The Virtue Of Chastity And Power In Shakespeare's Cymbeline

Issues of sexual authority are often closely intertwined with a contest for political as well as imaginative power. (Berry 1995) In the Elizabethan age, this association became increasingly problematic with the rise of Queen Elizabeth I and her dual virtues of chastity and political power. By embodying this curious conjunction, Elizabeth created for herself a literary cult that perceived “The Virgin Queen” as both an ideal and a threat.
This paper attempts a reading of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as a political text with specific narratives of Elizabeth as the chaste monarch. Using theories of Marilyn French that argue for the ‘inlaw’ and ‘outlaw’ feminine principles (French 1981), I propose that Shakespeare “divides the experience” of the chaste monarch by dispersing energies of chastity and power among two diametrically opposite female characters in Cymbeline – the villainous Queen and the gentle Imogen. I argue that Cymbeline’s Queen embodies not the specific and frequently alluded figure of Catherine de Medici

Spenser’s eclogue, for instance, describes the naked Eliza as clad in the “Scarlot” and “Ermines white” of her own skin, bathing in a pastoral setting. (Berry 76) However, the monarch’s increasing political power also proved to be a source of curiosity. As Berry notes, “while the myth of the masculine woman was occasionally idealized in the literature of this period, there is no doubt that the idea of this fiction being translated into reality was intensely threatening”. (Berry 66) Hence, Elizabeth was both an ideal monarch and a source of threat to the public sphere in the seventeenth century, as a result of which no linear narrative could capture the hermaphroditic identity of the