The sources of Cymbeline are sufficiently known. What now are we to do with them? Source-hunting offers its own satisfactions and it is an acceptable mode of conspicuous leisure, but it should be possible still to bring it to bear more closely on the problems of literary criticism. Its bearing, however, may differ from play to play. It is salutary, for instance, to recognize that striking debt owed by The Tempest to travel literature. When we find that Shakespeare’s contemporaries allegorized the historical event we may more readily discount E. E. Stoll’s scepticism about allegory in the play. I think, too, that the play sheds a backward light upon its sources, making us more alive to their dramatic and poetic potential.

Cymbeline is a different problem. It is not so self-evident a masterpiece. There is the common passage and there is the strain of rareness. The sources and analogues could be used to explain away whatever fails to make an immediate, effacing impression. But they have too, I think, a more positive value. They can show that many of the play's uniquely impressive effects could have been won only out of that specific area of convention that Shakespeare chose to explore. Within this area we can distinguish something like a dramatic genre, and as a label we might take Polonius' infelicity 'historical-pastoral' or, in deference to received opinion, 'historical romance'. Such labels are useful because they tell us what sort of conventions to look out for, although each play is apt to define its own area, make its own map. My emphasis will be on the 'historical', for there is, I think, a way of reading the sources which lends support to Wilson Knight's claim that Cymbeline is to be regarded "mainly as an historical play"