Bernabò, the husband, is convinced, not by these, but by the description of a mole with golden hairs under his wife’s left breast. He orders a servant to kill Ginevra, but the servant helps her to escape in male clothes.5

Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics chose to take sides over the wager plot, and to make moral judgments upon the action. For a long time Innogen was seen as an ideal portrait of womanhood and wifely virtue:

in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest possible characteristics of womanhood—untainted health of soul, unshaken fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inexhaustible forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never wavers, and unquenchable radiance of spirit.6

Unsurprisingly, many critics denounced Posthumus:

The wrong of Posthumus is the commonest of moral perversions, the false sense of honour that dares not refuse a challenge, whatever the moral cost implied in its acceptance, it is the perversion which is the product of social narrowness and artificiality; the duellist dreads the sentiment immediately surrounding him in the coterie that has dubbed itself “men of honour,” and forgets the great world with its balanced judgements and eternal principles of right.7

More recently, masculine anxieties and a male-driven culture of commodity have also been seen as driving the wager. Twentieth-century feminist criticism was especially interested in the socially constructed “virgin/whore” binary that women are fetishistically bracketed into by men, and the wager plot can be seen as a literal playing out of this, with the two men betting over Innogen’s chastity. Her sexual purity has been interpreted as prudery, and, paradoxically, the very thing that makes her an object of sexual desire. Rather than the moral touchstone or untouchable object of desire that towers above the other characters in the play, Innogen has also been seen as marginal to the male relationships in the play, subjugated by a domineering, insecure, and oppressive patriarchy: “Innogen begins the play as its primary defining figure, defining herself, her husband, and the dramatic focus of the audience; by the end, she has learnt her place.”8 In psychoanalytic critic Janet Adelman’s formulation, the play’s “happy ending” is seen as “radically contingent” on Innogen’s “self-loss, on the ascendancy of male authority and the circumscription of the female … the unmaking of female authority, the curtailing of female pride, as much for Imogen as for the wicked queen.”9

Although we know Iachimo is lying about sleeping with Innogen, critics have argued for a kind of sexual conquest in the “trunk” scene, and this violation has also been seen as a metaphorical playing out of one of the play’s other plots:

In this context, Giacomo’s [modernized spelling of Iachimo’s] intrusion into Innogen’s bedroom becomes itself a tale of a British “haven” infiltrated by scurrilous foreign forces. His secret incursion becomes an enemy “voyage upon her,” its invasive metaphors speak of assaulting the “walls” of Innogen’s honour, the “temples” of her mind.10

THE DYNASTIC PLOT AND THE PASTORAL MODE

Although the figures of Cymbeline’s sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, came from Holinshed’s Chronicles, Shakespeare’s source for the play’s quasi-historical narrative, the Wales plot has its roots in romances and folk stories. This part of the drama has frequently been seen to share in the conventions of pastoral: “In common with a number of his other plays from As You Like It, via King Lear to The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline uses an excursion to a wilderness setting so that characters can return to their normal lives and roles, refreshed and, to an extent, sorted.”11 The pastoral environment has been seen as shaping the princes and providing them with an earthy, simple model of morality they can apply to courtly life on their return:

The fine young men, schooled to endurance by their teacher and their habitat, take their places among the other courtiers naturally enough, their youthful discipline offering the promise that Cymbeline’s kingdom will be reorganized on new and different moral lines. Nature has raised these boys so that they can return to a birthright compromised in their absence and purify it by the simple strengths of their natural characters.12

A more recent critic has argued conversely that:

Cymbeline is innovative because it dares to follow the characters home and suggests that their moral transformation may not last … What marks the boys’ nobility out as far as Belarius is concerned is their ability to imagine themselves into his heroic stories, to occupy another world that they have never personally known. Ironically, however, this imaginative understanding of the “other” is merely a restitution of the unexamined heroic but also brutal values that caused Belarius to flee in the first place.13

The culmination of the fictitious pastoral and the play’s move back into history, where the princes can become kings, as well as the mixing of plots and genres, has been brilliantly described by the critic Robert Henke:

Belarius recognizes that the arrival and killing of Cloten spell the beginning and the end of his protected, pastoral theatre and initiates the move back into history … The killing of Cloten initiates a more active interplay between pastoral and history than that effected by Belarius’s cave stories. Violence inappropriate to the pastoral decorum invades its boundaries—although the displacement of violence offstage adjusts the levels of violence in a manner appropriate to a tragicomic decorum. And Belarius realizes that as an uncanny messenger, Cloten is an earnest of further negotiations with the court. As “pastoral-historical,” Cymbeline aims to join the “lopp’d branches” to the “old stock” of the “stately cedar”: to graft the pastoral denizens Guiderius and Belarius back onto the British dynastic tree.14

