BARBARIAN LIBERTY

Cymbeline (1609–10) is one of several plays written early in the reign of James I depicting an encounter between Romans and ancient Britons. Other plays on similar themes include Fletcher's Bonduca (1611), The Valiant Welshman (1615) by R. A. (possibly Robert Armin, Shakespeare's Touchstone), William Rowley's A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (1609), and, several years later, Jasper Fisher's The True Trojans (1625). All these plays are concerned with the growth of the Roman empire and resistance to it, contrasting Romans and barbarians, and all the plays treat Roman values with a degree of scepticism.

There are two traditions in the representation of ancient Britain in Shakespeare's day. One, stemming from Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, is patriotic myth. It gives special prominence to two invented figures: Brutus, who, like Aeneas, fled from burning Troy to establish a new nation, a second Troy, and Arthur, a heroic, doomed king. According to Geoffrey, Julius Caesar, though recognizing that the Britons, like the Romans, were descended from Trojan stock, saw the island as ripe for conquest. Cassivelaunus, King of the Britons, fighting in defence of liberty, to resist ‘perpetual bondage’, led an army which defeated the Romans in two separate battles, causing Caesar to flee to the European mainland.