Tracey Miller-Tomlinson
New Mexico State University
Dramatic Hybridities: Sex, Nation, and Genre in Cymbeline and Bonduca
1> Recent studies of early modern formulations of gender and what we might call the “nation” have shown that both concepts were undergoing radical redefinition in the first decades of the seventeenth century.[i] Valerie Traub has argued persuasively that the “one-sex” model that had prevailed in medical discourse in the sixteenth century and allowed for a measure of free play with the distinctions of “masculine” and “feminine” was beginning to be replaced by an emergent “two-sex” model that asserted fundamental biological difference between the sexes.[ii] Willy Maley and others have shown that the concept of “nation” was another site of intense ideological pressure in the first years of the reign of James I, whose advocacy of “British” union may be echoed in Cymbeline’s representation of a “British” proto-nationalism.[iii] In this paper, I suggest that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1610) and John Fletcher’s response to that play in Bonduca (1613) bring the transitioning discourses of gender and nation to bear on one another in ways that have lasting implications for the genre of the history play.
2> This line of inquiry is grounded in recent feminist readings of Cymbeline that consider the play’s gendering of early modern national identities and its implications for genre. Drawing on Janet Adelman’s influential account of the occlusion of the feminine and the maternal body in Cymbeline,[iv] Jodi Mikalachki reads the play as a “romance of Rome” in which England enters European history by effacing its matriarchal national origins and submitting to the masculinist and homosocial codes of Roman authority.[v] In a study that resonates with Mikalachki’s, Coppélia Kahn situates Cymbeline in the context of Shakespeare’s ambivalent treatment of English masculinity and romanitas in the Roman plays.[vi] While she, like Mikalachki, assumes that “like Romanness . . . [British] national identity is gendered masculine” in Cymbeline, Kahn notes that in the play’s setting of Roman Britain, virtus itself “is necessarily a hybrid, an uneasy marriage of native stock with scion” (160) in which English masculinity is contaminated and feminized by its emulation of romanitas. More recently still, Heather Dubrow and Valerie Wayne have called into question the assumption that the romances seek solely to occlude the feminine, noting in Cymbeline in particular the representation of concurrent desires to mourn the loss of, represent, or even recuperate the feminine.[vii]
3> Mikalachki concludes her account by questioning the assumption that early formulations of a nascent English national identity rested equally on discourses of misogyny and homophobia.[viii] Inspired by her question as well as by Kahn’s discussion of cultural hybridity in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I examine here some of the hybrid forms of gender, sexuality, nation, and genre that characterize both Cymbeline and Fletcher’s Bonduca, which treats the Briton resistance to Roman invasions led by the tribal queen Boadicea (or Bonduca) in 60-61 ce. Fletcher’s less-read play invites immediate comparison with Cymbeline. In addition to treating the same period in the prehistory of the British isles—Boadicea was a near contemporary of the historical Cunobelinus—both plays locate the national origins of the polity James I nostalgically denominated as “Great Britain” in the Roman conquest of ancient Britain. Thus, as Maley has noted, James I’s project for British union is recast in Cymbeline in terms of cultural and political absorption into a dominant foreign empire.[ix]
4> Much important work has been done in recent years on the ways in which Cymbeline and Bonduca both reflect critically on the union project and on the hybridity that empire might bring. In this paper, I wish to consider how representations of hybrid gender identities and configurations of desire, which proliferate in Cymbeline and Bonduca, translate the union debate into different terms. These hybrid forms—among them feminine masculinity, androgyny, fantasies of male and female parthenogenesis, homoerotics, and homosociality—construct British national identity as itself hybrid, yet the implicit commentary on the union project built by these representations diverges in important ways. My use of the Bahktinian and postcolonial term “hybrid” to describe these diverse unions in Cymbeline seeks to call attention to the ways in which they alternately resist and reinforce hegemonic narratives about hierarchies of gender, blood, and national origin.[x]
5> Two hybrid unions are alternately celebrated, rejected, and renegotiated in Cymbeline’s double plot: the princess of Britain’s secret marriage to a commoner and ancient Britain’s similarly unequal marriage to Rome. Cymbeline opens in the first plot, with news of Imogen’s marriage to Posthumus Leonatus, a marriage so radically unequal and exogamous that its very validity is in question. Courtiers may secretly applaud Imogen’s defiant marriage to a “poor but worthy gentleman” whose origins cannot be “delved . . . to the root” (1.1.7, 28) and whose Latin name both underscores the importance of fathers as identity-givers and his own lack of one.[xi] Yet the king himself has disavowed the marriage, banished Posthumus, and ordered the princess to marry Cloten, the son of his queen. Cymbeline rejects Imogen’s defense of Posthumus’ merit in language that presents the marriage as a contamination of bloodline: “Thou took’st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (1.2.141-2). As princess of Britain, Imogen’s body stands in for the nation, her womb for Cymbeline’s throne; Imogen herself reinforces this identification when she responds to reports of Posthumus’ supposed infidelity by commenting that “My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain” (1.7.112-3). The equation of the chaste womb with the defended nation is nearly a commonplace in the period, as Linda Woodbridge has observed; Martin Butler and Valerie Traub note how Queen Elizabeth’s virginal body likewise symbolized the impregnability of the nation in Elizabethan iconography. [xii] Cymbeline’s identification of Imogen’s womb with his own throne defines any marriage outside the royal family itself as not only miscegenation but also the usurpation or overthrow of British sovereignty.
