The play was probably first produced in 1610; in style, diction, and versification it resembles the two romantic comedies, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, which appeared in 1610 and 1611, respectively. Dr. Simon Forman, astrologer, quack, and theatregoer, who in his Book of Plays kept a record of the plays he attended, gives a synopsis of the plot of 'Cimbalin' in an undated entry which follows an entry dated May 15, 1611, recording a performance of 'The Winters Talle at the glob.' On January 1, 1633/4, 'Cymbeline was acted at court by the King's players. Well likte by the Kinge.'[1]
Irreverent hands were laid upon Cymbeline in 1682 by Tom Durfey, who attempted to fashion it to the taste of his generation under the title. The Injured Princess or The Fatal Wager. The names of the characters are changed—Imogen becomes Eugenia, Posthumus is Ursaces, and Iachimo is Shatillion; new characters are introduced, among them Clarina, who is Eugenia's confidante and daughter of Pisanio, and a drunken friend of Cloten's named Iachimo. Pisanio believes in Imogen's guilt; the lascivious Cloten and his ribald friend kidnap Clarina with evil intent; there is little left of Shakespeare's play but the outline of the plot. This perversion of Cymbeline held the stage until 1720, when Shakespeare's play was produced at the new Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.
But in 1755 another attempt was made, by Charles Marsh, to refashion the 'old and crude' play; and in 1759 still another. This time the culprit was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, William Hawkins, M.A., who possessed 'so thorough a veneration for the great Father of the English stage' that he 'retained, in many places, the very language of the original
- ↑ Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–1673, edited by J. Q. Adams, Yale University Press, 1917.
