Pericles, Prince of Tyre

• 1. Introduction

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  Pericles, Prince of Tyre arrived in print in 1609 as a quarto edition and was reprinted five times before 1635, making it one of the most popular plays of Shakespeare's era. Yet it was left out of the First Folio in 1623, the great collected edition that defined the Shakespearean canon. It would not join the official body of Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio of 1664. How does a play so beloved in its own time end up exiled from the very collection that would define its author's legacy? And who actually wrote it? The first question that haunts Pericles, Prince of Tyre is also the most basic one: whose play is it?

• 2. A Play in Two Hands

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  Modern editors who have studied Pericles closely have arrived at a striking conclusion: the play divides almost exactly in half by authorship. Shakespeare appears to have written roughly 827 lines, the portion that begins after scene 9 and follows the central stories of Pericles and his daughter Marina. The first two acts, some 835 lines covering Pericles' many voyages, point toward a different writer entirely. That collaborator is widely believed to be George Wilkins, a man of unusual range who worked as a victualler, a panderer, a dramatist, and a pamphleteer. Wilkins published his own prose version of the story, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, which itself drew from Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures. The Oxford and Arden editions of the play accept Wilkins as Shakespeare's collaborator, pointing to stylistic links found nowhere else in Shakespeare's work. The Cambridge editors dissent, arguing the whole play belongs to Shakespeare and that its oddities reflect a deliberately old-fashioned style. Yet those editors notably avoid engaging with the stylistic parallels to Wilkins that other scholars have documented. Harold Bloom, weighing in from a different angle, suggested that Shakespeare may have compensated for skipping the first two acts by making his three remaining acts the most radical theatrical experiment he had attempted since the mature Hamlet of 1600-1601.

• 3. Where the Story Comes From

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  John Gower, the fourteenth-century English poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, provided the backbone of the play through his Confessio Amantis, written in 1393, which tells the ancient story of Apollonius of Tyre. A second source was Lawrence Twine's prose retelling, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, dating from around 1576 and reprinted in 1607. Gower himself appears as a character in the play, delivering the choral prologues that introduce each act, and the choruses he speaks drew on two works from 1607: Barnabe Barnes's The Diuils Charter and The Trauailes of the Three English Brothers by John Day, William Rowley, and Wilkins. That Wilkins co-wrote one of the choral influences while also being the likely author of the play's first two acts makes his fingerprints on the work unusually layered. His prose novel, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, published in 1608, appears to be a novelization of the play rather than a source for it. Wilkins himself mentions the play in the argument to his novel, and scholars read that as confirmation that the prose work came after the stage version. Wilkins and Shakespeare were also connected outside of literature: both served as witnesses in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit of 1612.

• 4. A Corrupted Text

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  The only version of Pericles that survives from the period is the 1609 quarto, and scholars have long judged it to be in terrible shape. The text is often clumsily written and at points incomprehensible, leading to the widely held theory that it was a pirated reconstruction assembled from memory by someone who had seen the play performed. The parallel to the 1603 bad quarto of Hamlet is frequently drawn. The quarto was printed twice in 1609 by the stationer Henry Gosson, then reprinted in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. In 1619, William Jaggard included Pericles in what became known as his False Folio. The 1986 Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works took a bold editorial step, producing a reconstructed text that borrowed passages from Wilkins's novel on the theory that those passages preserved dialogue more accurately than the quarto itself did. The question of how to edit a play with such a broken textual history has divided scholars sharply, but the argument for collaboration was recognized as early as 1709, when Nicholas Rowe wrote that there was good reason to believe the greatest part of the play was not written by Shakespeare, though some part certainly was, particularly the last act. The specific proposal that Wilkins was the co-author entered scholarly debate in 1868 and gained significant traction through detailed studies by H. Dugdale Sykes in 1919, Jonathan Hope in 1994, and MacDonald P. Jackson in 1993 and 2003.

