Spoken song and imagined music in Cymbeline

Abstract

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.