ABSTRACT
Cymbeline presents a world in which people very like us, motivated by common human emotions, behave in ways that are often bizarre or extreme. This chapter examines a number of specific instances in the play that take their colour from a range of ritual practices, Christian and pagan. In several instances this intrinsic ecumenicalism explains choices of language that have seemed to other commentators at best decidedly odd and at worst in need of textual emendation. Shakespeare's play, with its historical setting at the dawn of Christianity, its final albeit insecure union between Britain and Rome, and the tension we have already discerned between this ecumenical ideal and ideas about absolute monarchy, is as politically topical in matters of religion as in its Welsh heroic elements. There are some very odd features indeed about the invented funeral rite in Cymbeline, some of which likewise relate to the addressing of the corpse.
