to crossdress in order to be an agent in her own salvation in her own rescue and who winds up in fact transforming the lives of others in her guise as somebody else this is a common comment this is about me this is something that is found in Shakespearean comedy in Rosalind in as you like it in viola in Twelfth Night in Portia in Merchant of Venice all of these plays many years before assembling this is a return to something that happened earlier in Shakespearean comedy you know this because these plays were not part of our so of us that is to say they are earlier rather than later Shakespeare they are Elizabethan rather than Jacobean Shakespeare and they are moments in which women's agency and the limits of women's agency are tested and discussed but the woman's in disguise becomes quite powerful and is able in a way to manage the reconciliations and indeed to some extent the education of her chosen husband or husband-to-be yes sorry black comedy about the conversation with a headless corpse yes I mean it's right it has to be topical okay good look at this one second let me just finish this other thing about about that Imogen in her her cross dress cause because when Shakespeare returns and again this is a stock figure from pastoral as well the this guy's lady out in the woods and so forth because she's disguised in order to protect herself the woman alone dressed as a woman is a more vulnerable figure but in here too she assumes a name I'm a nickname and many names in this play are emblematic the name Fedele the faithful one she how faithful is she this faithful one incidentally who's she faithful to in the course of this play when she is Fedeli who does she serve the ultimately serves Lucius yes the Roman and comes back as his when she thinks all is lost comes back in the last scene and he says you know save my page I don't care about me again the same move again and you're so such a beautiful young man of course you I grant I've never met you before though you look oddly familiar says Cymbeline but I will grant you because somehow you're so wonderful I'll grant you one wish the Lucius says I I'm sure you'll you'll choose me as your one wish although I'm not asking for that and she says well no actually not that actually I want to know why this guy is wearing this bracelet so I mean it's it's the all the expectations and the disappointments of those expectations very knowing use of these these these these tropes or these conventions everything is out there and everything is somehow sophisticated to the point where it could seem either very naive or very droll at the same time to keep being expectations deceptions reversals which are surprising two characters on stage but really not so surprising to us and if we imagine that write this play full of recognition scenes but if we imagine that unfolding recognition scene with Imogen sort of seeing the great I mean that there's got to be some sort of a hyper acting moment in which she notices this jewel on the arm of the akhom oh that leads her away from from Lucius so that the the the separated lovers again again whether this is in kind tragedy as in Romeo and Juliet or whether it's in comedy the separated lovers and their return their future destiny blessed at the end of the play somewhere buried in here is a Shakespearean Roman to comedy between posthumous and imogen and that's predicted at the very very beginning of the play in that little free speech that I read to you between the two Lords about the though he could have her but he doesn't really have her because the father wants to exile them and so forth now let's just try that okay there so the Headless that this grotesque scene in which Imogen wakes up from her famously from the drug that she takes that they think leaves her dead then there's the funeral sir wonderful the the funeral in which there is it happens to be a little graveyard right there because the mother you're awfully the supposed mother the former nurse is buried there and so they're going to bury the page Fedele there but then they decide that this noble cotton noble how do they know he's noble and they know he's noble yes sir he said so right okay so he's the king's son and he's dressed how in posthumous is clothes he's dressed in posthumous is clothes and he's dressed in popular posthumous clothes again because of us figure of speech because image and system I you know I posture missus meanest garment is more interesting to me than you are I would not marry you you know under any circumstances well and and he takes great umbrage at this meanest garment and so he address addresses himself in the meanest Carmen leading up to this miss recognition scene in which she says oh my goodness here's the leg here's the foot it's it this is his posthumous she doesn't say gosh he's looked like posthumous is closed but they don't fit this corpse very well she doesn't say hmm you know I mean she she seems to recognize the body without the head as that of posthumous which leads her to to to flee and to to move off to the wars sorry yes exactly exactly but as you quite grotesque it's absolutely grotesque to have this sort of anti love scene between Imogen and this headless corpse in which it's a recognition scene and a miss recognition scene in what in which what she seems to recognize and she it's a kind of anti blazing to be know what a blazing is a blazing is the traditional praise of the beautiful lady's face her eyes are like suns and her lips are like cherries and so forth the it's common in love poetry and in sonnets of the