Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Romance” is when everything comes out right in the end, however long the odds

Robert Knox
Aug 8, 2017 · 5 min read
From Shakespeare & Company production of “Cymbeline” in Lenox, Mass.

The late works of Shakespeare — “The Tempest,” “A Winter’s Tale,” “Cymbeline,” a couple others — don’t seem to fit into the categories of his earlier works — histories, comedies, tragedies. They treat some of the same themes (young love, aging jealousy) and structural characteristics of the earlier genres, comedy especially (concluding with one or more marriages), but add other, sometimes disconcerting touches. Highly unrealistic plot devices. Statues come to life. Gods appear on stage. Long-lost children are found. Old enemies reconcile.

The term ‘romance’ was not used to categorize these plays by Shakespeare in his own time. It was invented in the late 19th century by a critic who saw a resemblance between their “tall tale” story lines and the fantasized romances told in the late Middle Ages and in his own day. Unlike the structure of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, the action of the romance is set across long stretches of time and action takes places at distantly removed sites. In “Cymbeline,” named for a British king in the time of Augustus Caesar, the play begins in pagan Britain, moves to Rome, then comes back to Britain in time for a Roman invasion and an implausibly happy but wholly satisfying ending.

The plot involves a series of misunderstandings, plots, long-buried secrets and intrigue, fresh secrets, conspiracies and disguisew, clashes of arms, and settings range from royal courts to hunters’ caves. By comparison, plays like Hamlet, MacBeth and Othello are seamless.

Commentators speculate that the vogue for spectacle in Jacobean theater — during the reign of King James I following the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 — stems from the popularity of theatrical “masque” in James’s court. In the aristocratic (read “expensive”) entertainment of the masque, a kind of elaborate tableau plus special effects, actors and titled lords and ladies portray figures from mythology and the pantheon of Greek gods and dance or, pace, or simply show off glamorous costumes in highly ornamented settings. Think grand opera without music, singing, or story.

But Shakespeare has something that masque lacks, namely robust and sparkling language.

And for this and other reasons, a play such as “Cymbeline,” recently performed by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., works wonderfully well on the stage. Much of the credit goes to this company, responsible for much of the best Shakespeare theater in this country. But the play surely offers a talented company a lot to work with.

While the brief appearance of a god (Jupiter) on stage may help the plot move toward required resolutions, that resolution delivers a fairy tale satisfaction: the good are recognized and returned to their rightful place; the evil are defeated, their machinations exposed.

A final, arguably deeper quality that makes for the satisfying conclusion of the tall-tale “romance” plot is human reconciliation. Especially, in Shakespeare’s late romances, between fathers and daughters.

In “Cymbeline,” the essential character is the not the king, but his daughter, Imogen. She is not witty and complex like the heroines of the earlier comedies, she’s simply a lovable, lively force for good. Bad things happen to her, but she continues to be true to her own nature, and in the end everything works out. As director Tina Packer points out (staging this play for the first time in her extensive career as a master-level Shakespeare specialist), everybody loves her.

“She stands up to her father, is not deceived by her wicked step-mother… resists the seducer’s charms, and does her sex proud!” Packer writes.

How’s that for a work of art’s moral center?

An array of other characters serve the good, some with nobility of character, but none is really a “hero.” Their human ‘character’ is not the center of interest. Saving Imogen will do — and her reconciliation with her frequently bamboozled father is part of a general unveiling of secrets, along with a rediscovery of a pair of long-lost princes in a hilariously dizzying sequence of stage busy-nesses of the sort Packer and Shakespeare & Company specialize in.

Audiences, in my opinion, need not bother themselves with the question of what this play is supposedly “about” or what it is “trying to say.” Many other plays invite that kind of attention. “Cymbeline” is probably the purest bit of fairy tale in the romance genre. “The Tempest” written a year later or so is deeper, subtler, and more challenging.

The moral simplicity of “Cymbeline’s” universe is the characteristic that enables Shakespeare & Company to have so much fun with it. While under the sway of a devious second-queen, King Cymbeline holds our attention because Jonathan Epstein plays the part, and Epstein could command an audience even if he were asked to sell toothpaste. The self-love of the farcically ill-intended and fatuous Queen’s son, Cloten — whose clutches Imogen must evade — reaches heights that can only be described as Trumpian. (No explicit comparisons are made; this is my own evil mind at work.)

The other characters, some solid-good souls, a few all-bad, plus a couple of late-stage conversions to affirm the play’s “reconciliation and goodness” theme can all be played as seriously committed to their own nature, but also self-parodied in their categorical lack of self-awareness.

And this is exactly how this show plays. The entire cast embraces the straightforward cast of mind required of them by Shakespeare’s splendid honey-tongued dialogue, but these deft players also leap over the top into comic exaggeration and parody whenever director or actor finds a handy seam in the dramatic or linguistic web to exploit. The show also plays fast, with speeches, argument, and repartee delivered with flawless intelligibility.

I think that’s what local theater reviewers mean by comments such as “intoxicatingly funny… non-stop action” (CurtainUp, an online theater magazine) and “the must-see play of the Berkshire season” (Berkshire Fine Arts, a Berkshire County website).

In romance, we’re not meant to confront the complexity of the mortal universe as we are in the tragedies.

Instead we are assured that even though life appears to be a confused mess, and terrible things do in fact happen in the course of our lives, in the end life is triumphant.

Sometimes, maybe, that’s what we want to hear.

Robert Knox

Novelist, journalist, short story writer, poet, history lover, gardener, blogger. Author of “Suosso’s Lane,” a novel of the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case.

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