7
become the new Great Britain, fostering harmony and union, admonishing
those who would seek discord and division.
Shakespeare’s plays were popular for a while, but fell out of favour during
the Restoration. When Cymbeline returned to the playhouses it was modifi ed
to suit the changed political climate. In 1759 William Hawkins wrote a new
version of the story, but in his drama any thought of looking forward to a
union with Rome was missed out entirely. In this rendition Cymbeline ends
not by the king agreeing to pay the taxes to Rome, but with the complete vic-
tory of the British against their continental foe (Vickers 1976: 374). At the
time Britain was engaged in the seven-year war with France, while relations
with Rome and the papacy were at a low point. Not long after, David Garrick
performed in his own production of Shakespeare’s original play (1761) – but
here too, amendments were made to the text and the reconciliatory tribute-
paying ending was suppressed (Brown and Johnson 2000: 6).
It seems that from the late eighteenth century popular and academic rep-
resentations of Later Iron Age Britain and Rome were more interested in
fi nding a sharp division between Britain and the continent. Mention of the
notion of British kings being brought up in Rome virtually ceases, and Cae-
sar’s achievements are now downplayed. This is the tradition in mainstream
narratives, which has remained to this day. The desire to create distance with
continental Europe is not surprising. Problematic relations with catholic
France grew worse with the Revolution. To add to this, Napoleon’s Empire
and Napoleon III’s resurgent imperialism later in the nineteenth century
both explicitly used Roman imagery in their representations of statehood
and monarchy. The modern nation state of Britain now stood in antithesis to
continental empire builders, whether Napoleon’s France or the newly unifi ed
Germany of the late nineteenth century.
Those performances that did take place in Victorian Britain eschewed the
political message, and instead focused upon Cymbeline’s daughter, Princess
Imogen, as a model of feminine virtue. Since then, Cymbeline has been relat-
ively neglected, little performed in the twentieth century, and little studied
by Shakespearean scholars. As histories created distance between Britain and
Europe, so the play fell out of fashion; except in one distant part of the Brit-
ish Empire, namely India. Here Victorian imperial administrators were facing
a problem. They were fi nding that the Christian education being promoted
in the newly established university colleges was not working because of the
successful retention of Hinduism by the majority of the students. To tackle
this, English literature was thought to be a potential medium for inculcating
British values as an alternative to Anglicanism, so Cymbeline found its way on
to the curriculum. The subtext of Britain’s incorporation into the Princip-
ate could be paralleled with India’s annexation into the British Empire. The
success of this tactic meant that Shakespeare rapidly became part of educa-
tional curricula both there and back in Britain, and before long knowledge
of the bard was mandatory for entry into the civil service and professions,
INTRODUCTION