Customer Reviews

Cymbeline: The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford World's Classics)

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"Cymbeline" is my favourite Shakespeare play. It's also probably his loopiest. It has three plots, managing to drag in a banishment, a murder, a wicked queen, a moment of almost sheer pornography, a full-on battle between the Romans and the British, a spunky heroine, her jealous but not-really-all-that-bad husband, some fantastic poetry and Jupiter himself descending out of heaven on an eagle to tell the husband to pull his finger out and get looking for his wife. Finally, just when your head is spinning with all the cross-purposes and dangling resolutions, Shakespeare pulls it all together with shameless neatness and everybody lives happily ever after. Except for the wicked queen, and her son, who had his head cut off in Act 4.

"Cymbeline" is, then, completely nuts, but it manages also to be very moving. Quentin Tarantino once described his method as "placing genre characters in real-life situations" - Shakespeare pulls off the far more rewarding trick of placing realistic characters in genre situations. Kicking off with one of the most brazen bits of expository dialogue he ever created, not even bothering to give the two lords who have to explain the back story an ounce of personality, Shakespeare quickly recovers full control and races through his long, complex and deeply implausible narrative at a headlong pace. The play is outrageously theatrical, and yet intensely observed. Imogen's reaction on reading her husband's false accusation of her infidelity is a riveting mixture of hurt and anger; she goes through as much tragedy as a Juliet, yet is less inclined to buckle and snap under the pressure. When she wakes up next to a headless body that she believes to be her husband, her aria of grief is one of the finest WS ever wrote. No less impressive is her plucky determination to get on with her life, rather than follow her hubby into the grave.

Posthumus, the hubby in question, is made of less attractive stuff, but when he comes to believe that Imogen is dead, as he ordered (this play is full of people getting things wrong and suffering for it), he rejects his earlier jealousy and starts to redeem himself a tad. There's a vicious misogyny near the heart of this play, as Shakespeare biographer Park Honan observed, kept in balance by a hatred of violence against women. The oafish prince Cloten, who lusts after Imogen, is a truly repellent piece of work, without even the intelligence of Iago or the horrified panic of Macbeth; his plan to kill Posthumus and rape Imogen before her husband's body is just about as squalid and vindictive as we expect of this louse, and when a long-lost son of the king (don't even _ask_) lops Cloten's head off, there are cheers all round.

Shakespeare sends himself up all through "Cymbeline". I wonder if the almost ludicrously informative opening exposition scene isn't a bit of a gag on his part, but when a tired and angry Posthumus breaks into rhyming couplets, then catches himself and observes "You have put me into rhyme", we know that Shakespeare is having us on a little. Likewise, the final scene, when all is resolved, goes totally over the top in its piling-on "But-what-of-such-and-such?" and "My-Lord-I-forgot-to-mention" moments.

Yet the moments of terror and pity are deep enough to make the jokiness feel truly earned. When Imogen is laid to rest and her adoptive brothers recite "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" over her body, it's as affecting as any moment in the canon. That she isn't actually dead, we don't find out until a few moments later, but it's still a great moment.

Playful, confusing, enigmatic, funny and shot through with a frightening darkness, this is another top job by the Stratford boy. Well done.

A combination of "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," and "King Lear?" Well somehow, Shakespeare made it work. Like "Romeo and Juliet" we have a protagonist (Imogen) who falls under her father's rages because she will not marry who he wants her to. Like "Much Ado About Nothing," we have a villain (Iachimo) who tries to convince a man (Posthumus) that the woman he loves is full of infidelity. Like "As You Like It," we have exiled people who praise life in the wilderness and a woman who disguises herself as a man to search for her family in the wilderness. Like "King Lear," we have a king who's rages and miscaculated judgement lead to disastorous consequences. What else is there? Only beautiful language, multiple plots, an evil queen who tries to undermind the king, an action filled war, suspense, a dream with visions of Pagan gods, and a beautiful scene of reconciliation at the end. While this is certainly one of Shakespeare's longer plays, it is well worth the time.

This is probably one of the most outdated and misleading of the Arden editions. Nosworthy really doesn't like the play and dismisses it as an experiment leading up to _The Tempest_. Even his editing of the text is affected by his reading of the play. Only scholars who know something about Shakespeare should venture here.

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's least performed and least read plays. You do not stumble on it, you work your way through Shakespeare's opus and finally get there. The historical context is the war between Britain and the Roman Empire, and the action is hot and heavy, requiring five acts and twenty-seven scenes. Perhaps it is this complexity of plot that retarded Shakespeare's character development. Fewer lines have entered our lexicon from this play than most. Two exceptions are "the tongue is sharper than the sword," and to have "a bellyful of fighting." It is an excellent tragedy, however, combining elements of King Lear and elements of Othello. In its mystic elements it also resembles The Tempest.

The core of the plot is the bet between Posthumous, the king's son, and Iachimo, who wagers ten thousand ducats that he can seduce Posthumous' wife, Imogen. Posthumous, in turn, wagers a ring that Imogen has given him that Iachimo will not succeed. Initially, we amused by the idea, but upon further reflection, it is clear that the gambit cannot have a happy ending. Either the seduction is successful, breaking up the marriage, or it isn't, in which case Iachimo will certainly claim that he has secuced Imogen, simply to win the ring. In the process he sets himself the Iago-like task of converting love to hate.

The play is also full of classic Shakespearean gadgetry, including a potion that causes a trance resembling death, mystical soothsayers, the intervention of gods, women disguised as men, and a historical tableau which would have been familiar to Shakespeare's audience. It is a quintessential Shakespearean play, comprising nearly all of the classical elements of tragedy. If the plot could have been pruned, and the characters given more of the dimensionality that we expect from Shakespeare, Cymbeline would stand on a higher pedestal.

