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Cymbeline is a play by William Shakespeare. Critics often put it in a grouping called Shakespeare's Late Romances along with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale.
The King, Cymbeline himself, is based on a British chieftain, Cunobelin, who
reigned at the time of the Roman invasion.
Though once held in very high regard, Cymbeline has lost popularity over the past century. Some have held that,
written late in Shakespeare's career, the play was a personal joke of Shakespeare's, parodying his earlier works. For instance,
Iachimo (or "Little Iago") tries to fool the hero, Posthumous, into believing that his
beloved Imogen has been unfaithful (as in Othello). The falsely besmirched
Imogen fakes her death to whether the reverberations of this trick (as Hero does in Much Ado About Nothing). Some have taken the convoluted plot as evidence of the play's
parodic origins.
The Yale Shakespeare edition notes the presence of a co-adjutor during the writing of this play, and certainly some scenes
strike the reader as even more uncharacteristic of Shakespeare than the rest of the play, which is quite clumsily written. The
case that it is a parody is particularly strengthened by the play's resolution, in which virtually the entire cast comes forth
one at a time to add a piece to the puzzle.
Classification Cymbeline is often classified as one of Shakespeare's tragicomedies along with Pericles, The Tempest, and The Winter's
Tale
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