ABSTRACT
In Stuart Cymbeline – a product of the same historical momentum towards tragicomedy – the process is once again negotiated through Seneca and Senecanism. Most critics concerned with the topicality of Cymbeline are prepared to see Jupiter in his analogy to James I – as a quasi-monarchical source of transcendent power. Cymbeline’s transcendental reading of the power of Imogen and Posthumus’s reunion is equally an abuse – more seriously, though, it is an abuse of the future it could create, rather than just of the past from which it has derived. The figure of Seneca himself, like William Shakespeare a ‘king’s man’, seems to focus such a presence in Cymbeline: like Megara and Hercules, it certainly haunts the political unconscious of the play. Like Pisanio’s relationship with Posthumus, his use of Seneca’s Hercules furens in Cymbeline makes service to one kind of master the terms for liberty within the law of another.
