ABSTRACT
Even Caesar's historical conquest is qualified in the Queen's grudging reference as she asserts Britain's insular impregnability to Caius Lucius: "A kind of conquest Caesar made here, but made not here his brag Of 'Came, and saw, and overcame"'. Cymbeline, however, differs from Holinshed, and falls in with other contemporary plays about the same geopolitical terrain, ending with a reunion of Britain and Rome. This chapter suggests that the specific form that erotic energy takes in this play has everything to do with the uneasy co-existence of political reconciliation between Rome and Britain and their unresolved competition in the realm of poetics, aesthetics, and intertextuality. It describes a literary idea that emerges from national types and stereotypes, but feeds into an intertextual dynamic that fails, with curious precision, to map on to the geopolitical interrelation underpinning the play's plot.
