Page:Cymbeline (1924) Yale.djvu/160



The name Cymbeline, and the political setting of the play, Shakespeare took from Holinshed's Chronicles of England. The wager-story, which forms the basis of the Imogen plot, is a familiar one in mediæval literature; Shakespeare seems to have been chiefly indebted for this story to the ninth novel of the second day in Boccaccio's Decameron. It is hardly likely that he was familiar with an English version of this story, published possibly in 1603 but probably not before 1620, called Westward for Smelts. Other versions of the story which Shakespeare may, or may not, have known in some sixteenth century English form, are the thirteenth century French romances, King Florus and Fair Jehane, Roman de la Violette, and Roman del conte de Poitiers; a fourteenth century French mystery play; as well as scattered German, Scandinavian, and Gaelic versions. An English play printed in 1589, called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, may have suggested some names, characters, and incidents for Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster resembles Cymbeline in many details; the two plays were written at about the same time, and it is impossible to state definitely which influenced the other. Both plays indicate that a new type of drama was becoming fashionable toward the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century; it is quite conceivable that they were written contemporaneously and in friendly