The Integrity of Shakespeare: Illustrated from Cymbeline

Summary

Of all the plays in the Shakespeare canon there is, perhaps, not one which, at first sight, presents quite such a glorious conglomeration of styles as Cymbeline. It is not surprising, therefore, that a vigorous tradition of doubt exists, that Furness and Granville-Barker in the twentieth century found themselves rejecting as non-Shakespearian all those things which Pope and Hanmer had already disposed of in the eighteenth. Hence, conjecture has played merrily around a lost play which Shakespeare half-heartedly refashioned; a collaborator; a Shakespeare bored to death; a Shakespeare drunk with the new wine which Beaumont and Fletcher were pouring into old bottles. It is unlikely that any of these possibilities will long survive in the convictions of any reader who cares to work through the complex body of source material which lies behind Cymbeline, for, pace Dr Johnson and his followers, the construction of the play, when viewed in relation to the basic raw material, is altogether too uniform to admit of more than a single creative activity—and one that is neither drunk nor bored.