SOURCE: “Natural Bonds and Artistic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 440-60.

In the following essay, Lawrence analyzes the difficult and often misunderstood ending of Cymbeline, and suggests that a close reading provides insights into Shakespeare's poetics and into Renaissance literature in general.

“Cymbeline, though one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays now on the stage, goes to pieces in the last act”: thus George Bernard Shaw justifies his decision to provide a rewritten fifth act for the 1945 production of the play at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.¹ Wishing to salvage a great play for the sophisticated modern world—a world no longer subject to a vulgar craving for the easy consolations of poetic justice and happy endings—Shaw could approve of only two features in its concluding act: the vision of Jupiter, which he found to his surprise...