ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline has been read in a number of ways: as romance, tragedy, history play – even as farce. The First Folio boldly inscribes it among the Tragedies: a hint followed by Gabriele Baldini, in his translation, back in 1963, of the whole Shakespeare canon into a beautiful, and deeply-learned, literary Italian.1 In our tentative re-reading of Cymbeline as a Roman play, we are therefore only adding yet a new entry, as to genre, to an already long list of possibilities, authorized in so doing by the paramount importance of Rome in the action of the play. But there is also something more specific than a simple thematic coincidence to be taken into account, once we set Cymbeline, ideally, against the background of the better-established Roman plays, its antecedents in time. This last of Shakespeare’s stagings of old Rome is, in its own way, a one-off: the British ‘matter’ here comes to the fore on a par with the Roman, for a long time its ideal touchstone. It is no longer to be caught through tropes and allusions, as, for instance, in Julius Caesar. Rome and Britain are not only put face to face, finally and openly, but, for once, the invincible Roman army is vanquished by an external enemy. Its defeat is not the outcome of intestine wars. The subjected Britons, located at the periphery of the Empire, now have the upper hand over its powerful centre, situated in Rome. The balance of power has been inverted.