6> Initially called into question by her stolen marriage, Imogen’s chastity is later impeached by Jachimo’s slanderous claims that he has slept with the princess. Ironically, Posthumus interprets her alleged unchastity, much like Cymbeline interpreted her sexual agency, in terms of miscegenation. She has deflected his own “lawfull” advances with a “pudency so rosy” it would have warmed Saturn himself (2.5.11-12)—the phrase evokes the female genitals (pudenda) themselves even as it eroticizes her blushing shame at them. Yet Posthumus imagines that the foreign, “yellow Jachimo” has breached these defenses with ease: “Perchance he spoke not, but / Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one, / Cried ‘Oh!’ and mounted” (2.5.14-17). The nightmare fantasy moves swiftly from Jachimo’s Mediterranean origins to the boar’s German ones, from miscegenation to bestiality, from language (English?) to gutteral utterance. Recall also Posthumus’ immediate response to Jachimo’s display of the bracelet that, along with the ring, metonymizes Imogen’s genitals: “She hath been colted by him” (2.4.133).
7> Yet from this nightmare vision of exogamy as bestiality—difference in kin magnified to difference in kind—the fantasy vacillates wildly back to the suggestion of extreme endogamy with the adjective “German” (“Iarmen” in the first folio, sig. aaa2v). I would suggest that “Iarmen,” a reading that has put editors to some trouble, simultaneously connotes both foreignness and endogamous kinship; the boar is “German” and yet also “germane,” or “close kindred” to Imogen in her imputed bestial lust. (Compare Iago’s use of “Germaine” in a similar context in Othello [1.1.114].) A further irony is just possible here if one considers the alternate account of English origins put forward by Richard Verstegan in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), a treatise whose significance in the rise of Anglo-Saxon racialism has been documented by Mary Floyd-Wilson.[xiii] Verstegan seeks here to redefine the English as not Briton but Anglo-Saxon, a group whose purity of blood relative to the oft-conquered Britons Verstegan champions by arguing that the Anglo-Saxons and their conquerors, the Danes and Normans, were of the same Germanic stock. Posthumus’ nightmare shares in the disordered thinking of jealous husbands such as Othello and Leontes, yet its collapsing of otherness into sameness, exogamy into endogamy, also goes some way towards deconstructing the very notion of such purity of blood.
8> The marriage plot and Roman plot thus intersect in their shared concern with hybridity and miscegenation. If, as Kahn points out, Renaissance humanism in England emphasized and retraced the cultural legacy of Roman Britain, Cymbeline imagines a moment at which this hybrid union was chosen, not forced. The fact of Roman conquest is first rejected and later reversed in the play—rejected by Cloten’s and the infamous queen’s patriotic lines (“Britain’s / A world by itself, and we will nothing pay / For wearing our own noses” [3.1.12-4], “With shame— / The first that ever touched him—[Caesar] was carried / From off our coast, twice beaten” [3.1.24-6]), reversed by Britain’s resounding defeat of the Roman legions. The queen’s much-debated historiography is finally rendered irrelevant by Cymbeline’s voluntary decision to resume payment of tribute to Rome after Britain’s military triumph. Britain symbolically reenters the Roman empire as friend of Rome rather than as conquest: “Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together” (5.4.477-9). It is significant that Cymbeline not only resumes tribute but does so precisely on the model of his newly-acknowledged son’s (Posthumus’) clemency towards his own vanquished enemy, Jachimo. In both the marriage plot and the empire plot Cymbeline first rejects hybridity but later learns to embrace it.
9> Not only the play’s marriages but also those entering into them embrace hybridity at crucial turns. Imogen assumes male clothing when she learns that her husband believes her guilty of betrayal and has ordered her death. In the same scene, she abjures the isolationist patriotism represented by the queen’s faction at court: “Hath Britain all the sun that shines? . . . / Prithee, think / There’s livers out of Britain” (3.4.135-9). Britain is as a page that “seems as of, but not in” the “world’s volume,” as a “in a great pool a swan’s nest” (3.4.137-9). As Imogen casts off her royal clothing, dressing as “a franklin’s housewife”(3.278) to escape from court, then her women’s clothing, and finally British clothing, taking on the role of page to the Roman Lucius, she becomes a figure of hybrid class, gender, and national identity. Via the metonymy already established between her body and Britain itself, Imogen as Roman “page” restores Britain’s “page” to the book of the world from which it has been torn by isolationism—the “swan’s nest” to its pool.
10> Hybrid identities such as Imogen’s abound in Cymbeline. Posthumus’ name identifies him with the Romans, his hazy paternity with Briton resistance to Rome—the play’s first mention of the Roman conquest comes with the news that his father, Sicilius, fought with Cassibelan against the Romans [1.1.30]). Posthumus himself serves alternately as a Roman and a Britain soldier in the wars. Imogen’s brothers have double names that signal their double identities as Welsh and Briton (Floyd-Wilson argues further that the princes are associated with the Anglo-Saxon kings)[xiv]—they are also both royal and rustic, sought-after and unknown, insiders and outsiders longing to be written into the “world’s volume.”[xv] The Welsh woods seem to open up a liminal space, a romance-comic “green world” of potentiality that fosters such hybrid identities. Back at court, the queen recalls Holinshed’s Scottish chronicles; Cloten harkens after European fashions.[xvi] Cymbeline himself acknowledges a figurative Roman paternity: even as he rebels against Roman authority in the name of Mulmutius, “who was the first of Britain which did put / His brows within a golden crown” (3.1.57-8), he tells Lucius that “thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent / Much under him; of him I gathered honour” (3.1.67-8). Having proven himself worthy of this joint paternity by defeating the Romans, Cymbeline recognizes the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, recovers his lost sons, and remarkably describes himself as both father and mother to all, “Oh, what am I, / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (5.4.368-70).
