Chapter 9 - Cymbeline and the ‘Swan’s Nest’ of Britain: Insularity, Chastity and Imogen’s Transnational Virtues

Summary

The temple

Of virtue was she; yea, and she herself.

– Posthumus, 5.5.220–1

Prithee, think

There's livers out of Britain.

– Imogen, 3.4.139–40

Shakespeare's plays have long been aligned with a widespread movement in Elizabethan and Stuart literature to define, delimit and justify the sovereign English nation that, over the course of the sixteenth century, was fast replacing the older concept of a kingdom or realm. Accompanying this change was an acute anxiety over England's cultural identity, in response to which a generation of writers crafted literary signs of Englishness in order to fashion for their new state a national sense of self. Thus, as scholars such as Richard Helgerson have argued, Shakespeare's plays are invested in writing an emerging nation-state and rethinking the question of its identity – that is, of what constitutes ‘This England’ in the first place, of the source and authenticity of its supposed roots and origins, of the foundations and legitimacy of its governmental structures, and, indeed, of its very geographical and territorial demarcations. Perhaps the most famous Shakespearean and larger Elizabethan characterisation of England is that of an ‘island nation’ – an early conception of national identity so potent that it can still be observed in the Brexit saga of today. Though based on a blatant misrepresentation of geographic reality that appropriated both the contiguous Scotland and Wales and the island of Ireland, this discourse of ‘England’ as an elect island state, coherent unto itself, was shaped by Protestant isolationism and physical separation from Catholic Europe; catalysed by Henry VIII's break with Rome; and concretised by the miraculous salvation from the Spanish Armada. Noting that nationalism tends to be ‘rooted in claims about land’, island studies scholar Alex Law identifies early England's version as ‘maritime island nationalism’, an idea that ‘derives its force from an island mentality that conceives Britain or, more usually, England, as an “island race”’, a chosen people placed in a paradisal garden ‘bounded by clearly defined watery borders’. It is precisely this idea of nation that one finds in such history plays as King John (1594–6), where ‘that England’ is praised as a ‘water-wallèd bulwark, still secure / And confident from foreign purposes’ (2.1.26–8).