Abstract
Among Shakespeare’s plays, Cymbeline has tended to receive a lukewarm reception at best. Samuel Johnson notoriously condemned it as ‘unresisting imbecility’. His main grievances were directed at the plot: ‘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’.1 While many critics may not directly agree with Johnson, the overwhelming majority of them still feel the need to excuse several elements of the play. Cymbeline is packed full of moments that defy easy or logical interpretation. It relies heavily on coincidence, confusion, and twisted expectation, and has moments of overt fantasy: at one point the god Jupiter descends amidst thunder and lightning to converse with a group of ghosts. The play also takes extraordinary liberties with time and place, unapologetically meandering from ancient Britain during the time of the Roman Empire to what appears to be Renaissance Italy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Quoted in J. M. Nosworthy, ed., Cymbeline (London: Methuen, 1969), xl.
Geoffrey Bullough, ed., The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75), vol. 8, 3.
To see Forman’s comments in full, see Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed. , The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997), 3337.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford University Press, 1930), vol. 2, 352.
In this chapter I will be using fairy tales and folktales interchangeably. Although it is often thought that the two are different kinds of stories, fairy tales form a subcategory of folk tales, not a separate genre. I will therefore be treating them as two manifestations of the same well of oral sources. For a more in-depth explanation of the classification of folk narratives, see D. L. Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004) 29–34.
Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 67. Unfortunately, Frye does not investigate these links further.
See Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, eds, The RSC Shakespeare: Cymbeline (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2007), 163–172, especially 171–172.
Frank Kermode, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1963), 21–22;
A. C. Kirsch, ‘Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy’, ELH, 34.3 (1967): 285–306.
R. A Foakes, Shakespeare: the Dark Comedies and the Last Plays: from Satire to Celebration (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 103.
Susan Snyder, ‘The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95.
Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., quoted in Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2002), xi.
Indeed, fairy tales have inspired psychologists and folklorists to unearth just how violent, sexual and potent their basic emotional subtexts are. See, for example, Alan Dundes, ‘The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore,’ in Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (Madison, WI: University of Madison Press, 1987), 3–46.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 25.
A ‘type’ is a term used by folklorists to describe a basic plotline or sequence of events. Stories with the same basic plotlines are grouped together as one type, having one ATU number. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson first catalogued folktales in this manner, and Hans-Jörg Uther later updated the catalogue, hence the label ‘ATU’. Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: a Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004), part I, ATU 882.
Uther, ATU 882; Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2000), 86.
In Boccaccio, the men are all Italian, however they are well travelled and are meeting at a French inn. Valerie Wayne has proposed that the inclusion of characters from France, Italy and Spain in Frederyke may have been a way of acknowledging the different countries in which wager stories were commonly told. She adds that, given that Shakespeare included another nationality in his gathering with the addition of a Dutchman, perhaps he was also noting the tale’s Dutch associations (pp.173–174). Valerie Wayne, ‘Romancing the Wager, Cymbeline’s Intertexts’, in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (New York: Routledge, 2009), 163–187. I believe her theory has merit: there is an old folk tale that stars a Dutchman entitled ‘The Northern Lord’, in J. P. Collier, Broadside Black-Letter Ballads (New York: B. Franklin, 1868), 48–56.
In the Scottish folktale ‘The Chest’, for instance, the husband claims he has ‘a wife many of whose equals are not to be got’ (p. 11). Printed in J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edmonston and Douglas, 1860–62), vol. 2, no. XVIII, 9–16.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Ciara Rawnsley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rawnsley, C. (2015). Once Upon a Time: Cymbeline, Fairy Tales and ‘the terrifying truths of the inner life’. In: White, R.S., Houlahan, M., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Shakespeare and Emotions. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464750_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464750_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69074-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46475-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)