Шекспирдің "Цимбелин" трагедиясының кейіпкері – Инноген туралы

Character in Cymbeline

Imogen (also spelled Innogen) is the daughter of King Cymbeline in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline. She was described by William Hazlitt as "perhaps the most tender and the most artless" of all Shakespeare's women.

Academic consensus suggests that Shakespeare named the character Innogen, and the spelling "Imogen" is an error which arose when the manuscripts were first committed to print. Shakespeare probably took the name from the Matter of Britain character Innogen as found in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), and had used the name once before for a non speaking 'ghost character' in early editions of Much Ado About Nothing (1600), as the wife of the character Leonato (Imogen in Cymbeline is paired with a character with the similar epithet "Leonatus"). An early description of Cymbeline by Simon Forman in 1611 consistently spells Imogen's name as "Innogen", leading scholars to conclude that the spelling of the character's name as "Imogen" in the 1623 First Folio appears to have been a result of "scribal or compositorial error". As a result, some modern editions of Shakespeare's plays, notably the 1986 Oxford Edition, correct the name to Innogen.

Imogen is princess of Britain, and the virtuous wife of the exiled Posthumus, whose praise of her moral purity incites Posthumus's acquaintance Iachimo to bet Posthumus that he can seduce her. When he fails, Iachimo hides in her bedchamber and uncovers her body while she sleeps, observing details of a mole on her breast which he then describes to Posthumus as proof that he had slept with her. Posthumus plots to kill his wife, but the designated killer reveals the plot to Imogen and advises her to hide; she escapes to the woods dressed as a man and falls in with a family who helps her. Taking a drug, she falls into a coma and is presumed dead by the family, who cover her body and sing a song over her. When she wakes she finds the headless body of Cloten, a brutish character who had planned to rape her while wearing Posthumus's clothes, but had been killed in a fight with one of the men who took her in. She mistakes the headless body for that of her husband. After the battle at the climax of the play she confronts Iachimo who confesses his lies. She is reunited with Posthumus, and her father (King Cymbeline), and discovers two of the men who took her in are actually her long lost brothers.