11> Cymbeline’s self-declaration as both father and mother is often taken as reiterating Posthumus’ earlier misogynist fantasy of male parthenogenesis, “Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers?” (2.5.1-2). Yet the play’s valorization of hybridity authorizes the counter-reading that Cymbeline’s fruitful hermaphroditism imaginatively restores the reconciliation scene’s notoriously missing element, woman. Mikalachki’s argument that ancient Britain’s entrance into Rome and thus into history can take place only with excision of the “woman’s part” from British origins might be modified as follows: Britain’s entrance into Rome and into history—and later into “Great Britain”—requires acceptance of hybrid identities in which male and female coincide.
12> Cymbeline’s metaphorical hermaphroditism is visually reinforced by the remarkably prolonged embrace of Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus, which realizes the tablet’s prophecy that the “tender air”/heir will “embrace” a “lion’s whelp” (5.3.202-3). Yet the prophecy itself seems inadequate to explain the insistence with which the audience’s attention is directed to the embrace by characters onstage. Imogen describes herself as Posthumus’ “rock,” or foundation (5.4.262); Posthumus describes himself as the “fruit” that hangs on her “tree” (“Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” [5.4.263-4]). Several minutes later, Cymbeline directs everyone to “See, / Where Posthumus anchors upon Imogen” (5.4.393), and still later the soothsayer reads this embrace as the fulfillment of prophecy:
"This piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter,
Which we call mollis aer, and mollis aer,
We term it mulier; which mulier I divine
Is thy most constant wife, who even now
Answering the letter of the oracle,
Unknown to you, unsought, were clipped about
With this most tender air." (5.4.444-50)
13> The soothsayer’s pedantic reading, which redacts “tender air” to “wife” via the contrived homonym on mollis aer/mulier, is one of the least admired aspects of the play; feminist readings reserve particular scorn for the ease with which Imogen, heir of Britain, here “dwindles into a wife.”[xvii] Yet “mollis” also evokes a tradition quite counter to the soothsayer’s heteronormative reading. As Jenny Mann points out in her work on the Ovidian epyllion in the Renaissance, Ovid uses “mollis,” meaning soft or smooth, and its cognates six times in his tale of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, which likewise climaxes in a body-fusing embrace between a loving nymph and a resistant male beloved.[xviii] Smoothness becomes the defining characteristic of the hermaphroditic body, not only in Ovid’s fable but also in the Renaissance epyllia that celebrated the hermaphrodite as a figure of irreducible ambiguity. In this vein, it is very tempting to read here an oblique allusion to the Ovidian embrace that Britomart witnesses between Sir Scudamour and Amoret at the conclusion of The Faerie Queene, Book III:
"Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
And streightly did embrace her body bright
...........................................................
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.
Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought,
That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite,
Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought,
And in his costly Bath causd to bee site:
So seemd those two, as growne together quite . . . "
(The Faerie Queene, 3.12.45-6).
14> If Britomart, Spenser’s chaste mother of Britain “halfe env[ies]” this hermaphroditic union of male and female and “to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse” (3.12.46), Shakespeare’s mother of Britain, Imogen (or Innogen, the legendary wife of Brutus and mother of the British people), finally realizes it. If the play ends with the soothsayer’s climactic image of a male embrace in the Roman eagle (Augustus) uniting with the Briton “sun”/son (Cymbeline), this homosocial embrace is predicated and modelled on the union of male and female in both Posthumus/Imogen and Cymbeline himself.
15> In conclusion, I would like to turn briefly to Fletcher’s response to Cymbeline’s celebration of hybridity in Bonduca. Bonduca problematizes Cymbeline’s embrace of British union by looking forward fifty years to a new wave of Roman invasion that would end in unequivocal Roman conquest. The later play treats even alliance between Rome and Britain as conquest in all but name. At the same time, Bonduca does not reject the earlier play’s positive treatment of hybridity but actually expands it to include homoerotic (even hermaphroditic) expressions of desire. Bonduca reprises some of the central images of hybridity in Cymbeline. The patriotic warrior-queen Bonduca is represented as a virago in terms that resonate both with Shakespeare’s wicked queen and with Elizabeth’s own self-representation as an Amazon. Yet unlike Cymbeline’s queen, Bonduca dies heroically resisting the Roman invasion—this masculine mother captures the tragic sympathy of the audience.
