CYMBELINE first appeared in print in the Folio of 1623, and there is no evidence of any previous attempt at publication. The text, which presents many difficulties, has been edited on the basis of this original, with the assistance, as usual, of the results of later editors.

For the date of production the later limit is the death in 1611 of Simon Forman, who records in his "Booke of Plaies" a performance of Cymbeline witnessed by him. The entry is undated, but the records of performances of Winter's Tale and Macbeth, between which it occurs, belong respectively to May 15, 1611, and April 20, 1610. The metrical tests point to the years 16091611, and we may with some assurance regard 1610 as coming within a year of the date of composition.

Of authentic history in Cymbeline there is very little beyond the fact of the existence, about the beginning of the Christian era, of a British king, Cunobelinus. The pseudo-historical element Shakespeare derived from Holinshed, whose narrative is here chiefly legendary. The Chronicle represents Cymbeline as having been brought up in Rome and knighted by Augustus Cæsar, and as the father of two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. Conflicting stories are reported about the payment of tribute to Rome, but Holinshed puts stress on the friendship existing between Cymbeline and the Emperor, and makes the refusal of tribute come from Guiderius after his father's death. The references to previous conflicts between Rome and Britain are derived from the Chronicle. The account of the battle in the fifth act, and of the saving of the day by Belarius and the two princes, is based on Holinshed's story of a fight between the Danes and the Scots, in which the fleeing Scots were rallied in a lane by a husbandman and his two sons.

The romantic element in the plot belongs to a very widely diffused type of story. It is found repeatedly in French romance and drama, and occurs also in Italian, German, Scandinavian, Gaelic, and other literatures. In most versions there persist the characteristic features of the wager, the repulse of the villain, the deceptive tokens, the attempt of the husband or lover to punish the supposed infidelity by death, the wanderings of the heroine in disguise, the final reconciliation, and the confession of the villain. Shakespeare's version approaches most closely that of Boccaccio in the ninth novel of the second day of the Decameron, which he may have known in a lost English translation or in one of the current French editions. The English version which appears in Westward for Smelts cannot be proved to have been printed before 1620; and its author may himself have been indebted to Shakespeare, or both may have borrowed from an English source now lost.

A number of subsidiary sources have been suggested. The early anonymous play of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (printed 1589) has resemblances to our play, especially in the rôles of Imogen, Posthumus, Cloten, and Belarius, and the heroine is named Fidelia. The relation of the Queen to her son and Imogen recalls the familiar stepmother motive of Germanic folk-lore, and, with the episode in the cave, more specifically the fairy-tale of Little Snow-white. But from whatever sources Shakespeare drew these various details, the interweaving and the atmosphere are his own, and all the wealth of poetry and characterization which gives the drama its charm.

If Pericles be set aside as primarily a dramatized tale of adventure, Cymbeline is the first of that group of so-called "dramatic romances" with which Shakespeare closed his career. The difficulty of fixing a certain chronology prevents us from stating with assurance the relation of these plays to the somewhat similar group produced about the same time by Beaumont and Fletcher; but a close relation between the present play and the Philaster of these authors is beyond question, the balance of evidence favoring the younger authors as inventors of the type. Doubt has been cast upon the authenticity of several passages in the play, especially the vision of Posthumus in v. iv. The device itself is paralleled by the spectacular elements in The Tempest and Winter's Tale; but the inferior quality of such verses as 30-92 lends color to the belief that the scene was at least expanded by another hand than Shakespeare's.

Lords, Ladies, Roman Senators, Tribunes, a Soothsayer, a Dutchman, a Spaniard, Musicians, Officers, Captains Soldiers, Messengers, and other Attendants.