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47 Chapter 2 Dreaming of the Book in Cymbeline Counters and “Counter-­ change” Near the end of Cymbeline, in a burst of thunder and lightning, the Roman god Jupiter descends, a literal deus ex machina, to begin the turn of the play from tragedy to comedy.1 He presents the despairing Posthumus, who is languishing in prison and wishing for death, with a book that offers a riddling prophecy of a happy ending for Posthumus himself and for the British nation. The giving of the book marks the pivotal moment between what one editor of the play has called “four and a half acts of bad faith, cruelty, violence, and revenge”2 and a final scene in which all confusions are resolved and in which all parties—­ husband and wife, father and children, victim and repentant villain, Rome and Britain—­ are happily reconciled. As the hinge of the two parts of the play—­ the visible seam between its two genres and also the mechanism that allows them to be knit together—­ this scene is, essentially, what makes the play a romance, both in its hybrid nature and in its integrative function.3 Like romance itself, that is, the scene brings unlike parts together and makes brokenness whole. In the next scene, as the play’s generic rerouting becomes clear and the good are rewarded, Cymbeline remarks, “the Counter-­ change / Is severally in all” (5.5.397–­ 98). The immediate meaning is that the newly reunited royal family—­ the king himself, Imogen,4 her brothers, and her husband—­are reciprocally and generally exchanging loving gazes, “like harmlesse Lightning” (l. 395, recalling Jupiter’s pyrotechnics), and Cymbeline’s economic-­ cum-­ musical metaphor (“changes” are also the different combinations in which a set of church bells can 48 The Immaterial Book be rung, “severally” or all together) serves as a good description of the play’s structure of reversals of fortune, inversions of identity, genre morphing, and, above all, a kind of labored or counterintuitive harmony.5 At the same time, in the exchange of tragedy for comedy, the book, as the material remains of the transaction, the object that Posthumus carries from prison into the redeemed world of the last scene, is the counter, the chit or token, of generic change.6 As Charlotte Scott has recently noted, the shift from tragedy to comedy is marked by the appearance of a book.7 Given to Posthumus at his lowest ebb of misery and found by him to be incomprehensible at first, the book is reread and interpreted by the Soothsayer in the last scene—­ one scholar claims that it is the only text read out twice onstage in the whole Shakespeare canon8 —­ and is revealed as the compressed, brief story of the happy resolution itself, a final recapitulation of many anagnorises, the seeds of which had been present, disguised by symbolic language, even in the “tragic” Cymbeline. And, especially since romance is persistently associated with old books, as we hear in the references to the “text” (2.Prologue.39) from which “ancient Gower” (1.Prologue.1) draws his narrative in Pericles9 (and in Jonson’s sneer describing the sources on which Pericles is based as “mouldy tales”),10 Jupiter’s book is the “counter” (in the sense of abacus bead)—­ the marker, the representation, the emblem—­ of the romance mode at work in the play. As this chapter will suggest, the book is also an emblem of its reader’s self. As stage properties in Shakespeare’s drama, books often signify or advertise specific aspects of the characters who hold them. They appear as illustrations of the identity of their readers, marking scholarly devotion, piety, inward-­ focused contemplation. Even Prospero’s magic book in The Tempest, among its multifarious imaginative uses (to be discussed in chapter 3), is a kind of extension of the character, the site where his supernatural powers reside, and when he renounces the book (or at least promises to), he is also proclaiming his abjuration of the “magician” part of his identity. Indeed, Prospero’s book demonstrates the attachable and detachable quality of book-­ based characterness in Shakespeare: when Richard III appears with a prayer book to decline a worldly crown or when Polonius gives Ophelia a book to normalize her staged solitude, the intention is to put on readership like a costume. Cymbeline, however, marks a significant departure in Shakespeare’s exploration of the relationship between book and self. Here, books are not detachable objects that serve...

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