16> Posthumus’ fantasy of male parthenogenesis, corrected by Cymbeline’s expression of hermaphroditic parenthood, is translated in Bonduca into an instance of male-male parenting. The Roman general Penius and Britan Caratachus jointly “birth” Bonduca’s nephew Hengo by saving the boy from sure death in battle. Caratachus buckles Hengo behind his shield to endure the “labor” of battle; beset all around, they are saved only when Penius grants them safe passage, commanding Caratachus to “bear thy Lions whelp off safely . . . / let me meet thee once again in Arms; / And if thou stand’st, thou art mine” (1.1, 83). Caratachus has earlier figured war as the mother of masculine honor: “I was born a Soldier . . . . Ten struck Battels / I suck’d these honour’d scars from” (1.1, 81). The exchange between Caratachus on Penius on the battlefield removes the female body even as metaphor from the process of androgenesis. Significantly, Bonduca responds to Caratachus’ report of the battle by giving Hengo to him to parent. It is perhaps telling that Caratachus later likens Penius to Hengo’s long-dead biological father: “their proportions / And faces were not much unlike” (5.1, 145).[xix]
17> As Mikalachki has observed, Bonduca ends like Cymbeline with Britain’s reabsorption into the Roman empire, once again figured as a homosocial embrace.[xx] Caratachus, the last surviving member of the Briton royalty, submits out of necessity to the Romans who have starved him into submission and (anachronistically) shot Hengo. Yet the rhetoric of homosocial friendship pervades the final scene despite this brutality. Like Cymbeline, who phrases submission to Rome as friendship between nations, the Roman general Swetonius presents surrender as an act of friendship; “do me but that Honor, / That more to me than Conquests, that true happiness, / To be my friend” (5.3, 158). Caratachus submits to being the Romans’ “noble friend,” insisting that he yields “Not to your blows, but your brave courtesies” (5.3, 158). Yet here the language of male friendship in the context of empire is immediately exposed as empty rhetoric. To Caratachus’ resigned expectation that he will be taken to Rome in triumph, Swetonius responds very simply, “Ye must” (5.3, 159).
18> Idealized male-male friendship, which inhered in the homoerotic exchanges between Caratachus and Penius, now dead, may have flourished in the masculine rivalry of battle, but is now destroyed in all but name by the power imbalances of empire. Hengo’s fate—lured out of hiding by the promise of food, a deceptive show of male nurture, to be shot by one of Swetonius’ men—serves as a powerful reminder of the danger of such false friendship. Bonduca does celebrate hybridities of gender, desire, and even culture—for example, Bonduca dies the heroic and masculine ‘Roman’ death of suicide, just as Penius does, to preserve her honor. Yet Bonduca stops short of celebrating the project of imperial union, presenting this instead as a false face of hybridity—subjection masquerading as parity. In this way, Bonduca separates hybridity from subjection, nation from empire, in its critique of Cymbeline and the Jacobean discourse of union.
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Notes
[i] My use of the term “nation” is not meant to imply all that the modern “nation-state” and nationalism entail, but instead to point to the prehistory of such later formulations in emergent early modern discourses of national identity.
[ii] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 89-95. Traub’s discussion of the “one-sex” Galenic model draws on the work of historian of science Thomas Laqueur. See Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990). See also Phyllis Rackin’s discussion of the Elizabethan idealization of androgyny and its rejection after the accession of James I in “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage” PMLA 102, 1 (1987): 20-28.
[iii] See, for example, Willy Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) 145-57.
[iv] Janet Adelman. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992) 194, 203-4.
[v] Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1998).
[vi] According to Kahn, Rome serves here on one hand as a model for the construction of English masculine identity, and, on the other hand, as a reminder of ancient Britain’s feminizing defeat by the Romans, a defeat underscored and reiterated by such cultural emulation. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997). In Kahn’s view, the fact that “Cymbeline is romance as much as Roman” (168) allows for the resolution (albeit temporarily) of the tensions produced by this “marriage” of the native and the foreign through the extraordinary acts of forgiveness and reconciliation that conclude the play.
[vii] Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 32 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999) 129-31; Valerie Wayne, “The Woman’s Parts of Cymbeline,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002) 288-315.
[viii] Mikalachki 113-4. She cites here seminal work on nationalism and homophobia such as G. L. Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) and Jonathan Goldberg’s “Bradford’s ‘Ancient Members’ and ‘A Case of Buggery,’” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 60-76.
[ix] Willy Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) 145-57.
[x] Mikhail Bakhtin formulates hybridization in linguistic terms as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, and encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981) 358. Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity as subversive of the narratives that support colonialism—much debated in subsequent postcolonial criticism—is set out in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 113-22.
[xi] Quotations from Cymbeline are taken from the New Cambridge Shakespeare Cymbeline, edited by Martin Butler (Cambridge UP, 2005).
[xii] The Ditchley portrait’s superimposition of Elizabeth’s virginal body on a map of England provides a case in point. See Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1994) 45-85 and Georgianna Ziegler, “My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73-90. See Butler, “Introduction” 43; Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002) 128-54.
[xiii] Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003) 101-115.
[xiv] Floyd-Wilson 177-83.
[xv] Butler, “Introduction” 53.
[xvi] Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses the queen’s Scottish associations and her Scottish historiography in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, eds. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 101-15.
[xvii] Ann Thompson, “Person and Office: The Case of Imogen, Princess of Britain,” in Literature and Nationalism, eds. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, Rowman & Littlefield, 1991) 76-87, p. 84.
[xviii] Jenny C. Mann, “How to Look at a Hermaphrodite in Early Modern England,” SEL 46, 1 (2006): 67-91, esp. 84.
[xix] I discuss homoerotics in Bonduca in much more depth in “Hybrid Gender, Hybrid Nation: Race, Sexuality, and the Making of National Identity in Fletcher’s Bonduca,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 46 (2007): 51-66.
[xx] Mikalachki 103.
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Tracey Miller-Tomlinson is an associate professor of English and associate dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. Her book manuscript, Breaking the Mirror: The English History Play from Shakespeare to Rowe, analyzes the representation of proto-national identities in English historical drama staged during the seventeenth century. Her essays on a range of topics in early modern drama have appeared in Studies in English Literature, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, and Essays in Theatre/Ètudes théâtrales (forthcoming).
