Greek name, with possible reconstructions (, ) or (), from the final part of a name such as Erigone or Antigone. Some sources claim Innogen means in Greek. The name Imogen is also attested from before the Historia Regum Britanniae. Legacy 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 a result of "scribal or compositorial error". 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 a lost play by Henry Chettle and John Day entitled The Conquest of Brute with the first finding of the Bath which was performed by the Lord Admiral's Men at the Rose in December 1598. Notes References Legendary British people British folklore