Imogen (Cymbeline) - Literary Allusions

Literary Allusions

Oscar Wilde alludes to Imogen in The Picture of Dorian Gray when Dorian describes Sibyl Vane, the actress he is infatuated with.

'It must be, if you say it. And now I am off. Imogen is waiting for me. Don't forget about tomorrow. Good-bye.'(Ch. IV)

Stephen Dedalus alludes to Imogen in Ulysses, referring to the episode in which Iachomo observes the mole on her breast: "Ravisher and ravished, what he would, but would not, go with him from Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted."

E. M. Forster alludes to Imogen in Where Angels Fear to Tread when describing Lilia's sadness in her marriage: "Not Cordelia nor Imogen more deserves our tears."

A character in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers mentions Imogen: "Imogen was true, but how was she rewarded? Her lord believed her to be the paramour of the first he who came near her in his absence."

The great poet John Keats, a great admirer of Shakespeare, in a famous letter to Richard Woodhouse, contrasts Imogen to one of Shakespeare's most notoriously immoral characters, Iago, in order to describe the character of the poet: "The poetical character has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character and enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet... A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body."

Imogen is also alluded to in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Antique Ring": "Or, who knows, but it is the very ring which Posthumus received from Imogen?"