Dusty:

I have not read Pericles for maybe fifty years or more, and I’m not sure I read it even then. I have read about it, vaguely remembered something about Marina, and knew that the play was conventionally grouped with the late romances, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, and Cymbeline. But I was not prepared for what I found. It didn’t sound like Shakespeare at all. My Pelican editor, Stephen Orgel, notes that the play was attributed to Shakespeare in his lifetime (in the quarto), though not included in the First Folio. He says that it is often thought that the first two acts were not written by Shakespeare. Several features even seem unlike the other late romances:

Gower as Chorus. He’s quite unlike the Chorus in Romeo and Juliet and in Henry V, first because he was a real poet, and the source for Shakespeare’s plot, and second because he is used to set the scene, introduce the main characters, and explain not only the incest but also the riddle test that previous suitors had failed.

I suppose Shakespeare wants to use the Chorus to get the story started, rather than to have a couple of minor characters come on stage and discuss what is about to happen. But it seems clumsy. So too is the exposition in 1.4, when Cleon “discovers our woes” to his wife, who presumably does not need to be told about them.

The incest is shocking, but it is introduced quite casually, described concisely as “evil” but then, surprisingly, said to have been carried on so long that it was “accounted no sin,” presumably by the participants anyway; the impaled heads on the walls of the palace are even more gory than the head of Macbeth, brought on stage at the end of Macbeth.

The test in the first scene doesn’t seem at all like the tests in the Merchant of Venice and in Lear. The stakes are much higher, and the one who sets the test doesn’t want anybody to win, going so far as to advise the contestants not to risk trying to answer the riddle.

It’s not yet clear, in the first act, what the “plot” of the play is going to be. We know that Antiochus is trying to murder Pericles, who has quickly worked out his secret, and I suppose we assume that we will hear more about that. But as the act ends Pericles, having escaped from death in Antioch, now abandons Tyre (presumably he will return later in triumph) and, upon the advice of his counselor, will “travel for a while,” and  heads off for Tarsus. He will presumably have further “adventures” — a term he uses to describe his attempt to win Antiochus’s daughter. This doesn’t sound like a Shakespearean plot.

I found the longer speeches in the first act very difficult to follow, and had to read them two or three times to figure out what they were saying. It was not because the language was particularly complex. The speeches didn’t seem focused on whatever point the speaker was trying to make.

The verse seemed unlike the verse in Shakespeare. Many of the lines are end stopped. Many of them are rhymed (and not in Shakespeare’s manner, i.e., to end a scene). And many of the rhymes are pretty feeble: relieve them/grieve for them, and languish/punish (1.2). Sometimes the rhyme is on the same word: being known/be known.

There are other puzzles in the first act:

It’s hard to tell how seriously we are to take what we’re told. On the one hand it’s incest and death, but on the other it’s an “old song” that sounds like a fairy tale. Should the scene at the court of Antiochus be made to look creepy, decadent, and corrupt?

What attracts Pericles to Tarsus in 1.4, and why has his trip turned into a charitable mission (bringing food to the hungry)? For that matter, why has prosperous Tarsus fallen into such “misery”?

If Antiochus and his daughter have been carrying on an incestuous relationship for a long time, why don’t the members of the court know all about it? And if they do, why hasn’t word reached the ears of the suitors, and put them off from seeking damaged goods? (Did incest have a different valence for Shakespeare’s audience?)

How does the assassin happen to have a “pistol” in ancient Syria?

If you’ve taught this play, or written about it, maybe you can make more sense of it than I can. Maybe the play becomes more “Shakespearean” later.

Michael:

Your account of Act I lays out the large number of problems with the opening of the play. I have taught it in a seminar on the romances, but not for a long time and not with much recollection of various hypotheses of its generation. But I do remember that it becomes quite remarkable, especially at the end, and does seem related to the undoubtedly successful romances. The striking thing is that it was apparently Shakespeare’s most popular play, having been performed right up to the closing of the theaters in 1642 and reprinted multiple times (five?). There was a performance at the MLA in San Francisco maybe twenty years ago, which I remember having seen, but not much about it specifically; it might have been just a part of the play.

