SOURCE: "The Language of Sexual Revulsion," in The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, Longman Group Limited, 1974, pp. 112-42.

In this excerpt, Colman suggests that the dark bawdiness of Cymbeline places it in the tradition of Othello, King Lear, and Timon, of Athens, rather than with the other Shakespearean romances,

From most critical viewpoints, Cymbeline fits tidily into the place that chronology gives it, among Shakespeare's last plays. Recent editors have hazarded guesses of 1608 or 1609 as its most probable time of composition,²² and it has long been regarded as a companion piece to its close successor or contemporary, The Winter's Tale, Like both The Winter's Tale and Pericles, it has a plot that belongs in the romance genre, and many of its underlying concerns—loyalty, chastity, separation, remorse, reconciliation—are shared with The Tempest also. So far as its use of bawdy is concerned, however, Cymbeline belies this...