late 16th century so that when Shakespeare comes to write his anti blazing my mistress eyes are nothing like the Sun he is writing against this traditional kind of Hallmark card like a discussion of the beauty of the lady forward blossom or a blazing comes from the word for emblem or flag here and it's a kind of itemization of the beauties of the lady's face almost always describes a woman the only time the two places I can show you where it describes a man are in the museum a Night's Dream and also in Chaucer's sir TOPAS in both cases it describes this kind of sickly unbeautiful man but in this case you get the blazing below the neck so to speak you get the itemization of parts of a man without the head so you get what is it what is the sort of wonderful inversion of a convention of love poetry towards the grotesque because there's no head and also she seems to be recognizing every little piece of him and praising every little piece of him even though it's in fact not him and there we elsewhere heard that this particular body is not to be praised I think we've reached the point where we should take a little pause then we'll come back we'll actually look at some of the texts of this play okay well in the break I was chatting with somebody about the phenomenon which is often these days described by scholars of music or of art or literature as late style the late style of Rembrandt the late style of Picasso the late style of Beethoven the the moment when in in in the work of an artist who has achieved a considerable amount in his has has gone through a set of images over and over again in different keys now is able to paint with loose brush strokes or looser looser pen strokes to suggest rather than to nail down everything to gesture toward something to have a kind of elegiac note in what he or she does but really to quote in a way from previous work and to give it a kind of profundity which is partly because of its suggestiveness rather than it's it's it's because it's a quotation or an allusion or a suggestion rather than nailing everything down and I think with this play we have and indeed with all of these late plays of Shakespeare we have a wonderful example of late style now the the literary critic Edward Saeed who was also a music critic wrote about late style in Beethoven and late style in music altogether and these plays are often called Shakespeare's late plays or late romances and there is a sense and we talked about this a little bit when we talked about Pericles in which he is revisiting in these plays some themes and indeed some situations in some kinds of characters that we saw in earlier plays by by Shakespeare the what what King in other Shakespearean plays does Cymbeline seem to resemble to you if anyone where does here's the rashness of King Lear what what also was King Lear's domestic problem at the time that we encountered him daughters yes in this case a multiplicity of daughters about the marriage of one the question again a question that we could say is itself quoted from the dilemma of Shakespearean comedy of the father wishing to ordain the marriage of the daughter and the daughter wanting to assert her independence we saw this in a fellow as well by choosing her own partner made here in the case of Desdemona in a fellow in the case of Cordelia in King Lear bad things happen the in case of Romeo and Juliet exactly daughter's independence is dramatically spectacular rhetorically enormous ly powerful and the result in terms of the dramatic outcome is that the daughter dies the father is left to mourn to understand his own myths taking and ultimately the the sense is one of loss the Kingdom loses the montagues and capulets lose there is no continuity the continuity has to come from outside in this case that same rebellion of the daughter chooses her husband against the father's wish turns out he's pointing her every bad direction she is choosing somebody who everybody from line four of the play says is the most spectacular guy that everyone came to Britain and the result is that everybody wins that she seems to die like Juliet but comes back to life like herself she that posthumous who is named from and we should talk about his name from the very beginning suggests late style that he is belated from the very beginning and I want to say another word about his name in just a second returns from his various transformations and disguises and they live happily ever after so that that that romance and comedy intersect with history and tragedy in order to produce a kind of rich dynastic stew here a rich answer at the end of the play to the question of how how you build the history of Britain how you build a dynastic family how you assert the continuity between Britain and Rome rather than rather than the war that seems to sunder it now posthumous is named which literally means born afterward right so a posthumous publication is one that's done after the author is dead in what sense is posthumous posthumous born after his father died and what we learned in the at the very end of the play also I did you know his mother mother dies in childbirth so he is he's fulfilled this fantasy that we saw Coriolanus want is if a man were author of himself and knew no other kin here we have posthumous with the father he never knew and the mother who dies when he is born and who yes please and the brothers and the brothers exactly so and you would so he's got this name Leia nadas posthumous leonatus that turns out to be a riddle that needs to be unpacked and in the unpacking of the riddle