The Joy of Cymbeline

That is Samuel Johnson discussing William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a bit of criticism which would be impossible to do anything other than relish. Lytton Strachey remarked that the play was written by a man “half bored to death.” How about George Bernard Shaw’s evaluation: “for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of though by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”

I am glad to report, however, that Johnson, Strachey, and Shaw are wrong. Cymbeline is a fun play. Indeed, after reading it, I was surprised when I started reading commentaries on it; so many critics seem to miss what makes the play fun.

Imagine someone sitting down with the collected works of Shakespeare and deciding to write a giant over-the-top parody of the complete works of Shakespeare. Then, imagine that the parody is written in language as good as anything Shakespeare himself would write. It is hard to imagine someone pulling off that feat. But, it happened. Shakespeare wrote it himself. Cymbeline.

To summarize the plot is nearly impossible, which is fitting because it contains within it the plots of multiple plays. So, start with the genre. Is the play a tragedy a comedy or a history? In the First Folio, it was listed as a tragedy, which makes sense because it is a lot like Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Macbeth. But, later on it was lumped in with the comedies which makes sense because it is a lot like Twelfth Night and As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. Then again, Cymbeline was the British King at the time of Julius Caesar and this is a play about rules of succession and colonization and political infighting and actual battle scenes, so it really belongs with the Histories as a prequel to the Richard plays and the Henry plays.

You can instead look at a bunch of individual scenes and characters. Which play is this from: a conniving guy tries to make a husband doubt the faithfulness of his wife by convincing him that his wife has been unfaithful? Is the conniving guy Iago (Othello) or Iachimo (Cymbeline)? Or which is the play in which the young love-struck woman takes poison which causes her to fall into such a deep sleep that people think she is dead? Romeo and Juliet or Cymbeline? Or how about the play where the young woman leaves court and goes off into the forest where she finds a court in exile? As You Like It or Cymbeline? Or how about that play that ends with a seemingly endless series of revelations that people are not who everyone else thought they were? Pick your favorite comedy or Cymbeline? Cross-dressing? Check. Dream sequences? Check. Prophecies? Check. Plots within plots? Check. Seriously, pick a feature of Shakespeare, and it is somewhere in Cymbeline.

When I realized what was going on about halfway through the play (the Iachimo/Iago comparison was really hard to miss), I realized that this was just a play in which Shakespeare was having fun. I checked my instinct by asking Izzy Baird, whose claim to fame includes having read all of Shakespeare’s plays before her 23^rd birthday. Her reply: “I like that interpretation. The start of Cymbeline is what happens if King Lear married Lady Macbeth, the middle of the play is a weird mashup of Merry Wives and Julius Caesar, and the resolution is completely Twelfth Night.” Just so.

Now, imagine my shock when I looked at the professional critics and their disdain for this play. How did they miss the fun? Yes, the scenes in Britain are set in the age of Julius Caesar, but the scenes in Italy sure seem like they are taking place right down the street from Shylock making a deal with Antonio. That isn’t a failing; that’s funny.

Harold Bloom comes closest to getting it: “Cymbeline is a pungent self-parody on Shakespeare’s part: we revisit King Lear, Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and dozens of other plays, but we see them now through a distorting lens.” Aha! I thought. Exactly right…well except for the “pungent” bit. Even after realizing it is a parody, Bloom decides it is a failed play: “No other play by Shakespeare…shows the playwright so alienated from his own art as Cymbeline does.” Or this: “Shakespeare is his own worst enemy in Cymbeline: he is weary of making plays.” Does Bloom really think Cymbeline is “aesthetic self-wounding”? Yes he does.

What is happening here? Are serious Shakespeare scholars really so obsessed with thinking of everything in lofty terms that they are unable to recognize when something is just plain fun? Shakespeare just did the equivalent of writing a literary Airplane! and the critics forget to laugh and just sit up in their boxes shaking their heads at this guy who has lost his powers. You can hear the relief of the critics when The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest come along; maybe this guy isn’t washed up after all.

One of the serious blights on the academic landscape these days is this obsession with being serious. What happened to fun? What happened to the idea that you can show the heights of brilliance by being able to laugh? Of course we want Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but isn’t there space for Douglas Adams too? The Godfather and Citizen Kane are amazing, but does that mean we can’t appreciate at This is Spinal Tap? Doesn’t it make Shakespeare even more amazing that he can write both Hamlet and Cymbeline?

So, give me your discussions of comic books and Great Books. Give me your comparisons of Taylor Swift and T. S. Eliot. Give me your 500 pages of bad puns masquerading as a novel. Never forget that life is bursting with joy and if we can’t all pause to revel in the fun of Cymbeline, then we are missing out on a big part of the reason we are all here. God’s mirth is a beauty to behold and it shows itself in all these improbable ways.

Related Posts
Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream “Is It OK to Laugh?”
DC Comics Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years “Be Like Batgirl”