Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

would be allied to the qualities of the "good
useful" order. (p.29)
lachimo, as we have seen, gets short shrift (he is
described on page 32 in even less flattering terms: "the
filthy mind of this yellow-faced Italian"). And on page
30 Mra. Elliot suggests that Imogen is "worth two or three
of Posthumus". Indeed, Posthumus is dismissed as beneath
Imogen, together with the rest of the court, in a reiteration
of the myth and miracle of Imogen's education:
There is nothing heroic in the atmosphere of
»he court where she has been brought up.
Posthumus, her playfellow, and the one she
prized so dearly as to give him all herself,
is certainly no hero, albeit ho is the best
of them all. (p.26)
It is then suggested that Imogen "derived the fostering influences
that developed so pure and true a nature" from her
dead mother (pp.26f) (the resurrection of Imogen's mother
is reminiscent of Mary Cowden-Clarke's pleasant fiction,
Imogen the Peerless). Mrs. Elliot begins her essay with a
quotation from Swinburne's A Study of Shakespeare and three
lines of Tennyson:
In love, if love be love, if love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers;
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.
The authoress has at her fingers' end the biographical reason
for the creation of Imogen - Shakespeare
... had passed through all the stages of poetic
growth, and had attained the fullness of philosophic
age ... when in his retirement from the
busy scenes of metropolitan life and action he
conceived the play of which Imogen is the central
figure. (p.25)
This biographical interpretation had become gospel -
its definitive expression was Dowden's and it became part
of the minimum information which one could give on the plays.
In a book which sets out to provide such information for the
10.