Cymbeline was one of Shakespeare's more popular plays during the eighteenth century, though critics including Samuel Johnson took issue with its complex plot:
This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.[13]
William Hazlitt and John Keats, however, numbered it among their favourite plays.
By the early twentieth century, the play had lost favour. Lytton Strachey found it "difficult to resist the conclusion that [Shakespeare] was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams."[14]
In 1937, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote Cymbeline Refinished, that rewrites the final act of the play. Shaw commented on the play 1896, in one fiery critique stating it was:
"stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modem intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all tolerance."[15]
Shaw however would go on to reform his opinion of the play after his rewriting of the ending, yet he remained firmly of the opinion that the final act was disastrous, writing in 1946 that it was "one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays" but "goes to pieces in the final act." Harley Granville-Barker, who found success as an actor in Shaw's plays had similar views, saying that the play shows that Shakespeare was becoming a "wearied artist".[14]
Some have argued that the play parodies its own content. Harold Bloom wrote that "Cymbeline, in my judgment, is partly a Shakespearean self-parody; many of his prior plays and characters are mocked by it."[16]
British identity
Similarities between Cymbeline and historical accounts of the Roman Emperor Augustus have prompted critics to interpret the play as Shakespeare voicing support for the political notions of James I, who considered himself the "British Augustus."[17] His political manoeuvres to unite Scotland with England and Wales as an empire mirror Augustus' Pax Romana.[18] The play reinforces the Jacobean idea that Britain is the successor to the civilised virtue of ancient Rome, portraying the parochialism and isolationism of Cloten and the Queen as villainous.[19] Other critics have resisted the idea that Cymbeline endorses James I's ideas about national identity, pointing to several characters' conflicted constructions of their geographic identities. For example, although Guiderius and Arviragus are the sons of Cymbeline, a British king raised in Rome, they grew up in a Welsh cave. The brothers lament their isolation from society, a quality associated with barbarousness, but Belarius, their adoptive father, retorts that this has spared them from corrupting influences of the supposedly civilised British court.[20]
Iachimo's invasion of Imogen's bedchamber may reflect concern that Britain was being maligned by Italian influence.[21] According to Peter A. Parolin, Cymbeline’s scenes ostensibly set in ancient Rome may be anachronistic portrayals of sixteenth-century Italy, which was characterised by contemporary British authors as a place where vice, debauchery, and treachery had supplanted the virtue of ancient Rome.[19][22] Though Cymbeline concludes with a peace forged between Britain and Rome, Iachimo's corruption of Posthumus and metaphorical rape of Imogen may demonstrate fears that Great Britain's political union with other cultures might expose Britons to harmful foreign influences.[19][23]
Gender and sexuality
Scholars have emphasised that the play attributes great political significance to Imogen's virginity and chastity.[24][25] There is some debate as to whether Imogen and Posthumus's marriage is legitimate.[24] Imogen has historically been played and received as an ideal, chaste woman maintaining qualities applauded in a patriarchal structure; however, critics argue that Imogen's actions contradict these social definitions through her defiance of her father and her cross-dressing.[26] Yet critics including Tracey Miller-Tomlinson have emphasised the ways in which the play upholds patriarchal ideology, including in the final scene, with its panoply of male victors.[26][27] Whilst Imogen and Posthumus's marriage at first upholds heterosexual norms, their separation and final reunion leave open non-heterosexual possibilities, initially exposed by Imogen's cross-dressing as Fidele. Miller-Tomlinson points out the falseness of their social significance as a "perfect example" of a public "heterosexual marriage", considering that their private relations turn out to be "homosocial, homoerotic, and hermaphroditic."[27]
Queer theory has gained traction in scholarship on Cymbeline, building upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.[28][29][30] Scholarship on this topic has emphasised the play's Ovidian allusions and exploration of non-normative gender/sexuality – achieved through separation from traditional society into what Valerie Traub terms "green worlds."[28] Amongst the most obvious and frequently cited examples of this non-normative dimension of the play is the prominence of homoeroticism, as seen in Guiderius and Arviragus's semi-sexual fascination with the disguised Imogen/Fidele.[31] In addition to homoerotic and homosocial elements, the subjects of hermaphroditism and paternity/maternity also feature prominently in queer interpretations of Cymbeline.[32][33][34][35] Janet Adelman set the tone for the intersection of paternity and hermaphroditism in arguing that Cymbeline's lines, "oh, what am I, / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more", amount a "parthenogenesis fantasy".[36][37][38] According to Adelman and Tracey Miller-Tomlinson, in taking sole credit for the creation of his children Cymbeline acts a hermaphrodite who transforms a maternal function into a patriarchal strategy by regaining control of his male heirs and daughter, Imogen.[39][32] Imogen's own experience with gender fluidity and cross-dressing has largely been interpreted through a patriarchal lens.[40][41] Unlike other Shakespearean agents of onstage gender fluidity – Portia, Rosalind, Viola and Julia – Imogen is not afforded empowerment upon her transformation into Fidele.[41] Instead, Imogen's power is inherited from her father and based upon the prospect of reproduction.[41]