New Mexico State University
Dramatic Hybridities: Sex, Nation, and Genre in Cymbeline and Bonduca
1> Recent studies of early modern formulations of gender and what we might call the “nation” have shown that both concepts were undergoing radical redefinition in the first decades of the seventeenth century.[i] Valerie Traub has argued persuasively that the “one-sex” model that had prevailed in medical discourse in the sixteenth century and allowed for a measure of free play with the distinctions of “masculine” and “feminine” was beginning to be replaced by an emergent “two-sex” model that asserted fundamental biological difference between the sexes.[ii] Willy Maley and others have shown that the concept of “nation” was another site of intense ideological pressure in the first years of the reign of James I, whose advocacy of “British” union may be echoed in Cymbeline’s representation of a “British” proto-nationalism.[iii] In this paper, I suggest that Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1610) and John Fletcher’s response to that play in Bonduca (1613) bring the transitioning discourses of gender and nation to bear on one another in ways that have lasting implications for the genre of the history play.
2> This line of inquiry is grounded in recent feminist readings of Cymbeline that consider the play’s gendering of early modern national identities and its implications for genre. Drawing on Janet Adelman’s influential account of the occlusion of the feminine and the maternal body in Cymbeline,[iv] Jodi Mikalachki reads the play as a “romance of Rome” in which England enters European history by effacing its matriarchal national origins and submitting to the masculinist and homosocial codes of Roman authority.[v] In a study that resonates with Mikalachki’s, Coppélia Kahn situates Cymbeline in the context of Shakespeare’s ambivalent treatment of English masculinity and romanitas in the Roman plays.[vi] While she, like Mikalachki, assumes that “like Romanness . . . [British] national identity is gendered masculine” in Cymbeline, Kahn notes that in the play’s setting of Roman Britain, virtus itself “is necessarily a hybrid, an uneasy marriage of native stock with scion” (160) in which English masculinity is contaminated and feminized by its emulation of romanitas. More recently still, Heather Dubrow and Valerie Wayne have called into question the assumption that the romances seek solely to occlude the feminine, noting in Cymbeline in particular the representation of concurrent desires to mourn the loss of, represent, or even recuperate the feminine.[vii]
3> Mikalachki concludes her account by questioning the assumption that early formulations of a nascent English national identity rested equally on discourses of misogyny and homophobia.[viii] Inspired by her question as well as by Kahn’s discussion of cultural hybridity in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I examine here some of the hybrid forms of gender, sexuality, nation, and genre that characterize both Cymbeline and Fletcher’s Bonduca, which treats the Briton resistance to Roman invasions led by the tribal queen Boadicea (or Bonduca) in 60-61 ce. Fletcher’s less-read play invites immediate comparison with Cymbeline. In addition to treating the same period in the prehistory of the British isles—Boadicea was a near contemporary of the historical Cunobelinus—both plays locate the national origins of the polity James I nostalgically denominated as “Great Britain” in the Roman conquest of ancient Britain. Thus, as Maley has noted, James I’s project for British union is recast in Cymbeline in terms of cultural and political absorption into a dominant foreign empire.[ix]
4> Much important work has been done in recent years on the ways in which Cymbeline and Bonduca both reflect critically on the union project and on the hybridity that empire might bring. In this paper, I wish to consider how representations of hybrid gender identities and configurations of desire, which proliferate in Cymbeline and Bonduca, translate the union debate into different terms. These hybrid forms—among them feminine masculinity, androgyny, fantasies of male and female parthenogenesis, homoerotics, and homosociality—construct British national identity as itself hybrid, yet the implicit commentary on the union project built by these representations diverges in important ways. My use of the Bahktinian and postcolonial term “hybrid” to describe these diverse unions in Cymbeline seeks to call attention to the ways in which they alternately resist and reinforce hegemonic narratives about hierarchies of gender, blood, and national origin.[x]
5> Two hybrid unions are alternately celebrated, rejected, and renegotiated in Cymbeline’s double plot: the princess of Britain’s secret marriage to a commoner and ancient Britain’s similarly unequal marriage to Rome. Cymbeline opens in the first plot, with news of Imogen’s marriage to Posthumus Leonatus, a marriage so radically unequal and exogamous that its very validity is in question. Courtiers may secretly applaud Imogen’s defiant marriage to a “poor but worthy gentleman” whose origins cannot be “delved . . . to the root” (1.1.7, 28) and whose Latin name both underscores the importance of fathers as identity-givers and his own lack of one.[xi] Yet the king himself has disavowed the marriage, banished Posthumus, and ordered the princess to marry Cloten, the son of his queen. Cymbeline rejects Imogen’s defense of Posthumus’ merit in language that presents the marriage as a contamination of bloodline: “Thou took’st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (1.2.141-2). As princess of Britain, Imogen’s body stands in for the nation, her womb for Cymbeline’s throne; Imogen herself reinforces this identification when she responds to reports of Posthumus’ supposed infidelity by commenting that “My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain” (1.7.112-3). The equation of the chaste womb with the defended nation is nearly a commonplace in the period, as Linda Woodbridge has observed; Martin Butler and Valerie Traub note how Queen Elizabeth’s virginal body likewise symbolized the impregnability of the nation in Elizabethan iconography. [xii] Cymbeline’s identification of Imogen’s womb with his own throne defines any marriage outside the royal family itself as not only miscegenation but also the usurpation or overthrow of British sovereignty.
