t deeply interested in the play, but that
he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece
and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the
knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a
theatre on which many depended for bread.

There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel
at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an
excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly
by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see
clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read--

_Bawd._ ... they are so pitifully sodden.

_Pandar._ ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the
little baggage.

_Boult._ Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms--

with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that
the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These
scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm
at sea, put into the mouth of Marina--

"My father, as nurse said, did never fear,
But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling
His kingly hands, haling ropes;
And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea
That almost burst the deck....
Never was waves nor wind more violent:
And from the ladder-tackle washes off
A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'
And with a dropping industry they skip
From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and
The master calls and trebles their confusion"--

and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to
study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most
lovely things in the play.

_Cymbeline._

_Written._ (?)

_Published_, in the folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline
and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn.
2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_,
and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman
falsely accused of adultery.

_The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His
only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to
Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to
destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten,