SOURCE: Gajdusek, R. E. “Death, Incest, and the Triple Bond in the Later Plays of Shakespeare.” American Imago 31, no. 2 (summer 1974): 109-58.

In the following excerpt, Gajdusek traces the multiple incest threats and their symbolic implications in Cymbeline.

Cymbeline, the succeeding play [to Pericles], is … fundamentally concerned with incest. Posthumus' father had died before his son's birth, his mother while in birth labor, and from the first moments of life their son has been raised as though he were the son of Cymbeline beside Cymbeline's own daughter, Imogen. He is therefore, if not by blood, then by breeding, brother to Imogen. Attacked by her father for her marriage to Posthumus, Imogen explains the cause of her act:

It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus; You bred him as my playfellow. 

Incest is compounded, for Cymbeline urges upon his unacceptably married daughter separation from Posthumus and marriage with...