_Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn. 2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_, and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman falsely accused of adultery. _The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry Imogen. Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste. Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is killed by one of the sons. The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished. Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends happily. It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country, away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it "unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work. Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike _Othello_; but in _Othello_ the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In _Cymbeline_ the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end, so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.