STATE OF THE TEXT, AND CHRONOLOGY, OF CYMBELINE. "THE Tragedie of Cymbeline" was first printed in the folio collection of 1623. The play is very carefully divided into acts and scenes an arrangement which is sometimes wanting in other plays of this edition. Printed as Cymbeline must have been from a manuscript, the text, although sometimes difficult, presents few examples of absolute error. Of course some palpable errors do occur, and these have been properly corrected by the modern editors; but they have in this, as in every other instance, carried their vocation too far.* We, upon the principle which we have invariably followed, have implicitly adhered to the text, except in those instances of manifest corruption which can be distinctly referred to the class of typographical errors. The Cymbeline of the first edition is, in one respect, printed with very remarkable care; it is full of such contractions as the following: His daughter, and the heire of's kingdome, whom." We find this principle occasionally followed in some other of the plays; but in this it is invariably regarded. We do not, however, follow these elisions, which we may believe are not from the hand of the author, and which impair the freedom of his versification, without any real advantage to the reader. When the original edition of the Pictorial Shakspere was published, about twenty-five years ago, we designated by the term "modern editors" those generally known by the name of variorum," including principally Johnson, Steevens, and Malone. Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere bears the date of 1821. When, therefore, we now use the term "modern editors," we do not mean to indicate those who have been the recent labourers in the same field as ourselves-such as Mr. Dyce, Mr. Collier, Mr. Staunton, Mr. Grant White, and the Cambridge editors. We have often, in this new edition, substituted some other word for modern," but in other cases we leave the term "modern" with the signification which we originally attached to it. In placing this drama (it can scarcely be called tragedy, although we must adhere to the criginal classification) immediately after Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, we are called upon to state the grounds upon which we classify it amongst the comparatively early plays. Malone has assigned it to 1699, Chalmers to 1606, and Drake to 1605. The external evidence adduced by Malone for this opinion appears to us not only extremely weak, but to be conceived in the very lowest spirit of the comprehension of Shakspere. He assumes that it was written after Lear and Macbeth, for the following reasons:-The character of Edgar in Lear is formed on that of Leonatus in Sidney's 'Arcadia.' Shakspeare having occasion to turn to that book while he was writing King Lear, the name of Leonatus adhered to his memory, and he has made it the name of one of the characters in Cymbeline." Having occasion to turn to that book a mode of expression which might equally apply to a tailor having occasion for a piece of buckram. Sidney's 'Arcadia' was essentially the book of Shakspere's age-more popular, perhaps, than the 'Fairy Queen,' as profoundly admired by the highest order of spirits, as often quoted, as often present to their thoughts. And yet the very highest spirit of that age, thoroughly imbued as he must have been with all the poetical literature of his own day and his own country (we pass by the question of his further knowledge), is represented only to know the great work of his great contemporary as a little boy in a grammar-school knows what is called a crib-book. But this is not all. The story of Lear, according to Malone, lies near to that of Cymbeline in Holinshed's Chronicle, and some account of Duncan and Macbeth is given incidentally in a subsequent page; and so this very humble reader, who never looked into a book but when he wanted to get something out of it, composes Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline (two of them unquestionably the greatest monuments of human genius) at one and the same time, because, forsooth, he happened about the same time to turn to Sidney's Arcadia and Holinshed's Chronicle. But this sort of reasoning does not even stop here. Cymbeline is not only produced after Lear and Macbeth for these cues, but about the same period as the Roman plays. In this play mention is made of Cæsar's ambition and Cleopatra sailing on the Cydnus; ergo, says Malone, "I think it probable that about this time Shakspere perused the lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Mark Antony." P'erused the lives! But we really have not patience to waste another word upon this insolence, so degrading (for it is nothing less) to the country and the age which produced it George Chalmers fixes the date in 1606, because he conceives that Cloten's speech, in the second act," a Jack-a-napes must take me up for swearing,"-alludes to the statute of 1606, for restraining the use of profane expressions on the stage. There is nothing to which we object in this ingenious suggestion, but it is not conclusive as to the date of Cymbeline: nor indeed can any such isolated passage be conclusive; for we know from the quartos that passing allusions were constantly inserted after the first production of Shakspere's plays. Drake assigns no reason for the date which he gives of 1605. In the Introductory Notice to Richard II. we have given an extract from "a book of plays and notes thereof, for common policy," kept by Dr. Symon Forman, in 1610 and 1611. These notes, which were discovered and first printed by Mr Collier, contain not only an accourt of some play of Richard II., at which the writer was present, but distinctly give the plots of Shakspere's Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. We shall take the liberty of reprinting from Mr. Collier's 'New Particulars' Forman's account of the plot of Cymbeline: "Remember, also, the story of Cymbeline, King of England, in Lucius' time: how Lucius came from Octavius Cæsar for tribute, and, being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers, who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner, and all by means of three outlaws, of the which two of them were the sons of Cymbeline, stolen from him when they were but two years old, by an old man whom Cymbeline had banished; and he kept them as his own sons twenty years with him in a cave. And how one of them slew Cloten, that was the Queen's son, going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Imogen the King's daughter, whom he had banished also for loving his daughter. "And how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others to be presented to the King. