ABSTRACT
This chapter draws the distinction between what the tiny handful of ruling elite wished people to understand and what those people, encouraged by the imaginative playground that is the play, might actually be thinking. It considers the textual evidence for the early stage history of Cymbeline, and examines the process that lay behind the production. Press reactions to John Barton's production at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1974 indicate that the British resistance to Rome had been presented as a series of jokes against Britain's membership of the Common Market, the precursor to the European Union. Theatre historians and reviewers alike look to some of the more exciting productions of Shakespeare originating abroad in languages other than English and assume that it is the fact of having been set free from the original words that is so productive.
