The fictive chimneypiece recapitulates and goes beyond this: the artist’s figures seem on the verge of speech and movement, they are “likely to report themselves,” and though they are “dumb” they seem to make nature seem dumber. The air has vacated nature and entered the artwork. When we associate Diana with Innogen, the goddess seems to step down from the chimneypiece and become embodied on stage in the form of a lovely boy actor. The image effects in the audience’s mind what The Winter’s Tale feigns to deliver in performance: the metamorphosis of art into life. This is late Shakespeare at his most sophisticated and self-consciously inventive.

Simon Forman’s report reveals how much detail an attentive spectator could grasp in a complex Shakespearean drama—though he does seem to have momentarily muddled Cloten and Posthumus, just as Innogen/Fidele does. The account also suggests that Shakespearean playgoers worried little about the plot’s dependence on frequent coincidences. Strikingly, though, this spectator’s enthusiasm peters out toward the end: the closing reunions and the descent of Jupiter in Posthumus’ dream do not merit a mention. The long and outlandish final scene is extremely difficult to stage effectively: it has sometimes been played as parody, is often heavily cut, and has even been comprehensively rewritten (by George Bernard Shaw).

In the movement of the action from court to country, Cymbeline has a structure similar to the more popular and better-known Winter’s Tale. The two plays were probably written within a year of each other. The similarities are abundant. A man is falsely led to believe in his wife’s infidelity, with the result that his powers of reasoning are distorted and his language collapses into crabbed, dense invective against female wiles:

Is there no way for men to be, but women

Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,

And that most venerable man, which I

Did call my father, was I know not where

When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools

Made me a counterfeit …

…

… for there’s no motion

That tends to vice in man, but I affirm

It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it,

The woman’s: flattering, hers: deceiving, hers:

Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers:

Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,

Nice longing, slanders, mutability,

All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,

Why, hers, in part or all …

In fact, throughout Shakespeare’s works, most of these vices and faults are to be found in the men’s parts, not the women’s. It is the woman—Marina, Perdita, Innogen—who restores harmony.

In Cymbeline, as in The Winter’s Tale, she does so in combination with the forces of nature. The febrile air of court intrigue is cleared when we move outdoors and encounter princes disguised as shepherds. It is perhaps in Cymbeline that Shakespeare’s art of natural observation is at its most acute. The supposedly dead Fidele is apostrophized with the phrase “The azured harebell, like thy veins.” The color and structure of the harebell does precisely resemble those of human veins. Then there is Belarius speaking of how his two adopted sons show princely natures even as they are dressed as shepherds:

O thou goddess,

Thou divine Nature, thou thyself thou blazon’st

In these two princely boys! They are as gentle

As zephyrs blowing below the violet,

Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,

Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind,

That by the top doth take the mountain pine,

And make him stoop to th’vale …

The wind has the capacity not to move a violet but to flatten a mountain pine: Shakespeare likes that paradox.

The association of Innogen with nature goes back to the bedroom scene. The key token of recognition, the mole on her breast, is “cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops / I’th’bottom of a cowslip.” Is there any other English poet save the country laborer John Clare who could have created such a simile, who has such an eye as acute as Shakespeare’s for the intricacies of natural history and the apt metaphorical application of them to human encounters?

THE CRITICS DEBATE

Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, Cymbeline has polarized critics and audiences in their judgments on its quality as a work of art. Yet despite an uneven critical heritage, the twentieth century going into the early twenty-first has seen a massive resurgence in its popularity on both page and stage, and recent criticism now widely accepts it as a masterwork that no longer needs to be explained away or apologized for.

Historically, critics have been divided over the play’s mixed genre, improbable plot, characterization, moral texture, difficult language, bifurcated political position, and contrived ending. Dr. Johnson’s view, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare, is typical:

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.1

George Bernard Shaw was even more dismissive:

I do not defend Cymbeline. It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.2

But the play has always had its defenders. The early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt thought that:

Cymbeline is one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s [sic] historical plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance … The reading of this play is like going on a journey with some uncertain object at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and heightened by the long intervals between each action. Though the events are scattered over such an extent of surface, and relate to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete development of the catastrophe. The ease and conscious unconcern with which this is effected only makes the skill more wonderful.3

The last act, in which all the plot threads reconvene in a series of almost comically improbable revelations, has, like the play as a whole, been for a long time the object of critical scorn before more recently finding a reacceptance, especially in performance. Critics are now in fairly unanimous agreement on its dizzying, strange brilliance: “The finale is an intricate, beautiful machine in which an astonishing number of disguises are removed, misunderstandings swept away and reunions accomplished.”4

Traditionally, the play’s three main plots have been identified as the marriage/wager plot (involving Innogen’s marriage to Posthumus, his resultant banishment, Cloten’s attempted “revenge,” and the wager Posthumus makes with Iachimo over Innogen’s fidelity), the dynastic plot (involving the return of Guiderius and Arviragus, Cymbeline’s long-lost sons, and, unbeknownst to them, the future rulers of Britain), and the nations plot (involving the Roman invasion of Britain over Cymbeline’s refusal to pay the required tribute, and the eventual reunion of the two powers). Critical concerns have recently engaged with each of these elements and debated the politics of the play in terms of gender and state and the interplay between them.

THE WAGER PLOT

The wager story had its roots in popular folklore, narrated many times in the medieval period, though Shakespeare seems to have based his plot on a version in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Day 2, Novella 9), in which:

The villain, Ambrogiuolo, gets into Ginevra’s bedchamber in a chest and steals a ring, a purse, a girdle and a gown.