Why is Cymbeline seldom performed?
Many critics see Cymbeline as Shakespeare’s flawed experiment with the Romance tradition, before he perfected the genre in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. The Romance tradition consisted of improbable, magical or supernatural events remarkable more for their symbolic effect than for realism. Most Romances took the form of poems or stories designed for reading aloud, enabling scenes to be created in the listeners’ imaginations. Characters are subordinate and are reduced to one-dimensional emblematic figures: ethereal maidens, wounded kings, evil monsters and brave heroes. However, drama requires living, breathing characters with whom we can identify. But it is difficult to confine complex characters within the symbolic world of Romance. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare was faced with the problem of marrying these two worlds. Most critics feel he did not entirely succeed. The King is a mere cipher, the “wounded king” of Romance, and never fills out as a character. The “hero” Posthumus begins
