"Graze, as you find pasture": Nebuchadnezzar and the Fate of Cymbeline 's Prisoners

I

IN THE EARLY 1990S amateur military historian James Bacque incurred the wrath of scholars and veterans over his best-selling account of General Eisenhower's treatment of surrendering German forces during the tumultuous spring and summer of 1945. Bacque alleged that nearly a million Germans died of exposure, disease, and starvation in makeshift Allied prisoner-of-war camps, and that these deaths were concealed using the administrative euphemism "other losses." ¹ While his theory has been debunked by established military historians (who counter that there was no Allied campaign of reprisals against German POWs), Bacque did expose prisoners' horrendous living conditions during the months before and after VE Day. ² Faced with the logistical nightmare of supervising hundreds of thousands of surrendering forces, Allied commanders simply herded them into barbed-wire enclosures without tents, rations, potable water, latrines, or firewood; there prisoners huddled together for warmth, slept in holes dug with their bare hands, defecated on the ground, drank from puddles, and ate grass and leaves. In short, they were treated like animals. ³

What has Cymbeline—a play that depicts legendary events from Roman Britain, chivalric attitudes from the Middle Ages, and decadent villainy from Renaissance Rome—have to do with the controversial Rhine-meadow camps of 1945? ⁴ Quite a lot if we consider that the play evokes important issues concerning the ethical treatment of prisoners of war and the effects of incarceration on the captive self. In the play's own tumultuous postwar dénouement, Posthumus Leonatus dons the uniform of a Roman footsoldier and surrenders to the victorious British forces. Considering the slaughter perpetrated by the invaders and the low rank indicated by his dress, his surrender is tantamount to suicide—his "ransom's death" (5.3.80). ⁵ The captain who directs Posthumus's capture typifies the vindictive impulses of soldiers who suddenly find themselves with disarmed enemy forces at their mercy: "Lay hands on him: a dog, / A leg of Rome shall not return to tell / What crows have peck'd them here" (ll. 91-93). Following a dumb show in which prisoners are presented to Cymbeline, this exchange appears:

	Enter POSTHUMUS and two Gaolers.
FIRST GAOLER	You shall not now be stol'n, you have locks upon you:
	So graze, as you find pasture.
SECOND GAOLER	Ay, or a stomach.
	[Exeunt Gaolers.
POSTHUMUS	Most welcome bondage; for thou art a way,
	I think to liberty. . . .

(5.4.1-4)

The 1623 Folio does not indicate the precise setting of this captivity, and editors have proffered suggestions ranging from Nicholas Rowe's "Britain. A stockade in the British camp" to Alexander Pope's "Britain. A Prison" to J. C. Adams's "An open place near the British camp." ⁶ The original staging has also been the subject of much conjecture, ranging from J. W. Saunders's confident description of enclosures on the Globe stage—"Posthumus' prison . . . [was] certainly staged on the Platform"—to Alan C. Dessen's more cautious discussion of the synecdochic conventions of the bare thrust stage: "In one sense the fetters 'place' the action 'in prison', but both the gyves and the prison are rich signals that lead us to larger imagistic and psychological meanings. Rather than being a liability, the absence of a verisimilar prison yields greater freedom to the imaginative vision of Shakespeare and his audience." ⁷

Is Posthumus confined in a prison cell, penned in a stockade, or simply chained to the ground in an open field? Why does the First Gaoler worry (or joke) that someone would try to steal his prisoner? How might early audiences and readers have contextualized the degrading spectacle of a soldier shackled like an animal? It is my contention that Dessen is only half right, that the bare stage of the Globe did represent a specific "verisimilar" environment in that it replicated the open fields in which...