6> Initially called into question by her stolen marriage, Imogen’s chastity is later impeached by Jachimo’s slanderous claims that he has slept with the princess. Ironically, Posthumus interprets her alleged unchastity, much like Cymbeline interpreted her sexual agency, in terms of miscegenation. She has deflected his own “lawfull” advances with a “pudency so rosy” it would have warmed Saturn himself (2.5.11-12)—the phrase evokes the female genitals (pudenda) themselves even as it eroticizes her blushing shame at them. Yet Posthumus imagines that the foreign, “yellow Jachimo” has breached these defenses with ease: “Perchance he spoke not, but / Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one, / Cried ‘Oh!’ and mounted” (2.5.14-17). The nightmare fantasy moves swiftly from Jachimo’s Mediterranean origins to the boar’s German ones, from miscegenation to bestiality, from language (English?) to gutteral utterance. Recall also Posthumus’ immediate response to Jachimo’s display of the bracelet that, along with the ring, metonymizes Imogen’s genitals: “She hath been colted by him” (2.4.133).
7> Yet from this nightmare vision of exogamy as bestiality—difference in kin magnified to difference in kind—the fantasy vacillates wildly back to the suggestion of extreme endogamy with the adjective “German” (“Iarmen” in the first folio, sig. aaa2v). I would suggest that “Iarmen,” a reading that has put editors to some trouble, simultaneously connotes both foreignness and endogamous kinship; the boar is “German” and yet also “germane,” or “close kindred” to Imogen in her imputed bestial lust. (Compare Iago’s use of “Germaine” in a similar context in Othello [1.1.114].) A further irony is just possible here if one considers the alternate account of English origins put forward by Richard Verstegan in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), a treatise whose significance in the rise of Anglo-Saxon racialism has been documented by Mary Floyd-Wilson.[xiii] Verstegan seeks here to redefine the English as not Briton but Anglo-Saxon, a group whose purity of blood relative to the oft-conquered Britons Verstegan champions by arguing that the Anglo-Saxons and their conquerors, the Danes and Normans, were of the same Germanic stock. Posthumus’ nightmare shares in the disordered thinking of jealous husbands such as Othello and Leontes, yet its collapsing of otherness into sameness, exogamy into endogamy, also goes some way towards deconstructing the very notion of such purity of blood.
8> The marriage plot and Roman plot thus intersect in their shared concern with hybridity and miscegenation. If, as Kahn points out, Renaissance humanism in England emphasized and retraced the cultural legacy of Roman Britain, Cymbeline imagines a moment at which this hybrid union was chosen, not forced. The fact of Roman conquest is first rejected and later reversed in the play—rejected by Cloten’s and the infamous queen’s patriotic lines (“Britain’s / A world by itself, and we will nothing pay / For wearing our own noses” [3.1.12-4], “With shame— / The first that ever touched him—[Caesar] was carried / From off our coast, twice beaten” [3.1.24-6]), reversed by Britain’s resounding defeat of the Roman legions. The queen’s much-debated historiography is finally rendered irrelevant by Cymbeline’s voluntary decision to resume payment of tribute to Rome after Britain’s military triumph. Britain symbolically reenters the Roman empire as friend of Rome rather than as conquest: “Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together” (5.4.477-9). It is significant that Cymbeline not only resumes tribute but does so precisely on the model of his newly-acknowledged son’s (Posthumus’) clemency towards his own vanquished enemy, Jachimo. In both the marriage plot and the empire plot Cymbeline first rejects hybridity but later learns to embrace it.
9> Not only the play’s marriages but also those entering into them embrace hybridity at crucial turns. Imogen assumes male clothing when she learns that her husband believes her guilty of betrayal and has ordered her death. In the same scene, she abjures the isolationist patriotism represented by the queen’s faction at court: “Hath Britain all the sun that shines? . . . / Prithee, think / There’s livers out of Britain” (3.4.135-9). Britain is as a page that “seems as of, but not in” the “world’s volume,” as a “in a great pool a swan’s nest” (3.4.137-9). As Imogen casts off her royal clothing, dressing as “a franklin’s housewife”(3.278) to escape from court, then her women’s clothing, and finally British clothing, taking on the role of page to the Roman Lucius, she becomes a figure of hybrid class, gender, and national identity. Via the metonymy already established between her body and Britain itself, Imogen as Roman “page” restores Britain’s “page” to the book of the world from which it has been torn by isolationism—the “swan’s nest” to its pool.
10> Hybrid identities such as Imogen’s abound in Cymbeline. Posthumus’ name identifies him with the Romans, his hazy paternity with Briton resistance to Rome—the play’s first mention of the Roman conquest comes with the news that his father, Sicilius, fought with Cassibelan against the Romans [1.1.30]). Posthumus himself serves alternately as a Roman and a Britain soldier in the wars. Imogen’s brothers have double names that signal their double identities as Welsh and Briton (Floyd-Wilson argues further that the princes are associated with the Anglo-Saxon kings)[xiv]—they are also both royal and rustic, sought-after and unknown, insiders and outsiders longing to be written into the “world’s volume.”[xv] The Welsh woods seem to open up a liminal space, a romance-comic “green world” of potentiality that fosters such hybrid identities. Back at court, the queen recalls Holinshed’s Scottish chronicles; Cloten harkens after European fashions.[xvi] Cymbeline himself acknowledges a figurative Roman paternity: even as he rebels against Roman authority in the name of Mulmutius, “who was the first of Britain which did put / His brows within a golden crown” (3.1.57-8), he tells Lucius that “thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent / Much under him; of him I gathered honour” (3.1.67-8). Having proven himself worthy of this joint paternity by defeating the Romans, Cymbeline recognizes the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, recovers his lost sons, and remarkably describes himself as both father and mother to all, “Oh, what am I, / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (5.4.368-70).
