The resemblance between _Philaster_ and _Cymbeline_, such as it is, is closer than that between _Philaster_ and the Shakespearian successors of _Cymbeline_,--_The Winter's Tale_ and _The Tempest_. But the common features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic scenes and interest with those of royalty, the combination of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the resulting jealousy, intrigue, and crime, the wanderings of an innocent and distressed woman in boy's clothing, the romantic localization, did not appear first in either _Philaster_ or _Cymbeline_. _Philaster_ and _Cymbeline_ follow numerous clues in the idyllic-comic of _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _Midsummer-Night's Dream_; in the idyllic-romantic-pathetic of _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _As You Like It_, and _Twelfth Night_; and for that matter in the materials furnished by Greene, Lodge, Sidney, Sannazzaro, Montemayor, Bandello, Cinthio and Boccaccio; and in the romantic and tragicomic fusion already attempted in _Much Ado_, _All's Well_, and _Measure for Measure_. For the character and the trials of Imogen, Shakespeare did not require the inspiration of a Beaumont. He had been busied with the figure of Innogen (as he then called her) as early as 1599; for in the 1600 quarto of _Much Ado_ she appears by sheer accident in a stage direction as the wife of the Leonato of that play. He had been using the sources from which _Cymbeline_ is drawn,--Holinshed and Boccaccio, and that early romantic drama, _Fidele and Fortunio_,--before _Philaster_ was written. And it is much more likely that the Belarius of Shakespeare and the Bellario of Beaumont were both suggested by the Bellaria of Greene's _Pandosto_, than that Shakespeare borrowed from Beaumont. Nor is Shakespeare likely to have been indebted to Beaumont's example for the sensational manner of the denouement in _Cymbeline_--the succession of fresh complications and false starts by which suspense is sustained. These are precisely the features that distinguish those scenes of _Pericles_ which by the consensus of critics are assigned to Shakespeare; and _Pericles_ was written by 1608, at least as early as _Philaster_, and in all probability earlier. In his story of Marina, Shakespeare is merely pursuing the sensational methods of _Measure for Measure_ and anticipating those of _The Winter's Tale_. In general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic possibilities of the _Comedy of Errors_, _Twelfth Night_, _All's Well_, and _Measure for Measure_, and the romantic manipulation of _Cymbeline_ and the later plays.