Theatrical Virtuosity and Poetic Complexity in ‘Cymbeline’

Summary

In much the most helpful criticism of Cymbeline that I know, James Sutherland isolates two contrasting styles, one ‘impetuous, violent, straining after the maximum of intensity’, the other a ‘natural, easy, and unforced’ style. He describes illuminatingly the ‘new recklessness of expression’ in Arviragus’s

the bier at door,

And a demand who is’t shall die, I’ld say

My father, not this youth’:

(IV, ii, 22–4).

Undertakers do not come round to the door like dustmen to demand a corpse - a corpse, too, that is not yet dead when they arrive. What Shakespeare has to express is an avowal of love that will go a stage further than that just made by Guiderius. . . Clutching at some means to express this thought powerfully, Shakespeare moves naturally enough to a choice between life and death, a choice involving the (supposed) father of Guiderius on the one hand and the boy on the other. . .