About this audiobook
Cymbeline is a late romance by William Shakespeare, composed in the early seventeenth century (generally dated to c. 1609–1611) and first published in the First Folio of 1623. Written for the commercial London stage during the Jacobean period, the play reflects Shakespeare’s mature engagement with hybrid dramatic forms, blending elements of tragic intensity, court comedy, and the providential structures of romance. Its archaic setting—Britain under a legendary king in uneasy relation to Rome—draws loosely on chronicle materials (notably Holinshed) while also adapting international tale-types current in Renaissance narrative culture.
The drama interweaves dynastic politics with intimate tests of fidelity, staging a world in which private desire collides with public authority and where deception, exile, and apparent death become mechanisms for moral and social reordering. Central concerns include the vulnerability of reputation, the gendered economies of chastity and slander, and the instability of identity as characters move between court and wilderness, Britain and Italy, legitimacy and disguise. Cymbeline is notable for its intricate plotting and its late-style movement toward recognition and reconciliation, a pattern that influenced subsequent tragicomedy and helped define modern critical understandings of Shakespearean romance as a mode preoccupied with loss, restoration, and the tenuous workings of justice.
