Cymbeline

Summary

Cymbeline, written about 1609-1610 and seen at the Globe by the astrologer-physician Simon Forman before his death in 1611, is one of Shakespeare's late romances, though the First Folio of 1623 printed it last among the tragedies. It is set in ancient Britain under King Cymbeline (the historical Cunobelinus), who in the play's chronology reigns in the time of Augustus Caesar, and it braids together three stories: a slandered wife, two lost princes, and a quarrel with Rome over tribute. Imogen, Cymbeline's only remaining child, has secretly married Posthumus Leonatus, a gentleman of no fortune raised at court, instead of Cloten, the boorish son of her stepmother the Queen. Cymbeline banishes Posthumus. In Rome he boasts of his wife's chastity, and the Italian Iachimo wagers that he can seduce her. Rebuffed at court, Iachimo has himself carried into Imogen's bedchamber in a trunk, notes the room and a mole on her breast while she sleeps, steals the bracelet Posthumus gave her, and returns to claim his winnings. Posthumus believes him, rails against all women, and writes to his servant Pisanio ordering him to kill Imogen at Milford Haven in Wales. Pisanio cannot do it. He shows Imogen the letter, dresses her as a youth, and gives her a box the Queen had handed him as a restorative. The Queen had in fact asked her physician Cornelius for poison, but he, distrusting her, gave her a drug that only counterfeits death. Lost in the Welsh hills, Imogen, now calling herself Fidele, is taken in by Belarius, a banished lord, and two young men she does not know are her brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, whom Belarius stole from Cymbeline in infancy. Cloten, pursuing Imogen in Posthumus's clothes, quarrels with Guiderius and is beheaded. Imogen swallows the drug, is found apparently dead, and is laid beside Cloten's headless body while the brothers sing 'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun'. She wakes, takes the corpse for her husband, and joins the Roman general Lucius as his page. Rome invades over the unpaid tribute. Posthumus, repentant though he still believes Imogen guilty, fights for Britain disguised as a peasant, and with Belarius and the princes turns the battle; then he lets himself be imprisoned as a Roman, prays for death, and sees in a dream his dead family and Jupiter descending on an eagle, who leaves him a cryptic tablet. In the long final scene the Queen's death and confession are reported, Iachimo confesses, identities are revealed one after another, the lost princes are restored, Posthumus pardons Iachimo, and Cymbeline, though victorious, agrees to pay the tribute. 'Pardon's the word to all.' The play mixes court intrigue, pastoral, battle, theophany and comedy of recognition in a way some critics have found deliberately extravagant. It rewards attention to forgiveness, to faithful service that disobeys a wicked command, and to a peace sealed not by conquest but by reconciliation.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: A secret marriage, a banishment, and a wager

  Cymbeline banishes Posthumus for marrying Imogen; the lovers exchange a ring and a bracelet. The Queen plots for Cloten and obtains what she thinks are poisons from Cornelius, who secretly substitutes a sleeping drug. In Rome Iachimo wagers ten thousand ducats against Posthumus's ring that he can win Imogen. At the British court he slanders Posthumus to her, is rebuked, pretends he was only testing her, and asks her to keep a trunk of valuables overnight.

• Act II: The trunk, the mole, and the proof

  Iachimo creeps from the trunk, inventories the bedchamber, and takes the bracelet while Imogen sleeps, observing the 'mole cinque-spotted' on her breast. Cloten serenades her with 'Hark, hark! the lark' and is scorned. In Rome Iachimo describes the chamber and produces the bracelet; Posthumus gives up the ring and, alone, denounces 'the woman's part' in himself and all men.

• Act III: Tribute refused and a journey to Milford Haven

  Cymbeline, urged by the Queen and Cloten, refuses Rome's tribute, and the Roman ambassador Lucius declares war. Pisanio receives the order to kill Imogen, lures her toward Milford Haven, shows her the letter, and persuades her to disguise herself as a boy. In Wales Belarius reveals to the audience that the young hunters he calls Polydore and Cadwal are Cymbeline's stolen sons. Imogen, starving, enters their cave and is welcomed as Fidele.

• Act IV: The headless body and the dirge

  Guiderius kills Cloten and throws his head into the stream. Imogen, heart-sick, takes the Queen's drug and falls into apparent death. The brothers lay her beside Cloten's body with flowers and speak the dirge 'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun'. Waking, she mistakes the headless corpse in Posthumus's clothes for her husband and blames Pisanio; Lucius takes her into service. At court the Queen falls into fever and madness at Cloten's absence.

