Cymbeline
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- This article is about Shakespeare's play. The mythical British king Cymbeline is identified with Cunobelinus. For other uses of the word, please see Cymbaline (disambiguation).
The Tragedy of Cymbeline, King of Britain is a play by William Shakespeare. Critics often put it in a grouping called Shakespeare's Late Romances along with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale. Although it was grouped with the tragedies in the First Folio, it is almost universally accorded a place in the comedies today. It is believed to have been written around 1609. The King, Cymbeline himself, is based on a British chieftain, Cunobelinus, who reigned before the time of the Roman invasion. Though once held in very high regard, Cymbeline has lost popularity over the past century. Some have held that, written late in Shakespeare's career, the play was an instance of Shakespeare amusing himself, spinning absurd tales with no serious intent.[1] Both William Hazlitt and John Keats numbered it among their favorite plays. The play is sometimes referred to as a "problem play", as it focuses on a character confronting a specific moral or social concern.
The play is rarely performed, as it contains scenes that are almost impossible to stage (such as the moment when Imogen wakes up next to the decapitated body of somebody who looks exactly like Posthumus but isn't...). However, there have been some well-received major productions of it, such as 1998's Public Theatre production in New York City directed by Andrei Serban.
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[edit] Performance and Publication
Only one early performance is recorded with certainty:[2] it occurred on Wednesday night, Jan. 1, 1634, at Court. (It was "well-liked" by Charles I.) The play was not published before its inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. In the Restoration era, Thomas D'Urfey staged an adaptation of Cymbeline, titled The Injur'd Princess, or The Fatal Wager. In 1761, David Garrick returned to a more-or-less original text, with good success: Posthumus became one of his star roles.[3]
The play has a relationship with Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, a tragicomedy that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote ca. 1609-10, which tends to support the dating of Cymbeline—though it is not clear which play preceded the other.[4]
[edit] Plot synopsis
Posthumus, a man of low birth but exceeding personal merit, has secretly married Imogen, daughter of King Cymbeline. Cymbeline, angered at this subversion of his will, banishes Posthumus from the kingdom. His faithful servant Pisanio remains.
Iachimo (or "Little Iago"), a soldier in the Roman army, makes a bet with Posthumus that he can tempt Imogen to commit adultery. The falsely besmirched Imogen, warned by Posthumus' faithful servant Pisanio, fakes her death to weather the reverberations of this trick (as Hero does in Much Ado About Nothing), and makes her way to Milford Haven on the West Coast of Britain. There she befriends "Polydore" and "Cadwell," who, unbeknownst to her, are really Guiderius and Arviragus, her own brothers.
Two British noblemen swore false oaths charging that Belarius had conspired with the ancient Romans, which led Cymbeline to banish him twenty years before the action of the play. Belarius kidnapped Cymbeline's young sons in retaliation, to hinder him from having heirs to the throne. The sons were raised by the nurse Euriphile, whom they called mother and took her for such.
Some have taken the convoluted plot as evidence of the play's parodic origins. In Act V Scene IV, "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt," then commands an untangled plot and goes back up.
At the play's resolution, virtually the entire cast comes forth one at a time to add a piece to the puzzle. Cornelius, the court doctor, arrives to dazzle everyone with news that the Queen, Imogen's stepmother, is dead, reporting that with her last breath she confessed her wicked deeds: she never loved old Cymbeline, she unsuccessfully attempted to have Imogen poisoned by Pisanio (without Pisanio's knowledge), and she was ambitious to poison Cymbeline so Cloten, her own son, could assume the throne.
Cymbeline concludes with an oration to the gods, declares peace and friendship between Britain and Rome, and great feasting in Lud's Town (London), concluding "Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace."
[edit] Notes
[edit] Imogen
Imogen is one of the relatively small number of great female roles in Shakespeare. The editors of the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare believe Imogen is a typo for Innogen, and draws several comparisons between this play and Much Ado About Nothing in which a ghost character named Innogen was supposed to be Leonato's wife (of course, Posthumus is also known by the epithet, "Leonatus", the Latin form of the Italian name in the other play). The Yale Shakespeare edition suggests the presence of a collaborator during the writing of this play, and certainly some scenes (Act III scene 7 and Act V scene 2) may strike the reader as less characteristic of Shakespeare than the rest of the play.
[edit] Sources
Cymbeline is loosely based on an authentic British ruler, Cunobelinus. Shakespeare took a tale told by Geoffrey of Monmouth and then added many additional ideas and sub-plots. Isaac Asimov notes the interesting similarities between the stepmother / daughter / stepson part of the plot and the actual or supposed circumstances of the Roman Emperor Augustus. But most of the play is newly invented by Shakespeare.
[edit] Influences
Probably the most famous verses in the play come from the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, which begins:
- Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
- Nor the furious winter's rages;
- Thou thy worldly task hast done,
- Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
- Golden lads and girls all must,
- As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
These last two lines appear to have inspired T. S. Eliot; in Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier (in Five-Finger Exercises), he writes:
- Pollicle dogs and cats all must
- Jellicle dogs and cats must
- Like undertakers, come to dust.
The first two lines of the song appear in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The lines, which turn Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts to the trauma of the First World War, are at once an elegiac dirge and a profoundly dignified declaration of endurance. The song provides a major organizational motif for the novel.
[edit] References
- ^ Strachey, Lytton. Books and Characters. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922: 64
- ^ There is a performance mentioned in the Book of Plays of Simon Forman. Even if it is genuine (not all commentators think it is), the Book of Plays reference is undated and lacks specific information.
- ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 125.
- ^ Halliday, p. 366.
[edit] External links
- Cymbeline - searchable, indexed e-text
- Cymbeline - Full text at M.I.T.
- Cymbeline - Scene indexed play
- Cymbeline - HTML version.
- Cymbeline - plain text from Project Gutenberg
- Cymbeline - different plain text edition
