QUESTION. . .
Imogen: [H]ow far [is it] / To this same blessed Milford[?]

. . .AND ANSWER
The dear creature was impatient, and ignorant to boot, for two hundred and fifty-six miles and a half lie between Tyburn Gate and that far Welsh inlet of the sea. If, however, she were desirous of travelling to it as quickly as might be in this twentieth century, she would need but to take the 11.20 a.m. train from Paddington to be wafted, via the Severn Tunnel, to New Milford in five minutes under seven hours.[1]

1. This article will show how Shakespeare's Cymbeline gestures toward the disjunct, if not always conflicting, imperatives of different (conceptual, historical and national) landscapes. In order to do so, however, I must begin rather far afield, with seemingly simple questions posed by Imogen upon her discovery that her exiled husband Posthumus purportedly awaits her at Milford Haven. Of Pisanio Imogen eagerly asks "How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs / May plod it in a week, why may not I / Glide thither in a day?"[2] A few lines later, Imogen echoes her earlier utterance: "how far it is / To this same blessed Milford. And by th' way, / Tell me how Wales was made so happy as / T' inherit such a haven" (3.2.59-62). And again, shortly thereafter: "How many score of miles may we well rid[e] / 'Twixt hour, and hour?" (68-69). These questions may seem at first glance identical, but they differ in subtle ways. The first asks about mileage (how far is it . . . ) then links it to rapidity of passage ( . . . for one who glides rather than plods), thus registering distance in terms both of miles and, more emphatically, elapsed time. The second asks merely for geographical distance, while the third focuses on the hourly rate of travel Imogen will be able to maintain. Imogen is collecting information necessary to plot her journey: if I travel x miles at an hourly rate of y, then . . . However, only the last of these simple questions is answered; Pisanio says that "One score 'twixt sun and sun, / Madam's enough for you" (69-70), but Imogen vigorously disagrees, stating that "one that rode to's execution . . . / Could never go so slow" (71-72). Pisanio's answer is unsatisfactory to her, and both the distance and Imogen's rate of travel remain unknown. The effect of Imogen's questioning is to suggest the contingency of travel: thanks to her evocation of different travellers and rates of travel, of the variable relationship between distance covered and time elapsed, after her questioning we seem farther away from knowing "how far" Milford Haven is than we did at first.
   
   
2. While contingency is suggested, Imogen's journey is also reduced to two variables: her rate of travel, understood as a constant, and the distance to be covered. What is missing from her calculations is a description of the nature of the terrain to be traversed -- a journey over hills obviously necessitates a rate of travel different from that maintained over plains. Reducing the journey to the equation that she does means that Imogen figures the landscape as a frictionless surface to be passed over at a constant rate. Arguably Imogen's questioning represents a witty bit of metatheatre. We know that in one sense she could as effortlessly pass from Lud's Town to Milford Haven as she (or he, the boy actor) crosses the flat stage; Imogen's concern with how to get from one to the other can be seen as laughable in the context of Shakespearean romance, with its easy and fantastic negotiation of far flung places.[3] However, this fact only makes the difficulty that Imogen has in locating Milford Haven all the more striking; while that difficulty could be chalked up to the exigencies of plot -- for instance, by getting lost she meets Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus -- I want to suggest that we can make more out of the frustration of Imogen's journey. Her questions are eminently practical ones, and it is at the level of their practicality that I will first take them up, with the understanding that, as is always the case, the practical is inseparable from the ideological. Moreover, it is from an analysis of the seemingly prosaic problem of how to get from point A to point B that I will turn to Cymbeline's investigation of the relationship between disparate national landscapes, a relationship articulated in terms of relations between England and Wales in the pre-Roman, Roman and Tudor-Stuart periods.
   
   
3. In 1625, John Norden produced a text that a traveller could turn to in order to find the distance between points A and B. While Norden is not the first to present information regarding the distance between towns -- for principal thoroughfares, such information was a staple of almanacs and calendars from at least the early sixteenth century -- England. An Intended Gvyde for English Travailers not only includes more complete information than ever before but also provides for the first time tables that allow the reader to determine the distance between a number of possible starting and end points. Unlike in the almanacs, distances are not arranged along the axis of the highways; England focuses primarily but not exclusively on the mileage between towns in any given county. While Norden is certainly cognizant of the groundbreaking nature of what he calls his "new inuention," he is also keenly aware of the possibility that he will be criticized because "some errours of necessitie will be committed . . . " The reason for these errors? The most immediate one is the interference of "hills, dales, woods, and other impediments, which intercept the view from station to station. So that the lines of opposition cannot be so exactly directed, as upon a plaine and open horizon." What is important to notice here is the kind of measurement privileged by Norden: miles are measured as the crow flies, not as the wayfarer walks. In fact, the distance actually covered by the traveller is understood by Norden as a corruption of his true measurements: "But were the distances neuer so truly taken, by the intersection of right lines, yet in riding or going, they may seem vncertaine, by reason of the curuing crookednes, and other difficulties of the wayes."[4] The crookedness of the roads, the difficulties of the ways: these are not the conditions governing accurate measurement, but impediments to its actualization. While Imogen leaves the land's terrain out of her equation, Norden understands it as a force in one sense resistant, and in another irrelevant, to his measurements.
   
   
4. The resistance of the land to measurement, its reluctance to resolve itself always into "a plaine and open horizon," is particularly telling in the case of Wales. Next to the table representing "the distances of the most of the chiefe towns in Wales," Norden writes:

It is to be considered that by reason of the multitude of Hilles, Mountaines and Dales, and the bending of the Sea, betweene St. Dauids and the point neere Bradsey Iland, causing passages and highwayes in many places so to curue and crooke, that the distances betweene the Townes, may be something differing from this Table: But not so, but that good vse may be made of it.[5]

This passage seems more equivocal than the first. It is torn between articulating the above viewpoint -- the curved and crooked highways again suggest the terrain's deviation from its own "accurate" measurement -- and foregrounding the utility of the table, which would seem to depend upon its conforming to a traveller's experience of the landscape. However, what is clear is that Wales poses a potent problem for Norden's text; after the proliferation in this passage of impediments to proper measurement, the final assertion of the table's "good use" as a traveller's aid seems timid and unconvincing. In addition, while Wales itself is difficult to measure, so is the passage from England: "by reason of the Seuerne, that diuides Wales [from] Cornewall, Somerset , &c. . . . the distances betweene the Townes of either side, cannot be precisely set downe, for that there is great difference, between the land trauaile[d], and passages by water . . . "[6] Even entry into Wales defies easy and accurate measurement.



5. Were Wales composed only of "plaine and open horizons," there would still be a crucial disjunction between Norden's measurements and the miles covered by a traveller, a disjunction that emerged out of the unit of measurement itself. It was only in 1593 that the mile was standardized, importantly in a statute whose aim was to prohibit new building in London's suburbs (35 Elizabeth I. c 6 1592/3). However, the statute mile was only "adopted gradually throughout the kingdom, the adoption being nearly complete by the end of the eighteenth century, but only becoming of universal application through the all-encompassing Act of 1824 (5 George IV. c 74)."[7] As the purpose of Elizabeth's statute suggests, the immediate locus of relevance for this standardized mile was London; throughout the rest of the kingdom customary miles held sway. Such customary miles are usually understood as evidence of pre-scientific imprecision, as archaic units of measure that needed to be abandoned in the name of greater rationalization. This viewpoint is recorded in J. B. Harley's discussion of John Ogilby's landmark road atlas, Britannia (1675), one achievement of which was to survey roads, via a perambulator, in statute miles. As Harley puts it, "The statute mile of 1760 yards . . . was adopted only in parts of London and its environs, so that in Ogilby's day "Vulgar Computations" [i.e., customary miles], as he termed them, with "Erroneous and Irregular Consequences", were still widely employed, and were predominantly longer than the statute mile measured by [Ogilby's] perambulator."[8] Ogilby's language attests to the disdain with which customary miles were held, but it is worth noting that these "vulgar computations" were still enough of a fact of life that Britannia included them side by side with Ogilby's "dimensuration," his "accurate," perambulated measurements. (Intriguingly, Ogilby also listed "horizontal distance," the distance as a crow flies, "from station to station.") Thus, while he dismisses customary miles as erroneous and irregular, Ogilby must still take them into account. With that in mind, it is worth taking seriously their status as customary, a status that situates regional measures in terms of customs that help articulate local conceptions of landscape. The customary mile attests to the irreducibility of the region, the incommensurability of its landscape with other landscapes. While the statute mile seeks to make the measure of London the measure of all England and Wales, the customary mile insists on its own and its region's specificity.
   
