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Summary
Cymbeline, accompanied by the Queen and Cloten, bids farewell to Caius Lucius. The king then asks to see Imogen and sends a messenger to fetch her, but the messenger returns saying that the door to her bedroom is locked, and she has not been seen in days. Suddenly worried, Cymbeline goes to see for himself, and Cloten follows. After a moment, the Queen’s son returns with word of Imogen’s flight. The Queen goes to comfort Cymbeline, and Cloten is left alone to fume and plot revenge on Imogen and Posthumus. Pisanio comes in, returning from Milford Haven, and Cloten accosts him, demanding to know where the princess has gone. Pisanio, deciding that his mistress has had enough time to make her getaway, sends Cloten to the seacoast on what he knows will be a wild goose chase. The foolish prince, convinced that he will catch Imogen and Posthumus, takes one of Posthumus’s garments with him—the same garments Imogen claimed to prefer to Cloten. The prince plans to kill his rival and then rape Imogen while wearing Posthumus’s clothes.
Meanwhile, Imogen, disguised as a boy, has become lost in the Welsh wilderness. She comes upon the cave where Guiderius, Arviragus, and Belarius live, and Imogen enters in search of food. Shortly afterward, the three men come home from a day of hunting, and they find her there. She apologizes, offers to pay for the meat she has eaten, and introduces herself as “Fidele.” Guiderius and Arviragus, unaware that the boy Fidele is actually their sister, nonetheless feel a strange kinship with their guest, and Imogen reciprocates the feeling.
A Roman army under Caius Lucius makes ready to sail for Britain as Cloten arrives at Milford Haven. Imogen, meanwhile, has fallen ill, and as her hosts set off to hunt, she takes the potion that Pisanio gave her, believing it to be medicine. In the forest, Cloten, dressed in Posthumus’s clothing, encounters Guiderius, Arviragus, and Belarius, and he rudely challenges them to fight. Guiderius duels with the prince and kills him, cutting off his head. Belarius recognizes the dead prince from his days at court, and he worries that his hideout has been compromised. His sons, however, are elated, and Arviragus goes to wake “Fidele,” only to find the disguised Imogen seemingly dead. Dismayed and grief-stricken, Belarius and his adoptive sons lay her body in the woods, singing a prayer over her. Then, after setting Cloten’s headless body down beside her, they depart.
After a time, Imogen awakes and, seeing the headless corpse dressed in Posthumus’s clothes, assumes that it is her husband, dead. Realizing that the “medicine” she drank was a sleeping potion, and believing Pisanio to have given it to her knowingly, she now thinks that the servant must also be responsible for killing Posthumus. Stricken with grief, she lays herself atop Cloten’s body. Meanwhile, the Roman army has landed, and Caius Lucius and his men come upon Imogen and Cloten. At first, they think both are dead, but Imogen rises, says that her name is Fidele, and offers herself as a servant to the Roman commander. Caius Lucius, believing her to be a young man, accepts her offer and employs her as his page.
Analysis
Up to this point in the play, Cloten’s stupidity is so pathetic that the audience may be inclined to feel some sympathy for the hapless prince. But because Shakespeare plans to kill him—and violently—he now sets about alienating us entirely from the Queen’s son. Indeed, as soon as we learn of Cloten’s bizarrely vicious and perverse plan, all sympathy vanishes. He says, “With [Posthumus’s] suit upon my back will I ravish her. First, kill him, and in her eyes” (3.5.162–64). Here, truly, is a character that only a mother could love.
Meanwhile, in Belarius’s cave, Cymbeline’s children are finally united. And if the audience has forgotten that Imogen, Guiderius, and Arviragus are all siblings, we are soon enough reminded by the three young people’s strong feelings of kinship and by Imogen’s regretful comment, “Would it had been so, that they / Had been my father’s sons!” (3.6.89–90). She says this not only because of her sisterly feelings toward the youths, but also because—as she notes in an aside—if the boys had been her father’s sons, then Cymbeline would not have forbidden her marriage to Posthumus. Since she would not have been heir to the throne, she would not have been expected to marry Cloten.
The pastiche of previous Shakespeare plays continues to unfold here, as Imogen’s male disguise echoes the cross-dressing antics of early comedies like Twelfth Night and As You Like It. The disguise is remarkably convincing, it seems, since Guiderius and Arviragus fail to realize that she is a woman even as they carry and lay out her “dead” body. (Their failure may be forgiven, since they have been raised in the wilderness and probably have little experience with females.) Her seeming death, and the sleeping potion that induces it, clearly reference the ending of Romeo and Juliet. As in that play, the heroine here awakens with what seems to be her beloved’s dead body beside her. But this is a romance, not a tragedy, and so it follows different rules. In the first place, the body cannot be Posthumus’s, since only villains can die. Second, the sensible Imogen, while grief-stricken, cannot commit suicide as Juliet does, but instead must choose life. Having thus resolved to go on, she finds herself caught up in the Roman invasion of Britain.
One last issue presents itself in these scenes. As Imogen encounters what Cloten will disparagingly call the “rustic mountaineer[s]” (4.2.132), there arises conflicting ideas about social class and innate worthiness. For his part, Belarius, having fled the social and political complexities of courtly life, celebrates the natural world as much more peaceful and hospitable. But though he’s prone to distrust the king and his courtiers, Belarius nonetheless remarks on the innate nobility of his adopted sons. They don’t know their true identities, and yet they exhibit an undeniable nobility of spirit: “’Tis wonder / That an invisible instinct should frame them / To royalty unlearned” (4.2.225–27). In this way, he seems to reconsider his erstwhile critique of the nobility. Imogen, by contrast, undercuts Belarius’s reevaluation of worthiness and social class. Struck by the mountaineers’ kindness, she rejects received wisdom about the inherent superiority of the nobility: “Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court; / Experience, O, though disprov’st report!” (4.2.40–41). These lines echo her earlier speech, in act 3, scene 6, when she acknowledges that poor folks can lie, but so can rich folks, and such behavior is far more contemptible among the nobility.