he gets also to have a family reunion he gets to have in his dream this reunion with the father the mother the brothers he gets to recuperate he at the degree to which he is posthumous and so that they're the two sets of family reunions that happen here the one in the family of Cymbeline and also the one in the family of posthumous but posthumous is parent less Ness gives him at the beginning of the play at least a certain kind of independence which is quite in contrast to the fact that everybody else seems to have parents and indeed rather obtrusive and controlling parents and may may also be related to the fact that he seems so universally admired and like a comment like a piece of magic and said that they described him as if in fact he wasn't born of mad as if there wasn't a sense of his having become somebody but already having been somebody at the same time it's not all together and it's not a great theatrical role it is not a law in the part of posthumous compared to the parts of some of these other characters he is praised a lot at the beginning at the end but how much of an actor actually is he how much does he actually get to do it's a little bit like no row man with respect to Julie absolutely it has that has the bigger part the the the parking at the beginning of the play of this pair again normally a marriage would end a comedy the traditional end of romantic comedy is marriage this is a play that begins with the news of a marriage and therefore of a parking so again it turns that convention inside out this leads on the one hand to this scene that we saw of the he goes back so to speak I mean if you're to think about that the this normative evolution of the young adult from a crowd of friends into a one-on-one relationship with a life partner as with Romeo and Mercutio and all the guys he's out brawling with and then his choice of Juliet or Benedict and all the others in the wars and then finally his choice of Beatrice so here we have the reverse of that again first the love affair takes place offstage the marriage takes place offstage the separation of the two posthumous and and and Imogen and then as if he's living it backwards this boys will be boys conversation that he has with Giacomo and the Frenchman and these the the the mute Spaniard and Dutchman this this kind of braggadocio about my girls better than your girl he seems as if it ought to come prior to psychologically prior to the scene of the marriage but in fact it comes after it and it leads at least temporarily to disaster now the jealousy of posthumous who does that remind you of a fellow does it remind you substantively with that okay with jealousy he seems um so quick to be wary of her yeah um that it's totally irrational a completely at the with very few clues in fact before yokomo unpacks his entire bag of tricks I I am convinced even before he's seen you seize the jewel he hears about the marks on her body and so forth way before that he said oh my god I'm sure so so again it's is if he is if he were a psychologically conceived character you would say that like a fellow there's a certain self doubting this about him that she feels that that he is unworthy of her or that she in fact that this was a little mistake on her part since he's not a very psychologically conceived character but only a character who performs behaviors so to speak rather than our seeing any psychic development within him it all seems again very quick it seems to happen very quickly and very much on the surface he performs jealousy so to speak rather than becoming jealous if I can make that distinction for you and this would be very consonant with what I said a minute ago about late style that it is in a way a quote even if you've never seen a fella and we'll see next week another character who becomes jealous very quickly that that that his his utterance is performs that immediate turn around age of jealousy that we might if we were writing it up clinically say it happened very quickly but you'd never actually perform it so quickly here it is performed very quickly indeed let's just look at that for a second so you can see there is it 2-1 it must be oh sorry what before we look at his jealousy I'm sorry we should look at the admin chamber same for us that's that's why I've gotten ahead of myself the bedchamber seen as one of the great scenes in all of Shakespeare I think this is it's it's and it's partly terrific because because of the set up and again I think I probably write about this in my chapter that she's been reading she's gone to bed and she's it in in defiance of what books probably looked like in ancient Rome or Britain she has folded the leaf down of this codex that she's been reading but what has she been reading spewing about a rape she's been reading the tale of Terius now what is the tale of curious yes sorry yes but do you remember the story at all that's right that's right this is the story of pillow Mila of the who becomes the nightingale this is the story on which titus andronicus is based again you know if we're thinking about this play as a kind of anthology of other moves of shakespeare there's a kind of gesture back toward that horrendous rape that you actually do see on stage with all its physical dismemberment but she's been reading sensational literature let's call it that she's also been reading mythology so you could say it's high or it's low but she's been reading about a rape and she falls asleep and she's had before this this little discussion with yonkoma remember that yakumo has decided that he's going