SOURCE: “Cymbeline and the ‘Blameless Hero,’” in English Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 3, September, 1964, pp. 259-70.

In the following essay, Swander claims that Cymbeline is, in one sense, a modern and revolutionary text since it questions conventional Renaissance morality.

The first audience for Cymbeline would have been more aware than we are likely to be of certain social and literary conventions with which Shakespeare was working, and one must therefore be grateful to William Witherle Lawrence, who has insisted that we read the play not in a shadow cast by modern or personal prejudices but in the light shed by a knowledge of the conventions established in the medieval and renaissance analogues, all those plays, ballads, and romances that compose the cycle of stories about a woman falsely accused of infidelity.¹ If we do so, we discover, as Professor Lawrence said we would, that the broad outline of Posthumus'...