CYMBELINE AND ITS ENEMIES.

CYMBELINE AND ITS ENEMIES. In preparing to see CYMBELINE, I pasted a quote from Samuel Johnson in the front cover of my paperback copy of the play: “To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names…and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” Terry Teachout (in the December 14 Wall Street Journal) introduced me to a couple other critical comments. George Bernard Shaw: “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order.” Henry James: “a florid fairy-tale of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all.” I think that Henry James identified one major problem. Many readers do not like fairy tales.