GBS and Cymbeline Refinished

Of Cymbeline Dr. Johnson, no romantic, says:

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expence of much incongruity.

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation. (The Plays of William Shakespeare in Eight Volumes, 1765, vol. VII, p. 403).

Many critics have agreed.  This play's dramaturgy waxes more ambitious than many, perhaps any, other play Shakespeare ever wrote.  It combines the action of three plots: the Posthumus-Imogen marriage story, involving Posthumus' banishment, the wager on Imogen's constancy, the Iachimo deception, and the Pisanio murder sub-plots; the second plot is that of Belarius and Cymbeline's two stolen sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, their pastoral life in the cave, the theme of royal blood will out, and their eventual restitution; the third plot is that of the Roman invasion of Britain over the contested tribute, the war between Britons, led by King Cymbeline, and the army of Rome, led by Lucius, the heroic stand at the narrow pass, and the eventual peaceful resolution of the conflict.  Added to this complex mix are the evil-stepmother folk story, the subplot involving herbal drugs the evil stepmother thinks will kill Imogen, but that the benevolent doctor Cornelius has ameliorated, the sexual pursuit of Imogen by the evil queen's idiot son Cloten, the death of Cloten and the laying of his headless body where it will be found by the cross-dressed Imogen, in the character of Fidele, and spice it with identifying moles and birth marks, bloody handkerchiefs, diamond rings and bracelets, songs and dances, ghosts, oracles and prophecies, Roman and Briton warriors in pitched battle, and Jupiter descending from the heavens on an eagle hurling a thunderbolt.

Just a walk in the park, really...

Hardly.  Put like that, it might be easy enough to agree with Dr. Johnson.  One who did agree, where it came to the final act, in any event, was George Bernard Shaw.  According to Richard Hosley, "In the last scene the three actions are fused in a brilliant denouement in which no less than twenty-five plot complications are untied" (Introduction to the New American Library edition of Cymbeline, p. xxiv).  This number of revelations in the final scene was about 20 too many for GBS, an act he regarded as far from brilliant. 

Shaw says, "Cymbeline, though one of the finest of Shakespear's [sic] later plays...goes to pieces in the last act...the act is a tedious string of unsurprising denouements sugared with insincere sentimentality after a ludicrous stage battle.  With one exception the characters have vanished and left nothing but dolls being moved about like the glass balls in the game of solitaire until they are all got rid of but one" (Shaw, the Foreword to Cymbeline Refinished, 1936).  In rewriting the final act Shaw says, "I have ruthlessly cut out the surprises that no longer surprise anybody...The more childish spectators may find some delight in the revelation that Polydore and Cadwal are Imogen's long lost brothers and Cymbeline's long lost sons; that Iachimo is now an occupant of the penitent form and very unlike his old self; and that Imogen is so dutiful that she accepts her husband's attempt to have her murdered with affectionate docility.  I cannot share these infantile joys."  Nor does his version of Act V.

Shaw further states that "In doing so I had to follow the Shakespearean verse pattern to match the 89 lines of Shakespear's text which I retained.  This came very easily to me...Shakespearean blank verse has been to me as natural a form of literary expression as the Augustan English to which I was brought up in Dublin, or the latest London fashion in dialogue."  I disagree.  Shaw's efforts are pathetic, but you be the judge.  Here is the link to Shaw's version:  Cymbeline Refinished, from Project Gutenberg, Australia.  And here is a test to further engage the reader (who will need engagement because Shaw's version is fairly anemic): identify the 89 lines retained from the original among Shaw's insipid replacement text.

In attempting to think of literary analogs to others with enough literary chutzpah to re-write Shakespeare (excluding the 17th and 18th century adapters), Shaw cannot come up with one, so turns to musical examples instead: Mozart's additions to Handel's Messiah, Wagner's revision of Spontini, and the voluminous musical pieces specified as variations on a theme.

But literature is not music, and GBS was not Shakespeare.  It is of little import that his Cymbeline Refinished is a failure.  More importantly it reveals two things about Shaw: 1) his contempt for most auditors ("...I unhesitatingly recommend my version.  The audience will not know the difference; and the few critics who have read Cymbeline will be too grateful for my shortening of the last act to complain."); and 2) his complete misunderstanding of the structure and impact of the play. 

Cymbeline is, as editors have often pointed out, a tragi-comedy.  It skates perilously near tragedy, but remains comic, with a nearly unprecedented pacific resolution, because of its controlling agents of providence who possess supervisory knowledge of the events of the play.  Shakespeare places these agents, specifically intercessory agents, throughout to reassure us that when things look hopelessly tragic, a providential end is in sight.

One providential agent is Cornelius, who providentially prevents the wicked queen's drugs from causing death:

I do know her spirit
And will not trust one of her malice with
A drug of such damned nature. (1.5.34-36)

And so it happens that Imogen is stupefied into a mistaken death when she, in the character of Fidele, takes the drug, rather than tragically dying.  (The echo of Romeo and Juliet is clear).

The Second Lord who gulls Cloten is another such agent, who assures us that Cloten is too stupid to cause any real harm.  He, like Cornelius, is false to be true.  for Imogen:

That such a crafty devil as is his mother
Should yield the world this ass.  A woman that
Bears all down with her brain, and this her son
Cannot take two from twenty, for his heart,
And leave eighteen.(2.1.51-55)

In his role as providential intercessor, he prays:

The heavens hold firm
The walls of thy dear honor, keep unshaked
That temple, thy fair mind, that thou mayst stand
T'enjoy thy banished lord and this great land! (2.1.61-64)

Pisanio is also a providential agent who manipulates the action and steers it clear of disaster.  In response to Posthumus order for him to murder Imogen he says:

Thou bid'st me to my loss, for true to thee
Were to prove false, which I will never be,
To him that is most true.  To Milford go,
And find not her whom thou pursuest. Flow, flow
You heavenly blessings, on her. (3.6.155-159)

Note that he too calls upon providence to protect Imogen, and his actions in advising her and in sending the blood handkerchief to Posthumous further his role as providential aid.

Finally, after repeated prayer, Providence itself--or rather, himself, in the person of Jupiter, descends to the stage to set things right.  In league with the gods is Nature, who through the "sanguine star," the mole upon Guiderius' neck, is seen as

"...wise Nature's end in the donation
To be his evidence now." (5.5.370-71).

In the resolution of all of its intertwined plots this play assures the auditor of a providential outcome.  Far from being bored by the revelations in the final scene, as GBS asserts, I think most theatre audiences are delighted by them.  His accusation against the lack of genuine character is a little more telling, and certainly aligns with Dr. Johnson's criticism, but that is to look amiss with Shaw's eyes, "Compelled to worship priest invented gods" as Shaw would have it.  There is no such sentiment in the original.  It concludes fittingly (with lines Shaw incongruously adopts, silently admitting their potency while denying their effect) with Cymbeline's general benediction over a truly providential outcome.