ABSTRACT
No one seems to know quite what to make of Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline. As one scholar has noted, the play seems to require that the reader “accept an element of the esoteric” when turning to the task of its interpretation.1 At once a British play and a Roman play, it combines elements of history and romance, tragedy and comedy. The play resists simple classification. To the extent that scholars and critics have engaged the play in recent years, their focus has been almost entirely extra-textual, treating either the sources of the play or its place within the context of the Shakespearean canon.2 To read such scholarship, one might be inclined to concur with Johnson’s dismissal of the play as “unresisting imbecility” full of “faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.”3 And yet the play concludes with what may very well be the most carefully crafted, comprehensive, and theatrically satisfying of Shakespeare’s finales, a virtuoso display demonstrating the capacity of a mature artist to bring about unity and concord from what must otherwise appear to be a chaotic convergence of multiple plotlines presented as a series of disorganized, meandering episodes.
