Dave's Book Blog: Pericles Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare

I saw Pericles on Wednesday 28th June 2017 in an amateur production in the open air in the Elizabethan courtyard of the George in Huntingdon. The sky was overcast, the evening was chilly, it threatened rain throughout. The director had the bright idea of splitting Gower's narration in between the members of the case; often the appropriate character said what he or she was about to do. The fisherfolk (the men became women) were brilliantly funny; their reappearance as raddled whores in the brothel scene was less successful. Marina was especially good as was Boult. Some of the scenes (the tournament with the knights and the dancing afterwards) slow up the action; I would have cut them but I can see how they are irresistible to thespians. They were very careful to reinterpret Lysimachus's wooing of Marina in the brothel so that he became husband material before the end: they made him seem to be an honourable gentleman (seeking sex in a brothel) by cutting a couple of his lines where he asks the bawd for virgins and undiseased prostitutes; nevertheless the delicate posturing between a young man wanting sex and an honourable nobleman, possibly commonplace to Elizabethans but unacceptably hypocritical to our sensibilities, make this part difficult to credit and almost impossible to play convincingly and I felt for the actor who made a brave attempt at it.

Overall, the production was a decent attempt at a bloody difficult play.

This is a fascinating play. It breaks all the rules. There are so many locations that it stretches theatrical incredulity to breaking point (if Thaisa at Ephesus is able to receive letters telling her of her father’s death, how could she not send letters to tell her family that she was still alive?); furthermore the first few scenes in Antioch and the first wooing by Pericles have very little relation to the rest of the play (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in Shakespeare's Workmanship suggests that the first two acts make up a stand-alone plot which has “scarce anything to do with the story, and no necessary bearing on it whatsoever”. This isn't quite true, however. The incest theme is reprised near the end in the great recognition scene when Pericles says “My dearest wife was like this maid” (5.1.121). There are other repetitions too. When Pericles goes to Pentapolis via a shipwreck and woos the daughter of King Simonides, this is a near-repetition of his wooing of the daughter of King Antiochus in that he risks his life in a competition with other knights. And Pericles is reminded of his dead father by both Antiochus (he "would be son to great Antiochus"; 1.1.27) and Simonides (who he considers "my father's picture"; 2.3.41). Of course there are two storms. Both the wicked rulers (Antiochus and Cleon) are burned to death. And every ruler seems to have a single daughter as their heir: Antiochus, Simonides, Cleon, and Pericles (and, since Cleon's daughter never appears, “The final scene is ... the only moment in which the theater audience sees a family composed of two parents and a child" (Pericles: A Modern Perspective by Margaret Jane Kidnie in the 2005 Folger Shakespeare edition).

Other themes include loss and, sometimes, recovery, and, in particular, the wheel of capricious fortune:

"O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,

And snatch them straight away?"

(3.1.24-26)

The authorship:

Most scholars believe that the first two acts were written by George Wilkins and the last three by Shakespeare. The evidence for this includes:

Word frequency counts and rhyme analyses which suggest that the final three acts are by Shakespeare and the first two aren't.
The exclusion of Pericles from the first folio (and the second) suggesting that it wasn't regarded as an exclusively Shakespearean play.
The fact that Wilkins (a tavern keeper and likely brothel keeper who had several convictions for violence) was known to Shakespeare having been a fellow-witness in a court case in which Huguenot Stephen Bellott sued his father-in-law, wigmaler, Christopher Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £50; in 1604 Shakespeare was a lodger in the Mountjoy house, helped to arrange the betrothal and dowry and signed a deposition to this effect; Wilkins was the landlord with whom the newly-weds lodged after moving out from her parents’ house
Wilkins wrote the 'novelisation' of the play called ‘The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre’, described as "the true History of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet Iohn Gower ... by the Kings Maiesties Players excellently presented." which was published in 1608. The plot of this novel is very close to the plot of the play, to the extent that it the prose version may be used to reconcile inaccuracies in the First Folio version.
Wilkins wrote at least one play

Sources:

The Pattern of Painful Adventures by Lawrence Twines, a prose novel originally published in 1576 but reissued in both 1595ish and 1607; it is the last edition that was probably the principal source.