to seduce her one way or another and so first he comes in he says well posthumous is a Rotter and he's off sleeping with everybody else and you made a bad choice and really you know you should pay him back by sleeping with me and so she is it first horrified by these accounts of posthumous behavior until the yacumo said so the way to pay him back is to sleep with me at which point she understands that this is probably not true and says you know you go away I know what's at which point again in defiance of ordinary behavior he says no no I was just okay I was just testing you just trying to see whether you were a virtuous which I see that you are your everything he said he was he says you were and he said you were wonderful Oh fine she says don't worry about it no hard feelings now he says can I have a favor of you can I please store something something value but I didn't buying old gold plate silver plate as a gift and could I for the the Lord I serve could I please just store it for it with you for one night no she she says oh don't worry about it I'll be happy to store it but you're my boyfriend's friend my husband's friend stay longer than one night oh no I can't now why can't he stay for longer than one night why won't he right hang around the court longer well also cuz he's gonna be in the box so he can't really stay there because it the the the idea is get the box inside her bedchamber and of course it's her idea to store it in her bedchamber it's not he doesn't say would you please store this in your bedchamber he says would you put this someplace safe for for me and she says oh I've got the perfect place my bedchamber so so again it's it's it's as if she's functioning in this kind of a world of the unconscious speaks and he puts himself inside this trunk and then again it's what was it like those of you who saw the production in New York you saw it what was the scene like it's dark and then at night he this thing very slowly comes up and it's it's done with great yeah and but I mean he's probably more of a Snooper than anything else and when snooping around the room looking for clues and he's making this map of what the room looks like he's really looking for evidence and then she I guess overturns or something and that's where he sees this thing on her breasts the mark and and so be he's it's not a very honorable say I mean he looks like scumbag in there you know I mean you had this beautiful figure on the pad I mean there's a contrast between the two a great so but but but we could see that I mean if you wanted to think about this play in allegorical terms you could see this also as a kind of rebirth scene in which he's again remember that that both marina and VISAA were born out of trunks or containers or the the remember the dead body face it wasn't dead and was in the casket and so forth it that that in this case the task it opens up and it's Giacomo and he is not only you know an active agent but he's an agent who is both the detective and as you say completely dishonorable but is there a sense in which what happens at night while she is sleeping is a kind of dream of hers is it a kind of counterpart of what of the rape scene that she was reading of of the perhaps the remembrance of his attempt to seduce her to which she said no in the conscious but was she may be saying something else in her unkind to say it's hard to say but it's complicated because it's a night scene and because she is on stage and asleep and when something's happening in her bedchamber while she's on stage asleep there's some kind of connection between what's happening there and what she may be thinking or dreaming about so that this is again that those who remember the comedies of misshapes for the Midsummer Night's Dream there's Hermia has a dream while she is lying asleep in the woods and she dreams that a snake comes and and menaces her and so forth and it's a dream about her boyfriend Lysander who is is lying right near her so so here too it would let and let's just look at this just because it's great seen its act see act 2 scene 2 resist our Tarquin thus did softly press the Russia's air he wakened the chastity he wounded says Aria how bravely thou becomes thy bed fresh Lily whiter than the sheets that I might touch or kiss one kiss Ruby is on Paragon and so forth but my design to note the chamber I will write all down such as such pictures there the window such the adornment of her bed and so forth and as you say his intention initially is simply to have these these clues of the room and Oh sleep thou ape of death Lydell upon her and be her sense but as a monument thus in a chapel lying well here we might think again about Juliet in her her false sleep the sleep that the Romeo thinks is death and then then he begins to sort of take note about her body and the clock strikes one two three time time and he goes back into the trunk and so she has been violated she had but she has not been violated in the way that a rape scene in Titus Andronicus would take place she has been violated by his eyes she has been violated and immediately now you're going to have how caught and come and talk about penetrating and Lu's puns about the tongue and so forth in which this image of penetration and violation becomes before more coarsely presented but this little dream scene in which Giacomo performs an act of spying which is at the same time a kind of counterpart of what she's been reading is a kind of model for how we ourselves might read the rest of the play that it that the play is in a way very much engaged