Cimolino’s Cymbeline works — despite the play

When I saw Cymbeline last night at Stratford, I thought of Shakespeare in Love, the part where Geoffrey Rush’s character, Shakespeare’s producer Philip Henslowe demands a play with pirates, a dog and a happy ending.

There are no dogs or pirates in Cymbeline, but there is just about every other theme or motif from Shakespeare’s other plays, including a happy ending.

I enjoyed the production a lot because director Antoni Cimolino just let the play be what it was. He stayed true to the text and played it straight. This took some doing because there were so many unexpected things happening. Also the tone would change from farcical to serious on the turn of a line.  For example, the beheading of Cloten was a jarring surprise and the Queen’s death was a handy turn which came out of nowhere, not to mention, Belarius’s recognizing Cloten although he hadn’t seen him for 20 years. Nevertheless, Cimolino resisted the temptation to tidy things up or, worse, to send them up.

It seems such a mishmash of a play, I wondered whether Shakespeare had actually authored it (some sources think his Jacobean contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher had a hand in it) or if he just tossed it off because someone requested it and he needed the money. Unlike the hero of Shakespeare in Love wrestling with writer’s block early in his career, the actual Shakespeare would have had lots of his own previous works to draw on, as the play was one of his last — apparently first performed about 1611.

Cimolino’s production began with Cymbeline, king of the first-century Britons lying in a large (and anachronistic) four-poster bed with figures surrounding him as if in a dream. Therefore the entire play, similar to The Taming of the Shrew, could be understood as a dream, but without a lot of internal logic.  As in the latter play, using a dream format might also excuse the highly misogynistic views of women Shakespeare puts into the mouths of some of his characters.  The late Virgin Queen might not have been amused. Perhaps the unappetizing descriptions of women make Cloten’s death even less mourned and Posthumous’s repentance even more heart-felt, so there is some redeeming dramatic reason for their fervour.

But I actually wonder if Cymbeline might originally have been produced as a masque —James I, along with his wife, was very fond of this form of entertainment. It has the elements of such a courtly pageant: the scenes in the play often seem like tableaux; Wales provides the requisite pastoral setting (and in Milford Haven, a fleeting reminder of Henry VII’s landing there prior to the Battle of Bosworth); folk tales, in this case a wager based on a woman’s fidelity, were common themes in masques; the political subtext around the harmonious rule of a king would have bastioned the new monarch’s view of himself and his subjects.

The appearance of Jove — in this production at the sound of thunder and riding on an eagle with red eyes and flapping wings — would meet the need for elaborate staging. Although there is not a lot of singing, characteristic of masques, the two brothers of Innogen sing a dirge for her.  The masque format would also explain the seeming lack of coherence in the play and the many times only one character is on stage explaining the action.

Anyhow, be that as it may, Greg and I were outsourcing bits and pieces of the themes, characters and motifs of the play to other of Shakespeare’s works as we drove along the Highway 7 — so much so that laughing and talking, we turned too early for the detour at St. Mary’s.  We were soon off track in the pastoral wilds around Fullarton at midnight in the rain.  No pirates or dogs interfered in our little domestic drama, but we did eventually find our way home: a happy ending to an enjoyable evening of theatre.