The version by Twines was based on one of the stories in Confessio Amantis (The Confession of Lovers) by John Gower, completed in 1390. This is one of those ‘multiple stories within a frame’ works like Bocaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and, despite its relative obscurity today, was the third most copied Middle English manuscript after Canterbury Tales and Langland’s Piers the Plowman; it was printed by Caxton. Gower was one of the greats of English letters. He was buried in St Mary Overy (now Southwark Cathedral), Shakespeare’s local church which also contains the grave of Shakespeare’s younger brother Edmund, who was buried there in 1607. The fact that Gower appears as a one-man chorus and, in the play, speaks in the same octosyllabic rhyming couplets (rather than the pentameters popularised by Chaucer) in which he wrote (except for the prologue to Act 5 in which, strangely, Gower reverts to Shakespearean iambic pentameters) suggests that Gower was the principal source.

Apollonius of Tyre was a popular mediaeval tale. There are over fifty versions, in a variety of languages, including English, Dutch, German, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Latin. An incomplete Old English version dates from the 11th Century. The core of the tale tells how Apollonius is hunted and persecuted after he reveals Antiochus of Antioch's incestuous relationship with his daughter. After many travels and adventures, in which Apollonius loses both his wife and his daughter and thinks them both dead, he is eventually reunited with his family through unlikely circumstances or intercession by gods. In some English versions he is shipwrecked. It served Shakespeare as a source not only for Pericles but also for The Comedy of Errors, and Twelfth Night.

It may be that the change of name from Apollonius to Pericles was suggested by Arcadia by Sir Philip Sydney (completed about 1586) which features a cross-dresser called Pyrocles; Shakespeare clearly had read Arcadia because he uses elements of it in the Gloucester sub-plot in King Lear.

Step by step through the play
Prologue: spoken by old Gower in iambic tetrameter: The king of Antioch is having an incestuous relationship with his daughter. She is so beautiful that lots of princes try for her hand; they have to answer a riddle which alludes to the incest; if they fail to guess it right they die.

Act One:

Pericles discovers that the princess he fancies is having an incestuous relationship with her father King of Antioch. He realises that this is going to make the King fear him, and hate him, and

"Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke"

The King pretends to be nice but Pericles realises

"'Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss."

so he decides to flee to Tyre. But even there he isn't safe.

Pericles flees to Tyre but, realising that Antioch might invade to silence him and tailed by assassin Thaliard (who when he gets to Tyre finds Pericles has gone sailing and decides he will probably die at sea so gives up the search), moves on to Tarsus where there is a famine. The King Cleon is on the beach with his wife Dionyza; Cleon decides to go among the starving people and share their woes so they might feel solace in companionship although the waspish Dionyza sneers:

"That were to blow at fire in hope to quench it."

In the nick of time Pericles and his ships arrive with supplies.

Act Two:

Pericles is shipwrecked at Pentapolis whose king just happens to have a beautiful daughter whose hand Pericles wins at a knightly tournament. meanwhile we hear that Antiochus and his daughter/ mistress have been killed by a bolt of lightning and that the Lords in Tyre want Helicanus to be King in place of the absent Pericles. This was the bit with the rather silly knightly tournament and dancing at the subsequent ball. It started with the fisherfolk finding Pericles on the beach which included some great knockabout humour but little of this Act served to advance the plot of elucidate the characters.

"Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan

The outward habit by the inward man."

Act Three:

does the hard work. Again it is introduced by Gower. Pericles has married Thalia; she is pregnant. The letter from Tyre reaches them telling P that Antiochus is dead and Helicanus is, for the present, refusing the throne. P and his wife set out by sea for Tyre. But a storm blows up:

"the grisly north

Disgorges such a tempest forth"

The nurse brings him the baby and tells him that his wife has died in child-birth.

"O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,

And snatch them straight away?"

The sailors tell Pericles that the only way to calm the storm is to tip the corpse overboard. They have a sealed chest which will act as a coffin. P assents and tells them to make for Tarsus because the baby won't survive until they reach Tyre. He leaves newly named Marina there. But the chest comes ashore at Ephesus where the lord, who trained in medicine, revives Thalia.

"Virtue and cunning were endowments greater

Than nobleness and riches: careless heirs

May the latter two darken and expend;

But immortality attends the former,

Making a man a god."

So at the end of the act we have Thalia serving the temple of Diana in Ephesus, thinking Pericles and the baby dead, Marina in Tarsus and Pericles on his way back to Tyre, having sworn to Diana not to cut his hair till Marina be married.

Act Four:

Gower comes on again to tell us that that Marina is such a great kid that she well outshines the King's own daughter so the Queen, jealous, hires a murderer to kill Marina. But just as he is about to kill her, pirates kidnap her and sell her to a brothel in Mytilene.

The pander and the bawd have a problem: too many customers and too few whores. So they get their servant to buy Miranda from the pirates. The bawd will try to teach her the ropes though she foresees problems:

"You're a young foolish sapling, and must be bowed as I would have you."

The servant asks for 'commission':

"If I have bargained for the joint .../ Thou mayst cut a morsel off the spit."

Miranda hopes to kill herself.

Meanwhile Cleon rages at his wife for killing Marina and she rages back at him for being a pussy.

"such a piece of slaughter

The sun and moon ne'er looked upon!"

This argument between man and wife is at last worthy of Shakespeare. She is ashamed of his cowardice, he is ashamed of her lack of honour. But as she points out:

"Yet none does know, but you, how she came dead,

Nor none can known, Leonine being gone."

And then she plays the angry jealous mother:

"She did disdain my child, and stood between

Her and her fortunes: none would look on her

But cast their gazes on Marina's face;

Whilst ours was blurted at and made a malkin [slattern]

Not worth the time of day. It pierced me through"

Cleon tells her:

"Thou art like the harpy,

Which, to betray, dost, with thine angel's face,

Seize with thine talons."

But as Dionyza remarks

"But yet I know you'll do as I advise."

When Pericles finds out his daughter is dead he is distraught. But Miranda is busy persuading the bad folks of Mytilene to preserve her honour. The governor of Mytilene goes to the brothel for a virgin but Miranda persuades him not to. He pays her anyway. She uses the money to persuade Boult the doorkeeper to find her a job teaching in an honest house.

Act Five:

In a wonderful scene Pericles goes mad with joy on being reunited with Marina. At first he disbelieves her:

"O, I am mock'd,

And thou by some incensed god sent hither

To make the world to laugh at me.

...

This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep

Did mock sad fools withal: this cannot be:

My daughter's buried."

But when he believes he becomes almost incoherent with joy:

"Give me a gash, put me to present pain;

Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me

O'ergear the shores of my mortality,

And drown me with their sweetness."

and Shakespeare treats us to a wonderful moment of a man hearing music, ordering people about, exulting, and falling asleep, exhausted by happiness.

"Give me my robes. I am wild in my beholding.

O heavens bless my girl! But, hark, what music?

...

The music of the spheres!

...

Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear?

...

Most heavenly music!

It nips me unto listening, and thick slumber

Hangs upon mine eyes: let me rest."

Then he goes to Ephesus and finds Thaisa and everyone is happy ever after (except for Mr and Mrs Cleon who are burned in their palace).

Other selected quotes:

"The fishes live in the sea ... as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones" (2.1.28 - 29)
"A man thronged up with cold" (2.1.76)
"Here's a fish hangs in the net like a poor man's right in the law: 'twill hardly come out." (2.1.121-2)
"Pray, but be not tedious, for the gods are quick of ear" (4.1.78 - 79)

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.