   
6. Both Norden and Ogilby, then, can be understood in part as promoters of the statute mile, and such promotion necessitates the denigration of custom in the name of a rationalized and uniform landscape. Moreover, in Norden's case this goes hand in hand with a conception of measurement as divorced from the exigencies of travel -- as we have seen, the crooked or difficult highway is not a condition of but an impediment to "accurate" measurement. This bespeaks several conceptual assumptions of the early modern period -- a neoplatonic emphasis on form or ideal rather than the "accidents" of the material; the privileging of geometric or mathematical over experiential knowledge -- but the one I want to emphasize here is perhaps the most counterintuitive. I would assert that Norden and Ogilby's texts, both of which are understood as traveller's aids, function primarily as compendia of knowledge that exist in an uncertain relationship to the topography they describe. That is, each text has a value that exists independently of its status as a "traveller's aid." This is clearest perhaps in the case of Ogilby, whose Britannia was part of a much larger project designed "to cover the entire world" through a series of volumes devoted to Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Britain, each volume comprised of travel accounts, engravings and maps.[9] Moreover, the atlas of strip maps was supposed to be only one part of a multi-volume Britannia that would also include travellers' accounts and "The Description of the British Monarchy."[10] Given this, one can see how the accuracy of Ogilby's survey of the roads has a value and ambition that exceeds that of a traveller's aid; it is part of a larger empiricist project to collect and catalogue information, the immediate utility[11] of which is, in the case of the strip maps, arguably less significant than is the encyclopedic impulse behind its collection.[12]
   
   
7. While Norden's text is not the outgrowth of such an elaborate and ambitious endeavour, we have already seen that his tables are suited more to an idea of the land than they are to actual topographies. When Norden imagines others censuring him for England's inaccuracies, he suggests that they will do so because his text does not betray evidence of "deepe Diuinitie, high Astrologie, or intricate Geometrie," that it is instead "so vulgar, and so plaine, that euery Eye, may see it, euery Minde may conceiue it, & euery Tongue may censure it . . . "[13] However, through his tables Norden works to supplant the evidence of individual eyes with the rules of geometry -- to ground his measurement not in perambulations but in the (imaginary, unobstructed) view from station to station, hilltop to hilltop. It is geometrical knowledge that he obtains, and when his statute miles do not match those covered by a traveller, the problem lies in the land and its failure to conform to mathematical abstraction. Norden's tables exist less to provide the traveller with a precise sense of how far s/he has to go, a difficult enough task given the question of how to accommodate regional and statute miles, than they do to testify to the power of a surveyor to produce and display knowledge that is understood as having value in its own right. In this sense, the "good use" that can be made of England exceeds its status as a traveller's aid.
   
   
8. By now we should have a sense of how difficult it would be in the seventeenth century to produce a satisfactory answer to Imogen's questions.[14] However, that difficulty is in and of itself not terribly significant. What is important is the way in which travel, landscape, and the production of knowledge are construed in these two seventeenth century "traveller's aids." Ogilby and Norden's texts reveal the problematic rift between what we might (somewhat imprecisely) call a perspective on and an experience of the land,[15] a rift that conforms to Michel de Certeau's distinction between a panoramic view and a set of practices "that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geographical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions."[16] De Certeau's emphasis is on the relationship between the rationalized spatial order of the modern city, which is easily reconciled with the imperatives of the panoramic view, and the resistance of everyday practice to that order, but his insight is instructive here, especially given the conceptual centrality of the visual to knowledge production in the early modern period.[17] Moreover, de Certeau's opposition can be fruitfully yoked to our discussion of custom and landscape, both of which can be construed in terms of practice. In Ogilby, the customary mile is registered only as vulgar and inaccurate, while in Norden topography functions as impediment. For each the road is "the "geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions," and to each one might oppose a notion of the road as an integral part of a customary landscape defined by practices that exceed or evade panoramic scrutiny.[18]
   
   
9. De Certeau understands the panoramic view as existing at the expense of practice: "The panorama-city is a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum . . . whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-god created by this fiction . . . must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them."[19] Crucially, the panoramic view presupposes a subject-position, albeit a false or alienating one that is divorced from practice and from the customary. The "oblivion" of this position, its alienated singleness, is implicitly contrasted with the identity that emerges out of "murky intertwining daily behaviors," an identity predicated not only on practice but on intersubjectivity. And yet, a panoramic view offers something important to its viewer: it locates him or her, in space and in clear relation to the landscape s/he views. Practice, emerging out of a murky intersubjectivity, is not the antithesis of this -- it too presupposes a social location, albeit a shifting and regularly renegotiated one -- but it is more complicated. A landscape of custom, understood in terms of both intersubjectivity and the collective negotiations inherent in custom, constitutes a theory of location and identity that exists as and at the nexus of practice and topography. On the other hand, the panoramic view is a heuristic device that, like the survey, brings the land into knowledge in a way that fails to coincide with, and threatens to do (an at least conceptual) violence to, the landscape of custom and practice.[20] At the same time, it offers an identity that presupposes the visual mastery of the land -- not lived landscape but a panorama.
   
   
10. I will consider Imogen's journey in light of de Certeau's analysis, but first I want to talk in greater detail about Milford Haven itself. The significance of Milford Haven has been largely neglected in criticism of the play; when it has been discussed, scholars have followed Emrys Jones in seeing the meaning of the place as summed up in its associations with Henry Tudor's triumphal arrival into England and the monarchy via Milford Haven.[21] This viewpoint is confirmed by reference to Michael Drayton's chorographical description of Milford Haven in Poly-Olbion,[22] and to John Speed's map of invasions of England and Ireland "with al their Ciuill Wars Since the Conquest," on which the harbour is identified as where "Henry Earl of Richmond at milford hauen ariuet against R. 3 in august 1485."[23] William Camden talks of it as a haven

[like] which there is not another in all Europe more noble or safer, such variety it hath of nouked bayes, and so many coues and creeks, for harbour of ships, wherewith the bankes are on every side indented. . . . Neither is this haven famous for the secure safenesse therof more, than for the arrivall therein of King Henrie the Seventh a Prince of most happy memory, who from hence gave forth unto England then hopelesse the first signall to hope well, and raise it selfe up, when as now it had long languished in civill miseries and domisticall calamities within it selfe.[24]

Camden reads Henry's landing as the catalyst necessary for England to "raise it selfe up"; it is an end to England's languishing illness, its miseries and calamities. Speed's map, however, suggests an alternative: while it innocuously enough refers to Henry's "arrival," the map is one of civil wars and armed incursions. The potentially equivocal nature of Henry's landing is made clear by the context within which it appears; it is from one perspective a triumphal entry, from another an invasion. This equivocality is suggestive when considering Camden's description of Milford Haven itself. This safe and noble haven, replete with "coues and creeks, for harbour of ships," offers sanctuary as easily to invaders as it does natives. It is this fact that worries many period accounts of Milford Haven and its significance.



11. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century government officials thought about Milford Haven less as the site of Henry Tudor's historic arrival than as a potential point of penetration into England by Spanish invaders. On November 1, 1595 the earl of Pembroke, lord Lieutenant of Wales, wrote to the Welsh cartographer George Owen as follows:

My Good Cousin, I have long expected to have received from you a map of Milford Haven. There is now great occasion to use it and therefore . . . I most earnestly desire you with all possible speed to send it . . . I pray you be very careful to make your scale perfect for thereby shall I be able to know the true distance of places which unknown will either make void or make fruitless all our endeavours. First take truly the breadth of the entrance of the haven. Secondly the distances of one place to be fortified from another. Thirdly what place every fortification may annoy. Forget not to note in how many places you shall conceive fortifications to be needful and set down everything you shall think in this case meet to be considered of and provided for. . . . Your plots shall be shown to Her Majesty for as I know you can better any that I have yet seen, so shall Her Majesty know both what you can do and what you will do.[25]

Owen completed his map shortly thereafter, thus providing Elizabeth and her court with the harbour's dimensions, clearly yoked to the specific needs of defense, for Camden's safest of all European havens -- here the land is measured (presumably in statute miles) not to aid but in the hopes of hindering "travellers," invaders of England. However, fears regarding such an invasion of Milford Haven did not subside with the production of this map; in 1759 one writer still spoke of Milford Haven as "the most convenient and natural landing-place in all Great-Britain for a descent or invasion with a few troops," a fact evidenced by the "history of Henry earl of Richmond, who, by means of a small army brought into this harbour, made himself master of the crown of England . . . "[26] The significance of Henry's actions were not lost on Guy Fawkes, who as late as 1603, two years before the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot, travelled to Spain to attempt to convince King Philip to land an invasionary force at Milford Haven.[27] In that same year, rumours circulated that supporters of the Main Plot, a Catholic scheme to seize control of the government and, if he did not accede to their demands, replace James with Arabella Stuart, had "captured Milford and were awaiting the arrival of Spanish soldiers."[28] The capturing of Milford had broad implications, as George Owen understood:

. . . the havon yt selfe . . . is a sufficient harborowe for an infinite number of shippes, which havon being once gotten by the Enymye may drawe on such fortification at Penbroke towne and castle . . . as infinite numbers of men, and greate expence of treasure will hardly in a long tyme remove the Enymye, during w[hi]ch tyme her Ma[jes]tie shall loose a fertyle Countrey . . .

Moreover, once in possession of Milford that enemy "may make along [the river] Seaverne in both sydes even to Bristowe . . . And if he (w[hi]ch god forbidd) should enjoy Britayne withall, our English Marchantes can have noe trade, which will decrease her highenes Customes, and decaye the Navye . . . "[29] In short, Milford Haven, in which there were "many places where [an enemy] may easyly lande," signified not only as the celebrated point of entry for Henry Tudor, but also as a locus of national vulnerability.



