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영어

Anthropologists have observed among certain peoples a custom according to which the father retires to bed while his child is being born and behaves as if he were in the throes of giving birth to it himself. This custom is called the couvade. I think Cymbeline might be regarded as one long couvade in the guise of a dramatic romance. My angle on the play is that it makes sense of the apparent conflict between the Cymbeline plot and the Posthumus plot ― a conflict that seems to consign the script to structural incoherence. On the face of it, the two plotlines are pulling in opposite directions and endorsing contradictory views of women and of men. Cymbeline acts out the oscillating pattern of the romances as a whole: the plot that would recover trust in the female is frustrated and baffled by the plot that would recover masculine authority; the two remain incompatible. And yet this very incompatibility allows the two plots to protect one another.