The last essay on Alkibiades book about Shakespeare deals with that frustrating masterpiece manque: Cymbeline.
Alkibiades points out how pertinent to today's news is the starting point of the play where England is engaged on a real-politic power play with Europe. And how king Cymbeline walks an aloof middle ground: his land will not be a servant to the Roman Empire, as a matter of fact, he defeated Rome's invading troops, but he will pay tribute to Caesar to ensure peaceful relations with the Empire.
We also get a clue to Alkybiades' choice of nick. In Plato's Symposium after Socrates great speech about Love and Beauty, a drunk Alcibiades crashes the party and as drunks are prone to do he proceeds to effusively praise a loved one: Socrates. Alcibiades claims that for greatness and goodness among those living Socrates stands alone. Replace Socrates with Shakespeare and you'll see where I'm going with this.
Anyways, let's get to the main point. Alkibiades also writes about the two salient points of Cymbeline (at least from the point of view of critics).
First: the magnificent 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' poem, sung in the play by Cymbeline's sons Guiderius and Arviragus while mourning the death of Fidele:
GUIDERIUS. Fear no more the heat o' th' Sun,
Nor the furious Winters rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and taken thy wages.
Golden Lads, and Girls all must,
As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.
ARVIRAGUS. Fear no more the frown o' th' Great,
Thou art past the Tyrants stroke,
Care no more to cloth and eat,
To thee the Reed is as the Oak:
The Scepter, Learning, Physic must,
All follow this and come to dust.
GUIDERIUS. Fear no more the Lightning flash.
ARVIRAGUS. Nor th' all-dreaded Thunderstone.
GUIDERIUS. Fear not Slander, Censure rash.
ARVIRAGUS. Thou hast finish'd Joy and moan.
BOTH. All Lovers young all Lovers must,
Consign to thee and come to dust.
GUIDERIUS. No Exorciser harm thee,
ARVIRAGUS. Nor no witch-craft charm thee.
GUIDERIUS. Ghost unlaid forbear thee.
ARVIRAGUS. Nothing ill come near thee.
BOTH. Quiet consummation have,
And renowned be thy grave.
Stevenson seems to have been inspired by the first stanza when he wrote:
UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Second: the complicated nature and messy ending of the play. My theory is that the ending was changed from the way it was originally written, which would explain why in the first folio Cymbeline was listed as a tragedy, despite the fact that the main characters get a 'happy' ending.
George Bernard Shaw, who had the audacity to rewrite the last act for a 1937 performance trying to "improve" Shakespeare, disagrees with my POV while still making fun of Shakespeare on his Cymbeline Refinished:
"When I read the act I found that my notion that it is a cobbled-up pasticcio by other hands was an unpardonable stupidity. The act is genuine Shakespear to the last full stop, and late phase Shakespear in point of verbal workmanship.
The doggerel is not doggerel: it is a versified masque, in Shakespear's careless woodnotes wild, complete with Jupiter as deus ex machina, eagle and all, introduced, like the Ceres scene in The Tempest, to please King Jamie, or else because an irresistible fashion had set in, just as at all the great continental opera houses a ballet used to be de rigueur. So, I take it, had Shakespear to stick a masque into Cymbeline. Performed as such, with suitable music and enough pictorial splendor, it is not only entertaining on the stage, but, with the very Shakespearean feature of a comic jailor which precedes it, just the thing to save the last act.
Without it the act is a tedious string of unsurprising dénouements sugared with insincere sentimentality after a ludicrous stage battle."
"I have ruthlessly cut out the surprises that no longer surprise anybody. I really could not keep my countenance over the identification of Guiderius by the mole on his neck. … In Maddison Morton's masterpiece, Box and Cox, Box asks Cox whether he has a strawberry mark on his left arm. "No" says Cox. "Then you are my long lost brother" says Box as they fall into one another's arms."
Of course Shaw's resolution to the play is weaker than Shakespeare's. And the sad fact is that if I was stupid enough to try to write my own fan-fiction denouement it would be even worse. There is no satisfactory way to do reparations for Posthumus attempted murder of Imogen. Nothing will do, not even going all the way John Barth went on his retelling of the Scherezade story on Chimera and have Imogen do to Posthumus what Scherezade instructed her sister do to her husband:
to get him to "spread-eagle himself on the bed and suffer his wrists and ankles to be bound to its posts with silken cords, lest by a spasm of early joy he abort its heavenly culmination, et cetera. Then, little sister, then, when you have him stripped and bound supine and salivating, take from the left pocket of your seventh gown the razor I've hid there, as I shall mine from mine -- and geld the monster! Cut his bloody engine off and choke him on it, as I'll do to my husband Shahryar! Then we'll lay our own throats open, to spare ourselves their sex's worse revenge".
