Imogen or Innogen?

Among the few problems any modern editor of Cymbeline must face is what to call the play's heroine.  Is it "Imogen," as the First Folio has it and 400 years of commentary supports, or is it, as recent editors have tended, "Innogen," arguing that this is obviously the name Shakespeare intended and that the name in the First Folio is a "simple minim" scribal error on the part of Ralph Crane, or whoever transcribed the play from the King's Men's manuscript.  The arguments are rehearsed in many editions of the play and in other places, notably by Eric Rasmussen in Shakespeare Survey 52 ("Editions and Textual Studies," see p. 322).

Here are the basic arguments for "Innogen".

1.  "Innogen" is the wife of Brute, daughter of Pandarus, and first queen of Britain.  Her name is found in Shakespeare's source for one of the plots of this play, Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), which must be the inspiration for Shakespeare's use of the name in the first place.  See Holinshed, History of England, Book II Chapter 1, which can be found at Project Gutenberg, or in facsimile from SCETI.

"First, that Pandrasus should giue his daughter Innogen vnto Brute in mariage, with a competent summe of gold and siluer for hir dowrie."

and

"Al things being thus brought to passe according to Brutes desire, wind also and wether seruing the purpose, he with his wife Innogen and his people imbarked, and hoising vp sailes departed from the coasts of Grecia" (bolding and underlining added).

2.  In Simon Forman's eyewitness account of the play he saw (most likely at the Globe) in April or May of 1611 the name is given as "Innogen":

"Remember also the storri of Cymbalin king of England in Lucius tyme, howe Lucius cam from octauus cesar for Tribut and being denied...And howe of [sic] of them slewe Clotan that was the quens sonn goinge to milford hauen to sek the loue of Innogen kinge daughter whom he had banished also for louinge his daughter...And in thend howe he came wt the Romains into England & was taken prisoner and after Reueled to Innogen. who had turned her self into man apparrell & fled to mete her loue at milford hauen..."  (bolding and underlining added, for the entire quote see my "Simon Forman and Cymbeline").

3.  The names of the heroines in the late plays all have meaningful "overtones": Marina = born at sea; Perdita = the lost one; Miranda = "the top of admiration"; and thus Innogen with its overtones of "innocence" is appropriate.

4.  In the 1600 first quarto of Much Ado About Nothing there is a stage direction indicating that Leonato's wife is named Innogen. This Innogen never has a line in the play nor does she make another appearance, even in a stage direction.  The existence of this ghost character indicates (at least one imagines that this is the argument) that Shakespeare somehow associated the names of Leonato and Innogen, and when it came time to name the wife of Posthumus Leonatus, Innogen naturally occurred to him.

5.  According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of First Names, the appearance of Imogen as a name in English is due to Shakespeare's play Cymbeline. 

"The name owes its existence to a character in Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1609), but in earlier accounts of the events on which the play is based this character is named as Innogen. The modern form of the name is thus due to a misreading of these sources by Shakespeare, or of the play's text by his printer. The name Innogen is of Celtic origin, from Gaelic inghean 'girl', 'maiden'."

Shakespeare would not have simply invented a name out of broad cloth, but is much more likely to have used a traditional Cltic name for his British heroine.

The counter arguments run something like this:

1.  It is true that Holinshed was one of the sources for Cymbeline, but the section where the name "Innogen" appears is far apart from the material Shakespeare used for the play.  He used very little, other than the name "Cymbeline" itself, in fact from the section that deals directly with Cymbeline.  The part of Holinshed he actually drew upon in any substantive way was the part on Scottish history dealing with the Scots' battle with the Danes and the behavior of Hay and his sons in turning back the fleeing Scots, a passage Shakespeare probably read as he read source material for Macbeth.

It is unlikely, therefore, that the name Innogen was suggested to Shakespeare by Holinshed.

2.  It is true that Forman reports the name as "Innogen," but in his summary of Macbeth from the same notebook, The Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof, p Formans, for common Pollicie, undoubtedly very near the same date, Forman misreports several of the names he hears from that play:

"In Mackbeth at the glob, 16jo, the 20 of Aprill, ther was to be obserued, firste, howe Mackbeth and Bancko, 2 noble men of Scotland, Ridinge thorowe a wod, the[r] stode before them 3 women feiries or Nimphes, And saluted Mackbeth, sayinge, 3 tyms vnto him, haille mackbeth, King of Codon ; for thon shalt be a kinge, but shalt beget No kinge, &c. then said Bancko, what all to mackbeth And nothing to me. Yes, said the nimphes, haille to thee Banko, thou shalt beget kinges, yet be no kinge. And so they departed & cam to the courte of Scotland to Dunkin king of Scotes, and yt was in the dais of Edward the Confessor. And Dunkin bad them both kindly wellcome, And made Mackbeth forth with Prince of Northumberland, and sent him hom to his own castell... (from The New Variorum edition of Macbeth, ed. H. H. Furness, 1901, p. 356).

Are we, on the basis of the evidence provided by Forman, to change Banquo to Bancko, Macbeth to Mackbet, Macduff to Mack Dove, and rather than Thane of Cawdor rename Macbeth King of Codon?  As A. L. Rowse, an expert on Forman if there has ever been one, has said with reference to Forman's unreliability in writing names, "Forman, who is so careful as an astrologer to note dates and times--in case of consequences--is apt to be free and easy about names, as well as with their owners" (Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer, 1974).  We can safely conclude that Forman's evidence is no evidence at all, at least with respect to the pronunciation of the name.

3.  While Shakespeare uses names to suggest ideas about his characters, at least on occasion, the associations are not necessarily strong and are usually read back into the character once we have observed them in the plays.  It makes little difference that Pericles' daughter is named Marina, and very few would make an association with Miranda.  This point is so minor as to be negligible.  Shakespeare associates qualities with his characters through their speech, and in other ways.  In fact he seems so indifferent to expressing character through name in this play, that he doesn't even bother to give the first and second Lord names in their scenes.

4.  The fact that Shakespeare, in an early draft of Much Ado, may have intended to use a character named Innogen, and then abandoned the idea as his script developed, would seem to have nothing to do with his choice of names in a play he wrote over a decade later.  This is no argument, but rather a reading back into a situation something that in all likelihood never existed there in the first place.

5.  Shakespeare was a rapid innovator of words and would not necessarily be bound to use only a name that had already existed.  He may simply have invented one.  Furthermore, for reasons given above, it is quite a stretch to say, as the Oxford Concise does, that "...in earlier accounts of the events on which the play is based this character is named as Innogen."

6.  Heminge and Condell must have acted in the play, and must have been involved in a supervisory capacity, at least, over the manuscripts used to produce the First Folio.  Since they, as far as we know, did not protest the name Imogen, why should we?

In addition to these arguments, those in favor of retaining the original name can lay claim to 400 years of theatrical and literary tradition.  Imogen is Imogen to Keats, Hazlitt, Swinburne, and Tennyson, not to mention the great chain of Shakespearean editors from Rowe to Bevington.  "Innogen" sounds like some invidious genetics engineering firm out of a Michael Chrichton novel.  "Imogen" has warm associations for us simply because of its traditional stage and literary usages.  The idea of changing her name now smacks of puritanical revisionism and know-it-all fussiness on the part of editors willing to sacrifice received tradition in an uninvited display of their own erudition.

So what's your choice, sterile scholarly rectitude or the well-loved tradition?  I'm with Tennyson.  Imogen it is.

Comments

[Amy]

My two-year old daughter is named Imogen, so I'm very interested in the etymology. Because the name is rare in the United States, people ask a lot about the meaning. I was thrilled, therefore, to read your paper. Who wants to tell people their child's name was derived from a typo?! Long live Princess Imogen!

[Felix de Villiers]

I agree, Imogen sounds better. I was just about to suggest that Mr. Shakespeare could publish a list of the more difficult names with their pronunciation indicated with accents, but found that there is such a list on the internet. However this list does not include Jacques from As You Like It. According to Headway (English for foreigners) it should be pronounced Jeiquiz