A "Nation. . . Now Degenerate": Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Nova Britannia, and the Role of Diet and Climate in Reproducing Races

Readings of The Tempest that foreground its colonialist underpinnings—whether with reference to ancient Mediterranean contexts or emergent early modern Atlantic interests—have become a standard feature of Shakespearean criticism today. Scholars have observed the imperial dynamic structuring Prospero's relation to the island's native, suggesting the degree to which he wields a distinctively European, if not English, colonizing optic and how his actions compel Caliban to wage a war of resistance against a relentless enslaving apparatus. But less critical attention has been directed at plays in the corpus that engage the colonial dynamic more obliquely, resisting and confounding the master-slave narratives that have come to be the touchstone of colonialist readings. How are we to understand the move visible in plays roughly contemporaneous with The Tempest to undermine the stability of these binary terms, identifying the European self with the dissonance and alterity of savagery, barbarism, and the oppressions of conquest? Or what of the tendency not simply to reverse the binary assignments of self-other but to confound them altogether by perceiving identity in less rigidly defined terms? How would a play that posits a notion of identity as existing on a continuum, one that acknowledges and anticipates movement along that slide of identification, alter our narratives of colonialism?

Cymbeline is, I would suggest, a play that envisions the colonial dynamic from a very different vantage point than does The Tempest. But it is no less concerned with the modes of conquest and domination that structure the latter. Although the play's meditation on Roman imperialism and the resistance it evokes on British soil should serve as something of a cue to this focus, critical readings of the play have resisted this logic. In cases where this focus has been pursued, critics have tended to narrow the topical relevance to debates about the union spurred by King James's quest to forge a British state. While such analyses have been instructive, they also fail to consider evidence that suggests the extent to which Roman imperial models structured aggression in Ireland, no less than the New World, and should therefore be seen as resonating with debates about colonialism at large. Opening the play to these broader contemporary contexts enables not only more expansive engagements with the play but a revaluation of our colonialist narratives at large.

If a play like The Tempest could be said to express and, perhaps, even mystify the master-slave dynamic structuring conquest, then Cymbeline can be credited with unraveling such colonialist ideologies, demonstrating their fragility and provisionality. The play is not, of course, overtly concerned with a contemporary colonial context, such as many critics have seen structuring The Tempest. Instead, it takes as its explicit focus an episode from British history when Rome's imperial powers had been extended to British soil and yet found insecure. Rewriting these historical events so that they occur during rather than after Cymbeline's reign, the play engages the struggle that ensues between the British court and an encroaching Roman force. While quick to wage verbal valiance against their enemies, the court figures—Cymbeline, his second queen, and his son-in-law Cloten—are exposed as an inflated and corrupt group, shadowing the failures of their aggressors, as embodied by the corrupt Italian Iachimo. As a result, the kingdom's future is found to lie in the hands of the king's children, including his daugther Imogen and his two lost princes, each of whom is brought far from court to the native and rustic landscape of Wales. For the two princes, this movement has occurred roughly twenty years before the start of the play's action, since they are kidnapped at birth and raised in this harsh environment. For Imogen, the translation westward occurs in response to her father's objection to her marriage to Posthumus, whom the king considers of ignoble origins. The challenges they face in this untamed land equip them and, by extension, their people with the strength to resist the invasion and to cast off their servility...