The Cymbeline Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here we come to the garden for Cymbeline.

[Interlocutor]: Hm! And what plants are mentioned in this play, Will Shakespeare?

[Shakespeare]: Cedar, elder, pine, and oak; moss, rushes, reeds, and vines; violet, eglantine, primroses, lilies,
cowslips, daisies, and harebells, and marybuds, which are the buds of the marygold flower.

[Interlocutor]: A great many! How do they all fit into this play?

[Shakespeare]: This is a play of misconstrued events and wicked intents, concealed names and natures, mistaken misprizing of both good and evil. The plants of this play present qualities that illustrate like qualities in men and women. Consider the king, Cymbeline. Near the end of the play, as all is being put right, the soothsayer interprets an oracle that involves a cedar, a tree most renowned for majesty. He says:

The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline,
Personates thee, and thy lopped branches point
To the two sons forth; who, by Belarius stol’n,
For many years thought dead, are now revived,
To the majestic cedar joined, whose issue
Promises Britain peace and plenty.

[Interlocutor]: So the cedar is like this royally stern and upright king.

[Shakespeare]: The oracle also tells of the violence done to the king years before when Belarius cut off the king’s “branches”—his sons, carrying off the two infant boys. But Cymbeline is yet a living tree; and so it is possible to engraft his sons to make the tree whole again.

I[nterlocutor]: And what of the unhappy Belarius? The king condemned him for a traitor upon hearsay never verified.

[Shakespeare]: Belarius compares himself to a different tree.

Cymbeline loved me,
And when a soldier was the theme, my name
Was not far off: when was I as a tree
Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night,
A storm or robbery, call it what you will,
Shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves,
And left me bare to weather.

[Interlocutor]: He was fruitful for his king until unjustly banished from the orchard.. What happens to the stolen princes?

[Shakespeare]: Belarius, hidden, raises them as his own, living as cave-dwelling hunters. They think Belarius their father, but every day he sees their royal nature shining in their deeds. Belarius:

They are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing beneath the violet,
… ’Tis wonder
That an invisible instinct should frame them
To the royal unlearn'd, honour untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valour
That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop
As if it had been sowed.

[Interlocutor]: And Imogen, the king’s daughter? We have talked much of her brothers, but isn’t this play even more about her?

[Shakespeare]: It is. She endures much. Her imperious father forbids her what she loves most. He thinks she is his sole remaining child, and the last hope of peaceful succession for his crown.

[Interlocutor]: Her evil stepmother the Queen hates her and seeks to kill her. And
the Queen’s vicious dolt of a son abuses her and plots against her happiness and her virtue. Her loving husband Posthumus Leonatus learns in exile to denounce curses upon her for falsehood she never committed.

[Shakespeare]: And, for the mere sport of winning a wager, the crafty Italian braggart Iachimo uses her own trust and generosity to weave her ruin, even as he gazes on her beauty and virtue while she sleeps:

Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed, fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets!

[Interlocutor]: Cytherea – that’s Venus.

[Shakespeare]: Yes, the goddess of love. And note that he also calls her a lily, a flower well known as the emblem of purity and innocence. It is she who has persuaded him that such virtue truly exists.

Interlocutor: Imogen flees the court to seek her husband, disguised as a boy called Fidele. Along the way she meets her brothers, though they are unknown to her and she to them.

[Shakespeare]: Unknown and yet known. Her brothers clearly see both Fidele’s virtue and the distress that that boy would hide. One says:

I do note that grief and patience, rooted in “him” doth
Mingle their spurs together.

(“Spurs” here are the branches of the roots.) And the other answers:

Grow, patience,
And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine
Her perishing root with the increasing vine!

[Interlocutor]: That makes the elder tree sound very unpleasant: a grief that threatens to choke off natural patience.

[Shakespeare]: The elder was an ill-famed tree among us. Confronted with her sorrows, her virtue grows the stronger.

[Interlocutor]: It’s all hard for her. She becomes sick, and takes a potion given her by a trusted servant, thinking it to be medicinal. But it isn’t! Unknown to that servant, the evil step-mother has decocted a deadly potion.

[Shakespeare]: And yet it is not deadly. Deceit piles upon deceit. The evil Queen is often busy in her still-room. She learns from the doctor how to make confections and perfumes. She sends her ladies to gather innocent flowers for her:

So, so. Well done, well done.
The violets, cowslips, and the primroses
Bear to my closet.

When at length she asks to study lingering poison, the doctor suspects the Queen. He gives her a less cruel drug.

[Interlocutor]: So Imogen only falls into a sleep that resembles death.

[Shakespeare]: Aye. One of her brothers carries her seemingly dead body out of the cave while the other mourns:

O sweetest, fairest lily!
My brother wears thee not the half so well
As when thou grew’st thyself.

Recall that the lily is also an emblem of resurrection.

[Interlocutor]: There seems to be much to associate flowers with death.

[Shakespeare]: Say rather that many flowers speak of hope and promise in the face of death. Imogen’s brothers crave the comfort of flowers for Fidele when they think “he” is dead. They use the beauty of flowers as tribute to Fidele’s beauty:

With fairest flower,
Whilst summer lasts, I live here, Fidele;
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, or
The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine whom, not to slander,
Outsweetened not thy breath…
Yea, the furred moss besides, when flowers are none
To winter-ground thy corse.

[Interlocutor]: Yes. I also recall that Roman soldiers marching to battle pause to give kindly burial to the corpse which Fidele—that is, Imogen—mistakes to be that of her husband Posthumus. They too seek out flowers for the purpose:

Let us
Find out the prettiest daisied plot we can
And make him with our pikes and partisans
A grave.

[Shakespeare]:

Above all, the abundance of plants in this play fills it with possibility of new growth.

Let come what comes, plants ever flower anew.

At the end of the play, Imogen sheds her guise as a boy and embraces her husband Posthumus; and thus he too, like Cymbeline and Belarius, becomes a flourishing tree. He recovers not only his beloved and virtuous wife, but also his much-abused love and faith, with the cry:

Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die!