Primrose Road

My friend L., fascinated by the fact that Iachimo is able to convince Posthumus that he's slept with Imogen by merely describing a mole on her breast, told me that I should change my dissertation topic to "Breast Moles in the Plays of William Shakespeare." I share this only because I want to see how many people come to Primrose Road by inputting "Breast Moles in the Plays of William Shakespeare" into search engines.

(Though I should give some credence to L.'s suggestion, because she did come up with the idea for my master's thesis ... when we were in the ninth grade. It's true.)

Breast moles aside, the production at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater did a fairly good job of working simultaneously with the play's political and "fairy tale" elements. Phylicia Rashad did indeed deliver an almost Disney-style performance as many of the reviews claimed, but, as L. commented, Cymbeline can be a bit of a Snow Whitish play at times. Jonathan Cake was a scheming, near-motiveless Iachimo, a rather charming evil genius Roman solider. Martha Plimpton often portrayed Imogen as merely confused when she is, at different points in the play, naive/intelligent/brave. Her portrayal of Imogen's horror when she finds what she believes to be the headless Posthumus next to her, however, was on-target; while Cloten's beheading seemed to generate laughter rather than horror in the audience (I think laughter was the director's intention, anyway), Imogen's reaction to the headless body definitely seemed to send a chill through the (collective spines of?) the audience.

Though the political element was definitely present (the director seems to have made relatively few cuts), especially in the second act, I felt that the production went the easier route in portraying the queen's son Cloten as little more than a bumbling mama's boy who really does love Imogen. Granted, he is to some degree a bumbling mama's boy who thinks he has a chance with his married stepsister, but the playtext suggests that he's also a soldier/politician who genuinely believes, unlike his scheming mother, that the Britons should "nothing pay for wearing [their] own noses," that they are a nation that should not have to pay Rome for its nationhood.

I'm now going to discuss the ending, so if you're one of those people who lives in fear of learning the endings to Shakespeare's plays before you see them, I'd recommend not reading on.

In the play, the issue of the tribute is one of many problems explained away in a deus-ex-machina-style ending that restores the order and sweeps subversive possibilities under the rug; the King agrees to pay the tribute that the Britons had fought so hard not to pay because it was the Queen's idea, part of her plan to kill Cymbeline and make the kingdom her own.

L. said it best: "I think that was the first time I've seen an actual deus ex machina ending."

Yes, the staging of Posthumus' dream not only incorporated giant ghostly ancestor-marionettes who looked suspiciously like Roman statues but also a deus (Jupiter) riding on an eagle-shaped machina. Which was, in my view, actually the right thing to do, because audiences were laughing at the absurdity of the conclusion. So somehow, despite the extraordinarily traditional staging, despite (or, because of) the characters' regular appeals to a cluster of spotlights up above, Cymbeline exposed the absurdity of destiny by swiftly restoring the British tribute to the Romans, the king's supposedly-dead sons, and the general "world order" which the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were in the process of questioning.