Pericles

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal

Pericles
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Lucy Munro
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater:
Jonathan Bate and Lucy Munro
Commentary: Lucy Munro and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Will Sharpe
In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Will Sharpe and Kevin Wright):
Adrian Noble, Adrian Jackson, and Dominic Cooke
Playing Marina: Laura Rees

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

2012 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of Pericles and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare:

Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-890-4

www.BookishMall.com

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Photo 24/Getty Images

v3.1

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Pericles in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of Pericles: An Overview

At the RSC 124 The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Adrian Noble, Adrian Jackson, and Dominic Cooke

Playing Marina: Laura Rees

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

Further Reading and Viewing

References

INTRODUCTION

A lone figure, venerable and archaically dressed, steps onto the bare stage: “To sing a song that old was sung / From ashes ancient Gower is come.” Probably begun by a hack dramatist in 1607 and completed by Shakespeare in 1608, Pericles marks a fresh departure for the master after his exclusive focus on tragedy in the previous few years (Macbeth, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, and the contemporaneous Coriolanus). In his next group of plays, Shakespeare worked in a much more mellow form. The sea, the voyage, the storm, the unlucky and lucky chances, the years of quest and grief, the child lost and found, the resurrection of the apparently dead: this is the matter of the enduring literary form of romance.

One of the most widely circulated and oft-repeated tales from ancient Greece was that of Apollonius of Tyre, who wandered around virtually the whole of the Mediterranean world before what he had lost was restored to him. Chaucer’s friend John Gower included a version of it in his rambling poetic repository of old stories, Confessio Amantis. Just over two hundred years later, Gower was brought back to life on the boards of the Globe Theatre, with Apollonius renamed Pericles. The poet serves as chorus, guiding the audience through the story, asking us to hold in imagination the wanderer’s ship, two great storms, and a series of landfalls at Antioch and Tarsus in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, way over at Pentapolis in North Africa, back at Tarsus and Tyre, and eventually at Ephesus and Mytilene on the Aegean.

Old songs are true in deep but simple ways. If we come to Pericles looking for the psychological complexities of Shakespearean tragedy, we will be disappointed. There are none of the subtle shades of moral gray which endlessly fascinate us in Antony and Cleopatra, another play which circles around the ancient Mediterranean world and which may have been written immediately before Pericles. Instead, we have to accept black and white, and, most disconcertingly, white becoming black (Dionyza is protectress one moment, murderess the next), then black becoming white (Lysimachus sets out to deflower Marina in a brothel, but ends up being deemed a fit husband for her).

The play proceeds by a series of tableaux and formal dumb shows, which offer stark contrasts: first Pericles woos a daughter whose relationship with her father is turned inward in incest, then he woos a daughter whose father banteringly pretends to play the oppressive patriarch when really he is delighted that she has fallen in love with the knight in rusty armor. The narrative begins with a daughter who is “an eater of her mother’s flesh / By the defiling of her parents’ bed.” It ends with a daughter who regenerates her father. In Pericles’ extraordinary line, “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget,” the daughter seems to father her father without any trace of illicit desire. Having converted the clientele of the brothel, and even the randy old Bolt, from lust to honesty, now Marina brings her father from unshaven sackclothed wandering to a new life. The fifth act’s inversion of the first act’s perversion suggests that, episodic though it may be, the play has its own unity. Though the first two acts were written by another dramatist, George Wilkins, and the last three by Shakespeare, the stitching together of the plot was effectively done.

The language is more variable. It begins to thrill with the hum of late Shakespearean verse only from the great storm speech onward: “O, still / Thy deaf’ning dreadful thunders, gently quench / Thy nimble sulphurous flashes!” From here to the end of the play, there are certain speeches of quite extraordinary beauty and power. Most revelatory of all is the reunion of father and daughter, which recapitulates yet somehow goes beyond the reunion of Lear and Cordelia. Shakespeare never wrote a more moving scene.

THE CRITICS DEBATE

Pericles’ early reputation was as the epitome of theatrical success. The narrator of Pimlico or Run Red-Cap (1609) compares a crowd that he encounters to the hubbub at a theater presenting a successful new play such as Jane Shore (now lost) or Pericles:

all the room

Did swarm with gentles mixed with grooms,

So that I truly thought all these

Came to see Shore or Pericles.1

Similarly, the prologue of Robert Tailor’s 1614 play The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl concludes by saying, “if it prove so happy as to please, /We’ll say ’tis fortunate like Pericles.”2 Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson was forced to acknowledge that Pericles was successful, but he had serious reservations about its popular appeal:

No doubt some mouldy tale,

Like Pericles, and stale

As the shrieve’s crusts, and nasty as his fish-

Scraps, out [of] every dish

Thrown forth and raked into the common tub,

May keep up the play-club.3

Jonson criticizes the romance mode in which Pericles is written, and—in contrast with Pimlico’s vision of happy upper- and lower-class spectators—he implies that it appeals only to the more menial and (he suggests) less discriminating part of the theater audience.