with this question of reading and interpretation reading the the riddle that descends into the hands of posthumous reading the behaviors of characters reading costumes a tremendous amount of me staking of costumes in this play how many characters are can you think of we're wearing costumes not their own image and obviously Clutton anybody posthumous himself dresses yeah yes exactly exactly so and this all this play about inward versus outward about whether the the Queen is beautiful from the beginning to the end but she's wicked inside the the the the the behaviors of certain characters are admirable but they in fact disclose certain other secrets about them that this tremendous amount of rhetoric in this play about inside and outside about seeming and being about the difficulty of reading the surface for the interior and what's complicated about that is that this is in some ways so much a play of the surface that this is very much a play about songs and spectacles and not as we've been saying a play about psychology or about about detectable motivations here the what what are the recognition scenes in this play recognition and misrecognition scenes you have imogen miss recognizing cloten at the end there's a ton of them I've got it's way over the top it's like a Saturday Night Live skit I mean it's everybody turns out to be somebody else yes exactly and nobody recognizes anybody from the beginning you know Imogen doesn't recognize posthumous and and assembling doesn't recognize his children and it has to be described to everybody simile does kind of see in the pageboy something that looks kind of familiar and that again that we when one's often sees that in these kind of cross-dressing recognitions that there's a and that may be actually partly theatrically functional remember it's a boy actor playing a woman playing a boy so in a way you need some prompt to the audience to for to remember that he the observer will be seeing something that we should remember is there that is a an act of cross-dressing which is actually a redressing in the original gender so to speak that so that you'll often find this sort of sense that that of recognition when it's when it's penetration of that kind of disguise but indeed there's there's once again he fails to see very often but the plate turns on these miss recognitions partial recognitions false recognitions in order to get to the moment at the end of the play when there are these multiple again over determined over-the-top sets of repetitions of recognition sorry of recognitions of every possible member of the household and the family including remember for first in this this final scene or the beginning of this final scene they they can't find somebody who can't they find yes posthumous who had helped in the battle exactly they can't find that that that loyal good soldier where I wish I could reward him where is he we well Chris he's right there but but he they can't find him because he's changed his clothes again the so that the the the amount of deliberate misdirection or indirection in that wonderful last scene which again you could play for Laughs if you wanted to but that has a kind of magic about it it has a kind of of wonder about it and that word wonder which is a major word in the English Renaissance begins to be mobilized in the course of this of this final act do not wonder at it you can wonder out it you're a wonder and so forth that sense of wonder as a kind of Epiphany as a kind of apparition that appears before you that to to reveal something to you that that the the experience of wonder is partly the experience of the confrontation with something that can't merely be rationalized we can't merely be explained yes the first sighting of Imogen by her brothers in the cave didn't they describe it as maybe they didn't use the word wonder but something other than that would be very nice let's see ah okay yes here we go act 3 scene 7 and they just been out hunting you Polydor have proved best woodsman and our master of the feast cad wall and I will play the cook and servant peace be here poor house that keeps thy self I'm tired I'm hungry there's cold meat in the cave we'll browse on that I love this idea let's nibble let's have a little nosh before we cook we'll browse and really there's cold meat in the cave little browse on that and of course it's an animal word browse whilst we have what we've killed be cooked looking into the cave stay come not in but that it eats our vittles I should think here were a fairy what's the matter sir by Jupiter an angel or if not an earthly Paragon and that's again highly characteristic of Shakespeare that he's not going to allow you to take something for Supernatural it's gonna be immediately translated into something just like the supernatural only human behold divineness no elder than a boy enter Imogen good masters harm me not here's money for my meet I would have left it on the board money all's gold and silver rather than turns to dirt I see you're angry because of course this is it this is a free money economy this is not about exchange value here this is not about paying for things this is about being given things this is again this it's this idea of the pastoral as a place in which generosity rather than payment functions here what's your name Fedele sir I have a kinsman who's bound for Italy embarked at Milford and so forth prithee fair youth think us no Charles nor measure our good minds by this rude place we live in you're welcome boys bidam welcome were you a woman youth now we're gonna have that