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Excerpts from the Critics: Cymbeline and Pericles
Pericles, Prince
of Tyre is the first of Shakespeare’s Romances . . . Shakespeare
took this opportunity to develop several ideas and techniques . . .
. Most important is the growth of a theme that runs through all of the
late plays; that humankind cannot alter its destiny in an inexplicable
but finally benevolent universe. Pericles
is a fairy tale about a separated family’s coming back together
again. . . . Even though the whole story seems improbable when we read
it, it never fails to move audiences when it is performed. There is a lot
for modern audiences in Cymbeline. The story itself isn’t
complex or inaccessible; one man bets another that his wife can be proved
false. (Of course, if the man had known anything about how loyal Shakespeare’s
women always are, he wouldn’t have bothered to bet!) Posthumus,
the husband, is another one of those Shakespearean men. . . who wrongly
doubt their wives’ integrity. There’s the bettor, Iachimo,
an Iago-like figure who preys on Posthumus’s suspicions. And there
is the strong, determined, faithful wife Imogen, who sets out to save
her reputation and her husband, no matter what the obstacles. She is
one of Shakespeare’s strongest heroines, and a wonderful character;
in fact, George Bernard Shaw, who didn’t always have good things
to say about Shakespeare, like her best of all Shakespeare’s women. The term romance
suggest a return to the kind of story the author and playwright Robert
Green (1558-1592) had derived from Greek romance: tales of adventure,
long separation, and tearful reunion, involving shipwreck, capture by
pirates, riddling prophecies, children set adrift in boats or abandoned
on foreign shores, the illusion of death and subsequent restoration
to life, the revelation of the identity of long-lost children by birthmarks,
and the like. Tragicomedy and
pastoral romance were, in the period from 1606 to 1610, beginning to
enjoy a fashionable courtly revival. The leading practitioners of the
new genre were Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, though Shakespeare
made a highly significant contribution. The appropriateness of such
plays to the elegant atmosphere of Blackfriars and the court is subtle
but real. Their old-fashioned naïveté, which would seem
to be out of place to a sophisticated audience, responded to pastoral
and romantic drama as a nostalgic evocation of an idealized past, a
chivalric “golden world” fleetingly recovered through an
artistic journey back to naïveté and innocence. The evocation
of such a world demands the kind of studied but informal artifice we
find in many tragicomic plays of the period: elaborate masque and allegorical
shows, descents of enthroned gods from the heaves, quaint chorus figures,
the quasi-operatic blend of music and spectacle. At their best, such
plays compel belief in the artistic world created. The very improbability
of the story becomes, paradoxically, part of the means by which an audience
must “awake its faith” in a mysterious truth. The interest in
fathers and daughters, and in the difficulties fathers have in coming
to terms with their daughters’ marrying other men, continues to
fascinate Shakespeare from Othello and King Lear into
all of his late romances. The three main
plots of Cymbeline — of Posthumus and Imogen, of the
King’s lost sons, and of the war between Britain and Rome —
may seem outwardly unconnected with one another. Certainly the play
ranges over a wide geographical space and introduces a host of characters,
many of whom never meet until the final scene. Yet the three plots are
unified by being structurally like one another. In each, we perceive
a pattern of fall from innocence, followed by conflict and eventual
redemption. . . . The plots impinge on one another in ways that seem
contrived (as, for example, when the accidents of war finally bring
together Imogen, Posthumus, and Iachimo in the presence of Cymbeline),
and yet we understand at last that the contrivance is providential and
benign, intended to test humanity and then reward those who have persevered
or at least found true contrition. From Late Shakespeare:
