Shakespeare has diffused a marvellous poetry throughout this forest idyl; a matchless freshness and primitive charm pervade the whole. In this period of detestation for the abortions of culture, the poet has beguiled himself by picturing a life far from all civilisation, an innately noble youth in a natural state, and he depicts two young men who have seen nothing of life and never looked upon the face of woman; whose days have been passed in the pursuit of game, and who, like the Homeric warriors, prepared and cooked with their own hands the spoil procured by their bows and arrows. But their race shines through, and they prove of better stock than we should have looked for in the sons of the contemptible Cymbeline. Their instincts all tend towards the noble and princely ideal.
In the Spanish drama, which twenty-five years later received such an impetus under Calderon, it became a leading motive to portray young men and women brought up in solitude without having seen a single being of the other sex, and without knowledge of their rank and parentage. Thus in Calderon's Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño) of 1635, we are shown a king's son leading a solitary life in utter ignorance of his royal descent. He is seized by a passionate love on his first meeting with mankind kind, and is crudely violent in the face of any opposition, but, like the princes in Cymbeline, the seeds of majesty are lying dormant and the princely instincts spring readily into life. In the play En esta vida todo as verdad y todo es mentira of 1647, a faithful servant carries off the emperor's son from the pursuit of a tyrant, and seeks refuge in a mountain cave of Sicily. He also takes charge of a base-born son of the tyrant, and the two lads are brought up together. They see no one but their foster-father, are clad in the skins of animals and live upon game and fruit. When the tyrant appears to claim his child and slay the emperor's son, none can tell him which is which, and neither threats nor entreaties can prevail upon the servant to yield the secret. Here, as in Life is a Dream, the first glimpse of a woman rouses instant love in both young men. In A Daughter of the Air (La hija del ayre) of 1664, Semiramis is brought up by an old priest, as Miranda is by Prospero in The Tempest. Like all these beings reared in solitude remote from the turmoil of life, Semiramis nourishes an impatient longing to be out in the world. In the two plays of 1672, Eco y Narciso and El monstruo de los jardines, Calderon employs a variation of the same idea. Narcissus in the one and Achilles in the other are brought up in solitude in order that we may see all the emotions aroused, especially those of love and jealousy, in a being so primitive that it cannot even name its own sensations.
In this episode, and throughout this last period of his poetry, Shakespeare entered a realm which the imagination of the Latin races immediately seized upon and made their own. But in all their dramatic poetry of this nature they never surpassed that of the English poet.
He refrained entirely from the erotic in this idyl, and instead of the demands of a lover's passion, he portrayed unconscious brotherly love offered to a sister disguised as a boy. Imogen and the two strong-natured, high-minded youths dwell charmingly together, but their companionship is destroyed in the bud when Imogen, after having drunk the narcotic supplied by the physician to the queen instead of poison, lies as one dead. A gently touching element is introduced into this moving play when the two brothers bear her forth and sing over her bier. We witness a burial without rites or ceremonies, requiems or church formalities, an attempt being made to fill their place with spontaneous natural symbols. A similar attempt was made by Goethe in the double chorus sung over Mignon's body in Wilhelm Meister (Book VIII. chap. viii.). Imogen's head is laid towards the east, and the brothers sing over her the beautiful duet which their father had taught them at the burial of their mother. Its rhythm contains the germ of all that later became Shelley's poetry.
The first verse runs:
"Fear no more the heat of sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweeper, come to dust."[2]
The concluding verses, in which the voices are heard first in solo and then in duets, form a wonderful harmony of metric and poetic art.
This idyl, in which he found and expressed his reawakened love for the heart of Nature, has been worked out by Shakespeare with especial tenderness. He by no means intended to represent a flight from scorn of mankind as a thing desirable in itself, but merely to depict solitude as a refuge for the weary, and existence in the country as a happiness for those who have done with life.
As a drama, Cymbeline contains more of the nature of intrigue than any earlier play. There is no little skill displayed in the way Pisanio misleads Cloten by showing him Posthumus's letter, and where Imogen takes the headless Cloten, attired in Posthumus's clothes, for her murdered husband. The mythological dream vision seems to have been interpolated for use at court festivities. The explanatory tablet left by Jupiter, and the king's joyful outburst in the last scene, "Am I a mother to the birth of three?" prove that even at his fullest and ripest Shakespeare was never securely possessed of an unfailing good taste, but such trifling errors of judgment are more than counterbalanced by the overflowing richness of the fairylike poetry of this drama