Cymbeline

• 1. Introduction

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  Cymbeline begins with a king who has already lost almost everything. His two infant sons were stolen years before the play opens. His daughter, Imogen, has married in secret against his wishes. And his new wife, the scheming Queen, is quietly poisoning the court from within. Shakespeare sets this story in Ancient Britain, roughly around 10 to 14 AD, tying it to the real Celtic king Cunobeline. Yet the play defies easy categorisation. Though the First Folio published in 1623 lists it as a tragedy, modern readers and scholars just as often call it a romance, a comedy, or something in between. The first confirmed performance took place in April 1611, witnessed by the diarist Simon Forman. What was Shakespeare doing with this strange, knotted tale? And why has it provoked some of the most divided critical responses in all of his canon?

• 2. The Tangle of Sources

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  Shakespeare did not invent Cymbeline from nothing. The historical figure of Cunobeline appears in Suetonius's Life of Caligula and in Orosius's Historia adversus Paganos. In Medieval Welsh literature, the same figure surfaces under the name Cynfelyn in texts including the Trioedd Ynys Prydein, Branwen ferch Llŷr, the Dream of Macsen Wledig, and Lludd and Llefelys. The early 9th century Historia Brittonum names him as Bellinus son of Minocannus, a lineage that Welsh kings later claimed in the Harleian genealogies.

  The route Shakespeare most likely travelled was through the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, which gave him the setting and the character of Cymbeline himself. But the intricate wager plot involving Posthumus and Iachimo has a different origin entirely: story II.9 of Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, along with the anonymously authored Frederyke of Jennen. Both texts feature a man hiding in a chest inside a woman's bedroom to gather false proof of her infidelity. The detail of Iachimo noting Imogen's room as spurious evidence comes from The Decameron; the reluctant servant and the use of bloody clothes to fake a death come from Frederyke of Jennen.

  A play called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, first performed in 1582, contributed the subplot of Belarius and the lost princes. In that earlier work, an exiled nobleman named Bomelio is later revealed to be the protagonist's father, a story beat Shakespeare folded into Belarius's confession. Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th century Historia Regum Britanniae gave Shakespeare the two sons named Guiderius and Arvirargus, one of whom dies in the early stages of the Claudian invasion in that account.

• 3. A Name and Its Argument

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  The editors of the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare have argued that the name Imogen is itself a misprint. Their candidate is Innogen, a name that appears in early editions of Much Ado About Nothing as a ghost character listed as Leonato's wife. Posthumus in Cymbeline carries the name Leonatus, the Latin form of the Italian name Leonato, and the parallel seems too neat to dismiss. Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson point out that Holinshed's Chronicles, one of Shakespeare's confirmed sources, mention an Innogen by name. Simon Forman's eyewitness account of the April 1611 performance uses Innogen throughout. Despite these arguments, most published editions have continued with Imogen.

  The choice of Milford Haven as a meeting point in the play has generated its own debate. The port was not in recorded use during the early 1st century AD in which Cymbeline is set. Scholar Marisa R. Cull notes that it carries possible symbolic weight as the landing site of Henry Tudor, who invaded England via Milford on the 7th of August 1485 on his way to deposing Richard III and founding the Tudor dynasty. Milford Haven may also reflect English anxiety about the loyalty of Wales and the prospect of future coastal invasions.

• 4. A Play That Divides

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  Samuel Johnson did not mince his words about Cymbeline. He wrote that the play had "some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity", and that to catalogue the play's absurdities would be to "waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility". William Hazlitt and John Keats took the opposite view, numbering it among their favourite plays.

  By the early twentieth century, critical opinion had cooled. Lytton Strachey concluded that Shakespeare was "getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams." Harley Granville-Barker, who had made his name as an actor in Shaw's plays, similarly found that Cymbeline showed Shakespeare becoming a "wearied artist".

  George Bernard Shaw's relationship with the play was its own drama. In 1896, he complained to Ellen Terry, then preparing to play Imogen, calling the work "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar". Yet Shaw spent time enough with Cymbeline to rewrite its final act, producing Cymbeline Refinished in 1937. After that labour, he revised his overall verdict, calling it in 1946 "one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays" while still insisting it "goes to pieces in the final act". His rewrite cut many of the play's stacked revelations and made Imogen a more assertive figure, in keeping with his feminist views. Harold Bloom offered a different reading, arguing that Cymbeline is partly a Shakespearean self-parody in which Shakespeare mocks characters and situations from his own prior work.

• 5. Britain, Rome, and Power

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  Cymbeline stands at a strange intersection of ancient history and contemporary Jacobean politics. Critics have read the play's portrait of British-Roman relations as a coded endorsement of James I, who saw himself as a "British Augustus" and sought to unite Scotland with England and Wales under a single imperial identity. Augustus's Pax Romana mirrors James's own political ambitions, and the play frames the parochialism of Cloten and the Queen as a form of villainy.

  Other critics have pushed back on that reading, pointing to the fractured geographic identities in the text. Guiderius and Arviragus are the sons of a British king raised in Rome, yet they grew up in a Welsh cave. They lament their isolation, which is associated in the play with a kind of barbarousness; but their foster father Belarius argues that life in the cave has spared them from the corrupting influence of the supposedly civilised British court.

  Iachimo's intrusion into Imogen's bedchamber has been read in this context by scholar Peter A. Parolin as an expression of English anxiety about Italian influence. The Rome that appears in the play's ostensibly ancient scenes may be, in Parolin's reading, a portrait of sixteenth-century Italy, characterised by contemporary British writers as a place where vice and treachery had replaced the virtues of the classical world. The play ends with Cymbeline agreeing to resume paying tribute to Rome as a gesture of peace, but the damage Iachimo has inflicted on Posthumus and Imogen leaves that peace complicated.

