The Three Tales of Cymbeline Essay -- Shakespeare Cymbeline Essays

The Three Tales of Cymbeline   Cymbeline has always been a difficult play to categorize. The original line of battle of Shakespeares plays, "The First Folio" (published in 1623), classifies it as a tragedy modern editors have revised that to comedy, and to distinguish it further from opposite comedies, it is also referred to, along with The Tempest, The Winters Tale, and Pericles, as a romance. Of course, like so many other plays of Shakespeare, these classifications are only guidelines rather than definitions, for an attempt to analyze a work of art according to clean arbitrary classifications is to diminish the very essence - its originality - that makes it a work of art. Undoubtedly, there are many aspects, patterns, and rhythms in this play that echo through several of Shakespeares other tragedies, comedies, and plane histories, for he used every(prenominal) his plays to view and explore a multi-faceted human condition from a variety of angles. There app ear to be trinity main narratives to Cymbeline - the tale of Imogen and Posthumus, with the villainous Iachimo lurking beside them, poised to destroy their happiness the story of two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, who have been separated from their father and are eventually restored to him and the successful denial of Britain by King Cymbeline against foreign invasion, the one character most involved with all three stories, hence the name of the play. The understructure supporting these three plots is a virtual labyrinth of sub-plots and strands that shift in and out of each tale until the final scenes at the end, when Shakespeare, in a masterful denouement, perhaps unparalleled even in his own plays, weaves each skein (some two dozen or so), into a... ...end, King Cymbeline calls for a lasting peace between Rome and England, a peace that is a fitting resolution not only to the war but also to the internal conflicts, as wives and husbands, fathers and children return in harmony t o one another. But Cymbeline, for all its tragicomic patterns, romantic devices, and historical pretensions, is at heart, as Northrop Frye put it, "a pure told tale, featuring a cruel stepmother with her loutish son, a calumniated maiden, lost princes brought up in a cave by a foster father, a ring of recognition that works in reverse, villains displaying ill-considered trophies of adultery and faithful servants displaying equally false trophies of murder, along with a great firework display of dreams, prophecies, signs, portents, and wonders." It is a complex journey of love, forgiveness, jealousy, murder, war, and peace.