One great playwright rewrites another, as George Bernard Shaw imagines a far more rational, refreshingly feminist ending for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. In the same vein as Shaw’s final work Shakes versus Shav—a 10-minute Punch and Judy show in which the two bards debate who’s the better writer—Shaw tries to improve upon “one of Shakespeare’s finest later works” that nonetheless “goes to pieces” in Act V. The reading will feature Shakespeare’s original play, with Shaw’s reimagined final act, giving us a seamless experience of the two singular geniuses.
Made possible by the special support of the Michael Tuch Foundation.
This event will premiere LIVE from the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Peter Norton Symphony Space on Monday, May 18, 2026 at 7:30 PM ET. A recording will be available from Tuesday, May 19 at 7:30 PM ET thru Sunday, May 24 at 11:59 PM ET. Open captions will be available from Wednesday, May 20 at 7:30 PM ET thru Sunday, May 24 at 11:59 PM ET
THE CAST
ABOUT THE PLAY
Cymbeline (1609-10) is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, grouped generically as a romance with The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest in most collections of the complete works. After years of writing tragedies, Shakespeare returned to comic structures, themes and character types he had used before, most notably the duped, jealous husband, the heroine disguised as a boy, the clever, faithful servant, the contrast between an idealized rural life and the corrupt court, and the wicked queens and children who grow up unaware of their parentage that are reminiscent of fairy tales.
He grafted these elements onto a bit of dubious history he found in Holinshed’s Chronicles: King Cymbeline refuses to pay tribute to Augustus Caesar, which results in an invasion of Britain by a Roman army. This plot element required elaborate staging in a play already filled with a large cast, many shifts in location, and more than a few improbable events.
But Cymbeline also had one of Shakespeare’s bravest and most severely tested heroines. Imogen’s plight struck a chord with Shaw, who was a fierce advocate for the rights of women. In his Foreword to Cymbeline Refinished he justifies his decision to rewrite the fifth act by invoking the “successful and avowed variations” made by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Handel. And of course, he cites as precedent Shakespeare’s own appropriations of his sources: “Will it be contended that Shakespeare had no right to refashion Hamlet?” Therefore, with “no qualms of conscience” and “no apology to make” he tackles the final scenes of Cymbeline, during which, he observes, “the characters lost all their vitality and individuality and had nothing to do but identify themselves by moles on their necks or explain why they were not dead.” His compression of five scenes into one retains only eighty-nine lines of the original, focusing on a few characters and eliminating the clutter onstage. As the revelations and reunions so characteristic of Shakespearean comedy unfold, the spirit of rebellion dominates: the two brave young men, when told they are the sons of the king, refuse to exchange their rural upbringing for life at the court. And their sister Imogen angrily rejects reconciliation as well: Shaw transforms her from what he describes as “a wife so dutiful that she accepts her husband’s attempt to have her murdered” into a defiant Shavian woman who proclaims scornfully, “My husband thinks all is settled now / And this a happy ending.” When her father, King Cymbeline, reacts to her disguise with “Go change your dress…Have you no shame?” she replies, “None.” Her final words, however, sum up the plight of so many married women, then and now: “I must go home and make the best of it / As other women must.”
Shaw’s final act of Cymbeline was substituted for the original in a production at Britain’s Shakespeare Memorial Theater in 1937. It is not clear whether the play has ever been fully staged with Shaw’s revisions since then.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Shakespeare was the most prolific playwright in the English language until George Bernard Shaw’s fifty-two plays set a new record. For Red Bull’s audiences, Shakespeare needs no introduction. Or at least, his plays do not; as for the author, astonishingly little is known about his life, and the line of speculation referred to as “the authorship controversy” continues to produce new theories about who wrote the plays. We will not wade into them here. About Shaw, by contrast, we know a great deal, much of it from his enormous body of work. His career began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continued until the middle of the twentieth. Like Shakespeare’s, his name has become an adjective: Shavian. Born in Dublin but living in London as an adult, Shaw supported himself by lecturing and writing reviews of art, music and theater. After he began writing plays, he arranged to publish many of them with prefaces or forewords, at times taking on his critics or including autobiographical details. In addition, the published plays had such lengthy and abundant stage directions that reading a play by Shaw is a rather different experience from seeing it performed.
Shaw was a declared Socialist and an ardent reformer and his convictions permeate both his plays and the prefaces and forewords, particularly with the early plays such as Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” He acknowledged the influence of his Norwegian contemporary, Henrik Ibsen, whose “New Drama” asks us to question “which is the villain and which the hero” (Shaw’s “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” 1890). Shaw was scornful of many theatrical practices, among them the impulse to “improve” Shakespeare’s plays by supplying them with happy endings. This theatrical practice had begun in the seventeenth century and produced, as he wrote in his foreword to Cymbeline Refinished, some “crude literary butcheries [that were] successfully imposed upon the public” as recently as the late nineteenth century. Hence it was a surprise, but a very interesting one, when Shaw produced a new ending for Cymbeline.
- MARTHA TUCK ROZETT | Professor Emerita, Department of English, University at Albany, SUNY.