Page:Cymbeline (1924) Yale.djvu/163

The Tragedy of Cymbeline asking Ginevra to meet him on the way. The servant is instructed to murder her when he reaches 'a fit place.' Ginevra persuades the servant to let her escape, disguised as a page, and to carry word to his lord that she is dead. As page to a Catalonian lord she sails for foreign lands, and on her journeys encounters Ambrogiuolo and hears him tell, as a jest, the story of his wager. She arranges to have her husband brought over seas to listen as Ambrogiuolo tells this tale to the Sultan. The truth is then revealed, and after the Sultan has condemned Ambrogiuolo to be smeared with honey and eaten by wasps, they all sit down to a sumptuous banquet. It is only in the early part of the tale, the long-drawn-out angry debate which provides some possible motivation for the story, that Boccaccio's plot surpasses Shakespeare's.

 

Cymbeline was first printed in 1623, at the end of the First Folio, among the tragedies, and under the title. The Tragedie of Cymbeline. The text was taken from a prompt-book copy, and was divided into acts and scenes; but it was so carelessly printed that it is full of obscure and perplexing readings. In this play Shakespeare seems to have had the assistance of a coadjutor, who was responsible for the Vision of Posthumus in Act V, which is not an integral part of the action, and perhaps for portions of the Belarius plot. 