We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for Posthumus; and she deserves it better.  Of all Shakespeare’s women she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless.  Her incredulity in the opening scene with Iachimo, as to her husband’s infidelity, is much the same as Desdemona’s backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy.  Her answer to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.’  Her readiness to pardon Iachimo’s false imputations and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes; and may show that where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice.  The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen his master’s letter, accusing her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Iachimo, is as touch-ing as it is possible for any thing to be: 

Pisanio.  What cheer, Madam?  Imogen.  False to his bed!  What is it to be false?  To lie in watch there, and to think on him?  To weep ’twixt clock and clock?  If sleep charge nature, To break it with a fearful dream of him, And cry myself awake?  That’s false to’s bed, is it?  Pisanio.  Alas, good lady!  Imogen.  I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo, Thou didst accuse him of incontinency, Thou then look’dst like a villain:  now methinks, Thy favour’s good enough.  Some jay of Italy, Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him:  Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls, I must be ript; to pieces with me.  Oh, Men’s vows are women’s traitors.  All good seeming, By thy revolt, oh husband, shall be thought Put on for villany:  not born where’t grows, But worn a bait for ladies.  Pisanio.  Good madam, hear me—­Imogen.  Talk thy tongue weary, speak:  I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear, Therein false struck, can take no greater wound, Nor tent to bottom that.—­

When Pisanio, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a way to live, she says: 

          Why, good fellow,

What shall I do the while?  Where bide?  How live? 
Or in my life what comfort, when I am
Dead to my husband?

Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view’, by which she may ‘happily be near the residence of Posthumus’, she exclaims: 

Oh, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on’t,
I would adventure.

And when Pisanio, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must change

       —­Fear and niceness,

The handmaids of all women, or more truly,
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,
Ready in gibes, quick answer’d, saucy, and
As quarrellous as the weasel—­

she interrupts him hastily;

            Nay, be brief;
   I see into thy end, and am almost
   A man already.