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tems and rights.Although it does not belong to the historical play, Cymbeline, with its motif concernedwith the regal administration and royal affairs, shows its topical practice on the politicalpropaganda. And the elaborate arrangement of characters, places, plots, and some otherdetails in this play all reveal its diagnosis of King James’s regime and the early JacobeanEngland or Britain. The historical context of the creation of Cymbeline is that Britain hadbeen under the rule of King James I for several years. And for the people of the kingdoms,especially for his English subjects, it was a couple of years during which they hadexperienced the change from the overall sense of expectations for regime of the newlycrowned Scottish King, to the spreading mood of disappointment and resistance for James’sautocratic politics and his absolutism.
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Chapter OneWelsh Ethnic Identity: TheAnglicizing Process of Wales

The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution had brought huge changes in Westernpolitics, especially the transformation of ideology. The concept of nation and nationalismcame into being as an important concern first in politics, and then in literature, and thendeveloped into the collective consciousness of national identity in the nineteenth century.The concerns about “nation”, “state”, or “ethnics” have become the overt topicality of themodern world and also the theoretical perspectives to examine and introspect the humanhistories. While observing the concept and definition of national identity, Anthony D. Smithsummarizes the basic features of national identity, as follows:1. an historic territory, or homeland2. common myths and historical memories3. a common, mass public culture4. common legal rights and duties for all members5. a common economy with territorial mobility for members.34Having pointed out the features of national identity and the definition of nation, Smithimmediately distinguished the different conceptions between nation and state. He arguesthat, state signifies the “public institutions, differentiated from, and autonomous of, othersocial institutions” and carries out a “monopoly of coercion and extraction” within a certaindomain. On the other hand, nation alludes to the cultural and political attachment in a singlepolitical community in which all have the same historical culture and homeland.
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A. “Lived at honest freedom”: Wales before theAnglo-Saxon Invasions
Even though lot of critics did not admit the historical elements and accused of theanachronistic problems in this play, such as James M. Nosworthy identified it as a romancewith “pseudo-historical” experiment in it, Cymbeline, like Shakespeare’s other plays, makesuse of a plenty of historical material to indicate or explore “more up-to-date problems” inthe age. As J. Clinton Crumley argues, this play is historical only to the extent that it“comments up historical (for us) events during Jacobean England”.41This explains why theplay was set in the reign of “Kymbeline or Cimbeline” as Holinshed dates him about 33B.C. to A.D. 2 with an historical event of History of Scotland in A.D. 976 playing the partsof the Welsh characters’stories.42Therefore, Shakespeare’s elaboration of the history is notsimply authentic records of the historical events, at least not in its chronicle material.The dialogue on the comparison of the court life and hunter life among Belarius,Guiderius,