SOURCE: "Cymbeline," in The Poetics of Jacobean Drama, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, pp. 103-35.

In the following essay, Freer contends that the motives, self-regard, and development of the three main characters—Imogen, Iachimo, and Posthumus—can be traced through the imagery and syntax of their speeches.

When Iachimo first meets Imogen, he recognizes, with the quickness which he alone seems to possess in this play, that she looks like all that Posthumus had claimed her to be:

If she be furnish'd with a mind so rare,
 She is alone th' Arabian bird; and I
 Have lost the wager.

[1.7.16-18]¹

In an instant he conceives a daring plan whose purpose we grasp a few moments later. As Imogen reads Posthumus's introductory note, Iachimo launches into a wildly exaggerated "Elizabethan world-picture":

What! are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
 To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop...