In the opening scene of the play, the First Gentleman describes Cloten and Posthumus to the Second Gentleman in hyperbolic terms:
He that hath miss'd the princess is a thing
Too bad for bad report, and he that hath her—
I mean, that married her, alack, good man!
And therefore banish'd—is a creature such
As, to seek through the regions of the earth
For one his like, there would be something failing
In him that should compare. I do not think
So fair an outward and such stuff within
Endows a man but he.
The courtiers in Cymbeline’s court, the First Gentleman explains, are secretly pleased about the imprisonment of Imogen and the banishment of Posthumus due to their warped moral values. Cloten, the King’s step-son and the only son of the Queen, is “Too bad for bad report”—or, in other words, he is so bad that words cannot accurately describe him. Conversely, the First Gentleman claims that Posthumus, who has been banished after word of his marriage to the King’s daughter Imogen was revealed, is such a good man that his equal cannot be found in any of the “regions of the earth.” The First Gentleman speaks about these figures at court in hyperbolic terms that exaggerate both Cloten’s negative qualities and Posthumus’s positive qualities.
Hoping to prove that he truly did spend the night in Imogen’s bedchamber, Iachimo uses hyperbole, allusion, and metaphor when describing the carvings on Imogen’s chimney with rich detail:
The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves: the cutter
Was as another nature, dumb; outwent her,
Motion and breath left out.
After locating the area of her room where the chimney is located, he describes the carved “chimney-piece,” which depicts “Chaste Dian bathing.” Here, he alludes to the “chaste” goddess of hunting and virginity, Diana, the Roman equivalent of the Greek Artemis, an allusion that is ironic given that he claims (falsely) that Imogen has been anything but chaste since Posthumus’s exile.
Hyperbolically, he claims that he never saw artistic images that seemed “so likely to report themselves" (that is, to come to life at any moment). The “cutter” or carver of the chimney-piece, Iachimo claims in a metaphor, must have been “another nature,” a god-like creator of an entire world. His depiction of Venus, he adds, outdoes the real goddess Venus, even if she can neither speak nor move, since “Motion and breath” have been “left out” of the world created by the sculptor.