• Act V: Battle, the vision of Jupiter, and the great recognition

  Posthumus, grieving and penitent, fights for Britain as a peasant, saves the King with Belarius and the princes, then is captured as a Roman. In prison his dead parents and brothers appeal to Jupiter, who descends and promises his restoration. In Cymbeline's tent Cornelius reports the Queen's confession and death; Iachimo confesses; Imogen and Posthumus are reunited; Belarius restores the princes; the Soothsayer interprets the tablet; and Cymbeline makes peace with Rome and pays the tribute.

Characters

• Imogen, heroine, Cymbeline's daughter

  Faithful, quick-witted and brave; she marries for love, rejects Iachimo and Cloten, survives slander and apparent death disguised as the boy Fidele, and forgives her husband. Some modern editions spell her name Innogen.

• Posthumus Leonatus, Imogen's husband

  An orphan raised at court, worthy but rash; he stakes his wife's honour on a wager, orders her death on false evidence, then repents before he learns the truth.

• Cymbeline, King of Britain

  A king deceived by his second wife, who has lost two sons and banished his son-in-law; he ends by learning pardon.

• The Queen, Cymbeline's second wife

  An unnamed schemer who studies poisons under Cornelius, flatters the King, and plots to put her son on the throne; she dies mad and confessing.

• Cloten, the Queen's son

  A vain, violent prince who pursues Imogen and plans to rape her in her husband's clothes; he is killed by Guiderius.

• Iachimo, Italian deceiver

  A clever cynic who wins the wager by trickery, is later defeated by Posthumus in battle, and confesses in the final scene.

• Pisanio, Posthumus's servant

  A loyal servant who refuses his master's command to murder, protects Imogen, and is wrongly suspected by nearly everyone.

• Cornelius, court physician

  The doctor who, distrusting the Queen, gives her a sleeping draught instead of poison and later reports her confession.

• Belarius (Morgan), banished lord

  Wrongly exiled twenty years earlier, he stole the King's infant sons and raised them in a Welsh cave as his own.

• Guiderius (Polydore) and Arviragus (Cadwal), Cymbeline's lost sons

  Princes raised as hunters whose royal nature shows through their rustic upbringing; they shelter Fidele and fight for Britain.

• Caius Lucius, Roman general

  An honourable enemy who demands the tribute, takes Fidele into service, and is spared at the end.

Lessons

• Iachimo's inventory: evidence that is true and false at once

  Everything Iachimo reports to Posthumus is accurate: the tapestry, the chimney-piece, the bracelet, the mole. The conclusion he draws is a lie. The trunk scene lets students watch a deceiver gather true details to prove a false charge, and Posthumus's quick surrender shows what happens when a man trusts appearances over his knowledge of a person's character. Pisanio's speech on slander, 'whose edge is sharper than the sword', names the harm.

  • What exactly does Iachimo see in Imogen's bedchamber, and what does he claim it proves?
  • Why does Posthumus believe him so quickly? What could he have asked?
  • How does the play distinguish evidence from proof? Can you think of a modern example of accurate details used to support a false claim?

• Pisanio and Cornelius: faithful disobedience

  Two servants refuse wicked commands. Cornelius, asked for poison by the Queen, gives her a harmless sleeping drug; Pisanio, ordered to murder Imogen, protects her instead. Posthumus later learns the lesson himself: 'Every good servant does not all commands; / No bond but to do just ones.' The play honours loyalty that serves a master's true good rather than his passing will, a principle with clear roots in Christian teaching on obedience and conscience.

  • Cornelius deceives the Queen. Is his deception justified? What limits would you set on it?
  • Why does Pisanio not simply refuse openly or tell the King?
  • How does Posthumus's line about good servants change your judgment of his earlier command?

• Nature and nurture in the Welsh cave

  Guiderius and Arviragus have been raised as hunters, yet Belarius marvels at the 'invisible instinct' of royalty in them. The cave scenes set the simplicity of the mountains against the flattery of court, but they do not idealise wildness: the brothers long to see the world, and Guiderius beheads Cloten without a pause. Students can weigh what upbringing shapes, what birth gives, and what each person must still choose.

  • What does Belarius praise in the life of the cave, and what do the brothers complain they lack?
  • Compare Cloten, raised at court, with the princes raised in the wild. What does Shakespeare suggest about breeding and character?
  • Is Guiderius's killing of Cloten heroic, justified, or rash?

