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The final version of this review is published in Cahiers Elisabéthains:A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 95:1 (April 2018), pp. 126-9. Published by SAGE Publishing. All rights reserved. Deanna Smid, The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature (Leiden, Brill, 2017), 210 pp, ISBN 978-90-0434403-7

Believing her to be dead, Arviragus and Guiderius perform the funerary rite for Innogen in William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, but the men speak the words of the dirge listed as ‘Song’ in the first folio. Readers and spectators familiar with Shakespeare’s other late plays would expect musical solace here, yet the spoken song fails to comfort the brothers, and it may rattle the audience because it conjures the ending of Romeo and Juliet in their imaginations. The audience’s imagination is again invoked by the ‘harmony’ at the end of the play – a harmony they do not witness and thus must imagine.

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