In any case I think the problems you point out with the first act are entirely right. The whole business with the incest and the possible marriage is odd and un-Shakespearean. And it’s dispensed with in 2.4.1-15. And the long speeches are difficult and most of the time don’t sound much like Sh. The whole import seems to be to set Pericles in motion, to motivate his travels. The incest must have come from a source, but it doesn’t seem to matter much, except the gods punish it rather decisively. That linguistic figure that dispenses with the relative pronoun sounds like dialect and not characteristically Shakespearean. This looks like something Shakespeare has taken over, but why and to what degree?

Gower is certainly an atypical chorus, but I think he’s made purposely archaic to give the play an “old song” feel. Sometimes he sounds Shakespearean, sometimes less so, but he’s generally quite clear in exposition. I think his tetrameters eventually give way to pentameters.

Michael:

Then at Act 2.1, things suddenly sound Shakespearean. Pericles describes the storm that has tossed him on the shore, and the three fishermen look like his intelligent rustics. How do fish live in the sea? “Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.” Clearly were back in the Shakespearean groove. And Pericles’ aside at line 51ff sounds a bit like the gardener in Richard II. And then they find the rusty armor that sets the plot going again, and in a different direction. It feels to me like a different play.

The parade of the knights with their mottos looks a bit like the parade of the Trojan worthies in Troilus, and it characterizes Pericles as “the mean knight” with his rusty armor.

Simonides’ play with Pericles over his daughter, pretending to be angry and that he has bewitched her, seems a bit like Prospero with Miranda and Ferdinand, and we learn that Thaisa is actually the wooer in her letter. Are we to take this scene as the antithesis of the Antiochus episode, something amusing, somewhat delicate, and finally conclusive. Maybe not all of Act 2 is Shakespeare, but enough is to give much relief from the oddness of Act 1.

Dusty:

Very strange that Pericles was the most popular Shakespeare play. Shouldn’t that fact alter our sense of what “Jacobean drama” was?

I take your point that there is something sort of “Shakespearean” about the fishermen in 2.1, but on the whole I find this act not any more Shakespearean than Act 1. Gower is both an expositor — explaining what we have seen and what we are going to see — but he also serves to tell us what to think about Pericles, that he is a “good man . . . awful in word and deed.” We get a dumbshow — which we get elsewhere in Shakespeare — though I’m not sure why Gower couldn’t have continued his account, and explained the letter in a few lines. Maybe Shakespeare or his collaborator thought that Gower’s speech shouldn’t go on too long without interruption. It’s as if he moves off to one side and says that we can get the “tidings” first hand.

The “plot” continues to be episodic. Pericles moves on from Tarsus, and is shipwrecked. In  2.1 he washes ashore at Pentapolis — would an audience think about Odysseus washing ashore? Once landed, he wants to know who is king, and immediately heads off, without questioning, to take part in the tourney to win the hand of the king’s daughter. Why? I guess because that’s what adventuring romance heroes do. It’s very convenient, if a little implausible, that his rusty suit of armor is fished out of the sea by the fishermen. Why did it not sink immediately? So he’s all suited up and ready for competitive combat. The play skips over the combat itself, and 2.3 takes up the story after Pericles’  victory. The series of asides by several characters seemed so artificial as to make me think the play had shifted into some other even less naturalistic mode. The procession of the six knights would be good stage spectacle, but seems pretty flat on the page, as does the dance of knights. I was a little confused here: were the knights going to get ready for more jousting?

In 2.4 the royal incest at Antioch is all of a sudden judged to be a “heinous capital offense,” and both the king and his daughter are reported dispatched by a “fire from heaven.” Would Shakespeare have casually introduced something as shocking as incest and just as casually banished it from the play? The good Helicanus agrees to be king until Pericles returns. If this were a tragedy, that’s the sort of thing that leads to trouble.

2.5 confused me further. Hasn’t Pericles already “won”? Why does the king’s daughter call for a 12-month delay in the wedding? Because she wanted to send the other knights away?  I thought Simonides’ challenge to Pericles very strange. He makes clear at line 19 that he likes well his daughter’s choice of Pericles, but then proceeds to declare in public that Pericles is a “villain” and a “traitor.” Maybe this is a bit like Prospero testing Ferdinand, but this seems to be more of a challenge. It’s the sort of thing that, in a tragedy, leads to bloodshed now or later.

Dusty:

Act 3 again begins with a long speech from Gower, speeding over time (as in Winter’s Tale) to the conception (“molding”) of a child to Pericles and Thaisa. In comes news from Tyre, and Pericles must set sail for home, taking with him Thaisa, near her confinement, into the midst of a storm. To my ear, the play, beginning with 3.1 suddenly “sounds Shakespearean.” Because it is a storm at sea, it reminds us of The Tempest, but it also recalls Lear on the heath. The plot starts to make sense: there is a reason for Pericles to sail to Tyre. The verse is complex, but less end-stopped, without rhyme, and more focused. Thaisa apparently dies in childbirth, and, because the sailors are superstitious, her body is carefully thrown overboard in a special chest. (The sudden introduction of the a necessary item, the caulked chest, seems more plausible than the sudden introduction of a previous necessary item, the rusty armor in Act 2.) Pericles is persuaded to sail to nearby Tarsus instead of Tyre.

3.2 introduces Cerimon in Ephesus, skilled in physic and herbs, for the purpose of restoring the reportedly-dead Thaisa to life. Think Winter’s Tale. I guess the chest was airtight. In 3.3, after a time lapse, Pericles has been at Tarsus for 12 months, where he is much revered for having brought food to the starving people back in Act 1. But he needs to return to his home in Tyre, and leaves baby Marina, with her nurse, in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Cleon. Why not take the baby with him? (We already know that he did  not hesitate to take his pregnant wife on his previous voyage. Is he perhaps worried that me might encounter another deadly storm?) And 3.4 disposes of Thaisa, making sure she is safely out of the way as a vestal. But why is she sure she will never see Pericles again? In any case, the audience anticipates that Thaisa in Ephesus, Marina in Tarsus, and Pericles in Tyre will all be miraculously reunited before the play is done.

Michael:

Prompted by the your skepticism about Act 2, I did some reading about the textual situation of Pericles. It seems that textual scholars see the play as posing insuperable textual problems. Shakespeare apparently collaborated with George Wilkins on the play, Wilkins writing most of the first nine scenes (which would include the traditional Act 2), and Shakespeare scenes 10 to 22 (Acts 3 to 5). But then Wilkins did a prose version of the story of the play around 1608 entitled The Painful Adventures of Pericles, which refers to the play but isn’t an exact rendering of it. There’s a good deal more complication about the textual situation, but your skepticism about Shakespearean involvement in Act 2 seems vindicated. The Norton Shakespeare gives the text without act divisions, following the Oxford text and incorporating readings, including whole lines and passages from Painful Adventures. The text of the first quarto is thought to be a “reported text,” that is, a text drawn from memories of some of the actors. The Oxford editors did an original spelling edition from Q1, but then in the modern-spelling version incorporated readings of apparently corrupt passages from the Painful Adventures, which becomes the Norton text.

All that just skates over the surface, but indicates that Wilkins was most responsible for the first two acts, including those canny fishermen and the rusty armor. And what you say about the beginning of Act 3 seems right; this is where the Shakespearean part comes in. As for Act 2, I recant.

I understood that King Simonides’ daughter’s call for a twelfth-month delay was a ruse to clear the court, and that her letter confesses her desire to wed Pericles. And yes, I think Simonides’ apparent challenge to Pericles was just his ruse to make the winning of his daughter a bit less straightforward, like Prospero’s testing. It’s a bit awkward, but it provides just a bit of tension before his somewhat comic capitulation.

