Discount Cymbeline

The feeling I got reading "Cymbeline" the first time was that this was factory-second Shakespeare, as worthy of the term "problem play" as any. A second reading modifies this somewhat. You get used to its odd twists and turns, its often unlyrical quality. Good things pop up here and there. If the narrative never gels, it does keep moving and winds up in an interesting place.

The gooniness of "Cymbeline" is established early on. The title character, King of England just after a time of Roman rule, banishes from his reign Posthumus, husband of his only daughter, Imogen. Cymbeline is angered she did not choose her own stepbrother, the miserable Cloten. "Away!/Thou'rt poison to my blood," Cymbeline demands. Exiled in Italy, Posthumus gambles rashly on Imogen's virtue and pays a steep price despite her faithfulness. While Imogen comes to grief, Cymbeline dispenses with Roman extortion and faces a massive invasion.

Cymbeline has the feeling of a Shakespearean mash-up. You have the sundered young lovers from "Romeo and Juliet", a cruel assault on a good woman's virtue like "Othello", and a mad monarch a la "King Lear" who is twisted by a conniving queen who seems an even nastier variant on Lady MacBeth. There's also ghosts, a beheading, women disguised as men, and a left-field appearance by Jupiter to sort everything out.

It's all too much, especially when presented by Shakespeare at a sometimes headlong, sometimes frustratingly talky pace. The story really goes off the rails when we meet a rustic man and his two young companions who turn out to be Cymbeline's lost sons. None of this feels grounded in reality, yet it doesn't really soar as fantasy, either. Many point out Jupiter's cameo as a low moment, though Cloten's transformation from comic butt to dead would-be rapist is more jarring.

Cloten does have a couple of fun early moments, bragging about himself to two unctuous lords. One makes wisecracks as asides. "Would he have been one of my rank!" Cloten declares after a near-duel with Posthumus.

"To have smelled like a fool" the sneering lord answers.

A little later, Imogen takes heart at her sad situation: "Plenty and peace breed cowards; hardness ever/Of hardiness is mother." Imogen and Posthumus are complex central characters, and in the old Pelican edition I have, Robert B. Heilman advances Imogen as one of Shakespeare's best-realized romantic heroines. Of the play itself, Heilman is understandably more guarded: "Nothing lags; nothing stands still".

Nothing makes that much sense, either, but it's a ride worth taking if you are interested in Shakespeare making one-time use of a historical setting (Roman Britain) or the idea of him struggling circa 1609 to develop a new post-tragic dramatic form, the so-called tragicomedy, although it's more properly termed a romance and quite different from the later, more sophisticated works "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest".

If you have the time, the patience, and the passion for Shakespeare, you may like "Cymbeline" more than me. But I doubt you will come away thinking it unfairly overlooked.Get more detail about Cymbeline.