"Cymbeline": Constructions of Britain (review)

Ros King says that her book, "Cymbeline": Constructions of Britain, is an attempt "to do a number of different things, sometimes simultaneously" (2), and it reads that way. It grew from her experience as dramaturge for a 2000 production of Cymbeline "directed by Danny Scheie for Shakespeare Santa Cruz" (1).¹ During the production, King came to understand Cymbeline as a "hilarious tragicomedy that was using a sophisticated knowledge of classical and contemporary iconography and literary theory to ask fundamental questions about England's place in history, her experiment with religion, and her future in the world" (1–2). Much of the book is given over to chapters that fill in the historical background on these topics. Chapter 2 deals with the "matter of Britain," ranging diversely from British-themed entertainments of the early years of the reign of James I and VI, to its British historiography, to the coins of British antiquity, with applications to the play. Similarly, the third chapter handles, among other topics, Cymbeline's Welsh setting, New World colonialism, and the aftereffects of Roman imperialism. Chapter 4 covers the religious implications, both Protestant and Catholic, of the drama. Here, as in the preceding two chapters, King is careful not to advance a reductive argument. She cuts back and forth between text and context, building up layers of interpretation, "none of [which] should be regarded as the interpretation" (149). The reader who is looking for background on the questions that Cymbeline would have raised for its first audiences will find much of value in this book.

The problems emerge when we ask ourselves what audience this book was meant to find in our own time. In places, it seems to assume a reader who may or may not exist, one who is just as interested in William Camden's mistranslation of the word "Tascia" on British coins of the first century (66) as in dramaturge King's laudable determination to "get laughs on the lines, as well as on the business" (174) of the Santa Cruz production. Both the play's historical context and its contemporary performance are well worth talking about, of course, but most readers, I would guess, will find themselves wanting more discussion of the one topic and less of the other (or vice versa), instead of the uneasy blend we do get. King tells us that in Santa Cruz she "worked with individual actors on phrasing and intonation, ensuring that they understood precisely what they were saying" (176). When actors know this, "the words sound fresh and dynamic" (176). This "is . . . our best chance of realizing a way of doing Shakespeare that is not deadly boring" (178), since audiences and actors are not baffled by the text. But she also tells us that "the actors in Santa Cruz regularly came to refer to [her dramaturgical practice] as a 'luxury'" (179). How much of the content of chapters 2 through 4 made it into the production? I wondered. Not much, the answer seems to be: "I did not set out to write a history of early Jacobean religious politics, still less to lecture the cast on aspects of 'historical background'" (174). So for whom is this information meant? Critics who know the play will find much of King's background familiar and some of her claims tendentious, though her discussions mostly include some interesting detail or informed aside. The problem of multiple and perhaps incongruent readerships is already implicit in what King calls her "holistic analysis," which, she says in the introduction, will address the "construction, performance and reception of a piece of theatre that is simultaneously historical, cultural, theatrical, linguistic and performative" (3), as no doubt Cymbeline is. But in practice this gives rise to a chapter like the first, which consists of seven arbitrarily linked sections that take us quickly through the repunctuation of Cymbeline's opening lines to get at the "dramaturgical rather than grammatical sense" (7), to the classification of the play generically, to the relation of words to music...