• 5. The Story of Pericles

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  Antiochus, king of Antioch, has set a murderous riddle: answer correctly and win his daughter's hand, but a correct answer reveals that Antiochus is engaged in an incestuous relationship with her, and that revelation means death as surely as answering wrong. Pericles sees through the riddle instantly but asks Antiochus for forty days to deliberate. Antiochus grants the time and then sends an assassin after him. Pericles flees, leaves his trusted counsellor Helicanus as regent of Tyre, and sails to Tarsus, a city in the grip of famine. He gives the governor Cleon and his wife Dionyza enough grain from his ship to end the famine, then continues on. A shipwreck deposits him on the shores of Pentapolis, where fishermen pull his rusted suit of armour from the sea. He enters a tournament held by King Simonides and wins both the contest and the hand of Simonides' daughter Thaisa. On the voyage back to Tyre, a storm strikes and Thaisa appears to die giving birth to their daughter Marina. The sailors demand her body be cast overboard; Pericles reluctantly agrees. Her casket washes ashore at Ephesus, where the physician Lord Cerimon revives her. Believing Pericles lost, Thaisa becomes a priestess in the temple of Diana. Marina, left in the care of Cleon and Dionyza, grows up to outshine their own daughter, and Dionyza plots her murder. Pirates intervene by kidnapping Marina and selling her to a brothel in Mytilene, where she preserves her virtue by persuading clients to seek a moral life instead, and eventually earns her freedom as a tutor to respectable families. Pericles, told Marina is dead, drifts at sea in grief until chance brings him to Mytilene, where the governor Lysimachus introduces the despondent prince to a gifted young woman, and the father and daughter recognize each other. The goddess Diana then appears in a dream directing Pericles to her temple in Ephesus, where he finds Thaisa. Cleon and Dionyza are killed by their own people, and Marina is given in marriage to Lysimachus.

• 6. Centuries of Critical Dispute

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  Ben Jonson set the tone for generations of critics when he mocked Pericles in print in 1629, calling it a mouldy tale, stale as the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish, scraps out of every dish thrown forth and raked into the common tub. Jonson was responding to the play's evident popularity with audiences, which clearly irritated him. After Jonson, critics found little to praise until well into the twentieth century. Edward Dowden, a nineteenth-century scholar, wrestled with the text and concluded that the play was singularly undramatic and entirely lacked unity of action; its episodic structure and the lewdness of Act Four troubled him because they resisted his idea of what Shakespeare should be. T. S. Eliot took a sharply different view, describing the recognition scene in Act Five, scene one, where Pericles reunites with Marina, as the finest recognition scene of all. Eliot called it a perfect example of the ultra-dramatic, action involving beings who are more than human, seen in a light more than that of day. The rehabilitation of the play in scholarly circles accelerated after John Arthos published a study in 1953 examining the play's use of romantic narrative. From F. D. Hoeniger's Arden edition of 1963 onward, textual editors responded to the play with enthusiasm even when they disagreed sharply on editorial method. In 2002, Professor Brian Vickers took the Cambridge editors to task for ignoring more than a century of collaborative-authorship scholarship, a confrontation that reflects how much is still at stake in the debate.

• 7. On Stage, Across Centuries

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  The Venetian ambassador Zorzi Giustinian and the French diplomat Antoine Lefèvre de la Boderie both saw a play titled Pericles during the years 1606-1608. The title page of the 1609 quarto states that the play was often acted at the Globe Theatre. The earliest performance documented with certainty took place in May 1619 at the King's great chamber at Whitehall; another followed at the Globe on the 10th of June 1631. When theatres reopened at the start of the Restoration in 1660, John Rhodes staged Pericles at the Cockpit Theatre, and it became the first Shakespearean revival of that era. Thomas Betterton made his stage debut in the title role, and Gary Taylor credits that performance with securing Shakespeare's play a place in the mid-seventeenth century theatrical repertoire. The play's pseudo-naive structure sat badly with Restoration neoclassical taste, and it vanished from the stage for nearly two centuries before Samuel Phelps revived it at Sadler's Wells Theatre in Clerkenwell in 1854. Victorian decorum prompted Phelps to mute the play's treatment of incest and prostitution and to cut Gower entirely, replacing him with invented scenes between unnamed gentlemen. Walter Nugent Monck brought it back in 1929 at his Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich, and after the war that production was revived at Stratford with Paul Scofield in the title role. Tony Richardson's 1958 production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford organized the play around a large ship that dominated the stage, with Loudon Sainthill's design unifying what directors often find intractable. Geraldine McEwan played Marina and Richard Johnson played Pericles; the production was later viewed as a model for coherent, thematically unified staging. Terry Hands's 1969 production at Stratford hung a replica of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man above a near-bare stage. Ian Richardson played the title role, and on the nights of the Apollo moon landing, Hands added a special acknowledgment of that event to Gower's lines. The BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation, first transmitted on the 8th of December 1984, starred Mike Gwilym as Pericles, Amanda Redman as Marina, and Juliet Stevenson as Thaisa, directed by David Jones. The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2024 run at Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Tamara Harvey with Alfred Enoch as Pericles, subsequently toured to Chicago Shakespeare Theater from the 20th of October to the 8th of December 2024.