Cymbeline
A Princess of Britain
Daughter of Cymbeline, King of Britain, and his acknowledged heir, Imogen had fallen into deep disgrace at Court, and incurred her father’s severest displeasure. Cymbeline had lately married a second wife, a widow with one son, and it had occurred to both the King and Queen that it would be an excellent plan for Imogen to marry this youth. But Cloten was a clownish, ill-conditioned lout, and Imogen had chosen to prefer as her husband a poor but worthy gentleman. Posthumus Leonatus had been her playfellow from childhood, for his parents dying when he was an infant, he had been adopted by Cymbeline, who brought him up almost as his own son. Though the King, Queen, and Cloten himself were enraged at the choice Imogen had made, and the courtiers were forced to appear as if they followed the royal example, not one of the latter but was glad at heart at the thing he pretended to scowl at. For while Cloten was, as one gentleman expressed it, “a thing too bad for bad report,” Leonatus was a man endowed with such outward personal grace, and such inward nobility of soul, that it would be difficult to find his equal through all the world. Even as a boy, most praised, most loved, he had come unharmed through the trying ordeal of being a Court favourite, drinking in all branches of learning as lightly as others do air; and the proof of his excellence was evident in the fact that so peerless a lady as Imogen had chosen him for her husband.
But Cymbeline, untouched by his merits, was indignant that his daughter had married “a beggar” when she might have had the only son of the Queen. He pronounced the sentence of banishment on Leonatus, and commanded that Imogen should be imprisoned at Court, under the custody of her step-mother.
The new Queen was a crafty, designing woman, whose chief aim at present was to secure the future throne for her boorish son. Cymbeline, it is true, had had two sons of his own, but they were both stolen when they were little more than babies, the eldest being only three, and the youngest, two years old. From the day of their disappearance no trace of them had ever been found. The Princess Imogen was now the only child, and as Cymbeline’s heir, the Queen was anxious to entice her into a marriage with her son. When this attempt failed, the Queen did not scruple to plan other and darker means to accomplish her purpose. She had some knowledge of medicine, and took pleasure in making perfumes and preserves from all sorts of herbs and simples. Under pretence of perfecting her knowledge, she begged from a physician, Cornelius—who had helped her with her studies—some most poisonous compounds, which would produce a languishing death. She said she did not intend to use them on human beings, but only on animals, to try their power, and apply the antidote, in order to discover their respective virtues and effects.
The good physician did not at all approve of such cruel experiments. He knew the Queen’s evil nature, and would not trust one of such malice with drugs of so deadly a kind. While, therefore, pretending to comply with the Queen’s request, he really gave her some harmless compounds which would only stupefy and dull the senses for awhile, but do no ultimate injury.