APPENDIX A
Sources of the Play
The name Cymbeline, and the political setting of the play, Shakespeare took from Holinshed's Chronicles of England. The wager-story, which forms the basis of the Imogen plot, is a familiar one in mediæval literature; Shakespeare seems to have been chiefly indebted for this story to the ninth novel of the second day in Boccaccio's Decameron. It is hardly likely that he was familiar with an English version of this story, published possibly in 1603 but probably not before 1620, called Westward for Smelts. Other versions of the story which Shakespeare may, or may not, have known in some sixteenth century English form, are the thirteenth century French romances, King Florus and Fair Jehane,[1] Roman de la Violette, and Roman del conte de Poitiers; a fourteenth century French mystery play; as well as scattered German, Scandinavian, and Gaelic versions. An English play printed in 1589, called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, may have suggested some names, characters, and incidents for Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster resembles Cymbeline in many details; the two plays were written at about the same time, and it is impossible to state definitely which influenced the other. Both plays indicate that a new type of drama was becoming fashionable toward the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century; it is quite conceivable that they were written contemporaneously and in friendly rivalry. The story of Belarius and the kidnapped princes, as well as the final solution of the complicated plot, seems to have been Shakespeare's own invention.[2]
Cimbeline, or Kymbeline, was, according to Holinshed, a descendant of King Lear, and reigned in Britain from 33 B. C. to 2 A. D. He had been educated in Rome and 'knighted' by Cæsar Augustus. His sons were Guiderius and Arviragus. 'Our histories do affirme' that Cymbeline, and his father Tenantius (cf. Cymbeline I. i. 31) before him, lived at peace with the Romans, 'and continuallie to them paied the tributes which the Britaines had couenanted with Julius Cæsar to paie, yet we find in the Romane writers that after Julius Caesar's death . . . the Britaines refused to paie that tribute: whereat Augustus, being otherwise occupied, was content to winke; howbeit . . . at length . . . Augustus made prouision to passe with an armie ouer into Britaine, & was come forward vpon his iournie into Gallia Celtica. . . . But here receiuing aduertisements that the Pannonians . . . and the Dalmatians . . . had rebelled (cf. Cymbeline III. i. 73–75), he thought it best first to subdue those rebells neere home.' Holinshed is at a loss to know whether to believe 'our histories' or 'the Romane writers,' but he records presently the arrival of an ambassador from Augustus at the court of Cymbeline, who came to bring to the British king the thanks of the emperor 'for that he had kept his allegiance toward the Romane empire.' Later, Guiderius, after his accession, refused to pay a yearly tribute of three thousand crowns. Shakespeare, by attributing this refusal to Cymbeline, hoped to heighten the dramatic and emotional appeal of this singularly mild and uneventful portion of Holinshed's Chronicle.
Posthumus's account of the means whereby the British gained the victory (V. iii. 3–58) is taken from Holinshed's Chronicles of Scotland, which describe the sudden defeat of the Danes by the Scots, in the year 976, through the intervention of a husbandman named Hay, and his two sons.
The plot of Boccaccio's novel may be summarized as follows: Bernabo Lomellino of Genoa, stopping at an inn in Paris, boasts of his wife's virtue and devotion. Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza sneers at woman's virtue, and proves by philosophical argument that all women must be unchaste. Man is not chaste; woman is more frail than man; ergo! Entreaty, flattery, and gifts will win any woman. Bernabo repudiates philosophical argument and reaffirms his faith in his wife, Ginevra. The discussion waxes hot. Bernabo, in his anger, wagers his head against a thousand florins that Ambrogiuolo could not tempt Ginevra to sin. Ambrogiuolo accepts the wager, substituting a sum of money for Bernabo's head, and starts for Genoa. Within three months he must return with indisputable proofs of his triumph over Ginevra's virtue. Just as he is despairing of success he meets a poor woman, to whom Ginevra has been kind, and bribes her to send him into Ginevra's chamber, in her chest, on the pretence that she is about to take a journey and wishes to leave her belongings in Ginevra's care. Night comes; he emerges from the chest, notes the situation of the room, its ornaments and pictures, and approaching the bed he admires the lady's beauty and perceives the mole on her left breast. For further evidence he removes a gown, a ring, and a girdle. Bernabo is not moved by the description of the room, nor by the articles of apparel, but is 'struck to the very heart' when Ambrogiuolo reveals his knowledge of the mole. He sets out for home 'most cruelly incensed against his wife,' and sends ahead a servant with a letter asking Ginevra to meet him on the way. The servant is instructed to murder her when he reaches 'a fit place.' Ginevra persuades the servant to let her escape, disguised as a page, and to carry word to his lord that she is dead. As page to a Catalonian lord she sails for foreign lands, and on her journeys encounters Ambrogiuolo and hears him tell, as a jest, the story of his wager. She arranges to have her husband brought over seas to listen as Ambrogiuolo tells this tale to the Sultan. The truth is then revealed, and after the Sultan has condemned Ambrogiuolo to be smeared with honey and eaten by wasps,[3] they all sit down to a sumptuous banquet. It is only in the early part of the tale, the long-drawn-out angry debate which provides some possible motivation for the story, that Boccaccio's plot surpasses Shakespeare's.
- ↑ English translation in Aucassin and Nicolette and Other Mediæval Romances, Everyman's Library Edition, E. P. Dutton.
- ↑ For more detailed discussion of these points see Thorndike: Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1901, and Dowden: Cymbeline, in The Arden Shakespeare, third edition, London, 1918.
- ↑ This episode of the honey and the wasps, not used by Shakespeare in Cymbeline, is probably the source of the passage in The Winter's Tale (IV. iv. 816 ff.) in which Autolycus threatens the Clown with a similar fate.