In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the supposed literary origins of a popular girls’ name
Where does the name Imogen come from? Some name origins are more interesting than others. And the origin of the girls’ name Imogen is more interesting than most.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ is one of the most famous songs from a Shakespeare play, although its context – in the late play Cymbeline – is often forgotten, and is not as well-known, perhaps, to begin with. Here’s the text of ‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ followed by a few words of comment and analysis.
A short summary of the main facts surrounding Shakespeare’s neglected late play
1. Samuel Johnson wasn’t impressed by Cymbeline. The eighteenth-century critic, poet, and lexicographer dismissed its ‘unresisting imbecility’, while George Bernard Shaw (who liked All’s Well That Ends Well, at least as much as Shaw liked any Shakespeare) called it ‘stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order’. Shaw would rewrite the ending of the play in his short work Cymbeline Refinished. Henry James, in 1896, was kinder: ‘The thing is a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all, and of a psychological sketchiness that never touches firm ground, but plays, at its better times, with an indifferent shake of golden locks, in the high, sunny air of delightful poetry.’