The dramas have a grave beauty, a sweet serenity, which seem to render the name “comedies” inappropriate; we may smile tenderly, but we never laugh loudly, as we read them. Let us, then, name this group consisting of four plays, Romances.13

Although he devotes little space to it, Dowden gives Pericles a special position and value as the first of the romances:

Taken in this context, almost any critic who enjoyed the last three would have to at least appreciate the first one—the worst he might say of it was that it was a “study” for themes that would soon come to fruition … Under the heading of “romance,” Pericles now had a new paradigm, one far more accommodating than neoclassicism or realism had ever been … In this genre, it was understood that such conventions as vast expanse of time and space, fairy-tale improbabilities and sketchy characterization were not necessarily signs of an inferior talent but were simply part of the generic terrain.14

The idea of the “late play”—a special phase at the end of a great artist’s career, featuring works characterized by a newfound serenity and wonder—took forceful hold on mid-twentieth-century criticism of Pericles. G. Wilson Knight’s account of the play is idiosyncratic yet in many respects typical:

The depth and realism of tragedy are present within the structure of romance. The two extremes, happy and sad, of Shakespearian art coalesce to house a new, and seemingly impossible, truth; as though the experiences behind or within the composition of King Lear and Timon of Athens were found not necessarily antithetical to the happy ending but rather reached therein their perfect fulfilment. Hence the sense of breathtaking surprise, of wonder and reverence, in the reunions, and the cogent presence of the miracle-worker, Cerimon … Shakespeare’s drama is aspiring towards the eternal harmony and the eternal pattern.15

There have, however, been dissident voices. Lytton Strachey mischievously argued as early as 1904 that the “late plays,” including “the miserable archaic fragment of Pericles,” were the product not of benign serenity but boredom.16 Moreover, Suzanne Gossett points out, to describe Pericles as a late play at all is to overlook some important facts:

the lateness paradigm is inadequate to describe a play which is not entirely by Shakespeare; on which Shakespeare worked when he was not yet forty-four years old; which reworks a plot that had already served as a frame for one of his earliest comedies; and which he may have been writing simultaneously with or shortly before Coriolanus, a play with ties to an entirely different section of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.17

SEXUALITY AND GENDER

The attempts of Victorian critics to come to terms with the sexual material in Pericles foreshadow the trajectory taken in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For William Watkiss Lloyd,

[Pericles’] original difficulties spring from his suit to the daughter of Antiochus, a suit unblessed by any better passion than deceptive beauty stimulates, and the politic desire to furnish his realm with an heir. His error, for by the standards of Shakespeare’s moral feeling so it must stand, is recognized soon, but not so soon as to evade all its consequences; hence his exile and wanderings and vicissitudes; prudence and noble sensibility, and patience when fortune admits no better, help and preserve him, and weariness and melancholy are roused at least to renewed enjoyment of affection and prosperity.18

In an important essay of 1969, C. L. Barber argues that “where regular comedy deals with freeing sexuality from the ties of family, these late romances deal with freeing family ties from the threat of sexual degradation.”19 This line of argument has been developed by feminist and psychoanalytic critics. For Coppélia Kahn, Pericles is one of a group of plays focusing on “the male passage from being a son to being a father,” in which the hero

struggle[s] to accept their difference from and dependence on women, and to take parenthood as the measure of their mortality. Shakespeare resolves this crisis through the father-daughter relationship, using the daughter’s chaste sexuality and capacity to produce heirs as a bridge to the hero’s new identity as father … [Marina’s] purity banishes the shadow of oedipal sexuality, and brings the hero back to his wife and to the world.20

For Janet Adelman, the later acts of the play engage in “working and reworking” the threat posed in the first act:

acts 3 through 5 are structured counter-phobically, as though all sexuality were tantamount to that initial act of incest and all families based in the sexual body were similarly contaminated … In the end Shakespeare will reestablish Pericles’s masculine identity only by first detoxifying the contaminating female body and the family relations based on it, in effect undoing the initial trauma of the play and freeing the family from its sexual origin.21

Kahn and Adelman see the events of Act 5 as both resolution and containment of the threat posed in Act 1; others have been less certain:

Pericles and Marina are safe and the way is clear for rebirth and restoration … And yet there is an unresolved indeterminacy in the text which makes it possible to read the ending of Pericles not as a mandala closure but as a dizzying return to square one.22

In a striking recent reading, Margaret Healy views skeptically Pericles’ decision to marry Marina to the apparently reformed brothel-goer Lysimachus. Describing Pericles as “a satirical play,” she writes,

Through marriage, an innocent young woman will be placed at his disposal by the very person who should most seek to protect her—her father. Marina’s response to the intended match is articulate silence … Pericles is a prince who is seldom in his own state … who flees from danger rather than confronting it; who readily commits his young daughter to the care of rather dubious others; whose wallowing in self-pity comes dangerously close to incurring a charge of effeminacy … and who, through betrothing Marina to a potentially diseased son-in-law, is putting both her health and his future princely heirs’ at stake.23

TIME AND SPACE

Healy’s interest in the specific social, medical, and educational contexts of Pericles is part of a wider challenge to older views of the play as primarily aesthetic or ahistorical. For some critics, the play represents a rejection of topicality which is in itself political. Steven Mullaney argues that Pericles is political in spite of itself, a “radical effort to dissociate the popular stage from its cultural contexts and theatrical grounds of possibility—an effort to imagine, in fact, that popular drama could be a purely aesthetic phenomenon, free from history and from historical determination.”24 For Amelia Zurcher, the play

rejects entirely the humanist notion of history’s utility for the present, and with it any possibility for a dynamic relation between present and past … History is valuable in Pericles because it offers a vision of time when we too will be past interest, past all temptation to betray our integrity by extending and propagating ourselves through time, and instead fixed and hypostatized in a state in which time and integrity no longer need be at odds.25

Other scholars have instead argued, like Healy, that Shakespeare and Wilkins’ play does engage with contemporary debates. Constance C. Relihan suggests that Pericles’ eastern Mediterranean locations

amplif[y] the political implications of his text … Instead of sensing a merciful conclusion that unites the action of the play, the political ambiguities with which the play ends confound such a perception: the rulers who have been least willing to govern, Pericles and Thaisa, will control the best of the play’s societies; Marina, an inexperienced ruler, and Lysimachus, a reformed “john” who encouraged moral profligacy in Mytilene, will rule Tyre, a country they have never seen; Tharsus and Antioch’s governments are left undefined; Mytilene—the land of Pander, Boult, and Bawd—will be left without a ruler; and Ephesus will, apparently, continue to encourage the magic of Cerimon and the isolation possible within Diana’s temple. That all of these locations are part of an ambiguously imagined Asia Minor which resonates with Turkish and “reprobate” cultures as well as with Christian and classical traditions makes the political resolution of Pericles less reassuring and idyllic than much criticism of the play suggests.26

Stuart M. Kurland looks closer to home. Pericles’ “obliviousness” and “remoteness and general passivity” are contrasted with the “energetic conduct of the daughter who will inherit his authority,” and he argues that

These political aspects of Pericles … are best appreciated in the context of early Jacobean politics, notably the problems associated with King James I’s disinclination to stay in London to dispatch government business—that is, to govern and to be seen as governing.27

We must always be wary of attempts to map Shakespeare’s life onto his work. He was the least autobiographical of great writers. But even he must sometimes have drawn upon his own experience. Consider his stage doctors. In his earlier works there are just two of them, both comical—Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor—whereas in the plays written after the arrival in Stratford-upon-Avon around the year 1600 of Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare’s future son-in-law, there are several dignified and sympathetically portrayed medical men: the physician who has to deal with that difficult patient Lady Macbeth, the doctor who revives the exhausted King Lear in the Quarto version of that play, Dr. Cornelius in Cymbeline (who tricks the wicked stepmother, giving her a sleeping draught rather than the poison she desires). And, most suggestively, there is Cerimon in Pericles, a play about father and daughter, death and rebirth—a play written in the wake of the death of Shakespeare’s brother Edmund and the marriage of his daughter Susanna to Dr. Hall.

Pericles was probably completed during the final months of Susanna’s pregnancy or the early weeks of the life of Shakespeare’s first grandchild, Elizabeth.