SOURCE: “Cymbeline as a Renaissance Tragicomedy,” in Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 29-65.

In the following essay, Simonds claims that negative assessments of Cymbeline are often the result of misunderstandings about the play's proper classification, and suggests that evaluated as a tragicomedy rather than a romance, the work is a masterpiece.

Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. 

—The Tempest

As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has argued, we cannot hope to interpret a literary work with any degree of accuracy, much less criticize it fairly, until we have established its genre with a high degree of certainty,¹ and Ernst Gombrich has extended this same warning to the study of art history and iconography.² The problem of genre is particularly relevant to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a...