'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun, / Nor the furious winter's rages'
The funeral song spoken over the supposedly dead Fidele by Guiderius and Arviragus
Shakespeare · Late romances
Cymbeline
c. 1610–11
Late romance — Holinshed's ancient Britain crossed with a wager plot from Boccaccio's Decameron
A British king's daughter secretly marries a poor gentleman and her father banishes him to Rome, where he is goaded into betting on her chastity. A smooth Italian hides in a trunk in her bedchamber, steals a bracelet and describes a mole on her breast, and the husband orders her murder. Disguise, a sleeping potion, a headless corpse, two long-lost princes in a Welsh cave, a Roman invasion and a god descending on an eagle are all resolved in a final scene of some two dozen revelations.
How to spot them
- ▸Ancient Britain, refusing tribute to Augustus Caesar, with a battle in a narrow lane
- ▸A wager on a wife's chastity, settled by a man hidden in a trunk in her bedroom
- ▸Two princes stolen in infancy and raised in a Welsh cave by a banished lord
- ▸A heroine disguised as a page called Fidele, waking beside a headless body she takes for her husband
- ▸Jupiter descends on an eagle and throws down a tablet of prophecy
Scenes, characters & lines
'Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings'
The aubade sung beneath the princess's window by Cloten's hired musicians
A man hides in a trunk carried into a bedchamber and notes a mole under the sleeper's breast
Iachimo's false proof, taken with the bracelet slipped from her arm
A king's stepson is beheaded and his body mistaken for a husband's
Cloten, killed by Guiderius while wearing Posthumus's clothes
Two boys and an old man hold a narrow lane against a Roman army
Belarius and the princes turn the battle, a story Shakespeare took from Holinshed's Scots
A god descends on an eagle and leaves a riddling tablet on the sleeper's breast
Jupiter appears to Posthumus in prison, in a scene some editors have doubted is Shakespeare's
A queen's poison turns out to be a sleeping draught given her by her doctor
Cornelius substitutes the potion, so Imogen only appears to die
Key ideas
- It recycles devices from across the canon — the wager, the disguised heroine, the sleeping potion, the banished courtier — and knowingly piles them up
- Britain's refusal of Roman tribute, and then its voluntary payment, flatters James I's vision of a peaceable united Britain
Quick-fire facts
- •Simon Forman saw a performance, probably in 1611, shortly before his death
- •The First Folio calls it 'The Tragedie of Cymbeline' and prints it last of all thirty-six plays
- •The heroine is Imogen in the Folio; many modern editors print Innogen, arguing the Folio name is a misreading
- •The wager plot comes from Boccaccio's Decameron, second day, ninth story; the British history from Holinshed's Cunobelinus
- •The last scene contains roughly two dozen separate revelations, often cited as the most crowded denouement in Shakespeare
- •Tennyson is said to have died with a volume of Shakespeare open at Cymbeline, and a copy was placed in his coffin
- •George Bernard Shaw rewrote the final act in 1937 as Cymbeline Refinished
- •Samuel Johnson dismissed the plot's 'unresisting imbecility', while later critics have prized its strangeness
Drill it — 9 cards
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