By the late seventeenth century, Pericles was falling into neglect both on the stage and in the study. John Dryden was typical of his age in criticizing Shakespeare’s plays for not conforming to neoclassical requirements of unity and decorum in both plot and character:

Poetry was then, if not in its infancy among us, at least not arriv’d to its vigor and maturity: witness the lameness of their plots: many of which, especially those which they writ first, (for even that age refin’d itself in some measure,) were made up of some ridiculous, incoherent story, which, in one play many times took up the business of an age. I suppose I need not name Pericles, Prince of Tyre, nor the Historical Plays of Shakespear.4

Similarly, he argued that characters in a play “must be consistent with the manners which the Poet has given them distinctly” and that “He who enter’d in the first Act, a Young man like Pericles, Prince of Tyre, must not be in danger in the fifth Act, of committing Incest with his Daughter.”5

TEXT AND AUTHOR(S)

For Dryden, Pericles’ failings suggested that it was an early work; comparing it with Othello, he writes that “Shakespear’s own Muse her Pericles first bore, / The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moore.”6 Others have sought different explanations. As one recent scholar summarizes:

Theories put forward to account for the oddity of the first two acts are (a) that they are remnants of a very early Shakespeare script; (b) that Shakespeare deliberately wrote them, at the same time as Acts 3–5, in a style consonant with the medieval mode of his choric narrator, Gower; (c) that, as the 1609 quarto presents them, they are a reporter’s fumbling paraphrase of a greatly superior original, which may have been wholly Shakespeare’s; and (d) that they are the work of another dramatist.7

One of the earliest arguments for collaboration was put forward by Shakespeare editor Nicholas Rowe in 1709:

Mr Dryden seems to think that Pericles is one of his first Plays; but there is no judgment to be form’d on that, since there is good Reason to believe that the greatest part of the Play was not written by him; tho’ it is own’d some part of it certainly was, particularly the last Act.8

Rowe’s eighteenth-century successors either omitted Pericles altogether, or treated it with condescension:

This absurd Old Play … was not entirely of our Author’s penning; but he has honour’d it with a Number of Master-Touches so peculiar to himself that a knowing Reader may with Ease and Certainty distinguish the Traces of his Pencil.9

For many nineteenth-century critics, the textually and morally suspect went hand in hand. Much disapproval was focused on the opening scenes. Henry Tyrell wrote, sniffily, in 1860,

The opening incident respecting the criminal association of King Antiochus and his daughter is not calculated to please the taste of a modern audience. Incest is a crime not to be recorded by the poet; it is, as it were, an unhallowed and unlawful subject: our literature should not be associated with an offence so repugnant to humanity.10

Such unease led to a desire to dissociate Shakespeare not only from the opening scenes but also from those set in the brothel; the textual scholar F. G. Fleay offered a radical solution:

Shakespeare wrote the story of Marina, in the last three acts, minus the prose scenes and the Gower. This gives a perfect artistic and organic whole: and, in my opinion, ought to be printed as such in every edition of Shakespeare: the whole play, as it stands, might be printed in collections for the curious, and there only.11

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars put forward a number of candidates for co-authorship in Pericles, of which the more credible were William Rowley, Thomas Heywood, John Day, and George Wilkins. Modern scholarship has demonstrated that by far the most likely collaborator is Wilkins, although some critics continue to argue for Shakespeare’s solo authorship.12

ROMANCE? LATE PLAY?

Despite Fleay’s distaste for Pericles, the 1870s also saw the first hints of its critical rehabilitation. Although he agreed with Fleay about the play’s authorship, in his influential account of Shakespeare’s writing career Dowden grouped Pericles with Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale in a final phase that he called “On the Heights.” At this time Shakespeare “ascended out of the turmoil and trouble of action, out of the darkness and tragic mystery, the places haunted by terror and crime, and by love contending with these, to a pure and serene elevation.” Dowden describes the plays of this period as having a particular set of characteristics:

In all there is the same romantic incident of lost children recovered by those to whom they are dear—the daughters of Pericles and Leontes, the sons of Cymbeline and Alonso. In all there is a beautiful romantic background of sea or mountain.

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MY ACCOUNT

Pericles Read Online

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE CRITICS DEBATE

TEXT AND AUTHOR(S)

ROMANCE? LATE PLAY?

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