11> Cymbeline’s self-declaration as both father and mother is often taken as reiterating Posthumus’ earlier misogynist fantasy of male parthenogenesis, “Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers?” (2.5.1-2). Yet the play’s valorization of hybridity authorizes the counter-reading that Cymbeline’s fruitful hermaphroditism imaginatively restores the reconciliation scene’s notoriously missing element, woman. Mikalachki’s argument that ancient Britain’s entrance into Rome and thus into history can take place only with excision of the “woman’s part” from British origins might be modified as follows: Britain’s entrance into Rome and into history—and later into “Great Britain”—requires acceptance of hybrid identities in which male and female coincide.
12> Cymbeline’s metaphorical hermaphroditism is visually reinforced by the remarkably prolonged embrace of Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus, which realizes the tablet’s prophecy that the “tender air”/heir will “embrace” a “lion’s whelp” (5.3.202-3). Yet the prophecy itself seems inadequate to explain the insistence with which the audience’s attention is directed to the embrace by characters onstage. Imogen describes herself as Posthumus’ “rock,” or foundation (5.4.262); Posthumus describes himself as the “fruit” that hangs on her “tree” (“Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die” [5.4.263-4]). Several minutes later, Cymbeline directs everyone to “See, / Where Posthumus anchors upon Imogen” (5.4.393), and still later the soothsayer reads this embrace as the fulfillment of prophecy:
"This piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter,
Which we call mollis aer, and mollis aer,
We term it mulier; which mulier I divine
Is thy most constant wife, who even now
Answering the letter of the oracle,
Unknown to you, unsought, were clipped about
With this most tender air." (5.4.444-50)
13> The soothsayer’s pedantic reading, which redacts “tender air” to “wife” via the contrived homonym on mollis aer/mulier, is one of the least admired aspects of the play; feminist readings reserve particular scorn for the ease with which Imogen, heir of Britain, here “dwindles into a wife.”[xvii] Yet “mollis” also evokes a tradition quite counter to the soothsayer’s heteronormative reading. As Jenny Mann points out in her work on the Ovidian epyllion in the Renaissance, Ovid uses “mollis,” meaning soft or smooth, and its cognates six times in his tale of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, which likewise climaxes in a body-fusing embrace between a loving nymph and a resistant male beloved.[xviii] Smoothness becomes the defining characteristic of the hermaphroditic body, not only in Ovid’s fable but also in the Renaissance epyllia that celebrated the hermaphrodite as a figure of irreducible ambiguity. In this vein, it is very tempting to read here an oblique allusion to the Ovidian embrace that Britomart witnesses between Sir Scudamour and Amoret at the conclusion of The Faerie Queene, Book III:
"Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
And streightly did embrace her body bright
...........................................................
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.
Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought,
That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite,
Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought,
And in his costly Bath causd to bee site:
So seemd those two, as growne together quite . . . "
(The Faerie Queene, 3.12.45-6).
14> If Britomart, Spenser’s chaste mother of Britain “halfe env[ies]” this hermaphroditic union of male and female and “to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse” (3.12.46), Shakespeare’s mother of Britain, Imogen (or Innogen, the legendary wife of Brutus and mother of the British people), finally realizes it. If the play ends with the soothsayer’s climactic image of a male embrace in the Roman eagle (Augustus) uniting with the Briton “sun”/son (Cymbeline), this homosocial embrace is predicated and modelled on the union of male and female in both Posthumus/Imogen and Cymbeline himself.
15> In conclusion, I would like to turn briefly to Fletcher’s response to Cymbeline’s celebration of hybridity in Bonduca. Bonduca problematizes Cymbeline’s embrace of British union by looking forward fifty years to a new wave of Roman invasion that would end in unequivocal Roman conquest. The later play treats even alliance between Rome and Britain as conquest in all but name. At the same time, Bonduca does not reject the earlier play’s positive treatment of hybridity but actually expands it to include homoerotic (even hermaphroditic) expressions of desire. Bonduca reprises some of the central images of hybridity in Cymbeline. The patriotic warrior-queen Bonduca is represented as a virago in terms that resonate both with Shakespeare’s wicked queen and with Elizabeth’s own self-representation as an Amazon. Yet unlike Cymbeline’s queen, Bonduca dies heroically resisting the Roman invasion—this masculine mother captures the tragic sympathy of the audience.