This storm does remind us of those other Shakespearean storms, this time with a baby — and an apparently dead mother and queen. We have to accept Renaissance physiology to allow for Thaisa’s survival in the airtight chest after apparent death in childbirth. But with Pericles’ call for ink and paper, we suspect we haven’t heard the last of her. And yes, we’re anticipating WT in this. The storm in scene 11 (of Norton, 3.2 in earlier texts) must be impressive, maybe more wild than the earlier one (at 1.5), with thunder in the highest part of the theater and squibs for lightening. Then the quiet scene with Cerimon’s revival and the same kind of music that accompanied Paulina’s revealing of the seeming statue.

Michael:

At scene 15 (Act 4 begins) Gower performs the office of Time and advances the narrative into Dionyza’s plot to kill Marina. Leonine, the assassin, seems almost to be talked out of Marina’s murder, perhaps forecasting her eloquence in the brothel, but the pirates rescue her. It’s not clear what the revealed tomb, and later concealed, signify. It’s associated with the nurse, Lychorida, But it’s in the Norton, not in the traditional text.

4.2, scene 16, is the first of the brothel scenes and may suggest familiarity with the London underworld. And in the following scene, Dionyza’s crime is discovered.

Gower’s next appearance advances the interesting admission that the play is using one language for the different regions portrayed. Then another dumb show portrays Pericles’ mourning the loss, as he thinks, of Marina. We learn of his vow never to cut his hair or wash his face. This must be the nadir of Pericles’ fortunes. Now the tempest he endures is said to be internal.

In the brothel scene that follows, the Norton text incorporates text from Painful Adventures that the textual editors suggest were part of the original play, but censored out in favor of what’s in Q1, including a 22-line speech by Marina. It does represent a longer argument in favor of her objection to what Lysimachus is asking and makes more plausible her persuasion. In any case, he is persuaded, and the whole endeavor of the brothel is threatened. Finally, as Boult proposes to rape her, she enlists him in her favor and proposes to create a school in place of the brothel.

Back to you for Act 5, or the final three scenes.

Dusty:

Your reading about the textual problems overlaps considerably with an account by Stephen Orgel in the 2002 Complete Pelican that I am using. As Act 4 begins,  Gower, our reliable guide, again speeds over events. Marina, we later find out, was 14 when she was kidnapped. Why has Pericles not come to visit her in all that time? The murder scene– when Leonine and Marina go for a walk — seems pretty flat on the page. Marina is quite a talker. She manages to say a lot to Leonine as he prepares to murder her. Maybe the scene works a lot better on the stage. I found it almost comic when the pirates rushed in to “save” Marina — only to carry her off to a worse fate.

The brothel scenes are pretty gamy. I am not surprised that censors stepped in, or that the actors worried that they would. Dionyza seems to be a cousin of Lady Macbeth, and taunts her husband the way that she did. Cleon resists, but when the moral accounting is done at the end of the play he is treated as “cruel” and just as bad as his wife.

We get more Gower in 4.4, filling in “gaps” in the story. Why has Pericles decided, at this moment, to visit Marina? Shakespeare chose to present in dumbshow the emotional scene when Pericles finds out his daughter is dead. Maybe that’s to speed things up, or else to reserve the emotional climax for the reunion scene later.

In the next two scenes, back in the brothel, Marina amazingly converts from vice to virtue first some regular patrons, then the dissolute governor of the province, and finally the wicked Boult, by the force of her eloquence and beauty. Disbelief is suspended, not so willingly on the page but maybe on the stage.

Dusty:

In the opening to Act 5 Gower speaks, for the only time I think, in pentameter quatrains, as if Shakespeare is thinking about sonnet structure. In 5.1 it’s three months since 4.4. Marina is now called in to “heal” Pericles, though the immediate task is just to get him to speak. Time is compressed: a messenger is sent off stage to fetch her at line 47, and she comes in at line 59. (She must have been waiting in the tender, tied up to the ship.) This is the big scene we have been waiting for, when Marina reunites with her father. complete with a song and music. Shakespeare’s audience must have remembered  the reunion of Lear and Cordelia. Here he outdoes himself: they have been apart for 14 years. It turns out that this is not the climax of the play: there’s more. We get the descent of Diana, so for a few moments the play has turned into a masque, as at the end of The Tempest.

