I was afforded a choice between two shows to direct this season, and the decision was easy, once I had read Cymbeline . The opportunity to direct a rarely-produced play with such rich language, entertaining characters, and as many “undiscovered countries” as Cymbeline had to offer was not to be resisted.

Cymbeline is one of the last five plays Shakespeare wrote. Dated 1609 or 1610, it is considered his early experiment in a new genre of plays now termed “The Romances”. Preceded by Pericles in 1607, Shakespeare's work in this form culminated in The Winter's Tale in 1610 and in his masterpiece, The Tempest in 1611. All of these plays embrace elements of comedy and tragedy and all have similar motifs: families reunited after separation and suffering; recognition scenes in which characters re-encounter each other in a state of wonder; oracles, dreams, revelations, and gods; the finding or re-claiming of one's self.

The main plot of Cymbeline is one with which Elizabethan audiences would have been very familiar: a man wagers on his lover's chastity and is fooled, he orders her death (which is prevented by wise and faithful servant), and is finally reunited with her. It had been popular for centuries in various forms and languages. The most popular version Shakespeare drew from when writing Cymbeline was Boccaccio's Decameron , also a minor source for The Winter's Tale .

There are many important themes explored in the play; Appearance vs. Reality; The Restorative Power of Nature vs. the Oppressive Court ; Forgiveness and Reconciliation; the influence of the divine. All are delicately and interwoven throughout, and days could be spent exploring just one. The theme of Appearance vs. Reality, for example, abounds, for in Cymbeline , nothing is as it seems, and almost anything can happen. Equal time could be spent on exploring the play's similarities to the style of the fairy-tale. In Cymbeline we are given sundered lovers, a wicked step-mother and sleeping potion—and that is just the first scene.

Like Snow White , Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline , is forced from home by a step-mother, takes refuge with mysterious strangers, and becomes their housekeeper. She endures a virtual death through the afore-mentioned potion, and is finally reunited with her handsome lover. Though Snow White was not written down until the 18 th century, its resemblances to Cymbeline are uncanny and have caused speculation that the story was in oral circulation for centuries before.

Attention is often drawn to the amount of favorite and “re-cycled” plot devices Shakespeare employed in the writing of the play (a kind of Shakespearean-greatest-hits), including long-lost sons, a cross-dressing maiden, mistaken identities, and a banished lover. The language has been called rich but “often clumsy,” leading a number of critics to hypothesize that Shakespeare collaborated with a less-talented playwright.

Some feel that in Cymbeline , Shakespeare was creating a mere pastiche of his previous work, a self-parody of sorts. I disagree.

When one experiences the play as a whole, one not only witnesses some of Shakespeare's most beautiful writing, but becomes a participant in a myriad of human journeys drawn from his lifetime of experience and painted with the personalities of all the characters in his canon.

Regardless of one's thoughts on the play; whether it is fully Shakespeare, or whether it is one of his greater or lesser works, one cannot deny the beauty of the play's ultimately positive outlook on the universe: it demonstrates that despite everything that goes wrong in our lives—the struggles we endure, the sadness—things often have a way of working out in the end. The good triumph over the wicked, and those who have suffered greatly can be happy again. We can right wrongs, overcome obstacles and be re-united, reconciled and forgiven, even by those against whom we have committed the worst offenses.

Life may sometimes seem to run off course, but as the good servant Pisanio says:

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered…

                                                                                  — Joe Discher

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“Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's longest and richest plays. It's capaciousness is its great virtue. It ranges from the nightmare claustrophobia of Imogen's bedroom to the epic violence of the Romano-British battle; it juxtaposes the innocent prude Posthumus, the refined brute Cloten, and the non-chalant hero Guiderius. It accommodates Iachimo's corrosive cynicism and Jupiter's transcendental affirmations…The Victorian critics who supposed the ageing Shakespeare was writing in a mood of philosophic calm or catatonic boredom could scarcely have been more mistaken. Cymbeline was produced by a dramatist working at the height of his powers.” —Martin Butler

“Its variety of characters and tonalities—comic or tragic, realistic or fantastic—are all reconciled in a positive and unifying vision. The comic is never farcical, and the potentially tragic remains merely potential. The realistic does not preclude abstraction, and the elements of romance do not give way an entirely escapist retreat form reality. Cymbeline thus suggests and attempts to demonstrate…a vision of human weakness transcended.” —Charles Boyce, Shakespeare A to Z

From Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , by Harold Bloom:

“There is no way, one might think, that Posthumus is salvageable, though Shakespeare insouciantly does not care. Meredith Skura, in a brilliant application of psychoanalysis to the play's dilemmas, argues that Posthumus cannot find himself as a husband until he gets back to himself as a son, in relation to his lost family, available to him only in a dream-like vision. As Skura notes, identities are very unstable in Cymbeline , perhaps more than elsewhere in Shakespeare. “The exaggerated complications in Cymbeline make us realize with even more force than usual that ‘reality' finally lies in the enrichment, and truth lies in the excess.”

“A difficult play to stage, at least in our time, Cymbeline puzzles as frequently as it enchants.”

“Part of the fascination of Cymbeline is the readers (and playgoer's) sense that something is wayward about this drama; it will not abide a steady contemplation. One cannot be certain that it behaves like a play; the plot is chaos, and Shakespeare never bothers to be probable…perhaps Shakespeare was in a contrary mood and decided that this time he would please himself, and yet others were then pleased as well…”