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Critical Essay by Peggy Muñoz Simonds
SOURCE: “Cymbeline as a Renaissance Tragicomedy,” in Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 29-65.
In the following essay, Simonds claims that negative assessments of Cymbeline are often the result of misunderstandings about the play's proper classification, and suggests that evaluated as a tragicomedy rather than a romance, the work is a masterpiece.
Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance.
—The Tempest
As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has argued, we cannot hope to interpret a literary work with any degree of accuracy, much less criticize it fairly, until we have established its genre with a high degree of certainty,1 and Ernst Gombrich has extended this same warning to the study of art history and iconography.2 The problem of genre is particularly relevant to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a...
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This section contains 14,067 words (approx. 47 pages at 300 words per page) |
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