Cymbeline

In the meantime, Cymbeline's Queen is conspiring to have Cloten (her cloddish and arrogant son by an earlier marriage) marry Imogen to secure her bloodline.

He also takes note of the room, as well as the mole on Imogen's partially nude body, to present as false evidence to Posthumus that he seduced his bride.

Insisting that his betrayal years ago was a set-up, Belarius makes his own happy confession, revealing Guiderius and Arviragus as Cymbeline's own two long-lost sons.

Cymbeline is grounded in the story of the historical British king Cunobeline, which was originally recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, but which Shakespeare likely found in the 1587 edition of Raphael’s Holinshed's Chronicles.

[4][5] These share similar characters and wager terms, and both feature Iachimo's equivalent hiding in a chest in order to gather proof in Imogen's room.

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

[18] The play reinforces the Jacobean idea that Britain is the successor to the civilised virtue of ancient Rome, portraying the parochialism and isolationism of Cloten and the Queen as villainous.

The brothers lament their isolation from society, a quality associated with barbarousness, but Belarius, their adoptive father, retorts that this has spared them from corrupting influences of the supposedly civilised British court.

Miller-Tomlinson points out the falseness of their social significance as a "perfect example" of a public "heterosexual marriage", considering that their private relations turn out to be "homosocial, homoerotic, and hermaphroditic.

[28][29][30] Scholarship on this topic has emphasised the play's Ovidian allusions and exploration of non-normative gender/sexuality – achieved through separation from traditional society into what Valerie Traub terms "green worlds.

[36][37][38] According to Adelman and Tracey Miller-Tomlinson, in taking sole credit for the creation of his children Cymbeline acts a hermaphrodite who transforms a maternal function into a patriarchal strategy by regaining control of his male heirs and daughter, Imogen.

[40][41] Unlike other Shakespearean agents of onstage gender fluidity – Portia, Rosalind, Viola and Julia – Imogen is not afforded empowerment upon her transformation into Fidele.

[52] Kemble's productions made use of lavish spectacle and scenery; one critic noted that during the bedroom scene, the bed was so large that Iachimo all but needed a ladder to view Imogen in her sleep.

In 1827, his brother Charles mounted an antiquarian production at Covent Garden; it featured costumes designed after the descriptions of the ancient British by such writers as Julius Caesar and Diodorus Siculus.

[54] At the Theatre Royal, Marylebone, an epicene production was staged with Mary Warner, Fanny Vining, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Edward Loomis Davenport.

The set design, overseen by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was lavish and advertised as historically accurate, though the reviewer for the time complained of such anachronisms as gold crowns and printed books as props.

[57] By contrast, Peter Hall's production at the Shakespeare Memorial presented nearly the entire play, including the long-neglected dream scene (although a golden eagle designed for Jupiter turned out too heavy for the stage machinery and was not used).

Working on a set draped with heavy white sheets, director William Gaskill employed Brechtian alienation effects, to mixed critical reviews.

A decade later, John Barton's 1974 production for the RSC (with assistance from Clifford Williams) featured Sebastian Shaw in the title role, Tim Pigott-Smith as Posthumus, Ian Richardson as Iachimo, and Susan Fleetwood as Imogen.

[61] In 1980, David Jones revived the play for the RSC; the production was in general a disappointment, although Judi Dench as Imogen received reviews that rivalled Ashcroft's.

The 2004 production, directed by Jon Ciccarelli, embraced the fairy tale aspect of the story and produced a colourful version with wicked step-mothers, feisty princesses and a campy Iachimo.

[77] Critic Matt Truman gave the production four out of five stars, saying "The world's youngest nation seems delighted to be here and, played with this much heart, even Shakespeare's most rambling romance becomes irresistible.

Also in 2023, San Francisco's Free Shakespeare in the Park performed Cymbeline, directed by Maryssa Wanlass, with a David Bowie/fantasy-themed focus on the play's queer interpretations.

[91] Accordingly, in Cymbeline Refinished he rewrote the last act, cutting many of the numerous revelations and expositions, while also making Imogen a much more assertive figure in line with his feminist views.

[108] Elijah Moshinsky directed the BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation in 1982, ignoring the ancient British period setting in favour of a more timeless and snow-laden atmosphere inspired by Rembrandt and his contemporary Dutch painters.

[109] Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Helen Mirren, and Robert Lindsay play Cymbeline, his Queen, Imogen, and Iachimo, respectively, with Michael Pennington as Posthumus.

Perhaps the most famous verses in the play come from the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, which begins: The first two lines are quoted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway by the two main characters Clarissa and Septimus Smith.

At the end of Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, William Shakespeare is competing against George Bernard Shaw for the title of best playwright, deciding which of them is to be brought back from the dead in order to improve the world.

In The Scent of Water (1963) by Elizabeth Goudge, the central character, Mary Lindsay, feels struck by lightning when she realises she has fallen in love with Paul Randall, an author and Royal Air Force pilot, blinded in the last days of World War II, and married.

The description of Imogen's bed-chamber, for instance, owes nothing to the English tale, but we have only to glance at the Decameron to discover a room in which a candle is burning, which is hung with pictures, all carefully noted by Ambrogiuolo, and to recognise at once a refinement of detail that stirred Shakespeare's imagination and set the poetry flowing from his pen.