Tragedy of Cymbeline Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: often exceeding even its utmost capacity ; while in turn the language in his use became as a thing inspired, developing an energy and flexibility and subtilty su... more »ch as may well make him at once the delight and the despair of all wlio undertake to write the English tongue. For he here seems a perfect autocrat of expression, moulding and shaping it with dictatorial prerogative ; all this too, with the calmness of a spontaneous omniloquence. In his hands, indeed, the language is like a grand cathedral organ, with its every touch at his instant command, from the softest notes which the most delicate spirit of sense can apprehend, to the lordliest harmonies that mortal hearing is able to sustain. Date of the Composition. The Tragedy Of Cymbeline, as it is called in the original copy, belongs, both by internal and external marks, to the last ten years of the Poet's life, — the same period which produced Othello, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale. The only contemporary notice we have of it is from the Diary of Dr. Simon Forman, who gives with considerable detail the leading incidents of the play as he saw it performed somewhere between April, 1610, and May, 1611. It may be well to add that Cymbeline, as we learn by an entry of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, was acted at Court in January, 1633, and was "well liked by the King"; which is to me an interesting fact in reference to that ill-starred Prince, Charles the First, who, whatever may be thought of him as a statesman and ruler, was undoubtedly a man of royal tastes in literature and art. There is no reason to doubt that Cymbeline was freshfrom the mint when Forman saw it. It has the same general characteristics of style and imagery as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale; while perhaps...« less