12. Let us return to Imogen. The scene in which she talks to Pisanio about the distance to Milford Haven ends with Imogen insisting that her present time and location "have a fog in them," and that "Accessible is none but Milford way" (3.2.80-83). Despite the supposed accessibility of the "way" -- the word can refer both to her itinerary and to a specific road -- she does not exactly glide either to Milford Haven or to her rendezvous with Posthumus. Instead, somewhere near Milford Haven she learns of Posthumus' murderous designs, and Pisanio suggests she seek out Lucius, who is to meet the Roman troops at the harbour. However, she gets lost, and this after a view of the area: "Milford," Imogen states, "When from the mountain-top Pisanio show'd thee, / Thou was within a ken [i.e., in view]" (3.6.4-6). On the ground, however, Milford is not locatable, despite the fact that "Two beggars told me / I could not miss my way" (8-9). Consider the two kinds of assistance Imogen is offered: a panoramic view, in which she can precisely, if finally not usefully, locate herself in distant relation to the land she plans to traverse; and directions that situate her in terms of the landscape in which she finds herself. However, her "way," perhaps both physical path and personal itinerary, brings her not to Milford Haven but to the cave of Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius. Viewed panoramically, Milford Haven can be apprehended, but from the ground it becomes elusive. When the Roman army finds her, she seems to be both at and away from Milford Haven. The Romans name their location as such (4.2.335), but Imogen is outside the cave, a place earlier clearly designated as distinct from Milford Haven (3.7.30-1). Moreover, it is a location that is at one point identified by Imogen as other than Milford; she awakens from her drugged sleep as if in mid-conversation, and says: "Yes sir, to Milford-Haven, which is the way? / I thank you: by yond bush? pray, how far thither? / 'Ods pittikins: can it be six mile yet" (4.2.291-3). Psychic and geographic disorientation are inseparable here, and they are oddly underscored by the ensuing misrecognition: she takes Cloten's headless trunk for Posthumus's, this in spite of her earlier insistence on the complete incommensurability of the two (e.g., 2.3.123-135). For Imogen, Milford Haven is both unlocateable and a site of dislocation, a place that is not only hard to get to, but is also marked by the confusion of identity and allegiances.[31]
    
    
13. I have focused on Milford Haven and the problems of location: locating it, locating oneself in relation to it. The historical accounts of the harbour that I adduce above suggest that Milford Haven functioned in the English cultural imagination as the site either of triumphal entry or martial invasion -- in either case, as a point of disembarkation and a way into England. That is, Milford Haven was understood as a focal point for anxieties about or the celebration of military incursions. However, in dwelling on Milford Haven and on Cymbeline as a text that engages with the harbour's historical, geographical and cultural specificity, I have not attended to the country of which it is a part. It is my contention that Milford Haven can also stand in for all of Wales, and that the play concerns itself with the position of Wales in relation to English culture.[32] Moreover, to understand why Milford Haven would be difficult to locate, we need to consider its status as a part of the Welsh landscape. As we have seen, it is the Welsh landscape in particular that defies measurement. This is true in the narrow sense of Norden's tables and in a larger conceptual sense, for Wales figures for early modern England as that which is both familiar and strange, both a part of (and a way into) England and an alien land on the other side of the Severn.
    
    
14. I will talk later of the play's conception of Anglo-Welsh relations in the Roman period; for now my focus will be on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time characterized by the placid integration of the English and Welsh political nations. The fact of this integration has led critics to assume that the two countries are broadly indistinguishable in this period, an assumption that has also led to the near-total effacement of Wales from discussion of the play. While Leah Marcus stands as a partial exception to this trend, her comments on England and Wales in the play are instructive in light of my argument: "In the Britain of Cymbeline, unlike the Britain of James I, Wales, or Cambria, is a separate country. The Roman ambassador to the court of Cymbeline is escorted only as far as its border at the river Severn; British law is not applicable beyond that point."[33] Marcus's contention that in the logic of the play Wales is a separate country is a shrewd one that, as will become clear, this article partly endorses. Its separateness also requires that we see that Britain really refers to England, that the court of Cymbeline is seen as an English one. However, her assertion that Wales is not separate in James's time is problematic insofar as this view requires seeing Wales's administrative and political integration into Britain as the only index of its status as country. My argument is that in cultural and, if we believe Norden, geographic terms, Wales often either maintains its separateness or has its separateness forced upon it.[34] At the same time, that separateness does not obtain at every level, even within the world of Cymbeline. On the one hand, Wales is a country distinct from a Britain suggestive of England; on the other, it is where "British" battles against Roman troops take place. Thus, within the logic of the play Wales is simultaneously other than, and conceptually annexed by, Britain.
    
    
15. For the Welsh, cultural separatism did not register as antithetical to allegiance to Britain. What is striking about the period following Henry VIII's Acts of Union between England and Wales (1536, 1543) is the fact that most members of the Welsh gentry simultaneously held feelings of Welsh nationalism and of fervent loyalty to the Tudor and Stuart governments into which they were administratively integrated.[35] These feelings were initially made possible by the strong connections between the Tudors and the Welsh. Many Welsh understood Henry VII as a figure who would restore Wales to its former greatness, that of the ancient Britons; Henry himself even went so far as to promise that he would release the Welsh from "such miserable servitude as they have piteously long stood in,"[36] a reference to the fact that, after Saxon invasions and Norman conquest, the Britons who had once ruled the entire island were driven to Wales and Cornwall. Later, ties between the Welsh gentry and the courts of Elizabeth and James had developed to such a degree that even early in Elizabeth's reign Humfrey Lhuyd noted that "you shall finde but few noble men in England, but that the greater parte of their retinew (wherin Englishmen exceede al other nations) are welsh men borne."[37] The simple fact that Owen produced his map for the earl of Pembroke, Lord Lieutenant of Wales, who planned to share the map with the queen, attests to the interconnections between court and Welsh gentry. These interconnections were ideologically underwritten by "the belief that the Stuart as well as the Tudor royal dynasty was derived from a common British stock, a source of pride for the Welsh uchelwr class [i.e., the nobility active in administrative services at home and court] so closely attached to a new concept of British citizenship."[38]
    
    
16. I will return to this notion of a common British stock in my discussion of Cymbeline's Roman context; for now it is only necessary to note that Welsh assimilation into English political life was not always greeted with unadulterated enthusiasm. Consider the equivocality of Llwyd's account of the effects of the Acts of Union, an account that immediately precedes his comment regarding the predominance of the Welsh in noble English households:

[Henry VIII] deliuered [the Welsh] wholy from all seruitude, and made them in all poynets equall to the Englishmen. Wherby it commeth to passe, that laying aside their old manners, they, who before were wonte to liue most sparingly: are now enritched and do imitate the Englishmen in diet, & apparell, howbeit, they be somedeale impatient of labour, and ouermuch boastying of the Nobilitie of their stocke, applying them selues rather to the seruice of noble men, then geuynge them selues to the learnyng of handycraftes.[39]

This deliverance from servitude leads to the transformation of the Welsh character, a transformation that takes place because the Welsh are now free to act in ways apparently detrimental to themselves. This transformation might more precisely be called an assimilation, for the Welsh both abandon their traditional labours and become indistinguishable in diet and apparel from the English. Their "boastying of the Nobilitie of their stocke" seems to suggest less their commonality with the English through shared British roots than their indistinguishability from them. For Lhuyd, it is this uneasy sameness to the English that marks, for worse more than better, the Welsh gentleman.



17. What many, perhaps most, members of the Welsh political nation seemed to desire was both political integration and cultural independence, as is borne out by the fact that figures such as William Salesbury could both applaud the fact that after the Acts of Union "there shall hereafter be no difference in laws and language" while also worrying that the Welsh language, often called British, would become "full of corrupt speech and well-nigh completely lost."[40] Lhuyd suggests, however, that British citizenship, the supposed return to an integrated British culture, largely means the adoption of an English identity. More broadly, Lhuyd betrays a shrewd suspicion about the social and political ends of the reunification of Britain -- that it is finally in the service of the cultural annexation of Wales by England. I would argue that this fear is borne out in slightly different form in Cymbeline, a play in which the political nation of pre-Roman Britain is figured only as English. (I am speaking anachronistically, of course; the world of the play predates both the division and reunification of England and Wales. And yet, the play's obvious topicalities and its own adducement of a divided Britain -- we began this article with Imogen referring to a Wales so happy as to have Milford Haven in it -- forces us to examine its articulation of early Stuart Anglo-Welsh relations.) We can see this by considering the fact that, with the possible exception of the two beggars who give Imogen directions, there are no Welsh in the play. In fact, Wales is occupied by invaders or court figures in temporary exile and/or disguise: Pisanio, Imogen, Cloten, Posthumus, Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius. These last three, attired as rude mountain men who defeat the invading Romans with the aid of (the also disguised) Posthumus, are as close as we come, but they, of course, are finally and fully reintegrated into the world of the court from which they came. In fact, by play's end Wales is vacated, and the cultural centrality of the court is reaffirmed, and that the court is figured as English is made clear by Marcus's above statement. While Lhuyd worries about the Welsh becoming English, Shakespeare suggests that Wales is the geographical site across which English cultural struggles take place. Thus, both Milford Haven and Wales are landscapes across which English concerns of invasion and identity are articulated. Wales is constituted here in terms of a landscape of sovereignty, characterized as it is by its conceptual annexation into England.
    
