Comic flexibility, evident in Posthumus as well as in Imogen, succeeds tragic constancy as austere Romanitas dissolves into historical-pastoral romance.21

Politically self-conscious critic Terence Hawkes, meanwhile, focuses on the significance of Wales in the play’s various articulations of nationhood:

After all, any future “mixing” of Roman and British ways of life is surely implicitly to be modelled on and judged by the success or otherwise of the prior mixing of the cultures of Wales and England. This, evidently, is the point the Welsh setting seeks to affirm. And that raises a major difficulty in Cymbeline. Assertions of an achieved Britishness certainly abound … But where are the Welsh? Even though two-thirds of the play is set in Wales, we meet no native-born Welsh people there—unless we count the two “beggars” of whom Innogen asks directions [3.6.8–9]. Their status may be significant.22

There has also been an interest in seeing the play as a Jacobean panegyric, and many commentators have felt that it is utterly confusing until placed in the context of the historical circumstances of James I’s reign:

Cymbeline (in Shakespeare, though not in Holinshed) has one daughter and two sons; so did James I. James’s elder son, Henry, was created Prince of Wales in 1610, and some editors point to 1610 as a likely date for Cymbeline; and in connexion with the stress on peace with which the play closes, it is perhaps of interest that 1610 was the only year, of this period, in which all the European states were at peace. Lastly, Cymbeline’s final submission to Rome, even after he has won the war against the Romans, might have had some topical value in view of James’s efforts to enter into friendly negotiations with Papal Rome … the audience must have made a complex identification: the peace is both the peace of the world at the time of Christ’s birth, in which Britain participates, and also its attempted re-creation at the very time of the play’s performance, with Jacobus Pacificus—who was a figure of Augustus—on the throne.23

In the politically devolved Britain of the twenty-first century, G. Wilson Knight’s slippage, in the passage quoted earlier, from “England” to “Britain” looks sloppy. And it certainly would not have made sense to Shakespeare and his original audiences, for whom 1603 was a turning point, as Queen Elizabeth of England was succeeded by King James VI of Scotland and I of England, with his project to unite the two nations into a new “Britain.”

In summary, then: as well as being a pastoral fantasy and a fairy story, complete with wicked stepmother and poison (which, thanks to an honest-hearted physician, turns out to be mere sleeping potion), Cymbeline is a play about the Romans in Britain, under the auspices of the god Jupiter. The title in the Folio contents list is “Cymbeline King of Britain.” Shakespeare’s other King of Britain was Lear, who made the mistake of dividing his kingdom in three. Cymbeline may have been placed among the tragedies by the editors of the Folio because it traverses the same elevated ground of national history and destiny. But whereas the disarray of the divided nation in Lear is a negative example, perhaps intended to make the play’s original audience feel relief that King James had recently united the thrones of Scotland and England, the resolution of Cymbeline is altogether positive: “Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.”

Cymbeline was supposed to have been king of Britain in the year when Christ was born; at that time, the Roman emperor was Augustus. Shakespeare’s audience would have known that Augustus was the Caesar to whom Cymbeline agrees to pay tribute money, despite the miraculous victory of the British when Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus (otherwise known as Morgan, Polydore, and Cadwal) hold the road against apparently insurmountable odds. The end of the play heralds an “Augustan peace,” in which Britain is imagined as the equal of Rome. Milford Haven in Wales is a vital location and point of reference in the play. The more historically and politically literate members of Shakespeare’s original audience would have recalled that it was the port where Henry Tudor—the Richmond of Richard III and the future King Henry VII—landed in 1485, the year that brought the Wars of the Roses to an end and established the Tudor dynasty that turned the tables on modern Rome and began to establish an image of their nation as the divinely chosen Christian successor-empire to that of Augustus.

Imagine King James watching the play: he would have seen himself as a composite version of Cymbeline and Augustus, both a British king and a neo-Roman emperor. From the point of view of characterization, the part of King Cymbeline is astonishingly underwritten. His interior life is never opened to us, as is that of Lear or, in this play, Princess Innogen. All he seems to do in the long closing scene is ask questions, express amazement, and pronounce benediction. This makes sense if he is intended to offer an oblique representation of James, King of Britain. It would not do to inquire too closely into the monarch’s interior life. Instead, Cymbeline is the ideal spectator: during a court performance, the King would have been sitting at the focal point of the hall. In a production that works, his amazement, his questions, and his acceptance are also ours.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.