Song
Fear no more the heat o' th' sun
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' th' great;
Thou are past the tyrant's stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee,
Nor no witchcraft charm thee.
Ghost unlaid forbear thee;
Nothing ill come near thee.
Quiet consummation have,
And renownèd be thy grave.
– William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act IV, scene 2, ll 258 - 281
Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's four late romances (the other three being Pericles, The Winter's Tale, & The Tempest) & even in that fanciful, fairy-tale influenced company it is an extremely strange play. It combines multiple times & places – early Britain & Wales, the Rome of Caesar Augustus, the Italy of the Renaissance – into a famously complex plot; the chain of discoveries in Act V that resolves the various storylines is notoriously complicated (so much so that Shaw wrote a condensed finale, Cymbeline Refinished, as an aid to theatrical producers). And the cavalcade of plot points must be deliberate, as an additional & completely unnecessary one is added right before the finale, when the jailed Posthumus has a vision of his dead family & the god Jupiter, who leaves him with a cryptic prophecy that must now also be interpreted before the action can be considered complete. The play is filled with characters giving us elaborate explanations of their backstories or of their actions & motivations; there's even amusing meta commentary on this convention, as when Cornelius the Doctor explains to us, in an aside, that he has given the wicked stepmother (the Queen) what she thinks is deadly poison, but is actually a medication that causes a sleep that feigns death, & contrary to the standard assumption that characters speaking an aside to the audience are not noticed doing so by those on stage, the Queen repeats to him her previous injunction to go ahead & leave. He does finally get off the stage, having given us another key piece of plot knowledge.
The box containing the alleged poison is not the only container that isn't what it seems; there is an elaborate plot involving an attempted seduction & a treacherous man hidden in a trunk. There is the trunk of the Queen's loutish & menacing son, which gets mistaken by the heroine, Imogen, for the body of her husband Posthumus (the corpse has been beheaded, so this is a plausible mistake, one of several involving bodies that are mistaken in one way or another). Most of the characters are at one point or another (or all the way through), either actively deceiving others or in outright disguise. These remarks are the barest summary of the play, but as you can see, it is crowded with incident & colorful characters, although the title role is not one of them. Cymbeline is the King of Britain & I can't think of another title role in Shakespeare's plays who is so much a cipher, more of a plot device than a character, so consistently overshadowed by the people & actions around him.
I think the play used to be staged more often than it is now; I base this loose assumption on the number of reviews / references in Shaw's theater criticism (right now as part of the on-going upheaval around me, I can't find my copy of that wonderful volume, Shaw on Shakespeare, but my memory is that he reviewed it more than once, & not as a rarity; whereas I believe he never saw a staging of The Winter's Tale, which is now almost a standard), as well as the fact that the Act V revision he wrote was meant as a practical piece of theater. And references to the great Shakespearean heroines often use to include Imogen, though I think anyone coming up with such a list these days would most likely not automatically think of her.
The play may have slipped a bit with theatrical producers, but this song remains well-known. It comes a bit past the halfway mark of the show. It is sung in alternating stanzas & then lines by Guiderius/Polydore & his brother Arviragus/Cadwal, the two sons of Cymbeline who were kidnapped at an early age & raised in the mountains of Wales, ignorant of their origin (hence the two names). They are singing it to Imogen, disguised as the page boy Fidele, whom they think is dead (she has taken the poison / sleeping potion, having been told it was helpful medicine, one in the on-going series of misunderstandings & false information believed true). Imogen is sister to the two young men, though none of them yet knows their relationship. The song provides an oasis of reflection, a moment of stillness, a pause in the on-going machinery of the plot. It provides an almost philosophical reflection on the surrounding frenzy of actions at cross-purposes, hidden motives, rage & regret, lust & loss: it all ends with death. The play itself does not; it has a happy ending, filled with reunions, recoveries, & forgiveness, but in the center of the show sits this reminder of death.
The song also balances out an unpleasant strain in the play, in which "blood", meaning class origin, will out: the two young princes, raised in the wilderness & ignorant of their birthright, are nonetheless filled with the spirit of your ideal princes; the King finds himself strangely drawn to a young pageboy, who is his daughter in disguise; there is much surprise that a peasant soldier can fight valiantly (he turns out to be Posthumus, an aristocrat in, of course, disguise). Opposed to this sense of birth / blood as destiny is the reminder that all end up in the grave; in the celebrated lines from the first stanza, Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. The word play on come to dust, meaning both end up dead (dust you are, & to dust shall you return) & coming to clear the built-up dust out of the chimney, is characteristic of Shakespeare's many-layered language. It's a wonderful line, though of course the singers, who dwell in a cave, could really have no idea of what a chimney-sweeper is or does. (Presumably this is one of the evils of court life told to them by Belarius/Morgan, the wronged noble who kidnapped them.)
The first stanza is the standout; there is a dignity about it, & a reach: the extremes of hot & cold weather, the dignified image of the worker, receiving his wages for whatever he has managed to accomplish, going "home", followed by the memorable final lines, encompassing the Golden with the Lowly. It is consolatory – fear no more; your task is done. It is elegiac – excessive heat is over, furious cold is over, the day is done & you're going home.
The second stanza continues in the same vein. Again the subject of the song, the now-dead person addressed with the intimate & affectionate thou, is adjured not to fear, this time earthly power rather than that of extreme Nature, & comforted with the thought of being now past caring about even the basic necessities. The stanza ends with another proclamation that everyone must come to this, but this time the list is of the great & accomplished (the scepter, learning, physic: that is, governors, scholars & priests, & doctors) who cannot escape death.
The third stanza continues listing the earthly concerns that the mourned one is now past, concerns both natural (lightning & thunder) & social (slander & censure). A thunder-stone can refer to various things, but in this context it's pretty clearly meant as "whatever causes the thunder", the aural equivalent of the lightning flash. (Interestingly, my Signet Classic edition of the play doesn't annotate that word, though it does others that seem to me more obvious.) But this stanza also takes a turn away from the earlier ones: it is not only difficult & painful things that the mourned one is done with, but happy things: joy, as well as moan, is now finished. Love is done, & even young lovers end like this. (Consign in this context means end up the same category as you, that is, dead.) The dead are bereft of the beauty of life, as well as its struggles.
The final stanza is a sort of charm, a conjuration that nothing harm the body in its grave. This is suitable not only for the period in which the play is set, but the one in which it was written; think of the epitaph on Shakespeare's own grave. An exorciser would be one who performs exorcisms, that is, one who summons spirits from a body or a place; an unlaid ghost would be a spirit not laid to rest, one doomed to haunt the earth (like Hamlet's father, for instance). So apparently even the grave is not free from disturbances & struggles; the elegy ends with this protective prayer for quiet in the grave – yet not the quiet that comes from being forgotten; the final line is a wish that the mourned one, in this case a youth the singers have known only very briefly, whose story they never learned, may not be forgotten. It's a poignant moment in a tumultuous drama.
I took the text from the Signet Classic Shakespeare, which now seems to be available only in a 3-play volume, but of course there are many editions of the play available.
No comments:
Post a Comment