SOURCE: "Philaster and Cymbeline," in English Institute Essays, 1951, edited by Alan S. Downer, Columbia University Press, 1952, pp. 146-67.

In the essay below, Wilson counters assertions by previous critics that Shakespeare's Cymbeline was modeled after Philaster. He accounts for similarities between the plays by stressing that the "situations of the romantic plays of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher are the materials of romance which they and every other playwright of their time used in common."

At the beginning of the present century Professor A. H. Thorndike advanced two notable contentions in his book The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare [1901]. The first was that Beaumont and Fletcher had introduced a new dramatic genre to the Jacobean stage during the first decade of the seventeenth century, the genre of the heroic romance, with such plays as Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No King. This contention has...