    
18. But if for Shakespeare Milford Haven signifies as point of access to England, and if Wales is the site of English cultural struggles, then what specifically can we say about these two places? Above I follow de Certeau in drawing a distinction between panorama and practice, between viewed and customary landscapes. My argument suggests that in this play Wales is like the object of de Certeau's panoramic view insofar as it presents us with a landscape divorced from the imperatives of custom and practice. Intriguingly, Imogen's panoramic view of the landscape is not the only one in the Wales section of the play; it is mirrored by the view to be offered Guiderius and Arviragus from atop a mountain. Belarius frames that view as follows:

Now for our mountain sport, up to yond hill!
Your legs are young: I'll tread these flats. Consider,
When you above perceive me like a crow,
That it is place which lessens and sets off,
And you may then revolve what tales I have told you
Of courts, of princes; of the tricks in war.
This service is not service, so being done,
But being so allow'd. To apprehend thus,
Draws us a profit from all things we see:
And often, to our comfort, shall we find
The sharded beetle in a safer hold
Than is the full-wing'd eagle. O, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check:
Richer than doing nothing for a robe,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk (3.3.10-24).

As described here, this panorama offers Guiderius and Arviragus both a view of a landscape peopled only by the man they believe to be their father, who because of his distance from them appears to be a bird, and an opportunity for reflection on life at court, understood here as existing in explicit opposition not only to the lives they lead but the landscape they inhabit. While the opposition between rural purity and courtly corruption is hardly a startling one in Shakespeare[41], what is important here is that the Welsh landscape is figured only as the vehicle and opportunity for an object lesson about the court that Belarius has fled; the profit the two boys are to draw "from all they see" will supposedly drive home that lesson.[42] This assumption about the landscape finds its analogue at the beginning of the scene. Consider Belarius's following lines:

A goodly day not to keep house with such
Whose roof's as low as ours! Stoop, boys: this gate
Instructs you how t'adore the heavens; and bows you
To a morning's holy office. The gates of monarchs
Are arch'd so high that giants may jet through
And keep their impious turbans on, without
Good morrow to the sun (3.1.1-7).

Belarius refers first to the fact that they have left their low roofed cave, but then suggests that that roof has been replaced by another, the roof of the heavens, to which they pay tribute by bowing down. However, the roof of the heavens is then compared with a king's arched gates -- even in the act of performing "a morning's holy office" Belarius evokes the court. While his aim is presumably to suggest the hubris of kings who aspire to produce gates as lofty as the sky above, the fact remains that the court structures Belarius's apprehension of his environment.



19. Unsurprisingly, the court also structures both Guiderius and Arviragus's desires and their sense of the landscape. An example: Guiderius complains to Belarius that

Haply this life is best
(If quiet life be best) sweeter to you
That have a sharper known, well corresponding
With your stiff age; but unto us it is
A cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed,
A prison, or a debtor that not dares
To stride a limit (3.3.29-35).

While in the preceding passage the roof of the cave was metaphorically transmogrified into that of the heavens, here it is yoked by Guiderius to his sense of his life, which is compared to a cell and a prison, the site of only imaginary travel ("travelling a-bed"). Implicitly in opposition to this is experience of the court, a fact brought out by Belarius when he reflects that the princes, unaware of their true identities, "[from within] th' cave wherein they bow, [think] thoughts [that] do hit / The roofs of palaces . . . " (3.3.83-84). In this complex conflation of the images we examined above, Belarius metaphorically renders indistinguishable cave, court, and heavens; the cave within which they bow suggests both their lives and the homage paid beneath the roof of the heavens. However, the brothers' prayers lead them only to "the roofs of palaces" -- the landscape of either cave or countryside has for them been transmogrified into that of the court. Of course these scenes work to suggest the inevitability and naturalness of Guiderius' and Belarius's royal identities. However, it is worth noting that Wales is both where those identities have been shrouded (and admittedly where they will be most spectacularly enacted, in the battle against the Romans), and the obstacle that must be cleared in order for them to become princes again.



20. "It is place which lessens and sets off": Belarius's statement refers to the fact that it is location, the place from which one apprehends one's environment, that either diminishes or enhances what one sees. Intriguingly, in these scenes it is the conceptual proximity of the court that is always made plain, reducing the Welsh landscape to the stage across which the drama of a distant kingship is performed. Those who inhabit that landscape -- again, there are no Welshmen, only disguised and exiled courtiers -- nonetheless finally exist in relation to it in a way exemplified by the panorama's imposition of a false order on what is apprehended visually. For them, the landscape is brought into knowledge and representation in terms of the cultural centrality of the court. However, while de Certeau's account of the panorama understands it as existing in opposition to practice, Cymbeline obviously offers us no customary world to which the panorama can do a violence. All we have is a shadow Wales that exists to promote the cultural centrality of London and the court. Moreover, we should be able to see by now the affinities in this play between the panorama and the landscape of sovereignty: the viewed landscape that takes shape in accordance with the imperatives of the court makes clear the conceptual and cultural annexation of Wales, its subsumption into British (or English) monarchical culture. However, that does not mean that we need not consider the specificity of Shakespeare's inclusion of Wales -- this shadow Wales reinforces and enacts Lhuyd's fears about England's conception of Britishness, that it involves not the confirmation but the eradication of a distinctive Welsh identity.
    
    
21. Over the last few paragraphs I have stressed the conceptual integration of Wales into England, an integration that takes place at the expense of Welsh identity. And yet, earlier in this article I emphasized the cultural and geographic incommensurabilty of Wales and England. This seeming contradiction is actually crucial to Anglo-Welsh relations. For whereas one strain of English thinking about Wales downplayed the differences between the two cultures, even subsumed them in a notion of Britishness, another figured the Welsh as as difficult to assimilate as Norden found their land to measure. This paradoxical relationship is instantiated in the very name of Wales. Lhuyd talks of the country's name as follows:

Cambria, called Wales . . . wee in our mother tongue doo terme Cymbri. This . . . the Englishmen, after the fashion, and maner of the Germans [i.e., the Germanic tribes that invaded Britain]: haue called Wallia, that is Wales. For when the auncient Almaines had sometime ioynyng next unto them of Forreyners, the Frenchmen, whom they called Walli: it came to passe, that afterwarde they called all straungers, and those whiche dwelt in other prouinces: Walli, and Wallisei. . . . & al thinges that come foorth of strange countries: Walshe.[43]

The name of Wales inscribes the perceived alienness of that country's inhabitants, an alienness that exists side by side with its opposite, the sense of Wales as familiar, as assimilable into narratives of Britishness.[44] As Glanmor Williams puts it in describing the Welsh who came to England, "[They] seemed to their English hosts to be readily recognizable: the closest and most familiar of foreigners, and also the most distant and outlandish of provincials."[45] Williams's pithy articulation of Anglo-Welsh relations precisely isolates the problem of Wales and the Welsh for England: is it a foreign country or a distant province? Are they familiar outsiders to England or strange co-inhabitants of Britain?



22. What I have suggested so far is that Cymbeline is true to the paradox embedded in the first of the above two questions: it annexes the Welsh landscape for the purpose of staging a drama focusing on the fate of a throne seen as English, while it also reads that landscape as alien, as resistant to integration into English schemes of measurement. Moreover, as the example of Ireland in this period makes clear, the measurement of alien lands is a necessary precondition for their colonization; the inscrutability of the Irish landscape, linked to that of the Irish themselves, constituted an impediment to England's imperial ambitions.[46] While the position of Wales vis a vis England is obviously not easily made analogous to that of Ireland, the political significance of measurement obtains in both situations. The extension throughout Wales of the statute mile, a standard whose inauguration is linked literally to the expansion of London into the surrounding countryside, would mark the conceptual and symbolic integration of Welsh territory into England. In neither Norden nor Shakespeare is that integration fully achieved, just as it was not in fact. In his discussion of different measures, Holinshed declines to say much of "the olde Brytishe myle," asserting that there is

not greately neede to make any discourse of it, & so much the lesse, sith it is yet in use and not forgott[en] among the Welch men, as Leland hath noted in his commentaries of Bryteine: wherfore it may suffice to haue saide thus much of the same, and so of all the rest, beyng mindfull to goe forwarde and make an ende of this treatise.[47]

Like Ogilby with his "vulgar computations," Holinshed registers a different form of measurement, in this case one explicitly linked with Wales, only to assert its marginality: there is no great need "to make any discourse of it." At the same time, this need is not felt partly because the standard is still customary, still in use "among the Welch men." This simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of a customary mile used by the Welsh marks the end of Holinshed's section on measurement, eager as he is to "make an ende of this treatise." The haste with which Holinshed passes from a mile not worth discussing to the end of his treatise betrays the position of Wales in his chronicle. Wales is both present and absent, discussed here and elsewhere but not granted a space or a section of its own in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande.[48]



23. We have seen that Wales is both symbolically incorporated into and displaced from the Anglocentric world of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. However, to talk of early modern Wales is to focus on only half of the story, given that the play also concerns itself with the pre-history of England and Wales -- that is, the period of struggle between the ancient Britons and the invading Romans. It is my contention that the play simultaneously draws upon discourses governing contemporary Anglo-Welsh relations and takes up the history of Roman Britain in order to shape an early modern fantasy of a completely integrated British landscape, one that incorporates not simply Wales but also Scotland. The play looks both backward and forward to two united kingdoms, the former of which is unified by, among other things, roads.
    
