The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Cymbeline with Annotations and a General Introduction by Sidney Lee
By William Shakespeare
Introduction
If it could be assumed, with any strong probability, that
"Cymbeline," which ends the First Folio, was really the last play
which Shakespeare wrote, several difficulties which present
themselves in connection with it might be resolved at once. It
contains one of the most perfect of Shakespeare's women, two
gallant boys, a notable villain; with rapid, summarising studies in
jealousy, a murderous queen, a royal clown, done as if from memory
or on second thoughts. There are pastoral scenes in it which can
only be compared with the pastoral scenes in "The Winter's Tale";
and they are written in verse of the same free and happy cadence.
Yet the play is thrown together loosely, rather as if it were a
novel, to be read, than a play, to be acted. The action is
complicated here, neglected there. A scene of sixteen lines is
introduced to say that the tribunes are required to raise more
forces for the war, and that Lucius is to be general. The last
scene is five hundred lines long, and has to do as much business as
all the rest of the play. The playwright seems no longer to have
patience with his medium; it is as if his interest had gone out of
it, and he were using it as the only makeshift at hand.
Most artists, at the end of their careers, become discontented with
the form in which they have worked. They have succeeded through
obedience to this form, but it seems to them that a rarer success
lies, uncaptured, outside those limits. They are tempted by what
seems lawless in life itself; by what is certainly various and
elastic in life. They are impatient with the slowness of results,
with their rigidity, inside those inexorable limits. The technique
which they have perfected seems to them too perfect; something
cries out of chains, and they would set the voice, or Ariel, free.
That spirit, I think, we see in the later plays of Shakespeare, in
which not only does metre dissolve and reform, in some new,
fluctuant way of its own, but the whole structure becomes vaporous,
and floats out through the solid walls of the theatre. Even "The
Tempest," when I have seen it acted, lost the greater part of its
magic, and was no longer that "cloudcapt" promontory in "faery seas
forlorn," the last foothold of human life on the edge of the world.
What sense of loss do we feel when we see "Othello" acted?
"Othello" has nothing to lose; the playwright has never forgotten
the walls of his theatre. In "Cymbeline" he is frankly tired of
them.
"Cymbeline" is a romance, made out of Holinshed, and Boccaccio, and
perhaps nursery stories, and it is that happiest kind of romance...
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