KING OF BRITAIN

A number of critics have emphasized the play’s roots in fairy tale. Northrop Frye, one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century, saw the play as unhistorical, and its fairy-tale elements as defining:

Cymbeline is not, to put it mildly, a historical play: it is pure folk tale, featuring a cruel stepmother with her loutish son, a calumniated maiden, lost princes brought up in a cave by a foster father, a ring of recognition that works in reverse, villains displaying false trophies of adultery and faithful servants displaying equally false trophies of murder, along with a great firework display of dreams, prophecies, signs, portents, and wonders.15

Much recent criticism, however, has focused on the play’s politics in the widest sense, on the play’s treatment of Rome as well as its evocation of British nationhood. J. P. Brockbank adjudged the accounts of Holinshed to be “consonant” with the adventures of Brute, founder of the British nation according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and noted that Shakespeare’s dovetailing of sources creates a magical, principally theatrical, yet brilliantly researched historical narrative:

Shakespeare’s reading offers a paradigm for an action which makes the reconciliation with Rome a high event in the magical movement of British history from the vision of Brute to the golden prospect of the vision of Cadwallader … but he had scope still to exercise his imagination on other elements in the chronicle. In pursuit of that “odd and distinctive music” he chose to modulate from the Brutan into the Roman key and from the Roman into the Renaissance Italian.16

Earlier in the twentieth century, G. Wilson Knight had seen the play as dramatizing the passing of the baton from Rome to what would become England, which could be read in terms of the neoclassical world of the Renaissance taking up—in no small part through Shakespeare’s art—the torch of the classical world:

Certainly we are to feel the Roman power vanishing into the golden skies of a Britain destined to prove worthy of her Roman tutelage. Jupiter’s blessing on Posthumus’ marriage and the soothsayer’s vision thus make similar statements. Both symbolise a certain transference of virtue from Rome to Britain. Shakespeare’s two national faiths are here married; his creative faith in ancient Rome, felt in the dramas from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus, and his faith in England.17

Other critics felt the union between the two nations, based on mutual respect, rather than the supersession of one over the other, was key:

I find it difficult to accept [G. Wilson] Knight’s idea of Britain taking over from Rome. Iachimo is a corrupt Roman and he repents. Cloten is a villainous Briton and he is killed. Although there can be no doubt that some in the Jacobean audience would indeed see themselves as the successors of Rome, the play is not talking about the succession of empires but about the only true form of empire, which is when vassalage is removed, and union is a contract freely entered into.18

Gendering has also been identified as central to the Roman thread of the play, leading to the banishment of the Queen—who stands in defiant vocal opposition to Rome—from the final act: “powerful and rebellious females in native historiography threatened the establishment of a stable, masculine identity for the early modern state.”19 This gendering of nations has had a powerful hold on recent interpretations, including application of a “parthenogenesis” theory, which argued for Cymbeline’s desire to expunge the female from his world; not only his wife, the wicked Queen, but also the memory of the mother of his sons, and ultimately find union with the male world of Rome (also used to explain the play’s perceived structural problems):

In Cymbeline, a plot ostensibly about the recovery of trust in woman and the renewal of marriage is circumscribed by a plot in which distrust of women is the great lesson to be learned and in which male autonomy depends upon the dissolution of marriage. Moreover, the effect of the Imogen-Posthumus plot is everywhere qualified by the effect of the Cymbeline plot, and the two plots seem to be emotionally at cross-purposes: if one moves toward the resumption of heterosexual bonds in marriage, the other moves toward the renewed formation of male bonds as Cymbeline regains both his sons and his earlier alliance with an all-male Rome, the alliance functionally disrupted by his wife. Hence the emotional incoherence of the last scene: the resolution of each plot interrupts the other, leaving neither satisfactorily resolved.20

The scholar Robert S. Miola has argued that the play’s treatment of Rome veers in and out of, and ultimately rejects, the social and behavioral codes Shakespeare had worked so carefully to delineate in his previous, less fantastical, Roman plays:

Cymbeline’s loose aggregation of miniatures combines to portray a Rome that gradually yields to Britain. The chaste Roman matron Lucrece finally gives way to Imogen, the British maiden for whom honour and reputation are idle impositions, oft lost without deserving.