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Cymbeline

Cymbeline, also known as The Tragedie of Cymbeline or Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a play by William Shakespeare set in Ancient Britain (c. 10–14 AD) and based on legends that formed part of the Matter of Britain concerning the early historical Celtic British King Cunobeline. Although it is listed as a tragedy in the First Folio, modern critics often classify Cymbeline as a romance or even a comedy. Like Othello and The Winter's Tale, it deals with the themes of innocence and jealousy. While the precise date of composition remains unknown, the play was certainly produced as early as 1611.

Characters

 * In Britain
 * Cymbeline – Modelled on the historical King of Britain, Cunobeline, and father to Imogen
 * Queen – Cymbeline's second wife and mother to Cloten
 * Imogen/Innogen – Cymbeline's daughter by a former queen, later disguised as the page Fidele
 * Posthumus Leonatus – Innogen's husband, adopted as an orphan and raised in Cymbeline's family
 * Cloten – Queen's son by a former husband and step-brother to Imogen
 * Belarius – banished lord living under the name Morgan, who abducted King Cymbeline's infant sons in retaliation for his banishment
 * Guiderius – Cymbeline's son, kidnapped in childhood by Belarius and raised as his son Polydore
 * Arvirargus – Cymbeline's son, kidnapped in childhood by Belarius and raised as his son Cadwal
 * Pisanio – Posthumus's servant, loyal to both Posthumus and Imogen
 * Cornelius – court physician
 * Helen – lady attending Imogen
 * Two Lords attending Cloten
 * Two Gentlemen
 * Two Captains
 * Two Jailers

 * In Rome
 * Philario – Posthumus's host in Rome
 * Iachimo/Giacomo – a Roman lord and friend of Philario
 * French Gentleman
 * Dutch Gentleman
 * Spanish Gentleman
 * Caius Lucius – Roman ambassador and later general
 * Two Roman senators
 * Roman tribunes
 * Roman captain
 * Philharmonus – soothsayer

 * Apparitions
 * Jupiter – King of the gods in Roman mythology
 * Sicilius Leonatus – Posthumus's father
 * Posthumus's mother
 * Posthumus's two brothers

Summary
Cymbeline is the Roman Empire's vassal king of Britain. Twenty years earlier, Cymbeline's two infant sons, Guiderius and Arvirargus, were kidnapped by an exiled traitor named Belarius. Cymbeline discovers his daughter, Imogen (or Innogen), has secretly married her lover Posthumus Leonatus, a member of Cymbeline's court. The lovers have exchanged jewellery as tokens: Imogen with a bracelet, and Posthumus with a ring. Cymbeline dismisses the marriage and banishes Posthumus since Imogen—as Cymbeline's only remaining child—must produce a fully royal-blooded heir to succeed to the British throne. In the meantime, Cymbeline's Queen is conspiring to have Cloten (her cloddish and arrogant son by an earlier marriage) marry Imogen to secure her bloodline. The Queen is also plotting to murder both Imogen and Cymbeline, procuring what she believes is deadly poison from the court doctor. The doctor, Cornelius, is suspicious and switches the poison for a harmless sleeping potion. The Queen passes the "poison" along to Pisanio, Posthumus and Imogen's loyal servant. Imogen is told it is a medicinal drug. Unable to be with Posthumus, Imogen secludes herself in her chambers, away from Cloten's aggressive advances.

Posthumus must now live in Italy, where he meets Iachimo (or Giacomo), who wagers the prideful Posthumus that he, Iachimo, can seduce Imogen, whom Posthumus has praised for her chastity, and will then bring Posthumus proof of Imogen's adultery. If Iachimo wins, he will get Posthumus's token ring. If Posthumus wins, not only must Iachimo pay him but also fight Posthumus in a duel with swords. Iachimo heads to Britain where he attempts to seduce the faithful Imogen, who rejects him. Iachimo then hides in a chest in Imogen's bedchamber and, when the princess falls asleep, steals Posthumus's bracelet from her. He also takes note of the room, as well as the mole on Imogen's partially nude body, to present as false evidence to Posthumus that he seduced his bride. Returning to Italy, Iachimo convinces Posthumus that he has successfully seduced Imogen. In his wrath, Posthumus sends two letters to Britain: one to Imogen, telling her to meet him at Milford Haven, on the Welsh coast; the other to the servant Pisanio, ordering him to murder Imogen at the Haven. However, Pisanio refuses and reveals Posthumus's plot to Imogen. He has Imogen disguise herself as a boy and they continue to Milford Haven to seek employment. He also gives her the Queen's "poison", believing it will alleviate her psychological distress. In the guise of a boy, Imogen assumes the name "Fidele", meaning "faithful".

Back at Cymbeline's court, Cymbeline refuses to pay his British tribute to the Roman ambassador Caius Lucius. Lucius warns Cymbeline of the Roman Emperor's forthcoming wrath, which will be an invasion of Britain by Roman troops. Meanwhile, Cloten learns of the "meeting" between Imogen and Posthumus at Milford Haven. Dressing himself in Posthumus's clothes, he decides to go to Wales to kill Posthumus, and then rape, abduct, and marry Imogen. Imogen has now been travelling as Fidele through the Welsh mountains, her health in decline as she comes to a cave. It is the home of Belarius and his "sons" Polydore and Cadwal, whom he raised into great hunters. The two young men are the British princes Guiderius and Arviragus, who are unaware of their own origin. The men discover Fidele, and, instantly captivated by a strange affinity for "him", become fast friends. Outside the cave, Guiderius is met by Cloten, who throws insults, leading to a sword fight during which Guiderius beheads Cloten. Meanwhile, Imogen's fragile state worsens and she takes the "poison" as a medicine; when the men re-enter, they find her "dead." They mourn and, after placing Cloten's body beside hers, briefly depart to prepare for the double burial. Imogen awakes to find the headless body, and believes it to be Posthumus because the body is wearing Posthumus's clothes. Lucius' Roman soldiers have just arrived in Britain and, as the army moves through Wales, Lucius discovers the devastated Fidele, who pretends to be a loyal servant grieving his killed master; Lucius, moved by this faithfulness, enlists Fidele as a pageboy.

The treacherous Queen is now wasting away due to her son Cloten's disappearance. Meanwhile, the guilt-ridden Posthumus enlists in the Roman forces as they invade Britain. Belarius, Guiderius, Arviragus, and Posthumus all help rescue Cymbeline from the Roman onslaught; the king does not yet recognise these four, yet takes notice of them as they fight bravely and capture the Roman commanders, Lucius and Iachimo, thus winning the day. Posthumus, allowing himself to be captured, as well as Fidele, are imprisoned alongside the true Romans, who all await execution. In jail, Posthumus sleeps, while the ghosts of his dead family appear to complain to Jupiter of his grim fate. Jupiter himself appears in thunder and glory to assure the others that destiny will grant happiness to Posthumus and Britain.

Cornelius arrives at court to announce the Queen's sudden death, and that on her deathbed she unrepentantly confessed to villainous schemes against her husband and his throne. Both troubled and relieved by this news, Cymbeline prepares to execute his prisoners, but pauses when he sees Fidele, whom he finds both beautiful and familiar. Fidele has noticed Posthumus's ring on Iachimo's finger and demands to know how he obtained it. A remorseful Iachimo confesses about the wager he made, and how he tricked Posthumus into believing he had seduced Imogen. Posthumus then comes forward to confirm Iachimo's story, revealing his identity and acknowledging his wrongfulness in wanting Imogen killed. Ecstatic, Imogen throws herself at Posthumus, who, believing she is a boy, knocks her down. Pisanio then rushes to explain that Fidele is Imogen. Imogen still suspects that Pisanio conspired with the Queen to poison her. Pisanio claims innocence, and Cornelius reveals the potion was harmless. Insisting that his betrayal years ago was a set-up, Belarius makes his own happy confession, revealing Guiderius and Arviragus as Cymbeline's own two long-lost sons. With her brothers restored to the line of inheritance, Imogen is free to marry Posthumus. An elated Cymbeline pardons Belarius and the Roman prisoners, including Lucius and Iachimo. Lucius summons his soothsayer to decipher a prophecy of recent events, which ensures happiness for all. Blaming his manipulative Queen for his refusal to pay earlier, Cymbeline now agrees to pay the tribute to the Roman Emperor as a gesture of peace between Britain and Rome. Everyone is invited to a great feast.

Date and text
The first recorded production of Cymbeline, as noted by Simon Forman, was in April 1611. It was first published in the First Folio in 1623. When Cymbeline was actually written cannot be precisely dated.

The Yale edition suggests a collaborator had a hand in the authorship, and some scenes (e.g., Act III scene 7 and Act V scene 2) may strike the reader as particularly un-Shakespearean when compared with others. The play shares notable similarities in language, situation, and plot with Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding (c. 1609–10). Both plays concern themselves with a princess who, after disobeying her father in order to marry a lowly lover, is wrongly accused of infidelity and thus ordered to be murdered, before escaping and having her faithfulness proven. Furthermore, both were written for the same theatre company and audience. Some scholars believe this supports a dating of approximately 1609, though it is not clear which play preceded the other.The editors of the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare believe the name of Imogen is a misprint for Innogen—they draw several comparisons between Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, in early editions of which a ghost character named Innogen was supposed to be Leonato's wife (Posthumus being also known as "Leonatus", the Latin form of the Italian name in the other play). Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson point out that Holinshed's Chronicles, which Shakespeare used as a source, mention an Innogen and that Forman's eyewitness account of the April 1611 performance refers to "Innogen" throughout. In spite of these arguments, most editions of the play have continued to use the name Imogen.

