Cloten embodies the corruption of rank without corresponding virtue. The queen’s biological son and Cymbeline’s stepson, he pursues the princess Imogen with the entitlement of a man who has never been denied anything—except her. His courtship is less a romantic gesture than an assertion of power, backed by his mother’s influence and his proximity to the throne. When music fails to win Imogen’s favor, he cannot comprehend her refusal; when she mocks his courtship, comparing his clothes (borrowed finery, in effect) to Posthumus’s inherent nobility, he is wounded in his vanity rather than his heart. Cloten’s language reveals his shallowness: he boasts of his sword-skill yet proves a coward in actual combat; he claims great birth yet is revealed to be nothing without his mother’s manipulation of the king.
His journey to Milford-Haven—ostensibly to pursue Imogen and win her back to court—becomes an act of predatory violence. Wearing Posthumus’s stolen clothes, he intends to rape Imogen in the wilderness, ensuring she will be blamed on her husband rather than on himself. This plan exposes the ugliness beneath his courtly pretense: he is willing to commit sexual violence to possess what he cannot seduce. His confidence that he will succeed, that his station will protect him, and that the young men he encounters in the Welsh mountains will recognize and defer to him, marks him as fundamentally detached from reality. When Guiderius—a man of actual nobility raised in poverty, unknown to Cloten—challenges him, Cloten cannot imagine that words and threats will not suffice to cow a “mountain bumpkin.”
Cloten’s death at Guiderius’s hands is both swift and thematically fitting. Beheaded in a fight he could not win, his headless body becomes the source of Imogen’s deepest despair—she mistakes it for her husband and nearly perishes in her grief. In this way, Cloten’s cruelty rebounds upon the innocent. Yet his death also proves Belarius’s later assertion: that noble blood, even when raised in a cave, will show itself in courage and integrity. Cloten, for all his advantages, was always less a man than the penniless stranger who killed him.
