Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness by Beckwith Sarah;

Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness by Beckwith Sarah;

Author:Beckwith, Sarah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6110-1
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)


Infectious Confessions: The Gift of Speech

So let me now turn finally to the last scene of Cymbeline. The people collected together in that scene are unknown to each other in a variety of ways. Some are in a literal disguise: Posthumus as a Briton peasant, Imogen as Fidele, Belarius as Morgan. Some do not know their own identity and in this sense are unknown to themselves. This is true for Guiderius and Arviragus, but it is also true for Posthumus, who thinks he is a murderer, though he is not one. All, in any case, have mistaken or confused views of each other. It is a situation ripe for exposure and discovery. And it reworks some of the most romancey forms of recognition where the “fair unknowns” of medieval romance turn out to be gentle after all, where the creation by kingly knighting is confirmation, not creation, of prior identities that reconcile virtue with honorific status. All these delights inform part of the sense of playful recognition on the part of the audience, as Shakespeare revives his “mouldy old tales.” Yet what informs the sense of fragility and wonder in this last scene, and its extraordinary investigation of response and responsibility, is that this particular community is restored through the speech act of confession. The scene is structured by means of five confessions, the deathbed confession of the queen, the long, cluttered, self-interrupting confession of Giacomo, the confession of Pisanio completed by the outburst of Guiderius, and the confession of Belarius.

The reported confession of the queen is central to begin to un-poison the speech of the community, and the fact that it is a deathbed confession means that there can be no question at all of its veracity. “She alone knew this,” says Cymbeline, “And but she spoke it dying, I would not / Believe her lips in opening it”(5.5.40–2). This confession, whose truthfulness is guaranteed only by virtue of the fact that there is nothing at all to be gained for the queen by virtue of it, begins the un-poisoning of the court through further truthful speech.

It is the ring that motivates the second confession, the one by Giacomo. The ring, metonomy of Imogen, is just one of the complex signs in the play, and it is embedded in the central narrative turn of the plot because it is the ring that is transformed from a token of fidelity to the sordid, competitive marketplace of Giacomo and Posthumus’s degrading fantasies. The ring is not only the pledge of Imogen’s fidelity but the sign and pledge of their clandestine marriage, a marriage that is the only instance of truth and value in the entire corrupt court where all have to mimic the displeasure of the king in her choice of husband. But it is also “the jewel,” made the subject of a hideous barter with Giacomo in act 1, scene 4. The suddenness of this overturning is precisely an indication of the extreme fragility of even the deepest human bonds,



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