• 6. Imogen, Gender, and Power

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  Scholars have placed particular weight on the political significance the play attaches to Imogen's virginity and chastity. The legitimacy of her marriage to Posthumus is itself a matter of debate; she defies her father to enter it, and her cross-dressing as the page Fidele, meaning faithful, complicates any reading of her as a straightforwardly obedient figure. Critic Tracey Miller-Tomlinson has argued that the play ultimately upholds patriarchal ideology, particularly in its final scene, with its "panoply of male victors". Miller-Tomlinson also characterises the Imogen-Posthumus marriage not as a model heterosexual union but as one whose private dimensions turn out to be homosocial, homoerotic, and hermaphroditic.

  Queer theory has drawn significant scholarly attention to the play, building on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. Valerie Traub's concept of separation from traditional society into "green worlds" has been applied to the play's Welsh cave sequences. The semi-sexual fascination Guiderius and Arviragus feel toward the disguised Imogen is frequently cited as evidence of the play's homoerotic dimension.

  Janet Adelman focused on Cymbeline's lines upon recovering his children, in which he asks, "oh, what am I, / A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more", and described this as a parthenogenesis fantasy. Adelman and Miller-Tomlinson argue that in claiming sole credit for his children, Cymbeline acts as a hermaphrodite, converting a maternal function into a patriarchal strategy. Imogen's own experience with gender, unlike that of Portia, Rosalind, Viola, or Julia in other Shakespeare plays, is not presented as empowering; her authority derives from her father's bloodline and from the prospect of reproduction.

• 7. Four Centuries on Stage

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  After the April 1611 performance Simon Forman recorded, there is no documented production until 1634, when the play was revived at court for Charles I and Henrietta Maria and noted as being "well likte by the kinge". John Rich staged it at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1728, emphasising spectacle over text. Theophilus Cibber restored Shakespeare's original text in 1744 at the Haymarket.

  David Garrick edited a new version in 1761 and performed the role of Posthumus himself in its November premiere. Scholars have noted that his changes made the play more nationalistic, and his version was staged repeatedly over the following decades. A notable quirk of John Philip Kemble's 1801 production was the bedroom scene: one critic observed that the bed was so large that Iachimo all but needed a ladder to view Imogen as she slept. Kemble's brother Charles mounted an antiquarian production at Covent Garden in 1827, with costumes drawn from the descriptions of the ancient British by Julius Caesar and Diodorus Siculus.

  Ellen Terry's 1896 performance at the Lyceum with Henry Irving attracted wide praise; Irving, who played Iachimo, was judged indifferent in the role. The set, overseen by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was advertised as historically accurate but a reviewer for the Athenaeum noted anachronisms including gold crowns and printed books. Margaret Mather's 1897 New York production spent $40,000 on sets and publicity but was judged unsuccessful.

  The twentieth century brought experiments in staging. Barry Jackson mounted a modern dress production at Birmingham Rep in 1923. Peter Hall's 1956 production at the Shakespeare Memorial presented nearly the entire play, including the long-neglected dream scene, though a golden eagle built for the Jupiter apparition proved too heavy for the stage machinery. Peggy Ashcroft's Imogen drew particular praise. William Gaskill's 1962 RSC production, set against heavy white sheets, used Brechtian alienation effects; Vanessa Redgrave as Imogen was frequently compared to Ashcroft, and Eric Porter was widely praised as Iachimo. Judi Dench played Imogen in David Jones's 1980 RSC revival, her reviews rivalling Ashcroft's own. Ben Kingsley played Iachimo in that production.

  In 2012, the South Sudan Theatre Company staged Cymbeline in Juba Arabic for the Shakespeare's Globe "Globe to Globe" festival, translated by Derik Uya Alfred and directed by Joseph Abuk. Critic Matt Truman awarded the production four out of five stars. In 2016, Melly Still directed the play for the RSC with Gillian Bevan as Cymbeline, and in 2023 Gregory Doran's production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, with Peter De Jersey in the title role and Amber James as Imogen, was Doran's final production as artistic director.

• 8. The Funeral Song's Long Life

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  The most travelled lines in Cymbeline are not from the plot but from a song. The funeral dirge from Act IV, Scene 2, beginning "Fear no more the heat o' the sun", has circulated through literature and music in ways the plot's elaborate intrigues never quite matched. Franz Schubert set another song from the play, "Hark, hark! the lark" from Act II, Scene 3, to music in 1826.

  Virginia Woolf wove the funeral song's opening two lines into Mrs Dalloway, where they pass between the two main characters Clarissa and Septimus Smith, turning Mrs Dalloway's thoughts to the trauma of the First World War. Woolf uses the song as a major structural motif for the novel. Samuel Beckett returned to the same lines in Happy Days, where Winnie and her husband attempt to recall the words as they sit exposed to the elements. The final couplet appears in Anton Myrer's novel The Last Convertible; T. S. Eliot drew on the last two lines in his poem "Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier", collected in Five-Finger Exercises. In Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death, the character Ginevra Boynton quotes the first four lines of the verse in the novel's epilogue.

  Roger Quilter set the song as the first of his Five Shakespeare Songs, Op. 23, in 1921. Gerald Finzi included it in his song cycle Let Us Garlands Bring in 1942. Cleo Laine sang the text to music by John Dankworth on her 1964 album Shakespeare and All That Jazz. At the end of Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, Shakespeare himself sings the funeral song when asked to speak about death. In Beethoven's opera Fidelio, the loyal wife Leonore disguises herself as a man under the name Fidelio, a probable echo of Imogen's disguise as Fidele.