    
24. I have discussed elsewhere the way in which John of Gaunt's "royal throne of kings" speech produces a rhetoric of nationalism that both emerges out of and is complicated by a cartographically-enabled image of England as an island.[49] A similar speech occurs in Cymbeline, but with quite different implications. As part of a successful effort to convince Cymbeline to resist Roman demands for tribute, the Queen speaks of

The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
As Neptune's park, ribb'd and pal'd in
With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies' boats,
But suck them up to th' topmast (3.1.19-23).

With a hubris belied by the vulnerability of Milford Haven, which is soon to be occupied by "the legions garrison'd in Gallia" (4.2.333), the Queen speaks of the invulnerability of this island. Whereas John of Gaunt's patriotic rhetoric required collapsing Wales and Scotland into England, the Queen is referring to the reign of the ancient Britons, which was of course to end with the Roman occupation. Jodi Mikalachki has astutely identified what is most striking about this, the fact that the language of patriotism is besmirched by its association with the evil Queen, and that the play's happy ending involves "[a] Roman, and a British ensign wav[ing] / Friendly together" (5.5.481-482).[50] Thus the rhetoric of ancient British patriotism, which is importantly associated with resistance to the Romans, is denigrated.[51] Moreover, we have seen that rhetorics such as this one provided a crucial framework for early modern Welsh hopes for their integration into a revivified British culture. What does it mean, then, that the strongest nationalist language that the play proffers is associated with societal disruption and the malign intelligence of Cymbeline's unnamed queen?[52]



25. To answer this question, we might think about the role of the Romans in this text. Readers who have been nurtured on a steady diet of Shakespearean English history plays are often puzzled by the fact that the play denigrates the Queen's nationalism while endorsing the Roman occupation. However, just as in this period Milford Haven registered both as a site vulnerable to invasion and a staging ground for Tudor triumphs, the appearance of the Romans could be read as either catastrophe or boon. Consider William Camden's account of the Roman influence on the ancient Britons:

This yoke of the Romanes although it were grievous, yet comfortable it proved and a saving health unto them: for . . . the brightnesse of that most glorious Empire, chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds, like as from other nations whom it had subdued. . . . For . . . the Romanes, having brought over Colonies hither, and reduced the naturall inhabitants of the Iland unto the society of civill life, by training them up in the liberall Arts, and by sending them into Gaule for to learne perfectly the lawes of the Romanes . . . [who] governed them with their lawes, and framed them to good maners and behaviour so, as in their diet and apparell they were not inferior to any other provinces[53]

While Lhuyd is uncertain about the impact on the Welsh of their adopting of the diet and apparel of the English, for Camden the Britons are civilized thanks to the transformations enforced upon them by the Romans -- despite the grievous yoke, Camden finally praises the civilizing process.[54] Moreover, the process is implicitly linked to, among other things, the Roman construction of roads, a topic addressed immediately following this account of the remaking of the Britons. From among the many Roman works, Camden mentions "the Picts wall" and then passes on to

those Causeies [i.e., causeways] . . . [were] a wonderfull peece of worke, what with dreining and drying up the meres in some places, and what with casting up banks where low vallies were, in others: so fensed and paved with stone, and withall of that breadth, that they can well receive and with roome enough, waines [i.e., wagons] meeting one the other.[55]

Camden continues his discussion of the alteration of the topography of ancient Britain by quoting from Galen, who states that

Trajanus repaired, by paving with stone, or raising with banks cast up such peeces of them as were moist and miry; . . . where the way seemed longer than needed, by cutting out another shorter: if any where by reason by some steepe hill, the passage were hard and uneasie, by turning it aside thorow easier places: now in case it were haunted with wild beasts, or lay wast and desert, by drawing it from thence thorow places inhabited, and withall, by laying levell all uneven and rugged grounds.[56]

As the Romans civilized the Britons, so did they tame the ancient British landscape, altering the topography of the land in a way similar in spirit to the principle underlying Norden's measurements: both turn the crooked into straight, the Romans literally and Norden figuratively through his adherence to geometric absolutes.



26. Camden's reference to the Roman causeways that extend "thorowout the whole land" reminds us of the crucial role that roads played for the Romans. Roads were an essential prerequisite for military control and imperial expansion; they "fulfilled the most essential requirement of a military commander -- mobility of men and supplies . . . "[57] These roads also linked disparate regions in Britain, again through the alteration of the topographical landscape: "It was one of the most outstanding contributions of Rome in Britain that she broke through the successive belts of forest with her new main roads, and for the first time knit together the various habitable belts in one unified transport network, which for the most part radiated from London."[58] We should remind ourselves that such a "unified transport network" is hardly politically neutral. In fact, the Romans understood only too well that roads were crucial to the creation and management of a colonized nation; roads served to connect and bring disparate tribes and regions under military control, just as Roman efforts to "civilize" the Britons worked to bring them under ideological control.
    
    
27. An area where the Romans met resistance to their efforts was ancient Wales. Both the fact of this resistance and Roman efforts to combat it are registered in the roads. David Johnston discusses this topic in some detail:

Look at the road pattern west of the Foss Way [one of four major Roman highways] into Wales and you will see that it looks incomplete. . . . On the whole it is because -- for geographical as well as political reasons -- the initial military penetration was not followed up by the civilian development which produced so complex a pattern elsewhere. The political picture is one of Celtic [i.e., ancient British] tribes which refused to give in. After 50 years or so of military resistance they could be said, as far as the government in Rome was concerned, to have been "conquered". However, they had sheltered the British prince, Caratacus, as a refugee, their resistance had occupied much of the time of several governors in succession, and they had even succeeded in causing the death of one through sheer exhaustion. They never fully accepted all that was offered to them as "Romanisation" . . .[59]

While the incomplete expansion of a road system into Wales indicates the extent of native resistance, roads were central to local military responses to this resistance. Frequently the ancient British would evade the Romans by sequestering themselves in the hills. In order to prevent groups of resisters from making contact with one another, the Romans cordoned off the hills by building roads in the valleys below and constructing forts no more than a day's march apart from one another. Roads were built to facilitate the movement of the Romans while restricting that of those who rejected their authority.[60] The hills, so frequently linked in the popular imagination with Wales and the Welsh, were loci of resistance, encircled but not traversed by those agents of Romanisation, the roads.



28. What we have seen is that the Roman conquest of ancient Britain involved the "civilizing" of both native peoples and the landscape. Despite these efforts, however, much of Wales successfully resisted assimilation into the Roman empire. At first glance it may seem that this resistance is evoked in Cymbeline through the actions of the cave dwellers Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius, who by blocking Roman passage through "a strait lane" (5.3.7) inspire Cymbeline's soldiers to victory. However, just as the three men are not really Welsh, so do their heroic actions point to a conception of armed resistance that distances them from those who rejected Romanisation by taking to and fighting from the hills. Belarius at one point recommends that the three of them "[travel] higher to the mountains, [and] there secure us" (4.4.8). This plan is articulated in opposition to a sentiment expressed by Guiderius, whose views finally dictate the men's actions: "Nay," he says,

what hope
Have we in hiding us? This way, the Romans
Must [either] for Britons slay us or receive us
For barbarous and unnatural revolts [i.e., rebels]
During their use, and slay us after (4.4.3-7).[61]

Guiderius assumes an opposition between Britons who stand up against the Roman invasion and "unnatural revolts." This opposition leaves unanswered an important question: against whom would these "revolts" be rebelling -- the Romans who would "slay [them] after," or the Britons to whom they are here negatively compared? That is to say, if they are either rebels or British, then their rebellion situates them in opposition to the British as well as the Romans. This ambiguity is telling, suggesting as it does a conceptual alliance between noble, martial Britons and the Romans, two groups worthy of fighting one another.[62] In terms of this schema, the rebels, who are most suggestive of the resistant Welsh, are displaced from the ranks of the valorous. Moreover, Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius also distance themselves from them by eagerly entering the fray. The way they finally follow leads them not to the mountains, implicitly repudiated as home to barbarous rebels, but to a narrow lane.[63]



29. This narrow lane receives a surprising amount of attention in the play, and it becomes an integral part of the narrative of the heroism of Belarius, Arviragus, and Guiderius: "This was a strange chance," a lord says, "A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys" (5.3.51-2); Posthumus incorporates the lane into a rhyme: "Two boys, an old man twice a boy, a lane, / Preserv'd the Britons, was the Romans' bane" (5.3.57-8). While Posthumus's rhyme is shaped in bitter repudiation of the lord's idle wonder at these heroic exploits, its terms are significant. The lane is an agent in the rhyme's narrative, as it along with the old man and two boys exists as a bane to the invaders. Moreover, the strait lane, "ditch'd, and wall'd with turf" (5.3.14), is emphatically not a paved Roman road. Its centrality to this narrative of ancient British valour indicates the land itself here resists the civilizing process of Romanisation, the subduing of both the landscape and its inhabitants.
    