A New World of Words by Simon Palfrey For Shakespeare’s romances both observe and subvert conventional distinctions. And crucial here is the traditionally hierarchical separation of verse and prose. In Shakespeare’s late work, both are constructed out of the same peculiar intensity and, one might say, sleeplessness, of metaphor; ‘noble’ and ‘popular’ are forever interpenetrating and reorganizing one another. Aristocratic verse is laced with rude puns; the monster speaks in lilting iambic pentameters; folly endlessly recapitulates the acts of state. . . . . A new ‘genre’ is here emerging amid the wreckage of old distinctions. By Shakespeare’s time there had developed 2 broad traditions of ‘romance’, treating of its heroic subject-matter in fairly distinct ways. There was the tradition represented most famously by Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Sidney’s Arcadias, highly wrought, esoteric imitations of classical, medieval, and continental epic-pastoral. And there was the cheery demotic trade in ballads, penny chap-books, and open-air plays. . . . Long after aristocratic audiences had come to disdain them, functional knights and crusading zeal remained the staple fare of majority desire [evolution from Medieval Romance and the Knights of the Round Table]. . . The old tales of Dido, Aeneas, Arthur, and Griseld would filter down, transformed by the empathetic imperatives of an extemporizing crowd. . . Neither mode of appropriation [poetic or popular], humanist or vulgar, was a meek or deferential one. And Shakespearian romance — distinct from both, drawing from each — offers a further generic vivification: a new word in old words. Shakespeare . . .worked in a popular medium with its own self-respecting and correspondingly . . . .irrelevant traditions. His plays remain humanist [inspired by Sydney and the high poets], at times scholarly, and always engaged with the questions of liberty, apostasty (defection, renunciation), and virtue which so moved Sidney and Spenser. But still there are matters of tone, perspective, and priority which will distinguish the literary epic from the urban dramatic event. As Gower says in his introduction to Pericles: ‘It hath been sung at [Festivals], On Ember [eves] and [holidays]’, quite as often as it has been ‘red’ by ‘Lords and Ladyes’ (1 Chorus, 5-7). The old tale is brushed off as a genuine popular entertainment, a song as much as book, prone to all the dilations and mutation which the oral tradition confers. So in turning to the romance mode Shakespeare not only invokes the Arcadia, but pays a type of homage to popular Elizabethan plays. . . . These works tirelessly invoke chivalrous motif and sentiment but, as if faithful to their demotic franchise, remain strangely disobedient beasts. They share audience and orientation with old tales and ballads, possessing a tabloids’ topicality, a capacity to satirize, and an instinct toward allegory; they draw similarly upon fables, a genre rooted in the self-preservation and emotional democratizing of ‘proletarian’ communities. Improbably tales are not always the mollifying slave either of escapism of hegemony. While a polarization in taste was in its early stages, such material hadn’t entirely disappeared from the minds and entertainments of the better-off; it has been argued, for instance, that James’ daughter Elizabeth liked to recast her own travails in terms of the romances of which she was so fond. In Elizabethan Romance there was a rich tradition of irony mocking the genre [like Monty Python’s The Holy Grail]. . . even [in Jacobean romance] where, as in Pericles, the master of ceremonies is neither impudent nor ironical, the generic attitude of the work will itself impute just such a presence. Gower is from a distant time, and never pretends that his hobbling commentary can do justice to, let alone complete, the story. He ends most of his framing narratives with a humble deferral to the arts of the theatre. He sees his job as a bridging one, filling in the gaps, and begging the audience’s patience and acceptance toward the story’s patent violations of the unities. This in itself may be an unnecessary posture of apology, one that draws attention less to the play’s sweeping freeness with time and place — think of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies — than to Gower’s own outmoded conservatism. In other words, Gower is an old style master of ceremonies who implies, and indeed invites, the presence of a more modern counterpart, one who hasn’t slept through recent theatrical history. James’s son, Prince Henry, was helping to bring a tradition of aristocratic chivalry back in vogue . . . But such chivalrous ambition was again hardly the stuff of blind obedience: romance here might remain broadly monarchical, but its chivalry became a lighting rod for pan-European political grievances.. . . . the point is the ‘romance’ was an apposite form in which to portray, with respectful economy, the fact of discord and perhaps the hopes for change. Pericles (the character) begins as a kind of book of courtesy befitting the courtly chivalry he tries to embody; as has been