THE COPY FOR CYMBELINE, 1623

Summary

‘The Tragedie of Cymbeline’ is the last play in the First Folio. It is certainly not what we should call a tragedy, and it has been suggested that its appearance in this class may have been ‘the result of late receipt of the “copy” in the printing-house’. Greg, indeed, thinks that it may have been ‘through a misunderstanding that Jaggard placed it at the end of the volume instead of the section [containing the comedies]’ to which The Winter's Tale was added at a late stage. This is possible, but it cannot be regarded as certain. Heminge and Condell had denied themselves the convenient category of ‘tragi-comedy’, and, though Cymbeline seems to us to fall naturally into the same class as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, it contains weightier public and historical matter, so that it is not inconceivable that the placing of it among the tragedies was the deliberate choice of what seemed the lesser evil.

The Folio text is free from any marked idiosyncrasies. In 1942, it suggested to Greg ‘a prompt-book that has taken over progressively more of the author's original directions for production’. In 1955, while still seeing ‘behind F the company's prompt-book as it stood in the early twenties’, he thought that ‘the actual copy may, of course, have been an ad hoc transcript’.