Abstract
One taper burns in the bedchamber. It is almost midnight, the audience is invited to believe. Imogen puts down her book and, dismissing her servant, commends herself to the protection of the gods. In a silence broken only by the song of the crickets, an intruder raises the lid of a trunk. As Iachimo creeps towards the sleeping woman, he speaks of rape, invoking the notorious tale of a faithful wife violated in her bed by her Roman guest:
Our Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken’d The chastity he wounded.
Cymbeline (2.2.12–14)1
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Notes
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1969).
For cuckoldry as a pervasive theme of the plays, see Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 119–50.
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1963).
For extant representations of the marriage of Adam and Eve, see Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–59), vol. 2, Pt 1, pp. 81–2.
H. Diane Russell, ed., Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (New York: National Gallery of Art, Washington, with The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1990), pp. 114–15.
Margaret H. Swain, Historical Needlework: A Study of Influences in Scotland and Northern England (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), p. 23.
Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 27–8.
E. Marston, Thomas Ken and Izaak Walton, A Sketch of Their Lives and Family Connection (London: Longman, Green, 1908), pp. 170–2
The details of the relationship between the New York valance and Salomon’s woodcuts were first traced by Nancy Graves Cabot, ‘Pattern Sources of Scriptural Subjects in Tudor and Stuart Embroideries’, Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, 30:1-2 (1946), pp. 3–57, (pp. 7–17).
De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt, 1580), sig. A1r. I owe this reference to Georgianna Ziegler. Michael Neill reproduces a lithograph in which a dancing skeleton also forms the trunk of the tree of knowledge (Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 6.
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Philip Levine, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1966), 14.15.
Michel de Montaigne, ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Montaigne’s Essays: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J. I. M. Stewart, 2 vols (London: Nonesuch, 1931), vol. 2, pp. 233–98 (p. 255).
Francis Bacon, ‘Of Love’, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 31–3.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–94), 3.2.1.1 (vol. 3, pp. 40–41).
Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 245.
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© 1999 Catherine Belsey
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Belsey, C. (1999). Marriage: Imogen’s Bedchamber. In: Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15047-2_3
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