The Folger Shakespeare Library's annotated edition is excellent. It provides just the right notation on the page facing the text, and can be studied or ignored to suit the reader's purpose.

Roger Warren's In Performance: Cymbeline provides a thorough, scene by scene (often line by line) description and analysis of some of the most important productions of this wonderful play, beginning with a legendary RSC (or is it NT) production of the sixties, which starred Vanessa Redgrave as Imogen, and other productions at both Stratfords (U.K. and Canada) and the BBC TV version with Helen Mirren, Robert Lindsay, Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Michaels Gough and Pennington. Invaluable as a research tool for this unusually difficult play, both for the scholar looking to make live what he sees on the page, and the theater professional coming to terms with a play that affords being looked at from many possible angles. Highly recommended (and, as a bonus, divertingly written).

Granville-Barker's prefaces to Shakespeare are highly regarded as the first such written from a theatrical (as opposed to literary) point of view. This approach pays particularly high dividends in dealing with this, one of WS's least appreciated plays. (I am currently appearing in a production of it in NYC -- in a small role.) Jan Kott, in describing "Troilus and Cressida" in the 60's, called it "amazing and modern." Cymbeline, in the 90's, seems strikingly post-modern, and Granville Barker, writing in the 20's, accurately describes features of the play which speak strongly to our highly collage-like contemporary approach to art. Highly recommended (as is the Arden edition of the play itself, probably the most charming of all the Arden editions).

The feeling I got reading "Cymbeline" the first time was that this was factory-second Shakespeare, as worthy of the term "problem play" as any. A second reading modifies this somewhat. You get used to its odd twists and turns, its often unlyrical quality. Good things pop up here and there. If the narrative never gels, it does keep moving and winds up in an interesting place.

The gooniness of "Cymbeline" is established early on. The title character, King of England just after a time of Roman rule, banishes from his reign Posthumus, husband of his only daughter, Imogen. Cymbeline is angered she did not choose her own stepbrother, the miserable Cloten. "Away!/Thou'rt poison to my blood," Cymbeline demands. Exiled in Italy, Posthumus gambles rashly on Imogen's virtue and pays a steep price despite her faithfulness. While Imogen comes to grief, Cymbeline dispenses with Roman extortion and faces a massive invasion.

"Cymbeline" has the feeling of a Shakespearean mash-up. You have the sundered young lovers from "Romeo and Juliet", a cruel assault on a good woman's virtue like "Othello", and a mad monarch a la "King Lear" who is twisted by a conniving queen who seems an even nastier variant on Lady MacBeth. There's also ghosts, a beheading, women disguised as men, and a left-field appearance by Jupiter to sort everything out.

It's all too much, especially when presented by Shakespeare at a sometimes headlong, sometimes frustratingly talky pace. The story really goes off the rails when we meet a rustic man and his two young companions who turn out to be Cymbeline's lost sons. None of this feels grounded in reality, yet it doesn't really soar as fantasy, either. Many point out Jupiter's cameo as a low moment, though Cloten's transformation from comic butt to dead would-be rapist is more jarring.

Cloten does have a couple of fun early moments, bragging about himself to two unctuous lords. One makes wisecracks as asides. "Would he have been one of my rank!" Cloten declares after a near-duel with Posthumus.

"To have smelled like a fool" the sneering lord answers.

A little later, Imogen takes heart at her sad situation: "Plenty and peace breed cowards; hardness ever/Of hardiness is mother." Imogen and Posthumus are complex central characters, and in the old Pelican edition I have, Robert B. Heilman advances Imogen as one of Shakespeare's best-realized romantic heroines. Of the play itself, Heilman is understandably more guarded: "Nothing lags; nothing stands still".

Nothing makes that much sense, either, but it's a ride worth taking if you are interested in Shakespeare making one-time use of a historical setting (Roman Britain) or the idea of him struggling circa 1609 to develop a new post-tragic dramatic form, the so-called tragicomedy, although it's more properly termed a romance and quite different from the later, more sophisticated works "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest".

If you have the time, the patience, and the passion for Shakespeare, you may like "Cymbeline" more than me. But I doubt you will come away thinking it unfairly overlooked.

I think you're all missing the point (or a bunch of ringers from digireads.com). What we have here is the basic text derived a scanned version of the play, with no background information on how the text came to be. It's a decent enough interpretation, but with absolutely no editorial assistance to understand the language or the context in which the ideas of the author are set forth. Definitely better than nothing, though.

DO NOT GET THIS VERSION. It is a scam. Literally. It contains acts 1 and two, and then skips right to act 5. The text has obviously been copied and pasted from various sources, it randomly switches between paragraph form and iambic pentameter.
The image on the front and back is pixel-y, someone with little knowledge of image editing applied it.
This isn't even a good forgery. I could tell something was wrong the moment I picked it up.

Cymbeline is one of the later Shakespeare plays that is rarely staged and probably even as rarely read. The plot has elements that are familiar from several of the earlier works and many of the characters borrow from more familiar characters in other plays as well. Nevertheless, Cymbeline is a rewarding play to either view or read. The Arden version that I recently read was useful but for the footnotes which focused on various usages and interpretations of the language over time which I found distracting and finally chose to just ignore. The play itself because of the familiar elements will appeal to those who have read the better known works. Cymbeline revolves around a layered plot that includes the devices of mistaken identity, evil and deception , unbridled ambition and political intrigue. It is a rather long play with 5 acts and 27 scenes. Having the benefit of seeing this well staged would enhance the reader's experience.