already the sort of you know very close to uncovering or discovery all right no I mean again it's remarkable were you a woman youth I should wool hard but be you're grooming honesty I bid for you as I do by I'll make it my comfort he is a man I love it so too bad he's a man because I would love him if he were a woman but since he's a man I'll love him as a brother most welcome be sprightly for you fall amongst friends amongst friends if brothers aside would it had been so that they had been my father's sons then had my prize been less and so more equal ballasting to the posthumous that is to say I wouldn't have had so much of an inheritor I would have been it would have been easier to marry you because unlike my being the only heiress to the throne would have been less of a problem but notice that in this the course of this little exchange they've guessed everything they've guessed that she's a woman they've guessed that they're brother and sister they've guessed that the boys are are actually not Charles but Noble everything is here and yet it's as if there's a little screen in front of it because we don't want to know this yet we want to know and we don't want to know we have want to know but if we knew now the play would come to an end and we don't want the play to come to an end so it comes this close to discovery it's like those little scenes in which you see people pass each other not seeing each other and you think aha I know better but everything has been said here so this this is a recognition scene in which nothing is recognized everything is recognized and nothing is recognized everything you said and nothing is said it's all on the surface and it all goes right back down again and and again the the way she encounters their rudeness they're not not their bad manners but rather precisely not their bad manners they're their country nature the fact that they their pastoral existence is very much the way Orlando in as you like it encounters what again turns out to be the Duke and his company in exile in the forest where they say come on in and sit down and have a drink and he says you know I thought all things had been Savage here so she has a very similar moment in which she says oh I didn't understand that in fact I could find you know comfort and welcome and generosity here in the woods in the cave in and again it's the double whammy because on the one hand you're getting the ideology of pastoral that people in the country are more gentle their untainted by the court they are they have natural generosity and so forth on the other hand all these people we run into in the country actually belong in the court they're actually all Noble they're actually all royal they're they're only in terms of exile so that the nature-nurture come back together again so what looks like the topsy-turvy nosov nature is better than nurture turns out to be in fact redundancy rather than opposition but they've been been enabled to live in this pristine environment or this natural environment they're hunting in but they're there in nature and what what these plays will often show us just as King Lear remember preferred to be out in the nature that out in rain out in storm rather than to be inside where cruelty was really happening whereas we New Gloucester lives were being out where the sisters were behaving badly and so forth where at least in nature he was in some kind of state that didn't have malevolence attached to it whereas in the court here malice malevolence is in the person of the queen who embodies the this this kind of scientific curiosity about life and death that she's I mean this she's bored this is her hobby so she has a the the Cornelius the doctor and notice that every single one of these places gonna have a gun doctor magician figure what was the doctor a magician in Pericles and Brie's name ceremony ceremony in ceremony so we had ceremony there and here we have Cornelius which would have been recognizable as the name of a German scholar magician but here the name of the and again Shakespeare's fabulously mixing many nations in the choices of these names that they don't all belong to one national lexicon at all but here we have Cornelius who has been educating the Queen in a kind of big Honi in science you take a little disingenuous value stir it together and you get perfume where you get I mean because it's initially its described as sort of good things of the using of flowers and so forth but now she'd like to know she's rather like Doctor Faustus she'd like to know can I do bad things with this where's the power we're how can I am tired of making soap and lanyards now I would like to learn how to make death please just because I'm curious about how these things would work and but I'm not gonna use it on human beings oh no just on little cats and dogs well you know the so corneil but Cornelius in an aside tells us that he has already figured this out and that in this moment when she says to him it's not as if she asks him he says what shall I do oh I'll go off and get a fake but he's already figured this out so again it's this wonderful telescoping of things I knew she was going to ask me to do this and so I have already prepared this potion that is going to simulate death and in fact is only a kind of sleep so so again this is the half of Romeo and Juliet is here truncated into this one little moment but it's a moment again about the Queen as a Questor after universal knowledge and universal power and about magical powers again the power of life and death so we have the good