At the point where Shakespeare took over the writing from George Wilkins, there is a dumb show in which Thaisa is shown pregnant. A baby girl is then born in a storm. The mother dies in childbirth, only to be revived in the following scene by the medical arts of the Lord Cerimon. He voices a doctor’s credo:

I hold it ever

Virtue and cunning were endowments greater

Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs

May the two latter darken and expend,

But immortality attends the former,

Making a man a god. ’Tis known, I ever

Have studied physic, through which secret art,

By turning o’er authorities, I have,

Together with my practice, made familiar

To me and to my aid the blest infusions

That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones,

And I can speak of the disturbances

That nature works and of her cures, which doth give me

A more content in course of true delight

Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,

Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags

To please the fool and death.

Given that John Hall had a formidable library of medical “authorities” as well as a thriving practice and an encyclopedic knowledge of herbal cures (“the blest infusions / That dwells in vegetives”), it seems at the very least felicitous that Shakespeare wrote these lines in this context at this time in his life.

This is not to say that Cerimon is Hall, that the pregnancy of Thaisa is that of Susanna, or that Marina is Elizabeth Shakespeare. But family circumstances, and in particular the stabilizing figure of Hall, could not have been far from Shakespeare’s mind. At a deeper level, beyond the biographical, the speech establishes an opposition between the knowledge of nature on the one hand, and the pursuit of wealth and “tottering honour” on the other. For Shakespeare, London was the place associated with honor, status, wealth, and recognition at court. But it was also the place of plague and mass death. And of the commercialization of sex: the link between the theater industry and the sex trade was symbiotic. Not only did prostitutes work the playhouses for trade: George Wilkins, co-writer of Pericles, went on to a second career as proprietor of a string of brothels. Intriguingly, it was Shakespeare rather than Wilkins who wrote the play’s brothel scene, which simultaneously offers a quasi-magical act of grace and a highly realistic glimpse into the language and attitudes of the early modern sex trade.

Stratford-upon-Avon, in contrast to London, was associated with stability, community, garden, field, and health. Whether or not Shakespeare ever did take the mercury-bath cure for syphilis, as his final two sonnets strongly imply, he regularly took the nature cure by returning to his hometown. Like the Lord Cerimon, Master Shakespeare speaks of the disturbances that nature works and of her cures.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Pericles was not included in the Folio but appeared in a poor Quarto text in 1609—reprinted again the same year and in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635—full of errors and incomprehensible passages, and far more badly printed than anything in the Folio. The fact, however, that the job of printing the First Quarto was divided between two printing shops seems strongly to suggest that the fault lay with the underlying manuscript rather than with the shoddiness of the printers’ work. It is therefore largely assumed that the text of the First Quarto Pericles is a “memorial reconstruction”: a pirated text put together from memory by actors or audience members or other nonauthorial agents. Shakespeare’s collaborator on the play, George Wilkins, wrote a novella entitled The Painful Adventures of Pericles, which some editors have used to flesh out some of the Quarto’s more apparently incomplete passages, a practice not followed here due to the conjectural nature of the enterprise.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “PERICLES, Prince of Tyre”).

Locations Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty.