Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cymbeline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow-pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives may expect to find it in their food; for she is curious in distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful liegemen, including her husband; and then, after getting her married to Cloten, the "mortal mineral" was meant to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a royal footstool for her son.
Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are discovered, he exclaims,—
"O most delicate fiend!
Who is't can read a woman?"
Not he, certainly; for he had been fooled in the time-honored way of crafty women.
"Mine eyes
Were not in fault, for she was beautiful;
Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart,
That thought her like her seeming."
At the point of death, she confessed to her physician the whole of her unsexed intent. She never loved the King as Lady Macbeth loved her lord, but only affected the greatness got by him: she was wife to his place, but