Milford Haven is not known to have been used during the period (early 1st century AD) in which Cymbeline is set, and it is not known why Shakespeare used it in the play. Robert Nye noted that it was the closest seaport to Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon: "But if you marched due west from Stratford, looking neither to left nor to right, with the idea of running away to sea in your young head, then Milford Haven is the port you'd reach," a walk of about 165 mi, about six days' journey, that the young Shakespeare might well have taken, or at least dreamed of taking. Marisa R. Cull notes its possible symbolism as the landing site of Henry Tudor, when he invaded England via Milford on 7 August 1485 on his way to deposing Richard III and establishing the Tudor dynasty. It may also reflect English anxiety about the loyalty of the Welsh and the possibility of future invasions at Milford.

Criticism and interpretation
Cymbeline was one of Shakespeare's more popular plays during the eighteenth century, though critics including Samuel Johnson took issue with its complex plot:

"This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation."

William Hazlitt and John Keats, however, numbered it among their favourite plays.

By the early twentieth century, the play had lost favour. Lytton Strachey found it "difficult to resist the conclusion that [Shakespeare] was getting bored himself. Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams."

In 1937, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote Cymbeline Refinished, that rewrites the final act of the play. Shaw commented on the play 1896, in one fiery critique stating it was:"'stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modem intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all tolerance.'"Shaw however would go on to reform his opinion of the play after his rewriting of the ending, yet he remained firmly of the opinion that the final act was disastrous, writing in 1946 that it was "one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays" but "goes to pieces in the final act." Harley Granville-Barker, who found success as an actor in Shaw's plays had similar views, saying that the play shows that Shakespeare was becoming a "wearied artist".

Some have argued that the play parodies its own content. Harold Bloom wrote that "Cymbeline, in my judgment, is partly a Shakespearean self-parody; many of his prior plays and characters are mocked by it."

British identity
Similarities between Cymbeline and historical accounts of the Roman Emperor Augustus have prompted critics to interpret the play as Shakespeare voicing support for the political notions of James I, who considered himself the "British Augustus." His political manoeuvres to unite Scotland with England and Wales as an empire mirror Augustus' Pax Romana. The play reinforces the Jacobean idea that Britain is the successor to the civilised virtue of ancient Rome, portraying the parochialism and isolationism of Cloten and the Queen as villainous. Other critics have resisted the idea that Cymbeline endorses James I's ideas about national identity, pointing to several characters' conflicted constructions of their geographic identities. For example, although Guiderius and Arviragus are the sons of Cymbeline, a British king raised in Rome, they grew up in a Welsh cave. The brothers lament their isolation from society, a quality associated with barbarousness, but Belarius, their adoptive father, retorts that this has spared them from corrupting influences of the supposedly civilised British court.

Iachimo's invasion of Imogen's bedchamber may reflect concern that Britain was being maligned by Italian influence. According to Peter A. Parolin, Cymbeline’s scenes ostensibly set in ancient Rome may be anachronistic portrayals of sixteenth-century Italy, which was characterised by contemporary British authors as a place where vice, debauchery, and treachery had supplanted the virtue of ancient Rome. Though Cymbeline concludes with a peace forged between Britain and Rome, Iachimo's corruption of Posthumus and metaphorical rape of Imogen may demonstrate fears that Great Britain's political union with other cultures might expose Britons to harmful foreign influences.

Gender and sexuality
Scholars have emphasised that the play attributes great political significance to Imogen's virginity and chastity. There is some debate as to whether Imogen and Posthumus's marriage is legitimate. Imogen has historically been played and received as an ideal, chaste woman maintaining qualities applauded in a patriarchal structure; however, critics argue that Imogen's actions contradict these social definitions through her defiance of her father and her cross-dressing. Yet critics including Tracey Miller-Tomlinson have emphasised the ways in which the play upholds patriarchal ideology, including in the final scene, with its panoply of male victors. Whilst Imogen and Posthumus's marriage at first upholds heterosexual norms, their separation and final reunion leave open non-heterosexual possibilities, initially exposed by Imogen's cross-dressing as Fidele. Miller-Tomlinson points out the falseness of their social significance as a "perfect example" of a public "heterosexual marriage", considering that their private relations turn out to be "homosocial, homoerotic, and hermaphroditic."

Queer theory has gained traction in scholarship on Cymbeline, building upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. Scholarship on this topic has emphasised the play's Ovidian allusions and exploration of non-normative gender/sexuality – achieved through separation from traditional society into what Valerie Traub terms "green worlds." Amongst the most obvious and frequently cited examples of this non-normative dimension of the play is the prominence of homoeroticism, as seen in Guiderius and Arviragus's semi-sexual fascination with the disguised Imogen/Fidele. In addition to homoerotic and homosocial elements, the subjects of hermaphroditism and paternity/maternity also feature prominently in queer interpretations of Cymbeline. Janet Adelman set the tone for the intersection of paternity and hermaphroditism in arguing that Cymbeline's lines, "oh, what am I, / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more", amount a "parthenogenesis fantasy". According to Adelman and Tracey Miller-Tomlinson, in taking sole credit for the creation of his children Cymbeline acts a hermaphrodite who transforms a maternal function into a patriarchal strategy by regaining control of his male heirs and daughter, Imogen. Imogen's own experience with gender fluidity and cross-dressing has largely been interpreted through a patriarchal lens. Unlike other Shakespearean agents of onstage gender fluidity – Portia, Rosalind, Viola and Julia – Imogen is not afforded empowerment upon her transformation into Fidele. Instead, Imogen's power is inherited from her father and based upon the prospect of reproduction.

Performance history
After the 1611 performance mentioned by Simon Forman, there is no record of production until 1634, when the play was revived at court for Charles I and Henrietta Maria. The Caroline production was noted as being "well likte by the kinge." In 1728 John Rich staged the play with his company at Lincoln's Inn Fields, with emphasis placed on the spectacle of the production rather than the text of the play. Theophilus Cibber revived Shakespeare's text in 1744 with a performance at the Haymarket. There is evidence that Cibber put on another performance in 1746, and another in 1758.

In 1761, David Garrick edited a new version of the text. It is recognized as being close to the original Shakespeare, although there are several differences. Changes included the shortening of Imogen's burial scene and the entire fifth act, including the removal of Posthumus's dream. Garrick's text was first performed in November of that year, starring Garrick himself as Posthumus. Several scholars have indicated that Garrick's Posthumus was much liked. Valerie Wayne notes that Garrick's changes made the play more nationalistic, representing a trend in perception of Cymbeline during that period. Garrick's version of Cymbeline would prove popular; it was staged a number of times over the next few decades.

In the late eighteenth century, Cymbeline was performed in Jamaica.

The play entered the Romantic era with John Philip Kemble's company in 1801. Kemble's productions made use of lavish spectacle and scenery; one critic noted that during the bedroom scene, the bed was so large that Iachimo all but needed a ladder to view Imogen in her sleep. Kemble added a dance to Cloten's comic wooing of Imogen. In 1827, his brother Charles mounted an antiquarian production at Covent Garden; it featured costumes designed after the descriptions of the ancient British by such writers as Julius Caesar and Diodorus Siculus.

William Charles Macready mounted the play several times between 1837 and 1842. At the Theatre Royal, Marylebone, an epicene production was staged with Mary Warner, Fanny Vining, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Edward Loomis Davenport.

In 1859, Cymbeline was first performed in Sri Lanka. In the late nineteenth century, the play was produced several times in India.

In 1864, as part of the celebrations of Shakespeare's birth, Samuel Phelps performed the title role at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Helena Faucit returned to the stage for this performance.

The play was also one of Ellen Terry's last performances with Henry Irving at the Lyceum in 1896. Terry's performance was widely praised, though Irving was judged an indifferent Iachimo. Like Garrick, Irving removed the dream of Posthumus; he also curtailed Iachimo's remorse and attempted to render Cloten's character consistent. A review in the Athenaeum compared this trimmed version to pastoral comedies such as As You Like It. The set design, overseen by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was lavish and advertised as historically accurate, though the reviewer for the time complained of such anachronisms as gold crowns and printed books as props.

Similarly lavish but less successful was Margaret Mather's production in New York in 1897. The sets and publicity cost $40,000, but Mather was judged too emotional and undisciplined to succeed in a fairly cerebral role.

Barry Jackson staged a modern dress production for the Birmingham Rep in 1923, two years before his influential modern dress Hamlet. Walter Nugent Monck brought his Maddermarket Theatre production to Stratford in 1946, inaugurating the post-war tradition of the play.

London saw two productions in the 1956 season. Michael Benthall directed the less successful production, at The Old Vic. The set design by Audrey Cruddas was notably minimal, with only a few essential props. She relied instead on a variety of lighting effects to reinforce mood; actors seemed to come out of darkness and return to darkness. Barbara Jefford was criticised as too cold and formal for Imogen; Leon Gluckman played Posthumus, Derek Godfrey Iachimo, and Derek Francis Cymbeline. Following Victorian practice, Benthall drastically shortened the last act.

By contrast, Peter Hall's production at the Shakespeare Memorial presented nearly the entire play, including the long-neglected dream scene (although a golden eagle designed for Jupiter turned out too heavy for the stage machinery and was not used). Hall presented the play as a distant fairy tale, with stylised performances. The production received favourable reviews, both for Hall's conception and, especially, for Peggy Ashcroft's Imogen. Richard Johnson played Posthumus, and Robert Harris Cymbeline. Iachimo was played by Geoffrey Keen, whose father Malcolm had played Iachimo with Ashcroft at the Old Vic in 1932.

Hall's approach attempted to unify the play's diversity by means of a fairy-tale topos. The next major Royal Shakespeare Company production, in 1962, went in the opposite direction. Working on a set draped with heavy white sheets, director William Gaskill employed Brechtian alienation effects, to mixed critical reviews. The acting, however, was widely praised. Vanessa Redgrave as Imogen was often compared favourably to Ashcroft; Eric Porter was a success as Iachimo, as was Clive Swift as Cloten. Patrick Allen was Posthumus, and Tom Fleming played the title role.