16> Posthumus’ fantasy of male parthenogenesis, corrected by Cymbeline’s expression of hermaphroditic parenthood, is translated in Bonduca into an instance of male-male parenting. The Roman general Penius and Britan Caratachus jointly “birth” Bonduca’s nephew Hengo by saving the boy from sure death in battle. Caratachus buckles Hengo behind his shield to endure the “labor” of battle; beset all around, they are saved only when Penius grants them safe passage, commanding Caratachus to “bear thy Lions whelp off safely . . . / let me meet thee once again in Arms; / And if thou stand’st, thou art mine” (1.1, 83). Caratachus has earlier figured war as the mother of masculine honor: “I was born a Soldier . . . . Ten struck Battels / I suck’d these honour’d scars from” (1.1, 81). The exchange between Caratachus on Penius on the battlefield removes the female body even as metaphor from the process of androgenesis. Significantly, Bonduca responds to Caratachus’ report of the battle by giving Hengo to him to parent. It is perhaps telling that Caratachus later likens Penius to Hengo’s long-dead biological father: “their proportions / And faces were not much unlike” (5.1, 145).[xix]
17> As Mikalachki has observed, Bonduca ends like Cymbeline with Britain’s reabsorption into the Roman empire, once again figured as a homosocial embrace.[xx] Caratachus, the last surviving member of the Briton royalty, submits out of necessity to the Romans who have starved him into submission and (anachronistically) shot Hengo. Yet the rhetoric of homosocial friendship pervades the final scene despite this brutality. Like Cymbeline, who phrases submission to Rome as friendship between nations, the Roman general Swetonius presents surrender as an act of friendship; “do me but that Honor, / That more to me than Conquests, that true happiness, / To be my friend” (5.3, 158). Caratachus submits to being the Romans’ “noble friend,” insisting that he yields “Not to your blows, but your brave courtesies” (5.3, 158). Yet here the language of male friendship in the context of empire is immediately exposed as empty rhetoric. To Caratachus’ resigned expectation that he will be taken to Rome in triumph, Swetonius responds very simply, “Ye must” (5.3, 159).
18> Idealized male-male friendship, which inhered in the homoerotic exchanges between Caratachus and Penius, now dead, may have flourished in the masculine rivalry of battle, but is now destroyed in all but name by the power imbalances of empire. Hengo’s fate—lured out of hiding by the promise of food, a deceptive show of male nurture, to be shot by one of Swetonius’ men—serves as a powerful reminder of the danger of such false friendship. Bonduca does celebrate hybridities of gender, desire, and even culture—for example, Bonduca dies the heroic and masculine ‘Roman’ death of suicide, just as Penius does, to preserve her honor. Yet Bonduca stops short of celebrating the project of imperial union, presenting this instead as a false face of hybridity—subjection masquerading as parity. In this way, Bonduca separates hybridity from subjection, nation from empire, in its critique of Cymbeline and the Jacobean discourse of union.
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Notes
[i] My use of the term “nation” is not meant to imply all that the modern “nation-state” and nationalism entail, but instead to point to the prehistory of such later formulations in emergent early modern discourses of national identity.
[ii] Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 89-95. Traub’s discussion of the “one-sex” Galenic model draws on the work of historian of science Thomas Laqueur. See Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990). See also Phyllis Rackin’s discussion of the Elizabethan idealization of androgyny and its rejection after the accession of James I in “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage” PMLA 102, 1 (1987): 20-28.
[iii] See, for example, Willy Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) 145-57.
[iv] Janet Adelman. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992) 194, 203-4.
[v] Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1998).
[vi] According to Kahn, Rome serves here on one hand as a model for the construction of English masculine identity, and, on the other hand, as a reminder of ancient Britain’s feminizing defeat by the Romans, a defeat underscored and reiterated by such cultural emulation. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997). In Kahn’s view, the fact that “Cymbeline is romance as much as Roman” (168) allows for the resolution (albeit temporarily) of the tensions produced by this “marriage” of the native and the foreign through the extraordinary acts of forgiveness and reconciliation that conclude the play.
[vii] Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 32 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999) 129-31; Valerie Wayne, “The Woman’s Parts of Cymbeline,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, eds. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002) 288-315.
[viii] Mikalachki 113-4. She cites here seminal work on nationalism and homophobia such as G. L. Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) and Jonathan Goldberg’s “Bradford’s ‘Ancient Members’ and ‘A Case of Buggery,’” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 60-76.
[ix] Willy Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999) 145-57.
[x] Mikhail Bakhtin formulates hybridization in linguistic terms as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, and encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981) 358. Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity as subversive of the narratives that support colonialism—much debated in subsequent postcolonial criticism—is set out in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 113-22.
[xi] Quotations from Cymbeline are taken from the New Cambridge Shakespeare Cymbeline, edited by Martin Butler (Cambridge UP, 2005).
[xii] The Ditchley portrait’s superimposition of Elizabeth’s virginal body on a map of England provides a case in point. See Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1994) 45-85 and Georgianna Ziegler, “My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73-90. See Butler, “Introduction” 43; Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002) 128-54.
[xiii] Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003) 101-115.
[xiv] Floyd-Wilson 177-83.
[xv] Butler, “Introduction” 53.
[xvi] Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses the queen’s Scottish associations and her Scottish historiography in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, eds. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 101-15.
[xvii] Ann Thompson, “Person and Office: The Case of Imogen, Princess of Britain,” in Literature and Nationalism, eds. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, Rowman & Littlefield, 1991) 76-87, p. 84.
[xviii] Jenny C. Mann, “How to Look at a Hermaphrodite in Early Modern England,” SEL 46, 1 (2006): 67-91, esp. 84.
[xix] I discuss homoerotics in Bonduca in much more depth in “Hybrid Gender, Hybrid Nation: Race, Sexuality, and the Making of National Identity in Fletcher’s Bonduca,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 46 (2007): 51-66.
[xx] Mikalachki 103.
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Tracey Miller-Tomlinson is an associate professor of English and associate dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. Her book manuscript, Breaking the Mirror: The English History Play from Shakespeare to Rowe, analyzes the representation of proto-national identities in English historical drama staged during the seventeenth century. Her essays on a range of topics in early modern drama have appeared in Studies in English Literature, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, and Essays in Theatre/Ètudes théâtrales (forthcoming).
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures
