ABSTRACT
Cymbeline presents an image of an equally disturbing but infertile sexual act, bound up with the equivalent of the Horatius story. There are two attitudes to the idea of the acquisition of empire at this period, one based on an understanding of Roman practice and set out in books like Camden's Britannia, and the other using proselytizing Christianity as an excuse for national aspiration. Camden admires the later Roman policy of incorporating subject peoples into the organization, bureaucracy and military force of the Empire. The Anglican divine John Hooker sets out the second, now more familiar materialist argument for empire in the dedicatory epistle addressed to Walter Raleigh that prefaces his translation of Giraldus's twelfth-century Irish Historie in Holinshed's Chronicle of Ireland. The London stage seems to have kept up a fairly sceptical attitude toward the kind of sober benefits promised by the colonial adventurers.