A decade later, John Barton's 1974 production for the RSC (with assistance from Clifford Williams) featured Sebastian Shaw in the title role, Tim Pigott-Smith as Posthumus, Ian Richardson as Iachimo, and Susan Fleetwood as Imogen. Charles Keating was Cloten. As with contemporary productions of Pericles, this one used a narrator (Cornelius) to signal changes in mood and treatment to the audience. Robert Speaight disliked the set design, which he called too minimal, but he approved the acting.

In 1980, David Jones revived the play for the RSC; the production was in general a disappointment, although Judi Dench as Imogen received reviews that rivalled Ashcroft's. Ben Kingsley played Iachimo; Roger Rees was Posthumus. In 1987, Bill Alexander directed the play in The Other Place (later transferring to the Pit in London's Barbican Centre) with Harriet Walter playing Imogen, David Bradley as Cymbeline and Nicholas Farrell as Posthumus.

At the Stratford Festival, the play was directed in 1970 by Jean Gascon and in 1987 by Robin Phillips. The latter production, which was marked by much-approved scenic complexity, featured Colm Feore as Iachimo, and Martha Burns as Imogen. The play was again at Stratford in 2004, directed by David Latham. A large medieval tapestry unified the fairly simple stage design and underscored Latham's fairy-tale inspired direction.

In 1994, Ajay Chowdhury directed an Anglo-Indian production of Cymbeline at the Rented Space Theatre Company. Set in India under British rule, the play features Iachimo, played by Rohan Kenworthy, as a British soldier and Imogen, played by Uzma Hameed, as an Indian princess.

At the new Globe Theatre in 2001, a cast of six (including Abigail Thaw, Mark Rylance, and Richard Hope) used extensive doubling for the play. The cast wore identical costumes even when in disguise, allowing for particular comic effects related to doubling (as when Cloten attempts to disguise himself as Posthumus.)

There have been some well-received theatrical productions including the Public Theater's 1998 production in New York City, directed by Andrei Șerban. Cymbeline was also performed at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in October 2007 in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, and in November 2007 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The play was included in the 2013 repertory season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

In 2004 and 2014, the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey produced two distinct versions of the play. The 2004 production, directed by Jon Ciccarelli, embraced the fairy tale aspect of the story and produced a colourful version with wicked step-mothers, feisty princesses and a campy Iachimo. The 2014 version, directed by Rachel Alt, went in a completely opposite direction and placed the action on ranch in the American Old West. The Queen was a southern belle married to a rancher, with Imogen as a high society girl in love with the cowhand Posthumous.

In a 2007 Cheek by Jowl production, Tom Hiddleston doubled as Posthumus and Cloten.

In 2011, the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC, presented a version of the play that emphasised its fable and folklore elements, set as a tale within a tale, as told to a child.

In 2012, Antoni Cimolino directed a production at the Stratford Festival that steered into the fairy-tale elements of the text.

Also in 2012 the South Sudan Theatre Company staged Cymbeline in Juba Arabic for the Shakespeare's Globe "Globe to Globe" festival. It was translated by Derik Uya Alfred and directed by Joseph Abuk. Connections between the content of the play and South Sudan's own political struggle have been drawn by the production's producers, as well as some scholars. Overall, the production was well received by audiences and critics. Critic Matt Truman gave the production four out of five stars, saying "The world's youngest nation seems delighted to be here and, played with this much heart, even Shakespeare's most rambling romance becomes irresistible."

In 2013, Samir Bhamra directed the play for Phizzical Productions with six actors playing multiple parts for a UK national tour. The cast included Sophie Khan Levy as Innojaan, Adam Youssefbeygi, Tony Hasnath, Liz Jadav and Robby Khela. The production was set in the souks of Dubai and the Bollywood film industry during the 1990s communal riots and received acclaim from reviewers and academics alike.

Also in 2013, a folk musical adaptation of Cymbeline was performed at the First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook, Illinois. The setting was the American South during the Civil War, with Cymbeline as a man of high status who avoids military service. The play was performed outdoors and was accompanied by traditional Appalachian folk songs.

In 2015, at Shakespeare's Globe in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a production was directed by Sam Yates where the role of Innogen was played by Emily Barber and Jonjo O'Neill as Posthumus.

In 2016, Melly Still directed Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Company. This version of the play was performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre before moving to the Barbican in late 2016. The performance featured Bethan Cullinane as Innogen and Gillian Bevan as Cymbeline.

In 2023, Gregory Doran directed Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was his final production as artistic director, and received largely positive reviews. The cast included Peter De Jersey as Cymbeline and Amber James as Imogen.

Also in 2023, San Francisco's Free Shakespeare in the Park performed Cymbeline, directed by Maryssa Wanlass, with a David Bowie/fantasy-themed focus on the play's queer interpretations.

In 2024, at the Stratford Festival, Cymbeline, directed by Esther Jun, reversed the gender of several roles, with Cymbeline portrayed as Queen of Britain by Lucy Peacock and her husband as a Duke, played by Rick Roberts. Innogen was played by Allison Edwards-Crewe.

Adaptations
The play was adapted by Thomas d'Urfey as The Injured Princess, or, the Fatal Wager; this version was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, presumably by the united King's Company and Duke's Company, in 1682. The play changes some names and details, and adds a subplot, typical of the Restoration, in which a virtuous waiting-woman escapes the traps laid by Cloten. D'Urfey also changes Pisanio's character so that he at once believes in Imogen's (Eugenia, in D'Urfey's play) guilt. For his part, D'Urfey's Posthumus is ready to accept that his wife might have been untrue, as she is young and beautiful. Some details of this alteration survived in productions at least until the middle of the century.

William Hawkins revised the play again in 1759. His was among the last of the heavy revisions designed to bring the play in line with classical unities. He cut the Queen, reduced the action to two places (the court and a forest in Wales). The dirge "With fairest flowers..." was set to music by Thomas Arne.

Nearer the end of the century, Henry Brooke wrote an adaptation which was apparently never staged. His version eliminates the brothers altogether as part of a notable enhancement of Posthumus's role in the play.

George Bernard Shaw, who criticized the play perhaps more harshly than he did any of Shakespeare's other works, took aim at what he saw as the defects of the final act in his 1937 Cymbeline Refinished; as early as 1896, he had complained about the absurdities of the play to Ellen Terry, then preparing to act Imogen. He called it "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order". He later changed his view, saying it was "one of the finest of Shakespeare's later plays", but he remained convinced that it "goes to pieces in the final act". Accordingly, in Cymbeline Refinished he rewrote the last act, cutting many of the numerous revelations and expositions, while also making Imogen a much more assertive figure in line with his feminist views.

There have been a number of radio adaptations of Cymbeline between the 1930s and the 2000s. The BBC broadcast productions of Cymbeline in the United Kingdom in 1934, 1951, 1957, 1986, 1996, and 2006. NBC broadcast a production of the play in the United States in 1938. In October 1951 the BBC aired a production of George Bernard Shaw's Cymbeline Refinished, as well as Shaw's foreword to the play.

Screen adaptations
Lucius J. Henderson directed the first screen adaptation of Cymbeline in 1913. The film was produced by the Thanhouser Company and starred Florence La Badie as Imogen, James Cruze as Posthumus, William Garwood as Iachimo, William Russell as Cymbeline, and Jean Darnell as the Queen.

In 1937 the BBC broadcast several scenes of André van Gyseghem's production of the play, which opened 16 November the same year, on television. The scenes that comprised the broadcast were pulled exclusively from Acts I and II of the play, and included the 'trunk scene' from Act II Scene 2. In 1956 the BBC produced a similar television program, this time airing scenes from Michael Benthall's theatrical production, which opened 11 September 1956. Like the 1937 program, the 1956 broadcast ran for roughly half an hour and presented several scenes from Cymbeline, including the trunk scene.

In 1968 Jerzy Jarocki directed an adaptation of the play for Polish television, starring Wiktor Sadecki as Cymbeline and Ewa Lassek as Imogen.

Elijah Moshinsky directed the BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation in 1982, ignoring the ancient British period setting in favour of a more timeless and snow-laden atmosphere inspired by Rembrandt and his contemporary Dutch painters. Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Helen Mirren, and Robert Lindsay play Cymbeline, his Queen, Imogen, and Iachimo, respectively, with Michael Pennington as Posthumus.

In 2014, Ethan Hawke and director Michael Almereyda, who previously collaborated on the 2000 film Hamlet, re-teamed for the film Cymbeline, in which Hawke plays Iachimo. The film is set in the context of urban gang warfare. Ed Harris takes the title role. Penn Badgley plays the orphan Posthumus; Milla Jovovich plays the role of the Queen; Anton Yelchin is Cloten; and Dakota Johnson plays the role of Imogen.

Stage adaptions
Prior to operatic adaptations only incidental music was composed. The first operatic adaption seems to be composed by Edmond Missa in 1894, under the title "Dinah"; American composer Christopher Berg composed another one, of which scenes were performed in 2009.

Cultural references
In Beethoven’s one opera Fidelio, the loyal wife Leonore, disguising herself as a man, takes on the name Fidelio, as a probable reference to Imogen’s cross-dressing as Fidele.

The 'Song' from Act II, Scene 3 (Hark, hark! the lark) was set to music by Franz Schubert in 1826.

Perhaps the most famous verses in the play come from the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, which begins:
 * Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
 * Nor the furious winter's rages;
 * Thou thy worldly task hast done,
 * Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
 * Golden lads and girls all must,
 * As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

The first two lines are quoted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway by the two main characters Clarissa and Septimus Smith. The lines, which turn Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts to the trauma of the First World War, are at once an elegiac dirge and a profoundly dignified declaration of endurance. The song provides a major organisational motif for the novel. The final couplet also appears in the Anton Myrer novel, The Last Convertible.

The last two lines appear to have inspired T. S. Eliot in "Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier" (in Five-Finger Exercises). He writes:

 * Pollicle dogs and cats all must
 * Jellicle cats and dogs all must
 * Like undertakers, come to dust.

The song was set to music by Roger Quilter as "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun," No. 1 of Five Shakespeare Songs, Op. 23 (1921). It was also set by Gerald Finzi as part of his song cycle on texts by Shakespeare Let Us Garlands Bring (1942). The text is sung by Cleo Laine to music by John Dankworth on her 1964 album Shakespeare and All That Jazz.

At the end of Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, William Shakespeare is competing against George Bernard Shaw for the title of best playwright, deciding which of them is to be brought back from the dead in order to improve the world. Shakespeare sings the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, when asked about his view of death (the song is titled "Fear No More").

"Fear no more the heat of the sun" is the line that Winnie and her husband are trying to remember in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days as they sit exposed to the elements.

In the Epilogue of the novel Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie, the first four lines of the verse are quoted by the character Ginevra Boynton as she reflects on the life of her deceased mother Mrs Boynton.

In The Scent of Water (1963) by Elizabeth Goudge, the central character, Mary Lindsay, feels struck by lightning when she realises she has fallen in love with Paul Randall, an author and Royal Air Force pilot, blinded in the last days of World War II, and married. "Fear no more the lightning-flash", Mary suddenly thinks, along with the rest of that stanza, ending "All lovers young, all lovers must /Consign to thee, and come to dust", knowing she must hide her love, and recognising that, already fifty, she is growing old (Chapter IX, Part 1, p 164).

title: Cymbeline


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Shakespeare's late romances

The late romances, often simply called the romances, are a grouping of William Shakespeare's last plays, comprising Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter's Tale; and The Tempest. The Two Noble Kinsmen, of which Shakespeare was co-author, is sometimes also included in the grouping. The term "romances" was first used for these late works in Edward Dowden's Shakspere (1877). Later writers have generally been content to adopt Dowden's term.

Shakespeare's plays cannot be precisely dated, but it is generally agreed that these comedies followed a series of tragedies including Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespeare wrote tragedies because their productions were financially successful, but he returned to comedy towards the end of his career, mixing it with tragic and mystical elements. Shakespeare's late romances were also influenced by the development of tragicomedy and the extreme elaboration of the courtly masque as staged by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. The subjects and style of these plays were also influenced by the preference of the monarch, by Shakespeare's ageing company and by their more upper class audiences.

The romances call for spectacular effects to be shown onstage, including storms at sea, opulent interior and exterior scenery, dream settings and the illusion of time passing. Scholars have argued that the late plays deal with faith and redemption, and are variations on themes of rewarding virtue over vice.

Plays
Shakespeare's late romances are:
 * Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ca. 1603–08
 * Cymbeline, ca. 1608–10
 * The Winter's Tale, ca. 1609–11
 * The Tempest, ca. 1603–11
 * The Two Noble Kinsmen, ca. 1612–14 (co-written with John Fletcher)
 * Sources: F E Halliday (1964), A L Rowse (1978) and Stanley Wells (1986)

The Norton Shakespeare describes Henry VIII (ca. 1612–13) as being characteristic of the late romances, but still considers it one of the histories, as does Rowse.

Labelling and structure
The category of Shakespearean romance arises from a desire among critics for the late plays to be recognised as a more complex kind of comedy; the labels of romance and tragicomedy are preferred by the majority of modern critics and editors. In the First Folio of 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, its editors, listed The Tempest and The Winter's Tale as comedies, and Cymbeline as a tragedy. Pericles did not appear in it at all. In 1875, when Dowden argued that Shakespeare's late comedies should be called "romances", he did so because they resemble late medieval and early modern "romances", a genre in which stories were set across the immensity of space and time. The romances have grand plot points which are combined with humour, dramatic action and internal struggles. They also feature broader characters, larger spectacles and a different handling of the themes of appearance and reality. The late romances differed from early Shakespearean comedies by relying on grand themes, rather than specific moments. The romances are Shakespearean tragedies that end happily, instead of a moment of danger that moves rapidly to a solution. They also focus on the relationships between father and daughter.

Defining characteristics
The final plays share some common traits:
 * Tragic or potentially tragic elements at the beginning of the play that are then resolved by the end, such as Leontes's jealousy in The Winter's Tale, or the shipwreck and drownings in The Tempest;
 * Older men are more prominently featured;
 * Young lovers are a part of each play, but are not central to the plot;
 * A redemptive plotline with a happy ending reuniting long-separated family members;
 * Magic and other fantastical elements;
 * The presence of pre-Christian, masque-like figures, like Jupiter in Cymbeline and the goddesses whom Prospero summons in The Tempest;
 * A mixture of "courtly" and "pastoral" scenes (such as the gentry and the island residents in The Tempest and the pastoral and courtly contrasts of The Winter's Tale).

Tragicomic influence
Shakespeare's romances were also influenced by two major developments in theatre in the early years of the seventeenth century. The first was the innovation of tragicomedy initiated by John Fletcher and developed in the early Beaumont and Fletcher collaborations. Tragicomedies made a pretence at "grave stuff" but invariably provided a happy ending with light entertainment. Shakespeare's romances are more sharply tragicomic than his comedies: threats of death and scenes of suffering are more acute. Encounters with the supernatural are also more direct and emphatic. The other influence was the extreme elaboration of the courtly masque being stage in the same period by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Key scenes in the late romances are closely related to court masques: They embrace the visual magnificence but also the shallowness of such a display.

History
The popular drama during the Renaissance was subject to external influences, specifically what the ruler wanted to see. Elizabeth I enjoyed watching what the people liked, which were the tragedies. Elizabeth reigned until her death in 1603. James I succeeded her, and he preferred the romances.

Shakespeare's health was impaired, and he died about five years after The Tempest, the last play he wrote by himself. The shift indicates that he was giving up composition. He retired to Stratford following completion of his final play. The scholar Catherine Alexander has suggested that the plays were not specifically autobiographical in respect of Shakespeare's advancing old age, but reflected the fact that the actors themselves were older. The King's Men occupied a second playhouse, the Blackfriars, which had been out of use for several years. The playhouse had been shut down because of objections by local residents, but was reopened during the second half of 1608. In the interim the actors had aged, and Shakespeare adjusted the age of his characters.

The King's Men were allowed to change their name from the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1603, when James I came to the throne. They would put on as many as two new plays a week. Many plays had only a few performances, and there was no director: actors were expected to know fairly standard blocking patterns. Audiences at the Blackfriars were generally upper class, as the cost of admission was so high that the lower classes were unlikely to attend many performances. Because of the sophistication of the audience, the romances leaned more toward aesthetics and culture.

Performances
The romances create challenges for directors, as they require spectacular effects to be shown onstage. For Pericles, in 1854, Samuel Phelps created the effect of a storm by using rowers manning oars to carry Pericles from one location to another while a panorama moved behind them to create the illusion of travel. Cymbeline often offers two different directions for staging: grand and simple. In the spring of 1896, Henry Irving staged the play at the Lyceum Theatre, London with elaborate Celtic sets for Cymbeline's palace gardens and interior rooms, a Roman banqueting hall for Posthumus's visit to Rome, a handsomely decorated bedchamber for Imogen, and a spectacular dream setting for the descent of Jupiter. Ben Greet at The Old Vic in 1918, on the other hand, chose a simple, Elizabethan approach. The Winter's Tale poses the challenges of time passing and a bear pursuing Antigonus off stage. In 1976, Trevor Nunn and John Barton cast John Nettles as both Time and the bear. At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1986, Terry Hands used a bearskin rug, which rose off the ground to chase Antigonus off.

The Tempest opens with a scene inspired by the shipwreck of Sea Venture in 1609. This scene has allowed for different stagings, from William Charles Macready in 1842 at Covent Garden featuring a huge sea vessel, fully rigged and manned, to Robert Falls's production at the Goodman Theatre in 1987, where the scene was set on a cruiseship, with tourist passengers in deck chairs or playing shuffleboard until disaster struck.

Criticism
Because of the shift in style, as well as Shakespeare's physical state, there has been much debate about why the late plays were written as they were. Dowden created a biographical view that suggested that Shakespeare was suffering from depression when he wrote his tragedies, and had worked his way out of it to create the romances. SirEdmund Chambers suggested that he suffered a breakdown while writing Timon of Athens, and the romances reflect a kind of psychological convalescence. Clifford Leech viewed the romances as infected with a kind of fantastical puritanism that came from Shakespeare's personal revulsion from sex. D G James believed that Shakespeare ran out of poetic energy as he got older. Raphael Lyne comments that it is impossible to show that Shakespeare managed his career to this extent, and there is no pressing need to consider these works as anything other than coincidentally "late". There is a belief among some scholars that the late plays deal with faith and redemption, and are variations on themes of rewarding virtue over vice.

G. Wilson Knight was among those critics to argue that the late romances embody, together with the high tragedies or even above them, Shakespeare's greatest achievement. Harold Bloom says of The Winter's Tale that in it Shakespeare returns to his full talent and genius with full force.

Film adaptations
A film version of Cymbeline was released in 2014, starring Milla Jovovich, Ethan Hawke, Penn Badgley, John Leguizamo and Ed Harris.

The Tempest has been adapted most often. A silent film version was made in 1908. Later adaptations include, Yellow Sky (1948) – set in the wild west, with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; Forbidden Planet (1956) – a science fiction classic set in outer space; Derek Jarman's 1979 version relocated to a crumbling mansion off the Scottish coast; Tempest (1982) – set on a Greek isle, with John Cassavetes, Molly Ringwald, Gena Rowlands and Susan Sarandon; Prospero's Books (1991) starring John Gielgud – which is not so much an adaptation as a reading of the play, combining film, dance, opera, and animation; and a 2010 version with Prospero recast as Prospera, played by Helen Mirren.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Shakespeare's late romances


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User:Dachshund

Old stuff I worked on:

Theremin Vermont Szechuan cuisine and Hunan cuisine Dachshund Oberlin College Lithuania/History Electronic music Musique Concrete RCA Time sharing and Computer multitasking Adirondacks Tape bias Cape Cod Provincetown, Massachusetts Wellfleet, Massachusetts New England Digital Jon Appleton Dartmouth College

Newer Stuff:

Basically a handful of cryptography articles.

Please feel free to leave me comments:

Thanks for chiming in on sex education. You smoothed it over rather well. -- User:Ed Poor

Thanks for chiming in at the Village Pump in re links to adult content. You summed up my position on the issue quite fairly, allowing me to avoid the appearance of simply wanting to have the last word. -- NetEsq 23:17 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Good job on the ricin article. I found it to be very readable and encyclopedic. Two Halves

Licensing
I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

title: User:Dachshund


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Alpine skiing at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Alpine skiing at the 2002 Winter Olympics consisted of ten events held 10–23 February in the United States near Salt Lake City, Utah. The downhill, super-G, and combined events were held at Snowbasin, the giant slaloms at Park City, and the slaloms at adjacent Deer Valley.

Medal table
Source:

Men's events
Source:

Women's events
Source:

Participating NOCs
Fifty nations competed in the alpine skiing events at Salt Lake City.

Course information
Snowbasin hosted the downhill, super-G, and combined events; the giant slaloms were at Park City and the slaloms at adjacent Deer Valley Source:


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Cross-country skiing at the 2002 Winter Olympics

The cross-country skiing events at the 2002 Winter Olympics were marred by drug problems. The winners of three races were disqualified after blood tests showed that three skiers had overly high red blood cell counts indicating the use of darbepoetin, a drug used to treat anemia. At the time, the drug was not specifically listed in the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) list of banned substances, but the Olympic rules generally prohibit doping of any kind, in accordance with its charter. After two years and several lawsuits in Olympic and Swiss courts, the skiers in question (Johann Mühlegg of Spain, and Larissa Lazutina and Olga Danilova of Russia) were stripped of all their medals from the 2002 Games.

See the external links below for the official IOC press releases containing detailed information of the doping cases and their resolution, including initial, intermediate, and final amended results. This article gives the final medalists as decided on by the IOC in early 2004.

Participating NOCs
Forty-four nations competed in the cross-country skiing events at Salt Lake City.


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Figure skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics

All figure skating events in 2002 Winter Olympics were held at the Salt Lake Ice Center.

Men

 * Medals awarded Thursday, February 14, 2002

Yagudin received 5.9s and 6.0s for his free skating after World Champion Plushenko had made several errors in both the short program and the free skating.

Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Sally-Anne Stapleford

Assistant Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Junko Hiramatsu

Judges:
 * 🇦🇺 Wendy Langton
 * 🇫🇮 Merja Kosonen
 * 🇺🇸 Janet Allen
 * 🇷🇴 Nicolae Bellu
 * 🇺🇦 Yuri Kliushnikov
 * 🇩🇪 Volker Waldeck
 * 🇧🇬 Alexander Penchev
 * 🇯🇵 Mieko Fujimori
 * 🇦🇿 Evgenia Bogdanova
 * 🇨🇿 Jarmila Portová (substitute)

Ladies

 * Medals awarded Thursday, February 21, 2002

16-year-old Hughes, fourth after the short program, skated a clean free skating with seven triple jumps, including two triple-triple combinations. Kwan led after the short program but slipped to third after two jumping errors. Sasha Cohen finished fourth, after a fall on the back end of a triple lutz-triple toe combination. Slutskaya became only the second Russian to medal in the ladies' event at the Olympics.

Hughes and Slutskaya finished with tie scores, Hughes winning the gold medal on a tiebreaker for having won the free skating. The Russian officials were very disappointed with the result and filed a protest, which was not accepted by ISU after it examined all results and scores, thus confirming Hughes as the winner.

During competition, the pairwise ranked choice voting system that the International Skating Union (ISU) had adopted after a debacle during the ladies' competition at the 1995 world championships caused a similar change in the scoring. Kwan, whose routine had triggered the 1995 incident, had been ahead of Hughes until Slutskaya skated. The judges' revised rankings put Hughes ahead of Kwan, an undesired effect of the independent irrelevant alternative. Two years later the ISU changed the voting procedures again to range voting.

Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Britta Lindgren

Assistant Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Charles Foster

Judges:
 * 🇩🇪 Sissy Krick
 * 🇷🇺 Tatiana Danilenko
 * 🇸🇰 Maria Hrachovcova
 * Ingelise Blangsted
 * 🇮🇹 Paolo Pizzocari
 * 🇧🇾 Irina Absaliamova
 * 🇫🇮 Pekka Leskinen
 * 🇨🇦 Deborah Islam
 * 🇺🇸 Joseph Inman
 * 🇺🇦 Vladislav Petukov (substitute)

Pairs

 * Medals awarded February 11, 2002; second award ceremony February 17.

A controversial decision was taken which extended the Russian dominance of pair skating at the Olympics.

In the first week of the Games, a controversy in the pairs' figure skating competition culminated in the French judge's scores being thrown out and the Canadian team of Jamie Salé and David Pelletier being awarded a gold medal (together with the Russians who were controversially awarded gold previously and kept their medals despite the allegations of vote swapping and buying the votes of the French judge). Allegations of bribery were leveled against many ice-skating judges, leading to the arrest of known criminal Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov in Italy (at the request of the United States). He was released by the Italian officials.

Judges from Russia, the People's Republic of China, Poland, Ukraine, and France placed the Russians first; judges from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Japan gave the nod to the Canadians. The International Skating Union announced a day after the competition that it would conduct an "internal assessment" into the judging decision. On February 15 the ISU and IOC, in a joint press conference, announced that Marie-Reine Le Gougne, the French judge implicated in collusion, was guilty of misconduct and was suspended effective immediately.

Full results
The following are the final amended results, not the original results.

Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Ronald Pfenning

Assistant Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Alexander Lakernik

Judges:
 * 🇷🇺 Marina Sanaya
 * 🇨🇳 Yang Jiasheng
 * 🇺🇸 Lucy Brennan
 * 🇫🇷 Marie-Reine Le Gougne
 * 🇵🇱 Anna Sierocka
 * 🇨🇦 Benoit Lavoie
 * 🇺🇦 Vladislav Petukov
 * 🇩🇪 Sissy Krick
 * 🇯🇵 Hideo Sugita
 * 🇨🇿 Jarmila Portová (substitute)

Ice dance

 * Medals awarded Monday, February 18, 2002

Russian skater Anissina emigrated to France after Averbukh, her former partner, left her to skate with Lobacheva. It was the first gold in Olympic figure skating for France since 1932.

The first compulsory dance was the Quickstep. The second was Blues.

Full results
Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Alexander Gorshkov

Assistant Referee:
 * International Skating Union.svg Ann Shaw

Judges (CD1):
 * 🇱🇹 Eugenia Gasiorowska
 * 🇦🇿 Irina Nechkina
 * 🇺🇦 Yuri Balkov
 * 🇩🇪 Ingrid Charlotte Wolter
 * 🇧🇬 Evgenia Karnolska
 * 🇷🇺 Alla Shekhovtseva
 * Roland Wehinger
 * 🇮🇱 Katalin Alpern
 * 🇵🇱 Halina Gordon-Potorak
 * 🇮🇹 Walter Zuccaro (substitute)

Judges (CD2):
 * 🇷🇺 Alla Shekhovtseva
 * 🇺🇦 Yuri Balkov
 * 🇮🇹 Walter Zuccaro
 * 🇮🇱 Katalin Alpern
 * 🇧🇬 Evgenia Karnolska
 * 🇦🇿 Irina Nechkina
 * 🇵🇱 Halina Gordon-Potorak
 * Roland Wehinger
 * 🇩🇪 Ingrid Charlotte Wolter
 * 🇱🇹 Eugenia Gasiorowska (substitute)

Judges (OD):
 * 🇵🇱 Halina Gordon-Potorak
 * 🇮🇹 Walter Zuccaro
 * 🇱🇹 Eugenia Gasiorowska
 * Roland Wehinger
 * 🇦🇿 Irina Nechkina
 * 🇮🇱 Katalin Alpern
 * 🇩🇪 Ingrid Charlotte Wolter
 * 🇧🇬 Evgenia Karnolska
 * 🇷🇺 Alla Shekhovtseva
 * 🇺🇦 Yuri Balkov (substitute)

Judges (FD):
 * 🇷🇺 Alla Shekhovtseva
 * Roland Wehinger
 * 🇱🇹 Eugenia Gasiorowska
 * 🇩🇪 Ingrid Charlotte Wolter
 * 🇮🇹 Walter Zuccaro
 * 🇦🇿 Irina Nechkina
 * 🇧🇬 Evgenia Karnolska
 * 🇺🇦 Yuri Balkov
 * 🇵🇱 Halina Gordon-Potorak
 * 🇮🇱 Katalin Alpern (substitute)

Participating NOCs
Thirty-one nations competed in the figure skating events at Salt Lake City.


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User:Dasbobo

At the moment, DasBobo is a highly undifferentiated entity, and calls for no further description.

title: User:Dasbobo


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Freestyle skiing at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Four freestyle skiing events were held at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, at the venue in Deer Valley. There were both men's and women's competition in both aerials and moguls events. In moguls, the athletes ski down a slope littered with moguls (bumps), attempting to get down in as fast a time as possible while also attempting to get points for technique and their two aerial jumps during the course. The aerials events consisted of two jumps, which were judged by air, form and landing.

Participating NOCs
Twenty-one nations competed in the freestyle skiing events at Salt Lake City.


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Luge at the 2002 Winter Olympics

The Luge competition at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games was held at Utah Olympic Park in Park City. Three events were staged, taking place from 10 to 14 February.

Participating NOCs
Twenty-five nations competed in the luge events at Salt Lake City.

title: Luge at the 2002 Winter Olympics


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Nordic combined at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Nordic combined at the 2002 Winter Olympics, consisted of three events held over ten days, from 9 February to 22 February. The ski jumping part took place in Park City, while the cross-country part took place in Soldier Hollow. This was the first Winter Olympics to have two individual Nordic Combined events: the 7.5 km individual normal hill (sprint) and the 15 km individual large hill (individual).

Participating NOCs
Fourteen nations participated in Nordic Combined at the Salt Lake Games.


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Short track speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics

 * For the long track speed skating events, see Speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Short track speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics was held from 13 to 23 February. Eight events were contested at Salt Lake Ice Center (normally called Delta Center). Two new events were added for these games, with the men's and women's 1500 metres making debuts.

Medal table
China led the overall table with seven medals, while Evgenia Radanova's two medals for Bulgaria were their first in the sport.

Records
Two world records and fifteen Olympic records were set in Salt Lake City.

Participating NOCs
Twenty-six nations competed in the short track events at Salt Lake City. Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Israel, Romania and Slovakia made their short track debuts.


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Ski jumping at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Ski jumping at the 2002 Winter Olympics, consisted of three events held from 10 February to 13 February, taking place at Park City.

Medal table
Switzerland topped the medal table, with two gold medals from Simon Amman. The bronze medal won by Slovenia in the team event was the country's first in the sport.

Participating NOCs
Twenty-two nations participated in ski jumping at the Salt Lake Games. Estonia and Kyrgyzstan made their Olympic ski jumping debuts.

title: Ski jumping at the 2002 Winter Olympics


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Snowboarding at the 2002 Winter Olympics

The 2002 Winter Olympic Games Snowboarding competition consisted of men's and women's halfpipe and parallel giant slalom events. The snowboarding competition took place at Park City, over a five-day period.

Participating NOCs
Nineteen nations competed in the snowboarding events at Salt Lake City.


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Speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics was held over fourteen days, from 9 to 23 February. Ten events were contested at the Utah Olympic Oval.

Records
Salt Lake City's high altitude was a major contributing factor to the speed of the Utah Olympic Oval's ice, as new Olympic records were set in all ten events, and new World records in eight.

Participating NOCs
Twenty-three nations competed in the speed skating events at Salt Lake City.


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Bobsleigh at the 2002 Winter Olympics

Three bobsleigh events were competed at the 2002 Winter Olympics, at Utah Olympic Park. The competition took place between February 16 and February 23, 2002.

For the first time since 1932, Olympic bobsleigh added a new event, with the first ever women's competition, won by Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers of the United States.

The competitions comprised four heats. Teams raced in the first and third heats in the order of the draw. The second heat was raced in order of ranking after the first heat, and the fourth heat is raced in order of the ranking after the first three heats. Total time for the four heats determined the final rank.

Participating NOCs
Thirty-four nations competed in the bobsleigh events at Salt Lake City.

title: Bobsleigh at the 2002 Winter Olympics


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New England Digital

New England Digital Corporation (1976–1993) was founded in Norwich, Vermont, and relocated to White River Junction, Vermont. It was best known for its signature product, the Synclavier Synthesizer System, which evolved into the Synclavier Digital Audio System or "Tapeless Studio." The company sold an FM digital synthesizer/16-bit polyphonic synthesizer and magnetic disk-based non-linear 16-bit digital recording product, referred to as the "Post-Pro." The Synclavier was developed as the "Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer" by Dartmouth College Professors Jon Appleton and Frederick J. Hooven, in association with NED co-founders Sydney A. Alonso and Cameron W. Jones. The Synclavier would become the pioneering prototype hardware and software system for all digital non-linear synthesis, polyphonic sampling, magnetic (hard-disk) recording and sequencing systems technology that is commonplace in all music and sound effects/design today.

The instrument's development picked up speed in late 1978/early 1979, when master synthesist, sound designer, and musical arranger, Denny Jaeger, began working with NED to help create system upgrades, advanced capabilities, and unique sounds that were tailored to fit the needs of the product for the commercial music industry. The second generation's user interface panel and overall music design features of the original Synclavier (that would become Synclavier II) were substantially driven and designed by Denny Jaeger. His relentless attention to detail and unparalleled understanding of synthesis, audio recording, and technology provided tremendous product/market insight to the original founding hardware and software engineering team of Alonso and Jones.

In November 1979, immediately following the arrival of Denny Jaeger, Alonso hired Brad Naples as the company's Business Manager. Working in tandem, Jaeger and Naples were the main drivers of the marketing and sales/business development efforts of the company. However, all four individuals—Alonso, Jones, Jaeger, and Naples—worked as a collaborative team, which was quite unique and unparalleled at the time. NED unveiled the newly improved Synclavier II at the AES show in May 1980, where it became an instant hit.

In 1981 New England Digital pioneered the recording of digital audio to hard disk with the introduction of their Sample-To-Disk option. Their software module known as SFM (Signal File Manager) was popular among the academic world for research and analysis of audio. The SFM also found use in the US Military for the analysis of submarine sounds.

The company continued to refine the Synclavier II, with Jaeger leading more musician-friendly, technological improvements, and Naples evolving to become the company's President/CEO (1983–1993) to assist Alonso and Jones, who were substantially expanding the hardware and software team. Musicians such as New York City-based multi-instrumentalist Kashif were involved in the creative development of Synclavier.

It became one of the most advanced electronic synthesis and recording tools of the day. Early adopters included:

 * John McLaughlin
 * Pat Metheny
 * Michael Jackson, particularly on his 1982 album Thriller.
 * Denny Jaeger and Michel Rubini, the first to use the Synclavier to score a major motion picture (The Hunger, with David Bowie, released through MGM in April, 1983) and to score the first network TV series (The Powers of Matthew Starr, from Paramount Television, released September, 1982).
 * Laurie Anderson, whose 1984 album "Mister Heartbreak" includes visual depictions of Synclavier sound waves in the liner notes
 * Frank Zappa, who composed his 1986 Grammy-winning album Jazz from Hell on the instrument. He continued to use it on his studio albums until his death in 1993, culminating in the posthumous release of his magnum opus Civilization, Phaze III (by Zappa's estimation, 70% of this two-hour work is exclusively Synclavier.)
 * Producer Mike Thorne, who used the Synclavier to shape the sound of the 80s producing bands such as Siouxsie and The Banshees, Soft Cell, Marc Almond, and Bronski Beat
 * Record label founder Daniel Miller (Mute Records). It found use on most Depeche Mode albums in which band member Alan Wilder was involved.
 * Sting
 * Genesis
 * The Cars
 * Herbie Hancock
 * Sean Callery
 * Eddie Jobson

The system was nearly as famous for where it was not used, as it was for the list of premier studios in which it was: the extremely sophisticated synthesizer enjoyed the distinction of being banned from many famous concert halls, out of fear that it would make the musicians themselves obsolete. A notable exception being the massive, 55 minute Dialogue for Synclavier and Orchestra by American Composer Frank Proto, commissioned and performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1986. Bringing together the full forces of a contemporary orchestra with a fully decked out Synclavier in a live performance, it displayed what can be achieved, combining both seemingly incompatible disciplines, by a composer with intimate knowledge of not only the available orchestral and electronic forces, but with the compositional skills to take advantage of both, without resorting to gimmicky devices frequently found in attempts to wed the two.

The mature Synclavier was a modular, component-based system that included facilities for FM-based synthesis, digital sampling, hard-disk recording, and sophisticated computer-based sound editing. By the late 1980s, complete Synclavier systems were selling for upwards of $200,000, to famous musicians such as Sting, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and to major studios the world over. The Synclavier was also employed by experimental musicians, such as John McLaughlin, Kraftwerk, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Kashif and Peter Buffett who used it extensively in their music. It is still used to this day in major movies for sound design, along with TV, Commercials and Music composition and production.

The Synclavier became a victim of the early 1990s economic downturn, the high prices (due in part to high specs, failure to diversify, and high executive salaries) and the rapidly increasing capabilities of personal computers, MIDI-enabled synthesizers and low-cost digital samplers. In the span of two years, the company saw enormous sales evaporate, and in 1992 they closed their doors forever. Parts of the company were purchased by Fostex, which used the technical knowledge base of staff to build several hard-disk recording systems in the 1990s (like Fostex Foundation 2000 and 2000re), and AirWorks Media, a Canadian company who used portions of code in their TuneBuilder product line. Simultaneously, a group of ex-employees and product owners collaborated to form The Synclavier Company, primarily as a maintenance organization for existing customers, but with an eye to adapting Synclavier software for stand-alone personal computer use, while in Europe the previously profitable, but now motherless, NED Europe is run by ex-head of European operations, Steve Hills. , it was still trading in London, England, as Synclavier Europe.

In 1998, under the company Demas, NED co-founder Cameron W. Jones (original and current owner of the Synclavier trademark and software) collaborated with ex-employee Brian S. George (owner of Demas, the company that purchased all of NED's hardware and technical assets) and original co-founding partner Sydney Alonso to develop an emulator designed to run Synclavier software for Apple Computer's Macintosh computer systems and hardware designed to share the core processing with the later generation of Apple G3 computers giving enhanced features and greater speed to the system.

title: New England Digital


text:
Talk:Figure skating

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 January 2021 and 12 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Daniel Thompson326.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:14, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2020 and 15 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Suzanasg.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:23, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

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Nomination of Portal:Figure skating for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Figure skating is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Figure skating until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 13:13, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Rewrite and request for page improvements
Hi fellow editors, I've rewritten the first section of this page (down to Jackson Haines), added citations and links to other relevant pages. Please take a moment to review my edits.

I think this page in general is messy with duplicated content from the head section and sub sections. I'd suggest rewiting this content removing dubplication and organising it better for readers.

I think it could benefit from a skills techniques section to summarise and draw out exactly what is it that Figure Skaters do that sets it apart from other forms of skating and that helps readers to understand other sections/pages they might consult. E.g. competition and judging. At the moment, this information is scattered around the article or missing. Some of the sections are to detailled and might warrant (or already have) their own pages!

What do others think? Happy to do the work to tidy it up. CurvyEdges (talk) 23:40, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Along with others, I've noticed that the WikiProject:Figure skating isn't very active, also this page doesn't seem to be either! This might be because its the off season and lots of fans who are editors aren't paying attention? But it could explain why this page has ended up with lots of duplication. I think the best way forward is for me to edit it and try to organise and improve it in my sandbox. I'll post the link here and notify the projects that have declared it's in scope. I've also identified several other projects that might want to include it in their scope, ageing (adult skating), disability (inclusive skating) and LGBTQI+. I'lllet them know. Hopefuly we can get a few editors and some interest in making a really comprehensive, balanced, well written and concise page, that readers rate. That's my aim, please come help me! :) CurvyEdges (talk) 16:16, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please read MOS:LEAD:
 * "The lead section (also known as the lead or introduction) of a Wikipedia article is the section before the table of contents and the first heading. The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents. It is not a news-style lead or "lede" paragraph. The average Wikipedia visit is a few minutes.[1] The lead is the first thing most people will read upon arriving at an article. It gives the basics in a nutshell and cultivates interest in reading on – though not by teasing the reader or hinting at what follows. It should be written in a clear, accessible style with a neutral point of view. The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies.[2] The notability of the article's subject is usually established in the first few sentences. As in the body of the article itself, the emphasis given to material in the lead should roughly reflect its importance to the topic, according to reliable, published sources. Apart from basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article. As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate."

 * What's your reason for removing information about the fact that figure skating was the first winter sport included in the Olympics? That certainly is relevant to showing figure skating's notability/standing among winter sports. Is a discussion of "English" and "International" styles of skating among the article's "most important contents"? Does this adhere to Wikipedia's policy of neutral point of view (WP:NPOV) or is it promoting a particular country? Why are you changing Archive URLs from Archive.org to Webcitation? Archive.org is generally more stable. I don't object to all of your additions. I transferred some material to other sections to keep the lead concise and focused on the article's most important points, as recommended in MOS:LEAD. Also, please see Manual of Style/Capital letters. Hergilei (talk) 23:48, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Rewrite and request for page improvements (2)
I believe there can be more additions to the section about health and injuries, for the physical injuries there are examples of skaters who suffered them, but for mental injuries, there is only a single sentence about eating disorders. I would suggest giving an example such as Gracie Gold to add to the impact of mental stress in the sport. Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 15:35, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Have worked on a figure skating in pop culture section, so far have added books, films and shows, and video games the sport appears in, what else would this section benefit from? Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 16:09, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

 * In popular culture sections can become a bit trivial and should be trimmed to a minimum of notable items. Show us what you've got and we'll see what's relevant. Remember that anything you add must be accompanied by a reliable source – please see WP:POPCULTURE. Rodney Baggins (talk) 17:40, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

 * Thank you for that link User talk:Rodney Baggins I was basing the format and content of it off other sport pages that had similar sections referring to them in pop culture. You can find a list of the things I added in my sandbox named figure skating. Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 15:33, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

The section about clothing in the last paragraph in quotations is directly copied from the ISU rulebook, should be reworded to not be the exact language (Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 16:02, 28 April 2021 (UTC))
 * Also may want to reference why the rule changed due to Katarina Witt and her outfit at the 1988 Winter Olympics (Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 16:02, 28 April 2021 (UTC))

I have added information about mental health and skaters in the health and injuries section, a pop culture section, and made minor edits to the elements and moves, and clothing section. Please see the edit history for more details. Daniel Thompson326 (talk) 15:45, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Figure skating


text:
OCaml

OCaml (, formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the Caml dialect of ML with object-oriented features. OCaml was created in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, Didier Rémy, Ascánder Suárez, and others.

The OCaml toolchain includes an interactive top-level interpreter, a bytecode compiler, an optimizing native code compiler, a reversible debugger, and a package manager (OPAM). OCaml was initially developed in the context of automated theorem proving, and is used in static analysis and formal methods software. Beyond these areas, it has found use in systems programming, web development, and specific financial utilities, among other application domains.

The acronym CAML originally stood for Categorical Abstract Machine Language, but OCaml omits this abstract machine. OCaml is a free and open-source software project managed and principally maintained by the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria). In the early 2000s, elements from OCaml were adopted by many languages, notably F# and Scala.

Philosophy
ML-derived languages are best known for their static type systems and type-inferring compilers. OCaml unifies functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming under an ML-like type system. Thus, programmers need not be highly familiar with the pure functional language paradigm to use OCaml.

By requiring the programmer to work within the constraints of its static type system, OCaml eliminates many of the type-related runtime problems associated with dynamically typed languages. Also, OCaml's type-inferring compiler greatly reduces the need for the manual type annotations that are required in most statically typed languages. For example, the data types of variables and the signatures of functions usually need not be declared explicitly, as they do in languages like Java and C#, because they can be inferred from the operators and other functions that are applied to the variables and other values in the code. Effective use of OCaml's type system can require some sophistication on the part of a programmer, but this discipline is rewarded with reliable, high-performance software.

OCaml is perhaps most distinguished from other languages with origins in academia by its emphasis on performance. Its static type system prevents runtime type mismatches and thus obviates runtime type and safety checks that burden the performance of dynamically typed languages, while still guaranteeing runtime safety, except when array bounds checking is turned off or when some type-unsafe features like serialization are used. These are rare enough that avoiding them is quite possible in practice.

Aside from type-checking overhead, functional programming languages are, in general, challenging to compile to efficient machine language code, due to issues such as the funarg problem. Along with standard loop, register, and instruction optimizations, OCaml's optimizing compiler employs static program analysis methods to optimize value boxing and closure allocation, helping to maximize the performance of the resulting code even if it makes extensive use of functional programming constructs.

Xavier Leroy has stated that "OCaml delivers at least 50% of the performance of a decent C compiler", although a direct comparison is impossible. Some functions in the OCaml standard library are implemented with faster algorithms than equivalent functions in the standard libraries of other languages. For example, the implementation of set union in the OCaml standard library in theory is asymptotically faster than the equivalent function in the standard libraries of imperative languages (e.g., C++, Java) because the OCaml implementation can exploit the immutability of sets to reuse parts of input sets in the output (see persistent data structure).

Development of ML (Meta Language)
Between the 1970s and 1980s, Robin Milner, a British computer scientist and Turing Award winner, worked at the University of Edinburgh's Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science. Milner and others were working on theorem provers, which were historically developed in languages such as Lisp. Milner repeatedly ran into the issue that the theorem provers would attempt to claim a proof was valid by putting non-proofs together. As a result, he went on to develop the meta language for his Logic for Computable Functions, a language that would only allow the writer to construct valid proofs with its polymorphic type system. ML was turned into a compiler to simplify using LCF on different machines, and, by the 1980s, was turned into a complete system of its own. ML would eventually serve as a basis for the creation of OCaml.

In the early 1980s, there were some developments that prompted INRIA's Formel team to become interested in the ML language. Luca Cardelli, a research professor at University of Oxford, used his functional abstract machine to develop a faster implementation of ML, and Robin Milner proposed a new definition of ML to avoid divergence between various implementations. Simultaneously, Pierre-Louis Curien, a senior researcher at Paris Diderot University, developed a calculus of categorical combinators and linked it to lambda calculus, which led to the definition of the categorical abstract machine (CAM). Guy Cousineau, a researcher at Paris Diderot University, recognized that this could be applied as a compiling method for ML.

First implementation
Caml was initially designed and developed by INRIA's Formel team headed by Gérard Huet. The first implementation of Caml was created in 1987 and was further developed until 1992. Though it was spearheaded by Ascánder Suárez, Pierre Weis and Michel Mauny carried on with development after he left in 1988.

Guy Cousineau is quoted recalling that his experience with programming language implementation was initially very limited, and that there were multiple inadequacies for which he is responsible. Despite this, he believes that "Ascander, Pierre and Michel did quite a nice piece of work.”

Caml Light
Between 1990 and 1991, Xavier Leroy designed a new implementation of Caml based on a bytecode interpreter written in C. In addition to this, Damien Doligez wrote a memory management system, also known as a sequential garbage collector, for this implementation. This new implementation, known as Caml Light, replaced the old Caml implementation and ran on small desktop machines. In the following years, libraries such as Michel Mauny's syntax manipulation tools appeared and helped promote the use of Caml in educational and research teams.

Caml Special Light
In 1995, Xavier Leroy released Caml Special Light, which was an improved version of Caml. An optimizing native-code compiler was added to the bytecode compiler, which greatly increased performance to comparable levels with mainstream languages such as C++. Also, Leroy designed a high-level module system inspired by the module system of Standard ML which provided powerful facilities for abstraction and parameterization and made larger-scale programs easier to build.

