Cymbeline

Cymbeline is a late romance set in ancient Britain, in which the king's daughter Imogen is slandered by a scheming Italian, disguises herself as a boy and survives poison, war and mistaken death before a spectacular series of revelations.

Main characters

• Cymbeline, King of Britain
• Imogen (also spelled Innogen), his daughter
• Posthumus Leonatus, her husband
• The Queen, her stepmother
• Cloten, the Queen's son
• Iachimo, an Italian
• Pisanio, Posthumus's servant
• Belarius, a banished lord, and Guiderius and Arviragus, the king's lost sons

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Imogen has secretly married Posthumus, a gentleman without rank, instead of her boorish stepbrother Cloten, and Posthumus is banished to Rome. There he boasts of her faithfulness and Iachimo bets that he can seduce her. Rejected, Iachimo hides in a trunk in her bedroom, notes details of the room and a mole on her breast, and steals her bracelet. Posthumus believes him and orders his servant Pisanio to kill Imogen.

Pisanio instead helps Imogen escape disguised as a boy, Fidele. In Wales she is taken in by an old exile and two young men who, unknown to her, are her kidnapped brothers. She takes a drug she thinks is medicine, falls into a death-like sleep, and wakes beside the headless body of Cloten, dressed in Posthumus's clothes. When the Romans invade Britain, all the scattered characters are drawn into the battle, and in a long final scene every secret is revealed, the family reunited and Iachimo forgiven.

Themes

• Trust and jealousy
• Identity and disguise
• Britain and Rome
• Forgiveness and reconciliation

Famous lines

Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages.

Song, Act 4 Scene 2

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

Holinshed's Chronicles for the ancient British king Cunobelinus, and Boccaccio's Decameron (Day 2, Story 9) for the wager plot.

On stage and screen

The astrologer and physician Simon Forman saw it around 1611 and wrote a summary of the plot in his notebook. Its ending, in which around two dozen revelations follow one another, is a tour de force of stagecraft.

See where Cymbeline sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.