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Imogen by Herbert Gustave Schmalz

Imogen was 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.^[1]

According to some modern editions of Shakespeare's plays, notably the 1986 Oxford Edition, the correct name is in fact Innogen, and the spelling "Imogen" is an error which arose when the manuscripts were first committed to print. The name Innogen is mentioned as a ghost character in Much Ado About Nothing. Imogen in Cymbeline is paired with a character with the epithet "Leonatus".

Imogen is the virtuous wife of the exiled Posthumus, whose praise of her moral purity incites Posthumus's acquaintance Iachimo to bet Postumus 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 help 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, but had been killed in a fight. After the battle at the climax of the play she confronts Iachimo who confesses his lies. She is reunited with Posthumus.

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."

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This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.