Incoherent can be, at times, disarming. Even, at times, wise. The "unresisting imbecility" of Shakespeare's Cymbeline is precisely what makes the play relevant to debates about the euro, devolution, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the sexual insecurity of Anglo-American men.
"Unresisting imbecility" is Dr Johnson's phrase. The 18th century's most famous schoolmaster was too educated to overlook and too principled to excuse Shakespeare's "confusion... of the manners of different times". That confusion was chronic and incurable - it shows up in all his works - but the symptoms are especially "gross" in Cymbeline.
Historically, Cymbeline was a contemporary of Augustus Caesar. Shakespeare accordingly decorates his play with allusions to Roman gods and emperors, Roman provinces in Africa and Roman wars against the Parthians, Pannonians and Dalmatians. Cymbeline's daughter gets sleepy reading Ovid in a bedroom decorated with scenes from the life of Cleopatra.
Cymbeline is the last of Shakespeare's "Roman plays". It was written in 1609-10, soon after Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Like them, it calls for carefully choreographed battle scenes, showing Romans doing what Romans did best (marching). Like them, it ends in peace. Like them, it evokes a Roman world that profoundly shaped Renaissance ideas about the self and the state.
But Cymbeline's Roman empire is also populated by medieval "knights" and by "giants" wearing "impious turbans". James I was the first king of England to make "the Bedchamber" a pivotal court institution, but in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline's court is similarly organised. After the Norman conquest, "Richard du Champ" might well be the name of an English gentleman, but Shakespeare makes it contemporary with the Roman conquest. Shakespeare's Romans do not invade across the English channel, but come ashore instead at Milford Haven, like Henry Tudor's army in the 15th century. Although singing eunuchs did not appear in western Europe until the 16th century, Shakespeare's ancient Britons already know all about them.
Shakespeare, in other words, took everything out of context. And we cannot excuse the resulting hodgepodge on the grounds that he didn't know better. William Camden's magisterial history of Britannia had been published in 1586. Even before then, Shakespeare, like other Elizabethan schoolboys, would have learned from his textbook Caesar that the ancient Britons painted their bodies blue and practised polyandry. Shakespeare's heroine, by contrast, is "whiter than the sheets" of her bed. And the murderous jealousy of Shakespeare's Posthumus does not belong to a culture where a woman could have several husbands at once.
His jealousy belongs, instead, to a culture officially committed to Christian monogamy. But it also originates, more specifically, in the sexual contrast between Britain and Italy. Posthumus believes an Italian who claims to have seduced his wife within hours of having met her. The "proofs" of that alleged infidelity are ridiculously flimsy, and critics condemn either Shakespeare or Posthumus for the implausibility.
Sitting in a Roman cafe with the woman I love, I don't find the jealousy so incomprehensible. I'm surrounded by Italian males who seem to have been dipped, at birth, in sexual charisma. My friend Ernesto tells me that Italian men, if they catch the eye of a babe in a restaurant, will sometimes follow her when she goes to the bathroom and - if they get lucky - fotterla, then and there. My lover goes to the bathroom. She's gone a long time. I think about Cymbeline.
Posthumus credits Giacomo's lie because it's easy for uptight Anglo-Saxons to believe in the predatory erotic omnipotence of Latin lovers. In exchange for the resulting sexual insecurity, the uptight Anglo-Saxon is rewarded with a sense of moral superiority over Mediterranean males.
As I sit in that Roman cafe, thinking about Cymbeline, my lover is trapped for half an hour inside a locked toilet. When she closes the door behind her, the handle falls off on the outside, and she can not escape until another woman comes to her rescue. Presto! A bathroom farce of Italian incompetence replaces a bedroom tragedy of Italian omnipotence. The same thing happens in Cymbeline: British husband's British wife rejects would-be Casanova, husband repents jealousy, Brit hero defeats Italian villain in hand-to-hand combat. Happy Anglo endings all round.
