19 Facts About Cymbeline

Cymbeline discovers that his only child left, his daughter Imogen, has secretly married her lover Posthumus Leonatus, a member of Cymbeline's court.

Cymbeline dismisses the marriage and banishes Posthumus since Imogen — as Cymbeline's only child — must produce a fully royal-blooded heir to succeed to the British throne.

The Queen is plotting to murder both Imogen and Cymbeline, procuring what she believes to be deadly poison from the court doctor.

Cymbeline takes note of the room, as well as the mole on Imogen's partly naked body, to be able to present false evidence to Posthumus that he has seduced his bride.

Cymbeline has Imogen disguise herself as a boy and continue to Milford Haven to seek employment.

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Cymbeline gives her the Queen's "poison", believing it will alleviate her psychological distress.

Cymbeline is grounded in the story of the historical British king Cunobeline, which was originally recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, but which Shakespeare likely found in the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles.

Milford Haven is not known to have been used during the period in which Cymbeline is set, and it is not known why Shakespeare used it in the play.

Cymbeline was one of Shakespeare's more popular plays during the eighteenth century, though critics including Samuel Johnson took issue with its complex plot:.

Queer theory has gained traction in scholarship on Cymbeline, building upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.

Cymbeline's relied instead on a variety of lighting effects to reinforce mood; actors seemed to come out of darkness and return to darkness.

Cymbeline was performed at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in October 2007 in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, and in November 2007 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

Also in 2013, a folk musical adaptation of Cymbeline was performed at the First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook, Illinois.

Cymbeline's was among the last of the heavy revisions designed to bring the play in line with classical unities.

Cymbeline's version eliminates the brothers altogether as part of a notable enhancement of Posthumus's role in the play.

George Bernard Shaw, who criticised the play perhaps more harshly than he did any of Shakespeare's other works, took aim at what he saw as the defects of the final act in his 1937 Cymbeline Refinished; as early as 1896, he had complained about the absurdities of the play to Ellen Terry, then preparing to act Imogen.

Cymbeline called it "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order".

Cymbeline later changed his view, saying it was "one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays", but he remained convinced that it "goes to pieces in the final act".

Accordingly, in Cymbeline Refinished he rewrote the last act, cutting many of the numerous revelations and expositions, while making Imogen a much more assertive figure in line with his feminist views.