Making Sense of Cymbeline

Good luck.

With the title of my blog, I don't mean to suggest that the play's action itself doesn't make sense... In fact, I'm amazed that I've never heard of this play before I took this class. I found the characters, the action, the dialogue, and the story itself to pack a big punch. Each character, even the villains, are given such incredible detail and nuance to their personality--many of the more tragic characters are redeemed in the end (thanks to Ashley Arcel for pointing that out so well in her blog entry). And, of course, since college-aged students love sexual innuendo, I have to say that the dialogue in this play is masterful and quite filthy. I didn't even need to look at the footnotes to tell that Cloten was a sick, perverted bastard!

I am not yet able to completely describe how Cymbeline makes sense in the grand scheme of Shakespeare's romances as far as its relation to the mythic, as I have not yet completed the rest of them. My initial impression of this romance, as it compares to some of Shakespeare's other very, very dark tragedies (especially King Lear) is that while they maintain a similar arc, the ending tends to share more in common with the present-day narrative in American films.

This doesn't apply to all works of the present day, but it seems as if audiences are willing to accept just about any insane, dark, twisted elements in a story so long as things turn out all right in the end. If a character has been through hell, then they better make it out alive. Not to disparage the end of Cymbeline as a "Hollywood ending" (even though everything fell completely into place quite conveniently), but the characters we know and love make it out just fine. By and large, I think it works. Perhaps if Cymbeline ended in a blood bath like King Lear or Hamlet, its reputation would be more prominent because of that (I have no way of knowing, just a hunch).

Based on my current impressions on Cymbeline, what seems out of place when trying to categorize it as more of a comedy versus a drama makes for an interesting product, nonetheless. It's amazing how much of a model this is for what we see as a standard for entertainment today. A problematic set-up where everything that can possibly go wrong does, and in the end the difficulties are reconciled in such a way that it doesn't feel too out of place. Graned, the god Jupiter makes an appearance, but it felt okay with me. After all, deus ex machina has become so common in today's popular culture that most non-English majors (and even plenty who are) could see one without even knowing it.

Next up: Pericles.