Innogen

Innogen first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (). She was the eldest daughter of the Greek king Pandrasus, and was given in marriage to Brutus of Troy after he united the enslaved Trojans in Greece and defeated Pandrasus to gain their freedom. When Innogen left Greece with Brutus and the Trojans, she was inconsolable at leaving her parents and country. They travelled through the Mediterranean, around the coast of Iberia and Gaul, and arrived in Britain, where it was prophesied that Brutus would found an empire. Her great-great grandson Ebraucus named one of his thirty daughters Ignogni, who was sent along with her sisters to Alba Silvius in Italy, where they were married to the Trojan nobility there. Academic Fiona Tolhurst suggests that Innogen performs a pivotal function in the foundation of Brutus' Britain, by providing legitimacy to his rule through her bloodline, in the same way that Lavinia did for Aeneas. == Name ==

Innogen's name is spelled a number of different ways in the Historia Regum Britanniae, with the best readings being Innogen and Ignogen; The name is likely to be Celtic in origin, from Gaelic inghean (Irish iníon and Scottish Gaelic nighean), meaning , , or . However, Innogen could instead be derived from the Latin name , with a possible intermediate Celtic form of the name being Enogent. The character in the Historia is Greek, and it has been suggested that Innogen was intended to be a Greek name, with possible reconstructions (, ), or () from the final part of a name such as Erigone or Antigone. of the former Duchy of Brittany, blazoned "Ermine", which had its origin attributed to Innogen Modern uses of the name Imogen probably derive from a misspelling of Innogen in the 1623 First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Shakespeare probably took the name from a retelling of the story of Innogen and Brutus in ''Holinshed's Chronicles'' (1577), and had used the name Innogen once before for a non-speaking 'ghost character' in Much Ado About Nothing (1600). An early description of Cymbeline by Simon Forman in 1611 consistently spells the name of the character as "Innogen", and the spelling of the character's name as "Imogen" in the First Folio appears to have been the result of "scribal or compositorial error". Other mentions Innogen was mentioned in the funeral orations of Anne of Brittany in 1514. In the oration, Guillaume Parvi traced Anne's ancestry back to Innogen, and recounted a story that explained the origin of her family's heraldic ermine coat of arms. According to the story, during a hunt at Le Croisic, a stoat being pursued by Brutus' dogs took refuge with Innogen, who saved and fed it, and adopted it for (). Edmund Spenser mentioned Innogen in book two, canto ten of The Faerie Queene (1590), as "fayre Inogene of Italy". Innogen was a character in the lost play The Conquest of Brute with the First Finding of the Bath by Henry Chettle and John Day, which was performed by the Lord Admiral's Men at the Rose in December 1598. == Notes ==