    
30. And yet, it is important to remember one of the play's central paradoxes, that those who reveal their heroism by fighting the Romans end up among their allies and tributaries; the actions of the "old man, and two boys" serve not to secure their (and the culture's) dominance over the Romans, but only to reveal their intrinsic meritoriousness; that is, the salient fact is not the defeat of the Romans but the display of valour, which reveals them as worthy both of the court and of the Romans. In one sense, then, the play greets the arrival of the Romans as warmly as Camden did. In fact, traffic throughout the play between the world of the Romans and that of the Britons reveals that the two cultures are more integrated than oppositional. Consider the fact that Imogen, disguised as Fidele and at Pisanio's suggestion, for a time serves a Roman master; or that Posthumus travels among the Roman soldiers as a member of "th' Italian gentry" (5.1.18), then disguises himself as a British peasant, and finally lets himself be taken captive as a Roman. Posthumus's case is suggestive. While he deploys the language of patriotism and fights in the name of Britain, a country from which he has been exiled, no stigma attaches to his involvement with the Romans. Similarly, Imogen's actions seem most suspect not when she serves a Roman master, but when she shows indifference to his fate at a time when she might better it -- as she starkly puts it to Lucius upon being granted the power to pardon one prisoner, "your life, good master, / Must shuffle for itself" (5.5.104-5). Only here, and temporarily (see 5.5.404-405), do we see a disjunction in the identity of "Fidele," who has up until now been able to serve two masters, one Briton and one Roman. In short, the final alliance between the two nations has been anticipated by an easy exchange between their cultures that has been evident as early as Posthumus's journey to Rome.[64]
    
    
31. What Cymbeline overtly celebrates is the equality of Rome and Britain, made manifest in the aforementioned image of "A Roman, and a British ensign wav[ing] / Friendly together."[65] However, the play also anticipates Romanisation as eagerly as Camden celebrates it. On the simplest level, this is implicit in the play's narrative, representing as it does the beginning of the period of Rome's successful invasion.[66] Less obviously, the play is deeply invested in repudiating ancient British culture, represented in all its (imagined) patriotic provincialism by the Queen and Cloten,[67] and embracing the civilizing influence of Rome.[68] The latter is hardly surprising given the significant role Rome played in the early modern cultural imagination,[69] a fact made clear in Camden's account of Roman influence. However, I want us to think of Rome's influence on the landscape. In looking forward to Roman rule, Cymbeline also looks forward to the civilizing of both the culture and the landscape.
    
    
32. In celebrating the advent of Roman rule, Cymbeline also gestures toward a fantasy of national unification facilitated by road building. As Camden makes clear, Roman roads were believed to run "thorowout the whole land," physically and culturally linking Wales and England (to speak anachronistically) through the creation of a shared landscape. In fact, of course, the Welsh landscape posed a problem to the Romans analogous to the one it posed Norden, but Camden's conception of the Romans nevertheless attests to their perceived power as providers of a common civilization and a shared landscape. Cymbeline presents a very different picture; Milford Haven and Wales are alternately (or even concurrently) alien and unnavigable, sites of penetration, and screens across which the "[t]wo boys [and] an old man twice a boy" can both play out their desires and anxieties about the court and perform the actions that allow them to return to it. However, it is among other things the indeterminacy of this landscape that Rome hopes to civilize out of existence by subsuming Wales into its Empire. In that regard, Rome is analogous to Lhuyd's England, engaged in cultural annexation in the name of unity.
    
    
33. It is worth noting that at the time of Cymbeline's production the rhetoric of cultural unification was particularly resonant, suggesting as it did James's cherished scheme of unifying the kingdoms.[70] What has not been widely recognized is the significance of Wales to this scheme, a significance very clear to James himself. As James says to members of his first parliament, "Do you not gain from the union with Wales and is not Scotland greater than Wales?"[71] Thus Wales is both precursor to and model for a Scotland integrated into England. Moreover, as Jonathan Goldberg has shown, the example and analogue of Rome was crucial to both James's thinking about and his strategies of rule.[72] Given this, Cymbeline's interest in a landscape and culture civilized by Rome inevitably echoes James's ambitions for a united kingdom (or, perhaps, a unified and homogenized landscape of sovereignty). However, while both James and Cymbeline may optimistically look forward to a such a kingdom, Shakespeare's play also reveals the problematic nature of the enterprise. While on one level Wales exists only as that which is to be subsumed or civilized, its landscape and culture are alternately indistinguishable from and incompatible with those of England. Roman roads offer the hope of a united (and conquered) Britain, but in the end the play only gives us the narrow path, the folkloric stature of which resists easy integration into the culture of the colonizers. In sum, Wales is arguably as unassimilable to Rome as it was to Norden's measurement.
    
    
34. I want to conclude with a discussion of a brief account of the fate of Roman roads in the early modern period. As is widely known, long before the sixteenth century most of these roads had degenerated, a fact that clearly and obviously marked the decay long before of Rome's imperial ambitions. Consider Camden's dispirited description of the fate of many of these roads: "But now adaies these of ours [i.e., Roman roads in Britain], being dismembred, as it were and cut one peece from another in some places, by reason that the countrey people digge out gravell from thence, are scarcely to be seene."[73] This is a vivid testament to disunification, to the strategic and local uses of the raw materials (specifically gravel) necessary for the expansion of the long since fallen Roman empire. For Camden, the roads that once ran throughout the land have been "dismembered," destroyed not by the passing of time but by looting. Camden's dismay aside, this brief example provides a powerful metaphor for cultural appropriation, for the crafting of a postcolonial identity out of the raw materials of colonial authority. What I want to emphasize, though, is that what Camden sees as destructive is a crucial part of the construction of a landscape, one built out of, but radically different from, the Roman roads. While the Roman roads may suggest in all their fabled straightness the ""geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions," their dismemberment fifteen centuries later makes legible the power of "murky intertwining daily behaviors" -- the power, that is, of practice and custom, and of the landscapes from which they are finally inseparable.

Notes

[1] Charles G. Harper, The Oxford, Gloucester and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905) 1-2. [Back]

[2] William Shakespeare, Cymbeline ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Metheun, 1955) 3.2.51-53. Henceforth cited in the text. [Back]

[3] In this light, consider Gower's description of travel in another Shakespearean romance, Pericles: "Thus time we waste and long leagues make short; / Sail seas in cockles, have and wish but for't; / Making, to take our imagination, / From bourn to bourn, region to region" (from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works ed. Alfred Harbage [New York: Viking Penguin, 1969] 4.4.1-4). [Back]

[4] John Norden, England. An Intended Gvyde for English Travailers (London: Edward All-De, 1625), "To All Kinde Gentlemen and Others, Who Have Occasion to Make use of These Tables or Any of Them," n. p. [Back]

[5] Norden, England, Table for Wales, n.p. [Back]

[6] Norden, England, Table showing distances between cities and shire towns in England, n.p. [Back]

[7] R. D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1987) 70. This statute should be understood as one part of Elizabeth's larger effort to standardize measurements of all kinds. Between 1582 and 1602, Elizabeth created standards for troy and avoirdupois weights, as well as capacity measure standards (see Ronald Edward Zupko, British Weights and Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977] 86-93). Moreover, one of the achievements of which Elizabeth was most proud -- it is recorded in Latin on her tomb at Westminster --was her stabilizing of English currency (James O' Donald Mays, The Splendid Shilling [Burley, Ringwood, Hampshire: New Forest Leaves, 1982] 37). For more on Elizabeth's restoration of "right value," see C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1978). [Back]

[8] J. B. Harley, "Introduction," John Ogilby, Britannia, facsimile edition (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970) xxii. [Back]

[9] Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1976) 95. [Back]

[10] Ibid, 127. For more on Ogilby and Britannia, see also Harley, "Introduction," v-xxiii; Sir Herbert George Fordham, "John Ogilby: His Britannia, and the British Itineraries of the Eighteenth Century," The Library 4th ser., 6 (1926): 157-178. [Back]

[11] The category of utility is adduced advisedly here, since it is an anachronistic one that favours narrow conceptions of the "uses" of a text. What P. D. A. Harvey says of estate maps also applies, with obvious modifications and slight qualification, to productions such as Ogilby's: "Nor need [their ornamental beauty] be seen as a less practical, less functional purpose than the[ir] use . . . in the detailed work of running the estate. They were meant to be looked at and to impress, to excite the beholder's admiration and to satisfy the owner's pride of possession without even the trouble of travelling to the spot" (P. D. A. Harvey, "English Estate Maps: Their Early History and Their Use as Historical Evidence," in Rural Images: Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) 46). While Ogilby's atlas obviously does not attest to estate ownership, part of Britannia's "utility" would lie in its opulent form, in the cultural capital that accrues to its owner (because it is a fine and expensive book), and in its status as an emblem and accoutrement of gentlemanly identity. See the next note. [Back]