Objective Caml
Didier Rémy and Jérôme Vouillon designed an expressive type system for objects and classes, which was integrated within Caml Special Light. This led to the emergence of the Objective Caml language, first released in 1996 and subsequently renamed to OCaml in 2011. This object system notably supported many prevalent object-oriented idioms in a statically type-safe way, while those same idioms caused unsoundness or required runtime checks in languages such as C++ or Java. In 2000, Jacques Garrigue extended Objective Caml with multiple new features such as polymorphic methods, variants, and labeled and optional arguments.

Ongoing development
Language improvements have been incrementally added for the last two decades to support the growing commercial and academic codebases in OCaml. The OCaml 4.0 release in 2012 added Generalized Algebraic Data Types (GADTs) and first-class modules to increase the flexibility of the language. The OCaml 5.0.0 release in 2022 is a complete rewrite of the language runtime, removing the global GC lock and adding effect handlers via delimited continuations. These changes enable support for shared-memory parallelism and color-blind concurrency, respectively.

OCaml's development continued within the Cristal team at INRIA until 2005, when it was succeeded by the Gallium team. Subsequently, Gallium was succeeded by the Cambium team in 2019. As of 2023, there are 23 core developers of the compiler distribution from a variety of organizations and 41 developers for the broader OCaml tooling and packaging ecosystem.

Features
OCaml features a static type system, type inference, parametric polymorphism, tail recursion, pattern matching, first class lexical closures, functors (parametric modules), exception handling, effect handling, and incremental generational automatic garbage collection.

OCaml is notable for extending ML-style type inference to an object system in a general-purpose language. This permits structural subtyping, where object types are compatible if their method signatures are compatible, regardless of their declared inheritance (an unusual feature in statically typed languages).

A foreign function interface for linking to C primitives is provided, including language support for efficient numerical arrays in formats compatible with both C and Fortran. OCaml also supports creating libraries of OCaml functions that can be linked to a main program in C, so that an OCaml library can be distributed to C programmers who have no knowledge or installation of OCaml.

The OCaml distribution contains:
 * Lexical analysis and parsing tools called ocamllex and ocamlyacc
 * Debugger that supports stepping backwards to investigate errors
 * Documentation generator
 * Profiler – to measure performance
 * Many general-purpose libraries

The native code compiler is available for many platforms, including Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple macOS. Portability is achieved through native code generation support for major architectures:

 * X86-64 (AMD64), RISC-V, and ARM64 (in OCaml 5.0.0 and higher)
 * IBM Z (before OCaml 5.0.0, and back in OCaml 5.1.0)
 * Power (before OCaml 5.0.0, and due to reappear in OCaml 5.2.0)
 * IA-32 and ARM (before OCaml 5.0.0)
 * SPARC (before OCaml 4.06.0)
 * DEC Alpha, HPPA, IA64 and MIPS (before OCaml 4.00.0)

The bytecode compiler supports operation on any 32- or 64-bit architecture when native code generation is not available, requiring only a C compiler.

OCaml bytecode and native code programs can be written in a multithreaded style, with preemptive context switching. OCaml threads in the same domain execute by time sharing only. However, an OCaml program can contain several domains.

Code examples
Snippets of OCaml code are most easily studied by entering them into the top-level REPL. This is an interactive OCaml session that prints the inferred types of resulting or defined expressions. The OCaml top-level is started by simply executing the OCaml program:

Code can then be entered at the "#" prompt. For example, to calculate 1+2*3:

OCaml infers the type of the expression to be "int" (a machine-precision integer) and gives the result "7".

Hello World
The following program "hello.ml":

can be compiled into a bytecode executable:

$ ocamlc hello.ml -o hello

or compiled into an optimized native-code executable:

$ ocamlopt hello.ml -o hello

and executed:

The first argument to ocamlc, "hello.ml", specifies the source file to compile and the "-o hello" flag specifies the output file.

Option
The  type constructor in OCaml, similar to the   type in Haskell, augments a given data type to either return   value of the given data type, or to return. This is used to express that a value might or might not be present. This is an example of a function that either extracts an int from an option, if there is one inside, and converts it into a string, or if not, returns an empty string:

Summing a list of integers
Lists are one of the fundamental datatypes in OCaml. The following code example defines a recursive function sum that accepts one argument, integers, which is supposed to be a list of integers. Note the keyword  which denotes that the function is recursive. The function recursively iterates over the given list of integers and provides a sum of the elements. The match statement has similarities to C's switch element, though it is far more general.

Another way is to use standard fold function that works with lists.

Since the anonymous function is simply the application of the + operator, this can be shortened to:

Furthermore, one can omit the list argument by making use of a partial application:

Quicksort
OCaml lends itself to concisely expressing recursive algorithms. The following code example implements an algorithm similar to quicksort that sorts a list in increasing order.

Or using partial application of the >= operator.

Birthday problem
The following program calculates the smallest number of people in a room for whom the probability of completely unique birthdays is less than 50% (the birthday problem, where for 1 person the probability is 365/365 (or 100%), for 2 it is 364/365, for 3 it is 364/365 × 363/365, etc.) (answer = 23).

Church numerals
The following code defines a Church encoding of natural numbers, with successor (succ) and addition (add). A Church numeral is a higher-order function that accepts a function  and a value  and applies  to  exactly  times. To convert a Church numeral from a functional value to a string, we pass it a function that prepends the string to its input and the constant string.

Arbitrary-precision factorial function (libraries)
A variety of libraries are directly accessible from OCaml. For example, OCaml has a built-in library for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. As the factorial function grows very rapidly, it quickly overflows machine-precision numbers (typically 32- or 64-bits). Thus, factorial is a suitable candidate for arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

In OCaml, the Num module (now superseded by the ZArith module) provides arbitrary-precision arithmetic and can be loaded into a running top-level using:

The factorial function may then be written using the arbitrary-precision numeric operators =/, */ and -/ :

This function can compute much larger factorials, such as 120!:

Triangle (graphics)
The following program renders a rotating triangle in 2D using OpenGL:

The LablGL bindings to OpenGL are required. The program may then be compiled to bytecode with:

$ ocamlc -I +lablGL lablglut.cma lablgl.cma simple.ml -o simple

or to nativecode with:

$ ocamlopt -I +lablGL lablglut.cmxa lablgl.cmxa simple.ml -o simple

or, more simply, using the ocamlfind build command $ ocamlfind opt simple.ml -package lablgl.glut -linkpkg -o simple

and run:

$ ./simple

Far more sophisticated, high-performance 2D and 3D graphical programs can be developed in OCaml. Thanks to the use of OpenGL and OCaml, the resulting programs can be cross-platform, compiling without any changes on many major platforms.

Fibonacci sequence
The following code calculates the Fibonacci sequence of a number n inputted. It uses tail recursion and pattern matching.

Higher-order functions
Functions may take functions as input and return functions as result. For example, applying twice to a function f yields a function that applies f two times to its argument. The function twice uses a type variable 'a to indicate that it can be applied to any function f mapping from a type 'a to itself, rather than only to int->int functions. In particular, twice can even be applied to itself.

MetaOCaml
MetaOCaml is a multi-stage programming extension of OCaml enabling incremental compiling of new machine code during runtime. Under some circumstances, significant speedups are possible using multistage programming, because more detailed information about the data to process is available at runtime than at the regular compile time, so the incremental compiler can optimize away many cases of condition checking, etc.

As an example: if at compile time it is known that some power function is needed often, but the value of  is known only at runtime, a two-stage power function can be used in MetaOCaml:

As soon as is known at runtime, a specialized and very fast power function can be created:

The result is:

The new function is automatically compiled.

Other derived languages

 * F# is a .NET framework language based on OCaml.
 * JoCaml integrates constructions for developing concurrent and distributed programs.
 * Reason is an alternative OCaml syntax and toolchain for OCaml created at Facebook, which can compile to both native code and JavaScript.

Software written in OCaml

 * Alt-Ergo, a SMT solver.
 * Astrée, a static analyzer
 * Be Sport, a social network
 * Coccinelle, a utility for transforming the source code of C programs.
 * Coq, a formal proof management system.
 * Easycrypt, a toolset for writing computer-aided proofs.
 * FFTW, a library for computing discrete Fourier transforms. Several C routines have been generated by an OCaml program named.
 * The web version of Facebook Messenger.
 * Flow, a static analyzer created at Facebook that infers and checks static types for JavaScript.
 * Ocsigen, a client server Web and mobile development framework
 * Owl Scientific Computing, a dedicated system for scientific and engineering computing.
 * Frama-C, a framework for analyzing C programs.
 * GeneWeb, free and open-source multi-platform genealogy software.
 * The Hack programming language compiler, created at Facebook, extending PHP with static types.
 * The Haxe programming language compiler.
 * HOL Light, a formal proof assistant.
 * Infer, a static analyzer created at Facebook for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C, used to detect bugs in iOS and Android apps.
 * Liquidsoap, a scripting language for generating multimedia streams.
 * MirageOS, a unikernel programming framework written in pure OCaml.
 * MLdonkey, a peer-to-peer file sharing application based on the EDonkey network.
 * Opa, a free and open-source programming language for web development.
 * Tezos, a self-amending smart contract platform using XTZ as a native currency.
 * Unison, a file synchronization program to synchronize files between two directories.
 * The reference interpreter for WebAssembly, a low-level bytecode intended for execution inside web browsers.
 * Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), a turnkey virtualization solution for the Xen hypervisor.

Users
At least several dozen companies use OCaml to some degree. Notable examples include:
 * Bloomberg L.P., which created BuckleScript, an OCaml compiler backend targeting JavaScript.
 * Citrix Systems, which uses OCaml in XenServer (rebranded as Citrix Hypervisor during 2018).
 * Facebook, which developed Flow, Hack, Infer, Pfff, and ReasonML in OCaml.
 * Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, which adopted OCaml as its preferred language in its early days and continues to use it as of 2023.
 * Docker, which uses OCaml in the desktop editions on macOS and Windows.

title: OCaml