Noble Virtue in ‘Cymbeline’

Summary

Cymbeline has had small notice and less praise. It was reported ‘Well likte by the kinge’ when played at Court in 1633, and the Folger Library holds a copy of the Second Folio in which late in the seventeenth century someone inscribed the single word ‘good’ on the first pages of The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing, and on the first page of Cymbeline, the word ‘rare’. Dr Johnson, on the other hand, thought the play characterized by ‘unresisting imbecility’, and his view is the more prevalent today.

The play undoubtedly poses difficulties, but it has also had needless difficulties foisted upon it. Its opening scene, for example, is usually understood as clarifying stable values:

He that has miss'd the princess is a thing

Too bad for bad report: and he that hath her

(I mean, that married her, alack good man,

And therefore banish'd) is a creature such

As, to seek through the regions of the earth

For one his like; there would be something failing

In him that should compare. I do not think

So fair an outward, and such stuff within

Endows a man, but he.

(I, i, I6-24)