'Tho' the usual Absurdities of irregular Plots abound in [Cymbeline], yet there is something in the Discovery, that is very touching [however]... most of the Incidents in this Play smell rankly of Romance.'

Charles Gildon (1710)


'In Act V of Cymbeline there is a Vision, a Masque, and a Prophecy, which interrupt the Fable without the least necessity, and unmeasurably lengthen this act. I think it plainly foisted in afterwards for meer show, and apparently not of Shakespear'.

Alexander Pope (1723)


'It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance. There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this "immortal" pilferer of other men's stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity. To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, of Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to me'.

George Bernard Shaw (1896)


'Shakespeare's Cymbeline is a regrettably underrated and overlooked play. Misunderstood and evaluated upon false grounds, it is far better than many commentators recognize, for it embraces a multeity of Shakespearian devices, themes, and structural principles, with an energy of fusion characteristic only of the dramatist's maturity'.

William Barry Thorne (1969)


'Cymbeline is extravagantly experimental, showing Shakespeare at what we should nowadays call his most 'modern'. It is his most avant garde work. To begin with, there is the startling blend of elements... Holinshed and Boccaccio! Then there is the sophistication of the play's visual element. But beyond all these things, the chief mark of the experimental imagination in Cymbeline is to be found in its verse. The words are packed densely; instead of flowing out in sentences, they seem to break off individually, like drips of quartz under the hammer; they reach the ear in a rhythm that is abrupt and yet elegiac, angular yet gentle. (It was Tennyson's favourite play and his beloved copy was buried with him in the grave)'.

John Wain