seen, however, such a text has been corrupted, mocked into anachronism. Running from both tyranny and his own generic bewilderment, Pericles must in a sense be built from nothing. He retreats from Antioch, and finds himself in a sequence of wildernesses: first a mental alienation, then geographical homelessness, and finally the wild hinterland, quite alarming in a prince, of unkempt silence. This trope of the inner and outer desert returns in all of the romances: it represents both loss and opportunity. And what is significant about Pericles, and a pointer to the subsequent works, is the sources of the necessary rebuilding. They are not discovered ‘in’ the hero, who remains fundamentally bereft. They are found, rather, in his audiences.. . . As the protagonist, Pericles remains the vessel of any audience’s desires, courtly or popular.. . . Each place Pericles visits is a projection, a consequence, or a metaphor of his authority. And yet his role as the unfinished or inadequate hero imbues Pericles with the expectation that he will redress whatever failing in such authority is suggested by the condition of the place he visits. Pericles overlays one place and period with another, dramatizing various analogous city-states; these models contextualize and so inform the ‘authority’ of Pericles. His ‘character’ is less a personal thing than a text of civic potential. Pericles spends much of the play in one sense or another, stateless, estranged, savage. Intimating a kind of post-heroism, this pre-civility anticipates a new political dispensation.. . . The plays seek new faiths, forms, instruments, but lack a clear, precedent-buttressed identification of effective and legitimate agency . . . .straight genre roles like the noble hero, accustomed to a tidiness of function, cannot accommodate the messy turbulence of the age. There’s a touch of Groucho Marx in Posthumus: that the princess chose him says little for her taste; her whims are fickle and undiscriminating. Whether making absurd wagers, grotesque assassination plans, or suicidal abdications, Posthumus is confused into violence — against himself, his wife, his rivals, his country — because he measures everything, all morality and purpose, against an ideal which his own ostensible exemplification of ‘proves’ has done its dash. Like Imogen with the headless trunk, Posthumus is, throughout the play, a strangely embarrassed figure, left isolated and hysteric, pumping hot air into a memory shafted by mistake and corruption. Pivotal [to Cymbeline] is the relationship between Cloten and Posthumus. They never appear on stage together, but their relationship is introduced through report of a duel which, in establishing the terms of their rivalry, also prepares for the ensuing working-out of their conflict-cum-identity during the play. Either can fill in for the other; when together, they animate the conflicts which exist ‘independently’ within each and which the story goes on to dramatize. The duel between Cloten and Posthumus is an early example of a situation repeated time and again throughout the play: one figure seeks to defeat, kill, possess, or rape another. Shakespeare’s late romances always retain a sniff of the wilderness; this is so even at their most courtly or mercantile, as Leontes ‘bawdy planet’ or Mytilene’s piratical brothel might suggest. It is such a scent, given flesh by a bear, or by the strange island, or by the princess Imogen’s dream and then destiny of being thief-stolen, that the romances ensure the constant influence of indecorous desire. Such desire needn’t be sphere shattering. Resistance might take the form of criticism, or of a wish that [monarchy] not intrude upon certain important liberties; the plays seek space for a less fettered agency, and expect government to be neither cloistered nor unaccountable. . . . the nineteenth
century is where the critical and production history of Pericles
becomes most interesting, where it offers the greatest opportunity for
original research and thought. For the seventeenth century, there is
little existing documentation to support a historical investigation
of the play, but even the small account that survives has already been
well-trampled by scholars. Pericles was clearly one of the
most popular plays of the Jacobean era, and editors of most of the numerous
editions of the play include in their introductions the adulatory notes
of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights (as well as the sneering derision
of rival Ben Jonson, who wondered why audiences were flocking to see
such a “mouldy tale” as Pericles instead of one
of his own plays). |
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