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Date and text

Cymbeline cannot be precisely dated. The Yale edition suggests a collaborator had a hand in the authorship, and some scenes (e.g. Act III scene 7 and Act V scene 2) may strike the reader as particularly un-Shakespearean when compared with others. The play shares notable similarities in language, situation and plot with Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, (c.1609–10). Both plays concern themselves with a princess who, after disobeying her father in order to marry a lowly lover, is wrongly accused of infidelity and thus ordered to be murdered, before escaping and having her faithfulness proven. Furthermore, both were written for the same theatre company and audience^[3]. Some scholars believe this supports a dating of approximately 1609, though it is not clear which play preceded the other.^[4] Cymbeline was first published in the First Folio in 1623 but the first recorded production, as noted by Simon Forman, was in April 1611^[5].

Some have taken the convoluted plot as evidence of the play's parodic origins. In Act V Scene IV, "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt." After stating that Posthumus's fortunes will improve, Jupiter returns to heaven on his eagle.

Though once held in very high regard Cymbeline has lost favour over the past century. Some have held that Shakespeare, by frivolously spinning absurd tales, merely wrote it to amuse himself.^[6] William Hazlitt and John Keats, however, number it among their favorite plays. It is sometimes referred to as a "problem play", because its central character confronts a specific moral or social concern.

The editors of the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare believe the name of Imogen is a misspelling of Innogen—they draw several comparisons between Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, in which a ghost character named Innogen was supposed to be Leonato's wife (Posthumus being also known as "Leonatus", the Latin form of the Italian name in the other play). Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson point out that Holinshed's Chronicles, which Shakespeare used as a source, mention an Innogen, and that Forman's eyewitness account of the April 1611 performance refers to "Innogen" throughout.^[5] In spite of these arguments, most editions of the play have continued to use the name Imogen.