• 'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun': a dirge for one who is not dead

  The brothers' song over Fidele is among Shakespeare's most quoted lyrics: the dead are beyond heat, winter, tyranny and labour, and all, 'golden lads and girls', come to dust. Its beauty is heightened by dramatic irony, since the audience knows Fidele is drugged and alive. The scene invites close reading of form (alternating stanzas, plain monosyllables, refrain) and reflection on how the play leads through apparent death to restoration.

  • What things does the song say the dead need no longer fear? Which surprise you?
  • How does knowing that Imogen is alive change the way we hear the song?
  • Where else in the play does a character seem lost or dead and then return? What pattern do these returns make?

• 'Pardon's the word to all': repentance, forgiveness and peace

  Posthumus repents in prison before he knows Imogen is innocent, offering his life and asking whether sorrow is enough. In the last scene he spares Iachimo; Cymbeline, though he has won the battle, pays the tribute and makes peace with Rome. Shakespeare's chronicle sources place Cymbeline's reign in the age of Augustus and the birth of Christ, and some readers see the closing universal peace as alluding to it, though the play never names Christ. The ending shows forgiveness as costly and freely given, not a denial that wrong was done.

  • In prison Posthumus asks, 'Is't enough I am sorry?' How does the play answer him?
  • Why does Posthumus forgive Iachimo, and why does Cymbeline pay a tribute he no longer has to pay?
  • Does the play's final peace feel earned or contrived? Support your answer with the final scene.

Context

Cymbeline combines three sources. The British history of Cymbeline (Cunobelinus, who ruled much of south-east Britain in the early first century AD), his sons Guiderius and Arviragus, and the dispute over Roman tribute come from Holinshed's Chronicles, which drew on Geoffrey of Monmouth; Holinshed notes that Christ was born during his reign. The wager plot comes from Boccaccio's Decameron (Day 2, Story 9), probably with an English derivative, Frederyke of Jennen. The banished lord who raises the lost princes echoes the anonymous play The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (printed 1589). Shakespeare's mingling of an ancient Roman-British past with a Renaissance Italian present is deliberate anachronism. The play's interest in British union and peace with Rome has been linked to James I's promotion of a united 'Britain' after 1603.

Composition

The earliest record is Simon Forman's account, in his Booke of Plaies, of a performance he saw, probably at the Globe in 1611 (Forman died in September 1611). Style and its close kinship with The Winter's Tale and Pericles point to composition around 1609-1610, possibly for the King's Men's new indoor Blackfriars theatre as well as the Globe. The only early text is the First Folio (1623), where the play is titled The Tragedie of Cymbeline and placed last among the tragedies. The Folio divides acts and scenes; the Project Gutenberg text used here subdivides some scenes differently from most modern editions.

Reception

Samuel Johnson dismissed the plot's 'unresisting imbecility', but Imogen became a favourite heroine of the nineteenth century: Hazlitt and Swinburne praised her, Ellen Terry played her for Henry Irving in 1896, and Tennyson was reported to have died with the play beside him in 1892. George Bernard Shaw rewrote the last act as Cymbeline Refinished (1937). Twentieth-century criticism, from G. Wilson Knight's The Crown of Life onward, read the romances as a coherent late phase concerned with loss, recovery and reconciliation. The play was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 26.

Comparisons

• Othello

  Both plays turn on a husband persuaded by a manipulative Italian that his wife is unfaithful and on a stolen token offered as proof. Othello carries out the murder and learns the truth too late; Posthumus orders it, is saved by Pisanio's disobedience, and repents before he knows his wife is innocent, which moves the story from tragedy to romance.

• The Winter's Tale

  Written within a year or two of each other, both romances feature a wife wrongly accused, a long separation, children lost and recovered, and a closing recognition scene. The Winter's Tale hides its heroine as a statue for sixteen years; Cymbeline crowds its many revelations into one long, almost comic final scene.

• Romeo and Juliet

  Both plays use a drug that counterfeits death and a heroine who wakes beside a body. Friar Laurence's potion leads to the lovers' deaths; Cornelius's substitute, prepared from distrust of the Queen, preserves Imogen's life, a reversal that shows how the romance form handles the same device.

• King Lear

  Both are set in a legendary pre-Christian Britain drawn from Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and both begin with a king who misjudges his children's loyalty. Lear ends in the loss of Cordelia; Cymbeline ends with daughter and sons restored.