physician in the bad physician again Cornelius and the Queen and we have a queen who is user ping not only the power to decide yes the tribute no the tribute yes married cloten don't marry cloten you should shouldn't negotiate with the with the Romans all of these masculine roles that where we said yes how can we admire Cymbeline when he's so diminished here but also UserA paying this Faustian or Faust like quest to be able to use nature to harness nature this is in the action of a scientist to do cool bad things to take life - so that I mean somewhere buried here and and I must say that this is something I not thought about before somewhere buried in this little description of the Queen he is a kind of hint of what we're going to see with the benevolent good magician Prospero in the tempest who again can harness all of these he's male that can harness all these powers he is books he has recipes he is the combination of Cornelius and the Queen in one person he only uses these powers for good but but her curiosity here is a very early modern curiosity about the uses of science and it's all again made into this kind of negative fairy tale of the wicked stepmother she's got all the things wrong with her she's the stepmother she's dominating the man the husband and she she wants explicitly to know how to make death to make death work so that again we might want to juxtapose the let's look at the various ways in which death appears in this one that that was one thing when I came in here to see me I wanted to make sure to to demonstrate a little bit to you so we have the Queen's potions well what where else does death make a and appearance in the heading potent okay good and and then the funerals that so so the beginning cloten and the other funeral of course is is Imogen is the the simulated the apparent death the mourning over the supposed death of Imogen where else yes death of the Queen at the end yes exactly where instead of the macbeth moment she should have died Hereafter we had this long description of her deathbed words and of her beauty in a her said but exactly her death we don't see it but we hear an awful lot about it yes what else posthumous think he's murdered Imogen or he's had been murdered yes he they they both blamed pisanio it's interesting they both blame this this this loyal servant for for the posthumous says there's some commands you're better to resist and again we'll see that it will see that next week we'll see that in in Winter's Tale we're the question of whether you should obey a royal command or a command from an employer that you actually think is a bad idea or whether you should resist it will come up again in The Winter's Tale so he blames pisanio for presumably killing Imogen and she blames pisanio for what doesn't she blame him too she does I'm making this stuff because at the end when we have her say then you gave her the box yes yes yes tell me you gave me poison you you you know he she doesn't understand that because he thought the Queen now why since he perfectly well sees through the Queen to why he should think that the Queen said it gives to him something that's healthy rather than something you know it's unhealthy and again I I know I talked a little bit in my chapter about the small boxes and the big boxes about the the the difference between this box of poison small box that's carried around and the big box of plate that also contains the poison it's the akio inside the bedchamber of Imogen that these are dream images in a way of one another here the Queen Queen's relationship to these structures to other appearance occurrences of the death motif are in the the jail scene with the execution or the jailer talking about hanging and there's a sort of comic interchange on that and then the the battle scenes and the so I can't pinpoint the the speeches but they're the battle scenes are reviewed in a sort of narrative mode and the sort of heroic marshal yes talk about the narrow lane yes turning the Romans back right right I love that passage I don't know how it played on the stage but I loved that the first is long description and then it's reduction into this mythic form of the remember the questions that we saw in empirically it did you not name a tempest of birth and death but here a narrow lane two boys that that the the reduction of this get get twice you get you don't see it then you get this long description then you get its reduction to a kind of mythic and you can see that this would be the headline it is for modern history this would be the headline in the new paper the what is the narrow lane sorry there's three things an old man and three boys yes and two boys sorry exactly the so that they I love that yes no miniaturised 300 sorry it's Thermopylae yes yes yes exactly exactly and you have that sense of and it's a miracle - it's a kind of astonishing moment and it's it from a and it's also a mythic moment of the turning of the tide in terms of this of the British fortunes here that and and it's done by loyalists it's done by we can again think about these images of the Revolutionary War where it's all people in tatters versus people in in major uniforms and so forth to get that but in the in the final recognition see you even find Cymbeline saying to go Darius I am sorrow for thee by thine own tongue now are condemned and must endure our Lord law thou art dead I love that moment again where he says - this is when good Arius the son says it's me I killed cotton oh my gosh you know I was about to reward you with a kind of you know Purple Heart but