ABSTRACT
Although cross dressing occurs in Cymbeline, the play invests its imagination less in women’s playful assumption of male dress than in the fantasy of male parthenogenesis, i.e., the male who dreams of comprising both male and female roles in reproduction. Imogen assumes male dress in a mode that downplays and renders redundant the playful gender reversals and comical double binds of earlier comedies like As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Since Imogen is chastely married from the opening scene, unlike Rosalind and Viola, her taking on of male garments does not facilitate fl irtation and rapprochement with a fi ancé. There are hints that her brothers in the countryside are attracted to Imogen as Fidele, but the suggestions remain chaste and understated, never threatening to implode into the complications of incest. Her male dress grants Imogen the special prescience of seeing without being seen, but by the end of the dramatic action it puts her under erasure, since her status is that of a pseudo-male swept up in the surrounding triumph of homosocial bonds.