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre

  Pericles, written shortly before Cymbeline, shares its episodic structure, its apparent deaths, and its divine intervention (Diana in Pericles, Jupiter in Cymbeline). Both prepare for Shakespeare's last romances by treating suffering as a passage to restoration.

• Much Ado About Nothing

  In both plays a chaste woman is slandered by evidence staged or reported to her betrothed, and a pretended death (Hero's arranged by the Friar, Imogen's by a drug) opens the way to repentance and reunion.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's most useful plays for the history of medicine and medical ethics. The court physician Cornelius is asked by the Queen, his former pupil in distilling and preserving, for slow poisons she says she will test on animals; he warns that such trials will harden her heart, suspects her motives, and substitutes a drug whose effect is only 'the locking up the spirits a time', an early stage portrait of a doctor who refuses to become an instrument of murder and does so by deception. The resulting death-like sleep drives the fourth act. Imogen calls herself 'heart-sick', and Belarius judges that Fidele died of melancholy. The Queen falls into 'a fever' and 'a madness' at her son's absence and dies 'with horror, madly dying', confessing her plan to poison the King with a slow 'mortal mineral'. Posthumus calls death 'the sure physician' and in prison has a vision he cannot distinguish from dream. Retrospective readings of the Queen's madness or Imogen's melancholy are interpretive; the play presents them in the humoral and moral terms of its own time.

• Act 1, Scene 6 (Gutenberg numbering; Act 1, Scene 5 in most modern editions)

  The Queen receives 'poisonous compounds' from Cornelius and proposes to test them on animals; Cornelius warns her and, aside, reveals that he has given her a drug that only counterfeits death. She then gives the box to Pisanio as a cordial that has saved the King's life.

  Physicians Doctors Pharmacology Poisons Medical Ethics
• Act 2, Scene 2

  Iachimo invokes sleep as the 'ape of death' while Imogen sleeps; the scene's image of a sleeper as a funeral monument foreshadows her later apparent death.

  Sleep Insomnia Death Dying
• Act 4, Scene 2

  Imogen, 'heart-sick', swallows the drug and is found apparently dead; Belarius attributes the death to melancholy; the dirge names 'physic' among the things that come to dust; she wakes believing she is dreaming and finds the headless body.

  Pharmacology Poisons Melancholia Depression Grief Death Dying Dreams Nightmares
• Act 4, Scene 3

  Cymbeline reports that the Queen lies in a fever and a madness at the absence of her son, in danger of her life.

  Fever Infection Madness Psychosis
• Act 5, Scene 4

  Posthumus in prison welcomes death as 'the sure physician' who frees one sick of the gout, then sees in sleep his family's ghosts and Jupiter.

  Death Dying Dreams Nightmares
• Act 5, Scene 5

  Cornelius reports the Queen's mad death and confession, including a slow mineral poison meant for the King, and explains the sleeping drug; Cymbeline reflects that medicine may prolong life but death seizes the doctor too.

  Physicians Doctors Pharmacology Poisons Madness Psychosis Medical Ethics

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Cornelius's private journal entry on the evening he gives the Queen the box: what he suspects, why he chose deception rather than refusal, and what he fears if he is wrong.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Pisanio and Imogen on the road to Milford Haven, before he shows her the letter, in which he tries and fails to find the right words.

• Essay

  Shakespeare places Iachimo, Posthumus, Pisanio and Cornelius in situations where truth and loyalty conflict. Which character acts most rightly, and on what principle? Use at least three scenes.

• Poetry

  Write a dirge of your own in the form of 'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun': four-beat lines, alternating speakers, each stanza naming something the dead no longer need to fear.

• Classroom

  List every disguise, false identity and revelation in the play on a chart. Then stage the final scene's recognitions in order and discuss which revelation unlocks which.

Further Reading

• The Decameron (Day 2, Story 9), Giovanni Boccaccio

  The tale of Bernabò and Zinevra, source of the wager plot, the chest, and the disguised wife.

• The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Raphael Holinshed

  Shakespeare's source for Cymbeline's reign, the princes, and the Roman tribute.

• The Crown of Life, G. Wilson Knight

  A 1947 study of Shakespeare's final plays, with an influential chapter on Cymbeline's British and visionary themes.

• Cymbeline Refinished, George Bernard Shaw

  Shaw's 1937 rewriting of the final act, with a preface criticising the original.