SOURCE: “Cymbeline and the Comedy of Anticlimax,” in Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, edited by Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod, Ohio University Press, 1974, pp. 131-41.

In the following essay, Powlick proposes that Shakespeare deliberately modified the conventions of tragedy in Cymbeline in order to expose the constricting nature of the genre.

For the more than three hundred years since its first publication critics have debated where among the other plays of Shakespeare to place Cymbeline. The first fault, of course, lay with Hemminge and Condell who included it with the tragedies in the first folio edition, and it is obvious that Cymbeline is no tragedy. The usual tendency of critics to say definitely that if it is not fish, then it must perforce be fowl has in this case been scrupulously avoided, and the result has been that some combined form—tragicomedy...