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep. He opened the chest and came forth of it, and viewed her in her bed, and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet, and after accused her of adultery to her love, &c. And, in the end, how he came with the Romans into England, and was taken prisoner, and after revealed to Imogen, who ha! turned herself into man's apparel, and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven; and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her two brothers were: and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods, and the body of Cloten by her, in her love's apparel that he left behind him, and how she was found by Lucius, &c." "This," Mr. Collier adds, "is curious; principally because it gives the impression of the plot upon the mind of the spectator, at about the time when the play was first produced." We can scarcely yield our implicit assent to this. Forman's note-book is evidence that the play existed in 1610 or 1611; but it is not evidence that it was first produced in 1610 or 1611. Mr. Collier, in his 'Annals of the Stage,' gives us the following entry from the books of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels:*On Wednesday night the first of January, 1633, Cymbeline was acted at Court by the King's players. Well liked by the King." Here is a proof that for more than twenty years after Forman saw it Cymbeline was still acted, and still popular. By parity of reasoning it might have been acted, and might have been popular, before Forman saw it. In the absence, then, of all specific information as to the chronology of Cymbeline, we must be guided by what is after all the safest guide in such cases-internal evidence. Coleridge, in the classification of 1819, places Cymbeline, as he supposes it to have been originally produced, in the first epoch, to which he assigns Pericles: "In the same epoch I place The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, differing from the Pericles by the entire rifaccimento of it, when Shakspere's celebrity as poet, and his interest no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid-by labours of his youth." Tieck, whilst he considers it "the last work of the great poet, which may have been written about 1614 or 1615," adds, "it is also not impossible that this varied-woven romantic history had inspired the poet in his youth to attempt it for the stage." Tieck assigns no reason for believing that the play as we have received it is of so late a date as 1614 or 1615. We presume to think that he is wrong. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that, as it stands, it is fuller of elliptical construction, proceeding from the over-teeming thought, than any of the early plays. Malone has observed, and we think very justly (for in matters in which he was not tainted by the influences of his age his opinions are to be respected), that its versification resembles that of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. To whatever age these romantic dramas shall be ultimately assigned we have no doubt that on every account-from the nature of the fable, as well as the cast of thought, and the construction of the language-Cymbeline will go with them. But, however this may be, we heartily join in the belief, so distinctly expressed by two such master-minds as Coleridge and Tieck, that the sketch of Cymbeline belongs to the youthful Shakspere. We have fancied that it is almost possible to trace in some instances the dove-tailing of the original with the improved drama. The principal incidents of the story of Imogen are in Boccaccio. Of course, with reference to the knowledge of Shakspere, we do not hold with Steevens that they, "in their original Italian, to him at least, were inaccessible." Such a fable was exactly one which would have been seized upon by him who, from the very earliest period of his career, saw, in those reflections of life which the Italian novelists present, the materials of bringing out the manifold aspects of human nature in the most striking forms of truth and beauty. As far as the main action of the drama was concerned, therefore, we hold that it was as accessible to the Shakspere of five-and-twenty as it was to the Shakspere of five-and-forty; and that he had not to wait for the publication in 1603 of a story-book in which the tales which were the common property of Europe were remodelled with English scenes and characters, to have produced Cymbeline. All the historical accesssories too of the story were familiar to him in his early career. He threw the scene with marvellous judgment into the dim period of British history, when there was enough of fact to give precision to his painting, and enough of fable to cast over it that twilight hue which all young poets love, because it is of the very truth of poetry. Assuming, then, that Cymbeline might have been sketched at an early period, and comparing it more especially with Pericles, which assuredly has not been re-written, we venture to express a belief that the scenes have, in some parts, been greatly elaborated; and that this elaboration has had the effect of thrusting forward such a quantity of incidents into the fifth act as to have rendered it absolutely necessary to resort to pantomimic action or dumb show, an example of which occurs in no other of Shakspere's works. This might have been remedied by omitting the "apparition" in the fifth act, which either belongs not to Shakspere at all, or belongs to the period when he had not clearly seen his way to shake off the trammels of the old stage. But would an audience familiar with that scene have parted from it? We believe not. The fifth act, as we think, presents to us very strikingly the differences between the young and the mature Shakspere, always bearing in mind that the skill of such a master of his art has rendered it very difficult to conjecture what were the differences between his sketch and his finished picture. The soliloquy of Posthumus in that act, in its fullness of thought, belongs to the finished performance,-the minute stage directions which follow to the unfinished. Nothing can be more certain than that the dialogue between Posthumus and the gaoler is of the period of deep philosophical speculation; while the tablet left |