instead you're the penalty of the law is gonna come down on you thou art dead but it's the present tense that that interests me here because there's so many characters in this play who are kind of living dead like like the the the the the family of Sicilian sicinius leonatus they who come alive and are the Living Dead here's the question question of life and death is always in flux yes I don't know what it is how you describe where one of the boys is over her body and as that that marvelous to talk on the flowers that young Eleanor sure okay in fact there's something I want to in my addition it does not tell you something completely crucial about this song I again I'm told that I weren't told I read in the review of the of the production that this song was spoken rather than some I'm not going to sing it but but here it is in act 4 scene 2 again the songs of Shakespeare a very famous they're often excerpted the song the in in these late plays these songs often this this is played it's got everything it's got the descent in God it's got that the the prophecy come to life and again a very clunky prophecy that is read twice so you can figure out in it's all about etymology and so forth and it's got all these wonderful songs if you're not more of the heat of the Sun nor the Furious winters rages thou the worldly task has done home art gone and tain lie wages golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust just stop with this this stanza for a second because does anybody know in English folklore what golden lads are yeah they're dandelions precisely so that this is my Edition which dates from 1955 doesn't even talk about that about the fact that what's that that that the natural round here is being compared to social rank human existence and so forth the the on the one hand this says royal well born people lucky people are just the same in the eye of God or in this angle of life and death as common born people chimney sweepers the gold and the dusty the high and below the fortunate and the unfortunate but what so they're in one hand this is all about social distinction and how death is the great leveler but it's also about the naturalness of death golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers and of course the chimney sweepers themselves come to do the dusting as well as to dust so they are agents as well as recipients of this notion fear no more the frown of the Great Thou art past the tyrants stroke care no more to clothe and eat great and eat would have rhymed in this period to the the read is as the oak a very slightest to the most powerful the sceptre learning physic must all follow this and come to dust now this is a very familiar kind song in Elizabethan language the idea that that the their wonderful early songs about the fear of death and how one must overcome it because the Death Comes to everybody fear no more the lightning flash nor the all dreaded thunder stone I hear them coming here if you're north slanders center Center rash now has finished joy in Mon all lovers young all lovers must consigned to thee and come to dust and now there are these four lines in which they they they strew things on the grave now one of the things that I want to say about she experience songs in relationship to the plays that connect new that contain them is that often they like plays within the play are the thing that doesn't happen that they that this is a description of death and mourning and earthly transformation set over against a play that is going in fact to bring everyone back to life in which even the really debt the parents of posthumous are going to reappear on stage but so that this the enclosed in the song and we can see this even in the full song in King Lear enclosed in the song is both both metamorphosis and transformation and the the round of life and death and the song will both present it and hold it away from fulfillment because in fact nobody is going to die in this plan somebody is caught it's going to drive it but the rest of the figures claudin is in a way the sacrifice here that Clutton and the mother are and we could go back to the the to the the end of macbeth in which there's a kind of claim using of Scotland from the evil Macbeth's here there's a cleansing of England from this Widow and her step her son who is the king of step son so that everybody else can be reborn back into their old existences so the figures who seem to be themselves turn out to not be themselves whereas the figures who seemed not to be themselves all turn out in fact to be reborn into a different kind of existence was there more that you wanted to ask about the song it's it's a beautiful song as it's performed but this the the combination here of the story about social class and the story about the natural round and here just to finish this up as we'll see in the place that are cutting to come as well the third piece here is the jewel which is almost always in these plays an equivalent of virtue but we saw that with Desdemona one entire prayer and perfect chrysolite but here becomes also a token of fidelity and that which is not changed by time by rain by wind by by anything like that so that we've got three stages we've got the natural round we've got the human and we have the eternal as figured in the jewel and we'll see all of those things again in The Winter's Tale so I'll see you next week

Channel: CosmoLearning

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Id: T4dAafh4Dxo

Length: 102min 6sec (6126 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 18 2015