In Shakespeare's (Italian) source for the story of Posthumus, there is no national or ethnic difference between the jealous husband and the alleged seducer. Shakespeare, instead, makes that ethno-sexual contrast central to a play entitled Cymbeline, King of Britain, which uses the words Britain, British, Briton more than 50 times (far more than in all his other works combined).
In the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare had written 10 or 11 plays based on English history. After her death, he wrote, instead, British history plays: King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline. That change originated in the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, and the new monarch's efforts to unify his two kingdoms into a single constitutional entity called Great Britain.
The English Parliament resisted its Scottish king, and a century passed before the Act of Union legalised his dreams. But Cymbeline, like Ben Jonson's court masques, imagines a new social identity that could be called British. It does so, in part, by constructing a new image of the past, what historians of nationalism call an "invented tradition".
The difficulty of inventing a plausible British identity shows in the historical incoherence of Cymbeline. No real biological, cultural or political continuity unites the various peoples who have settled the geographical locales we call Britain. The aboriginal inhabitants described by the Romans belonged, even then, to different ethnic groups. None of the subsequent invaders - Romans, Germans, Scandinavians or Normans - successfully subdued the entire island.
"British" is a fictional category created, and imposed, in the 17th century. Shakespeare helped create it. He also helped make it palatable to his fellow Englishmen. Cymbeline, King of Britain is (as an early spectator recorded) really just Cymbeline, King of England. Although much of the play's second half takes place in Wales, there are (as a modern critic observes) no Welshmen in Cymbeline's Wales. It's entirely inhabited by various exiles or tourists from the English court.
There are no Scots in Shakespeare's Britain, either. Cymbeline dramatises a battle that took place between the Danes and the Scots near Perth in 976; the heroes of that battle were the ancestors of one of King James's favourite Scottish courtiers. But Shakespeare changed the battle's date, transferred it to Wales and replaced Highland heroism with English yeoman stubbornness.
In its definition of Great Britain as a euphemism for English dominance, Cymbeline confirms the suspicions of Welsh and Scottish nationalists. But the absence of Scots and Welshmen from Cymbeline's kingdom is matched by the absence of... Englishmen. The British hero is named Posthumus Leonatus; his father (Sicilius) fought for a British king named Tenantius. Other British characters are named Cornelius, Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus. No Tom, Dick or Harry here. There's a British servant named Pisanio and a British expatriate named Philario. They all worship Roman gods.
Who are the British? They are, says Shakespeare, ancient Romans by another name, who speak English instead of Latin. They are a civilised, chaste, imperial, warlike people. The struggle between Cymbeline and Augustus Caesar is a civil war, like Henry Tudor's landing at Milford Haven to attack and defeat Richard III, founding the Tudor dynasty that would annex Wales, recolonise Ireland and eventually put James I on the throne of Great Britain. Cymbeline, the last of Shakespeare's three Jacobean plays on British history, is also the last of his three Jacobean plays on Roman history. Having defeated the Roman legions, Cymbeline nevertheless volunteers to pay tribute to Rome, so that the play's final image is of "a Roman and a British ensign" waving "friendly together".
James I was a Europeanist. His first act as king was to end the war between England and Spain. He wanted to unite Europeans by marriages and treaties, not gunpowder. He was also an ecumenical Christian. King James, the patron of Shakespeare's acting company, thought it possible to heal the divisions between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. The King's Men's Cymbeline imagines, not only a unified Great Britain, but a reunified Christian Europe.
Sam Johnson, writing just after the Seven Years' War between Catholic France and Protestant England, was convinced of "the impossibility of the events" of Cymbeline "in any system of life". Some of those events look less impossible now. Indeed, Shakespeare's heap of "unresisting imbecility" may have been prophetic. Could it be - as Ben Jonson, writing over a century before Sam Johnson, claimed of Shakespeare generally - "not of an age, but for all time"?
Sitting in the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, between Etna and the sea, watching storm clouds make their exits and their entrances above the puny human movements on display on stage, I am almost ready to believe that I understand Aeschylus and Aristophanes, despite the passage of millennia. Yes, I want to announce, art is for ever.
As long as we take it out of context.
· Cymbeline is in rep at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Box office: 01789 403403.