But we’re not done yet, and the play builds further. Again Gower is summoned, this time for tetrameters. And we end at the Temple of Ephesus, where we get yet another reunion, actually a double or triple reunion, as Pericles and Marina are reunited with Thaisa.

Gower provides the epilogue, separating the sheep and the goats, celebrating the virtuous (Pericles, but also Helicanus and Cerimon) and reporting the punishment of the wicked (Antiochus and his daughter, Cleon and his wife). You would think that Marina should be singled out, given how she  held on to her virtue even in the midst of a brothel. But she doesn’t even get named, and is only the third part of “Pericles, his queen, and daughter.”

I thought it odd that the epilogue ends with a feminine rhyme on the word “ending.”

On the whole, I find the play, even the fourth and fifth acts, with Marina’s shining virtue and the gratifying reunions, less satisfying and moving than The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

Your thoughts on Act 5?

Michael:

As far as the Greek romances go, pirates seem almost essential; weren’t they mentioned in “Shakespeare in Love” too? But they are just a useful gimmick here. But the worse fate allows Marina to purge the brothel and encounter Lysimachus. I do like the idea that Marina was standing by in the tender.

The recognition scene between Pericles and Marina seems to gain effect by its slow unfolding and the gradual realization of Pericles.

The descent of Diana must be a simulated dream of Pericles, who like Lear when Cordelia finds him, is now dressed in fresh garments but still with long hair and overgrown nails. The audience must hear the celestial music, though on stage no one but Pericles hears. This masque-like scene, which is also like the descent of Jupiter in Cymbeline, is another of those coups de theatre; Diana must come down, and go back up, from the theatrical “heavens” by some sort of machinery. Lear, though not in a dream, had been awakened from sleep by Cordelia, also with music.

I suppose they must get to Ephesus by way of Kusadasi, but no lingering there. The second recognition scene, with Thaisa is much quicker and a contrast with the earlier one. Thaisa simply hears Pericles’ story and faints. An audience must worry that she dies, as Pericles says, until she is quickly revived. It is strange that Marina isn’t named in Gower’s sorting of things. But in the scene with Thaisa, she embraces, and maybe clings to Thaisa.

I agree that the play is not up to, and not close to, WT and Tempest. But I think the sheer theatricality must account for its Jacobean and Caroline popularity. The storms, the bundling up of Thaisa in the chest, the image of Pericles with long hair and filthy clothes, the music (quite a lot of music), the descent of Diana, the recognition scenes, all must have been spectacular. Which is also suggested by the fact that Ben Jonson really disliked it. I wonder if Shakespeare in a sense “discovered” the romance form in taking over, or collaborating in, the play. Interesting that Lear seems on its way to being a romance — and then becomes that in the later alterations.

Dusty:

I had not thought of the descent of Diana being visible only to Pericles.

Do you suppose Jonson didn’t like the play because Shakespeare was intruding on what would later become Jonsonian turf?

Michael:

I think Jonson simply didn’t like plays that weren’t anchored in solid reality, either contemporary (most of his plays) or antiquity (Sejanus), and he indicates the romances especially among his dislikes. In the induction to Bartholomew Fair the “book-holder” or scrivener reprehends those who would bring in a “servant monster” (Caliban?) or a “nest of antics” and says the playwright is “loth to make nature afraid like those who beget tales, tempests, and suchlike drolleries.” And he didn’t like dances (“mixing his head with other mens’ heels”). I think it’s in his “Ode to himself” where he bids farewell to the stage that he calls Pericles a “moldy tale”; hard to argue with that of course. But the most spectacular sorts of things on stage seem to evoke Ben’s irritation.

It is kind or ironic that he later becomes a masque composer, but I suppose those were tied to contemporary political realities and used lots of learned mythology. And he quarrels with Inigo Jones, as I recall, over the visual competition.

Poor Ben — in any other world he would have been the major playwright.