1. Ros King discusses the textual and syntactical issues thrown up by the play’s opening in the first chapter of her book, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 5–10, moving from this into a discussion of the mixed form of tragicomedy.
2. Lisa Hopkins sees the scenes set in Wales as undercutting the power of the king in a similar way, especially in relation to the problematic figure of James I. See her book The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 11.
3. Heather James: Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151. Many of the issues mentioned in my own chapter are also noted by James; where I differ from her interpretation is in trying to make sense of the uses of Cymbeline.
4. For an analysis of gendered nationalism in the play, see Jodi Mikalachki: ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly (Vol. 46, 1995), 301–22.
5. In the Introduction to the Arden 2 edition of the play, J.M. Nosworthy describes Cymbeline as a play that ‘exhibits a certain degree of structural ineptitude’: J.M. Nosworthy (ed.): Cymbeline (London: Methuen, 2002), xxx. This seems hardly adequate given the subtleties of the socio-political nuances that Shakespeare is developing here.