SOURCE: “Cymbeline and the Languages of Myth,” in Mosaic, Vol. 10, No. 3, Spring, 1977, pp. 105-15.

In the following essay, Garber observes Shakespeare's use of classical mythology as a unifying force in Cymbeline.

In many ways, Cymbeline is an experimental play. Like Pericles, it presents audience and reader with a relatively new mode of image-making, which we may perhaps call “realization”: things, objects, and concrete images, which in the tragedies were part of metaphors, are in the romances brought out of the linguistic texture of utterance, and transferred to the dramatic texture of action. As an example of this technique, we might consider the jewel, which is used in the play as a metaphor for a beloved person, and by extension for that person's fidelity and chastity. In the course of the action the jewel as image becomes equated with actual jewels in the dramatic action: the ring Imogen gives...