Pericles (Vol. 51) | R. S. White (essay date 1985)
R. S. White (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Romances: Pericles," in 'Let Wonder Seem Familiar': Endings in Shakespeare's Romance Vision, Humanities Press, 1985, pp. 115-130.
[In the following excerpt, White defends Pericles as the most perfect example of the romance genre among Shakespeare's plays.]
Pericles
Pericles is the one and only pure romance in the Shakespearean canon, and viewed as such it has a strange and moving beauty of its own. The courtly wit of the early comedies is replaced by a hushed honesty of poetic statement, and a sense of reverent awe, as a man finds himself at the mercy of the elements and the gods. As the play moves through its recurrent rhythms of turbulence and stillness, grief and joy, the central figure can adopt only humble patience as his basic point of view, fully aware that he is involved in living a life which lies at the discretion of destiny:
We...
[The entire page is 6170 words long]
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