[12] This is reinforced by the fact that Ogilby's atlases are produced in a form that makes them anything but convenient traveller's companions. Britannia, like the others, is an "[i]mperial-sized foli[o made with] fine paper, clear type, large margins, handsome and numerous illustrations, drawn and engraved by the best illustrators he could find" (Van Eerde, John Ogilby, 122). Obviously Britannia was both expensive and unwieldy, suited more for a gentleman's study than the open road. [Back]

[13] Norden, England, "To All Kinde Gentlemen," n. p. [Back]

[14] A topic that I don't take up here is the problem of time, obviously important to the answering of Imogen's question. In fact, Cymbeline is quite interested in the relationship between time, distance and disparate locations, as evidenced by 3.2.79-83, most of which is discussed below, or Imogen's wish that she and Posthumus had arranged to pray at the same hour, the shared time of their "orisons" uniting them despite the distance between (1.4.30-33). Given that it took the national extension of the railroads and the concomitant necessity of railroad timetables to synchronize Britain's watches, regional temporal variations were undoubtedly significant in the early modern period, and must have played a significant role in the customary practices of particular areas. [Back]

[15] The imprecision obviously lies in the fact that a view of the land is an experience of it, but I draw this distinction in order to emphasize different kinds of relationships to the land. [Back]

[16] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (1984; Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) 93. [Back]

[17] See Patricia Parker, "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello, and bringing to light," in Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994) 87. [Back]

[18] Custom and practice are obviously not identical, but they are allied. While I at times use them as if they are practically synonymous terms, I mean to suggest not their status as equivalences, but the complex interpenetration and mutual constitution of the two in the early modern period. Also, I do not mean to oppose to the statue mile an "authentic" customary mile; I want only to consider the implications of the imposition of the London mile on the rest of the country, an imposition made at the expense of the customary. [Back]

[19] De Certeau, 93. I find de Certeau's tacit opposition between the authenticity of practice and the voyeurism of the panorama somewhat troubling. Why is "voyeurism" (a patently loaded term) divorced from practice? And why is it necessarily an alienated, isolating activity? Still, his schema is useful for unpacking and critiquing the assumptions inherent in texts such as Ogilby's and Norden's. [Back]

[20] For more on surveys and the category of landscape, see my "The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage," forthcoming from Stanford UP. [Back]

[21] Emrys Jones, "Stuart Cymbeline," Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 84-99. See also Frances A. Yates, Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare's Last Plays (Boulder: Shambala, 1978) esp. 26-29; Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) 131; D. E. Landry, "Dreams as History: The Strange Unity of Cymbeline," Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982) 71-73. [Back]

[22] John Selden's note to a section in Drayton's poem that focuses on Milford Haven reads: "At Milford hauen arriued Henry Earle of Richmont, aided with some forces and summes of money by the French Charles VIII. but so entertained and strengthened by diuers of his friends, groaning under the tyrannicall yoake of Rich. III. that, beyond expectation, at Bosworth in Leicester, the day and Crown was soone his. Euery Chronicle tels you more largely" (Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London: M. Lownes, I. Browne, I. Helme, I. Busbie, 1612) 83). [Back]

[23] John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London: Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, 1676) n.p. [Back]

[24] William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London: George Bishop & John Norton, 1610) 651. [Back]

[25] Quoted in B. G. Charles, George Owen of Henllys: A Welsh Elizabethan (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales P, 1973) 154. [Back]

[26] Anonymous, "A Plain Disquisition on The Indispensable Necessity of Fortifying and Improving Milford-Haven" (London: P. Davey and B. Law, 1759), 15. [Back]

[27] Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c. 1415-1642 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 366-367; Eric N. Simons, The Devil of the Vault: A Life of Guy Fawkes (London: Frederick Muller, 1963) 37-40. [Back]

[28] G. Dyfnallt Owen, Wales in the Reign of James I (Suffolk: Boydell P for the Royal Historical Society, 1988) 70. [Back]

[29] Owen, "Milford Tracts" 565. [Back]

[30] Owen, "Milford Tracts" 565 [Back]

[31] Imogen is not the only one who gets lost on the way to Milford Haven. Despite the fact that "th' place where [Imogen and Posthumus] should meet" has been "mapp'd" -- it is not clear whether the term suggests verbal or visual description -- for him by Pisanio (4.1.1-2), Cloten too gets lost. Arguably Pisanio gave Cloten bad directions; if so, this opens up the scene to a comic reading predicated on Cloten's being duped, but that comedy nevertheless reinforces our sense of the Welsh landscape as being as difficult to navigate as Milford Haven is to locate. However, the problem of location becomes more complex. Cloten has read in a letter held by Pisanio that Posthumus has arranged to "Meet [Imogen] at Milford-Haven" (3.5.131), and he even echoes Imogen's earlier questioning of Pisanio when he asks, "How long is't since she went to Milford-Haven?" (3.5.150). At the end of the play, though, Pisanio reports that Cloten has read a "feigned letter " that "directed him / To seek her on the mountains near to Milford" (5.5.279-281). This change probably represents a rewriting of the contents of the letter through the lens of the scenes involving those "rustic mountaineer[s]" (4.2.100) -- Cloten's term -- Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus. However, it is also more broadly suggestive, accommodating as it does the two spaces invoked in the Wales scenes: Milford Haven and an unnamed, stereotypically mountainous Welsh landscape. [Back]

[32] This contention is confirmed by a pair of lines from the play in which Cymbeline conflates Milford Haven and Wales: Lucius desires of Cymbeline "A conduct over land, to Milford-Haven" (3.5.8); Cymbeline agrees, but the order he then gives specifies that Lucius only be accompanied "Till he have cross'd the Severn," the river that marks the Welsh border (3.5.17). I should also note that Lucius's request could also suggest the difficulty of navigating this landscape. However, unlike Imogen or Cloten, the Roman ambassador travelling by land uneventfully reaches Milford Haven and meets up with the invading legions that disembark there. This points toward a topic that I will take up at the end of the paper -- the play's hope that the Roman presence will unify the landscapes of England and Wales, making the way to Milford Haven as accessible as Imogen once imagined it to be. [Back]

[33] Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare 134-135. [Back]

[34] See, for example, Glanmor Williams's catalogue of the period's defining Welsh stereotypes (Recovery 465), a catalogue that makes palpable the perceived difference that lies at the heart of the kingdom's administrative sameness. [Back]

[35] I am indebted to an unpublished piece by Philip Jenkins, entitled "Language, Identity and Monarchy: The Unification of Seventeenth Century Britain," for an insightful account of this phenomenon in relation to the critical and historical construction of the nation. [Back]

[36] Glanmor Williams, Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1979), 171. [Back]

[37] Humfrey Lhuyd, The Breviary of Britayne, trans. Thomas Twyne (London: R. Johnes, 1573) Fo. 60 r. [Back]

[38] J. Gwynfor Jones, Wales and the Tudor State (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1989) 78. The historian A. H. Dodd has said that "the Welsh gentry, educated by the Tudors into a sense of active British (as distinctive from exclusively Welsh) citizenship, entered into the broader fields of politics thus opened to them with a vigour, independence and understanding not to be recaptured till . . . the [19th] century" ("The Pattern of Politics in Stuart Wales," The Transactions of the Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion [London: Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion, 1949] 9). [Back]

[39] Lhuyd, Breviary Fo. 60 r. [Back]

[40] Quoted from G. Williams, Religion 132. [Back]

[41] Arguably the spatial logic of Cymbeline owes a great deal to the influence of classical oppositions between city and wilderness, with garden as a middle category absent here. Moreover, these categories can be and have been mapped onto narratives of British nationhood. Denis Cosgrove has shown how the classical paradigm shapes to this day the way in which London (the metropolis characterized both by civility and corruption), the cultivated English countryside (a middle landscape of garden lands that represents a harmonized relationship between nature and civilization), and the "hinterlands" (the untamed and "historic" wilderness of Scotland, Ireland and Wales) have been conceptualized ("Landscapes and Myths, Gods and Humans," in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives ed. Barbara Bender [Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993] 281-305). According to Cosgrove, Wales has been seen both as uncultivated territory and the originary site of a primitive British nationalism, both an uncivilized land distinct from the English urbanity associated with London and assimilable to an Anglocentric notion of Britishness. [Back]

[42] Marcus situates this scene in terms of the play's larger concern with riddles: "Even out in remote Wales, far from the world of the court, there are emblematic "texts" to be interpreted, natural lessons in morality imprinted upon the landscape. . . . [A] hill signifies dangerous eminence like that won and lost in the courts of princes; the low mouth of their cave teaches the virtue of humble devotion" (Puzzling Shakespeare 120). However, of all of the riddling allegories that she analyzes, these are the only ones that emerge out of, or are projected on, a landscape. Of course this kind of allegorical reading of the landscape is not unusual in this period, but it is worth noticing that only in Wales does the landscape appear as a text to be read in this way; no other landscape is allegorical. Also, here allegory, like panorama, involves the evacuating of "murky intertwining daily behaviors" from the landscape. [Back]

[43] Lhuyd, Breviary Fo. 56 v. For the same etymology, see also Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London: John Jaggard, 1602), B1r-B1v. [Back]

[44] This paradox differentially obtains in Shakespearean portrayals of Welsh characters. This is clearest in 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V , where we encounter a range of Welsh characters: the eccentric mystic Owen Glendower (or Owain Glyn Dwr); Glendower's unnamed daughter, the wife of Mortimer, whose potentially emasculating alienness, registered in the foreignness of her speech, is admirably explicated by Phyllis Rackin (Stages of History (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1990) 146-200); "Davy Gam, esquire," or Dafydd ap Llewellyn ap Hywel, who is included in the list of those "of name" who died at Agincourt (Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter [London: Routledge, 1990] 4.8.106-7); and most notably Fluellen, who is on the one hand respected and on the other rendered a comic butt because of the strangeness of his language. Henry also refers to his own Welsh origin -- to Fluellen he says, "For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman" (Henry V 4.7.109) -- an historical fact which as we have seen enabled the smooth political integration of Wales into England. [Back]

[45] Williams, Recovery, 464. [Back]

[46] See Ann R. Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, et al (New York: Routledge, 1992) 157-171; Michael Neill, "Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories," Shakespeare Quarterly 45:1 (Spring 1994) 1-32. [Back]

[47] Raphael Holinshed, "The Description of Britaine," in The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London: John Harrison, 1577) 120 r. [Back]

[48] It is not unusual at all for Wales to be collapsed into England in either chronicle histories or descriptions of the nation (two genres which in practice cannot be easily distinguished from one another, as geographical accounts, usually chorographical in nature, provide readers with much historical material, while chronicles include geographical information): see, for example, William Smith, The Particular Description of England. 1588 (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1879). However, this strategy was not always embraced by the Welsh. For a discussion of the ways in which Wales and the ancient British are either omitted from or maligned in chronicle histories, see David Powel's letter "To the Reader" in Caradoc of Llancarian, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales trans. Humphrey Lhoyd (London: R. Newberie at H. Denham, 1584). [Back]

[49] See "Reading Shakespeare's Maps" in "The Drama of Landscape." [Back]

[50] "The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism," Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 301-322. [Back]

[51] It is important to note that the play simultaneously endorses patriotism that manifests itself as heroic behaviour: consider the martial activities of Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus, and Posthumus against the Romans. However, their actions do not finally interfere with their acceptance of Roman authority at the play's end. [Back]

[52] G. Wilson Knight articulates this paradox nicely. On the one hand, "the wicked Queen and her normally repellent son are, at this moment, primarily Britons and their reaction to the Roman threat [reveals] the measure of British toughness and the islanded integrity of their land." On the other, "The Queen and Cloten, though British and the upholders of Britain's integrity, are nevertheless conceived as types which Cymbeline, that is, Britain, must finally reject" (The Crown of Life [London: Oxford UP, 1946] 136-137). [Back]

[53] Camden, Britain 63. [Back]

[54] Not all chroniclers share Camden's sanguine view. Holinshed, for instance, states that the Britons were civilized by the Romans, but is more ambivalent about the benefits of civilization (see "The Historie of Englande," The First Volume, 69). [Back]

[55] Camden, Britain 63. [Back]

[56] Ibid, 63-64. [Back]

[57] John J. Brigg, The King's Highway in Craven (Cross Hills: Dixon & Stell, 1927), 6. [Back]

[58] Sheppard Frere, Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, 3rd. ed. (London: Pimlico, 1991), 3. [Back]

[59] Frere, Britannia, 86; Johnston, Roman Roads, 53. [Back]

[60] One example among many is Sir Walter Whorehound's Welsh ex-mistress, who masquerades as a gentlewoman who is "heir to some nineteen mountains" (Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid In Cheapside ed. Alan Brissenden [London: A & C Black, 1994] 1.1.131-132). In reference to Cymbeline, Knight points out that "The setting is a cave in a "mountainous country", among the Welsh mountains. Nowhere else in Shakespeare do mountains . . . receive a primary emphasis. The setting is rugged; we face nature in its primal grandeur" (The Crown of Life 157). This critical move is both different from and typical of accounts of the play's Welsh setting. Unusually, Knight focuses on the Welshness of the setting, pointing out the uniqueness of mountains in the Shakespeare canon, but then he subsumes the specificity of the setting into an account of "primal grandeur." Most critics have read the Welsh landscape in a similarly symbolic fashion. Maurice Hunt, for example, reads Wales as backdrop for and agent in Imogen's development: " . . . experience expands the understanding in Wales. . . . In Wales, Imogen is instructed in faithful love" ("Shakespeare's Empirical Romance: Cymbeline and Modern Knowledge," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22:3 [1980] 331). William Barry Thorne's account is also typical in that it sees Wales's meaning as emerging out of its opposition to the court. However, Wales is also defined in terms of its "naturalness": "In general, the nature scenes . . . are designed as a sharp philosophical contrast to the action of the court, and the conceptual structure is thus based on the simple dichotomy of court-country" ("Cymbeline: "Lopp'd Branches" and the Concept of Regeneration, Shakespeare Quarterly 20:1 [1969] 152). [Back]

[61] In providing the bracketed glosses, I follow J. M. Nosworthy's helpful notes to this passage. [Back]

[62] This kind of martial homosociality, which binds noble rivals together even as it sets them against one another, finds its fullest Shakespearean articulation in Coriolanus. For more on this topic, see Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England (1991; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) 31-77. [Back]

[63] Linda Woodbridge notes the similarities between Milford Haven and this lane: "When the Romans invade, they press into Britain at an inlet, Milford Haven, and try to penetrate through a lane whose narrowness is repeatedly emphasized. . . . Here, the attempted invasion of a country is paralleled by the attempted invasion of a woman's body" (The Scythe of Saturn [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994] 55). These similarities suggest that both lane and Milford Haven function as national loci of vulnerability, and the imagined wholeness of a Britain figured as a woman's body dovetails intriguingly with my assertion that Wales is assimilated into a unified British landscape that is actually an English one. [Back]

[64] Consider in light of this Philip Edwards's observation that "With curious forgetfulness, Shakespeare makes Posthumus's father (who was supposed to have died with grief at the death of his sons) go on to fight in the Roman army. (Philario in Rome says, "[H]is father and I were soldiers together" [1.5.26].)" (Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979] 89). While Posthumus has been exiled, there is little sense in the play that he journeys to the alien world of his country's enemy. Instead, he reenters a social milieu familiar to him from previous travels. Rome here seems a site for cosmopolitan exchange, and Iachimo stands in stark moral contrast to other Romans such as Lucius. Leah Marcus perceptively alludes to the way in which "Shakespeare ingeniously (albeit anachronistically) separates two levels of Roman influence in the play -- that of the ancient Rome of Caesar Augustus, associated with the ideals of James I . . . and that of the Renaissance Rome of the degenerate Italians, associated rather with perversion, bawdry, and amorality" (Puzzling Shakespeare 126). I would only add that by the play's end the latter Rome, in the person of Iachimo, has been reformed out of existence; his repentance is sincere, preceding even his revelation of wrongdoing at the end, and his status as commander of Roman troops unites him with "the ancient Rome of Caesar Augustus." The Rome we finally encounter is a uniformly positive one. On ideal versus degenerate Romans, see also Knight, The Crown of Life 150. [Back]

[65] See also 5.5.475-6, which mentions how "Th' imperial Caesar, should again unite / His favour with the radiant Cymbeline . . . " [Back]

[66] This is made clear in the Queen's references to Julius Caesar's two preceding invasions (3.1.23-27), which did not result in the establishment of colonies. It was the next invasion, that of Augustus Caesar, that would do so, and the Roman presence in Britain clearly suggests this eventuality. It should be noted, however, that in other ways Shakespeare plays fast and loose with the historical record. It was not the historical Cymbeline but Arviragus and Guiderius, who were never abducted or disguised as Welsh hillfolk, who resisted the Roman presence during their respective reigns. [Back]

[67] See Mikalachki, "Masculine Romance." [Back]

[68] Robert S. Miola ("Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Valediction to Rome," Roman Images, ed. Annabel Patterson [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984] 51-62) and William Barry Thorne read my "embracing" as suggesting either the salutary fusion of Rome and Britain (Miola, 60) or the transformation of the kingdom through "regeneration and reconciliation" (Thorne, 159). While these two critics shrewdly identify the dynamic of the ending, with its promise of revitalization, I differ from them in insisting that that revitalization is possible only through the Romanisation of the Britons. [Back]

[69] On Cymbeline and Rome, see J. Leeds Barroll, "Shakespeare and Roman History," Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 327-343; David M. Bergeron, "Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Last Roman Play," Shakespeare Quarterly 31:1 (1980): 31-41; Miola, "Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Valediction"; and Mikalachki, "Masculine Romance." For information on period attitudes toward Augustus, see especially Barroll. [Back]

[70] For readings of Cymbeline in relation to this scheme, see Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare 118-148; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) 188-95; E. Jones, "Stuart Cymbeline." [Back]

[71] Quoted in G. Williams, Recovery 474. [Back]

[72] Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (1983; Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989). [Back]

[73] Camden, Britain 64. [Back]

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© 1998-, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS).