As an implausible romance, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline encourages the audience to delight in its fiction. A 1998 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company began with the performers around a campfire, gathered for a story, as a man in a red robe intoned, “There was a king …” In other recent productions, such as those by Shakespeare’s Globe in 2002 and Fiasco Theater Company in 2011, the entire cast sat throughout the play in a semi-circle around the stage, ready to take on different roles at different times. With a small cast and many doubled roles, these performances required some instant character changes on stage, further reinforcing the play’s status as a fiction as well as making vivid for audiences the assumption of a pose that is involved in playing any part—fitting for a play in which so many of the characters also take on disguises or present themselves falsely. In depicting explicit fictions, the play encourages audiences to experience intensely a reaction Jeremy Lopez has argued was typical for the early modern theater, in which the overtly “theatrical” use of “conventions” became the audience’s prompt “for admiring the act of representation itself.”

Many readers have called attention to Cymbeline’s engagement with fictionality. Peter Holland expresses a typical view of its “pleasure in the joys of ending narratives and of storytelling itself.” Patrick Cheney takes note of the play’s frequent references to other authors and to Shakespeare’s own previous works in order to argue that “this play reflects on Shakespearean art more broadly.” Cymbeline emphasizes its fictionality most of all, I would suggest, in how it employs conventional literary tokens of recognition—bodily marks, clothing, and jewelry—that prove the character or identity of Imogen and her brothers. Terence Cave has argued more generally that while recognition scenes create “a shift from ignorance to knowledge,” they also involve “a shift into the implausible.” Extending Cave’s work on the links between knowledge, recognition, and artistic fictions, and especially his insights into how the depiction of an implausible recognition may foreground the fictionality of literary works, I am particularly concerned with how the gender dimension of material proof in the play underscores the difficulty of making chastity apparent.