anzas of inferior
poetical merit are inserted to form "an apparition."

+Date+.--Simon Forman, the writer of a diary, who died in 1611,
describes the performance of _Cymbeline_ at which he was present. The
entry occurs between those telling of _Macbeth_ (April 20, 1610) and
_The Winter's Tale_ (May 15, 1611). The tests of verse assign it also
to this period. The first print was that of the First Folio, 1623.

+Source+.--From Holinshed Shakespeare learned the only actual
historical fact in the play, that one Cunobelinus was an ancient king
of Britain. Cymbeline's two sons are likewise from Holinshed, as is
the rout of an army by a countryman and his two sons; but the two
stories are separate. The ninth novel of the second day of the
_Decameron_ of Boccaccio tells a story much resembling the part of the
play which concerns Posthumus. The play called _The Rare Triumphs of
Love and Fortune_ (1589) contains certain characters not unlike Imogen,
Posthumus, Belarius, and Cloten. Fidelia, Imogen's name in disguise,
is the heroine's name. But direct borrowing cannot be proved.

+The Winter's Tale+.--Nowhere is Shakespeare more lavish of his powers
of characterization and of poetic treatment of life than in this play.
He found for his plot a popular romance of the time, in which a true
queen, wrongly accused of infidelity with her husband's friend, dies of
grief at the death of her son, while her infant daughter, abandoned to
the seas in a boat, grows up among shepherds to marry the son of the
king of whom her father had been jealous. Disregarding the essentially
undramatic nature of the story, as well as its improbabilities, he
achieved a signal {203} triumph of his art in the creation of his two
heroines, and in his conception of the pastoral scenes, so fresh,
joyous, and absolutely free from the artificiality of convention.

In the deeply wronged queen he drew the supreme portrait of woman's
fortitude. Hermione is brave, not by nature, but inspired by high
resolve for her honor and for her children. Nobly indignant at the
slanders uttered against her, her wifely love forgives the slanderer in
pity for the blindness of unreason which has caused his action.
Shakespeare's dramatic instinct made him alter Hermione's death in the
earlier story to life in secret, with poetic justice in store.
Artificial as the long period of waiting seems, before the final
reconciliation takes place, it is forgotten in the magnificen