SOURCE: Cutts, John P. “Pericles' ‘Downright Violence.’” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1969): 275-93.

[In the following essay, Cutts argues that the outer disharmony Pericles encounters reflects the inner disharmony of his own character.]

F. D. Hoeniger, in the introduction to his edition¹ of Pericles, asserts that G. Wilson Knight² is wrong in his argument that Pericles is somehow infected by the evil of Antiochus' daughter whom he tried to woo, and that Kenneth Muir's³ suggestion that Thaisa upon suddenly marrying Pericles broke a vow to Diana is equally misleading, and that to seek for a moral cause of Pericles' troubles is to assume the role of Job's comforters. On the contrary I think that to take Hoeniger's own position that Pericles is the plaything of Fortune and the gods, that he is “an impeccably good man, man without defect,” is to make of Pericles an unnecessary Job. From the totality of the play's structure one must be very uncomfortable with Pericles as a Job as I hope to be able to show by modifying, elaborating upon and adding to both Wilson Knight's and Muir's arguments.

The play's opening, couched in medieval terminology, would surely have us consider “man's infirmities” (I.ch.3) to teach “frail mortality to know itself” (I.i.43) as a restorative. Any estimate of the play's total impact will certainly have to allow for the striking effect of the reincarnation of the medieval poet, but he is surely there not simply as a makeshift device for holding the play's sprawling action together, nor is he explainable by the colorful garb he wears suggestive of the quaintness of an archaic world. Gower's presence makes certain that the audience be made aware of mortality and man's infirmities. One would be hard pressed to find an exemplum in medieval drama that treated of its main figure as an “impeccably good man, a man without defect.”⁴

It is too easy to suggest that Pericles accidentally finds himself imbroiled in the discovery of Antiochus' incest, that he was innocent of any thought of wrongdoing when he approached Antiochus' court in the first place. It was hardly naïveté which led him to believe that he would be successful where many had failed before, that he would solve the riddle, Oedipus-like, win the daughter and become “son to great Antiochus” (I.i.27). He is in such a hurry⁵ to interrupt Antiochus, who is about to unfold all the dangers and difficulties, that when Antiochus merely addresses him as “Prince Pericles” Pericles rushes in with “That would be son to great Antiochus.” But even if we were to allow him genuine innocence before he reaches Antiochus' court there can surely be no doubt of his impetuousness, his rashness, and his infatuation with moral danger once he is there. All the visible signs around him cannot be mistaken for anything but what they are, powerful indications of death on an insidious scale. Thinking “death no hazard in this enterprise” (I.i.5) he is little removed from Hamlet's “I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape / And bid me hold my peace” because his “fate cries out,” or from Faustus' “Ile conjure though I die therefore” or from Hotspur's “Albeit I make a hazard of my head” in his drunk-with-choler mood. “Thus ready for the way of life or death” (I.i.55) Pericles awaits the “sharpest blow” (I.i.56). Antiochus, like Mephistopheles with Faustus, does not equivocate on the mortal dangers inherent in Pericles' presumption. He points out the skulls of “sometimes famous princes” (I.i.35) which advise Pericles to desist “for going on death's net, whom none resist” (I.i.41). Pericles is in a House of Death and cannot but be sensitive of this fact. It is instructive, I think, to see how at the end of the play, where there are so many cross-references to Antiochus' court, Lysimachus will try to excuse his presence in a brothel house by claiming that he had not brought “[t]hither a corrupted mind” (IV.vi.103), but he protests too much his innocence for us to be convinced; “For me, be you thoughten / That I came with no ill intent: for to me / The very doors and windows savour vilely” (IV.vi.108-110). The same criterion he used in judging Marina—“Why, the house you dwell in proclaims you to be a creature of sale” (IV.vi. 76-77)—must surely be exercised against himself. The house he has stepped into proclaims him to be a creature buying, and the Bawd, Pander and Boult evince no surprise at his seeking such a commodity.

Pericles' own terminology in the House of Death gives him away. To greet Antiochus' daughter, presented by the father as fit for “the embracements even of Jove himself” (I.i.8), as

See, where she comes apparell'd like the spring
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king
Of every virtue gives renown to men!

(I.i.13-15)

is to mistake the House of Death for the House of Life, and to invite consideration of Jove's immoral ventures rather than chaste behavior. Strangely enough Pericles himself sums up this confrontation with Antiochus' daughter by presuming “To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree” (I.i.22), thereby putting the whole situation in the context of Eden's tree of life or tree of death. Nor is this merely random rhetoric, for Antiochus' very next words place Pericles' quest in the context of Hercules' twelfth labor:

Before thee stands this fair Hesperides,
With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touch'd:
For death-like dragons here affright thee hard.
Her face, like heaven, enticeth thee to view.

(I.i.28-31)

Jacobeans would hardly miss the Biblical implications of the fruit of that forbidden tree. Comes' Mythologiae (1567),⁶ in which the meaning of the golden apples is explained as symbols of wealth which is given to men almost as a touchstone by which to test their souls,⁷

quare praeclare dictum est a sapientibus diuitias tanquam lapidem indicem animi cuiusquam esse datas hominibus, quae viris bonis & prudentibus facultates essent

makes the message doubly clear. Pericles is entering into very great temptations. Like Guyon in Mammon's cave confronted with “a woman gorgeous gay, / And richly clad in robes of royaltye, / That neuer earthly Prince in such aray / His glory did enhaunce, and pompous pride display,”⁸ and tempted to taste of the golden apples of this Proserpina's garden and to sit in her silver stool, Pericles is tempted by the magnificence, the wealth, and the power of Antiochus' daughter, but, unlike Guyon, he commits himself and asks for the passport, staking his whole “riches” (I.i.53) on the issue of the die. His easy couplet

For death remember'd should be like a mirror
Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error

(I.i.46-47)

could well be interpreted as a good man's recognition that he is dust and to dust shall return. But the mirror rhetoric is picked up again only a few lines later, after the anticlimax of the riddle, and heaven's countless eyes viewing man's acts are bidden not to peep through the blanket of the dark, but to hide their fires, to cloud their sights perpetually, not just because the revelation of the riddle causes Pericles to consider “There's nothing serious in mortality” as a consequence of Antiochus' action, but much more significantly if ironically because the “Fair glass of light” (I.i.77), Antiochus' daughter, in which he saw mirrored forth his conquest of magnificence, wealth and power, has now been shattered. Instead of that glorious image of himself he is now forced to acknowledge that like Pandora he has opened “this glorious casket stor'd with ill” (I.i.78), the gift of all the gods to his way of thinking, and let loose in the world that which will work no peace, no rest, no comfort, until his sea voyage of life returns him a belief again in that innocence which his action in the court of Antiochus lost—his Marina, a symbol of his own personality (not just a symbol of the fruition of his marriage with Thaisa),⁹ and returns him a link again with human affairs, his purpose in life, his Thaisa—a symbol of his own personality, his link not just with his marriage partner but with his hold on life.

Surely when Pericles exclaims immediately after his mention of the casket that “[his] thoughts revolt; / For he's no man on whom perfections wait / That, knowing sin within, will touch the gate” (I.i.79-81), this can hardly refer only to his post-riddle revulsion against accepting Antiochus' daughter as a bride. It is true that Antiochus' anxious answer “touch not upon thy life” (I.i.88) interprets Pericles' response to the daughter in this light, but Antiochus must keep drawing attention to his own boldness, must have his deeds in the limelight. Like Aaron or much more subtly Iago, he must feel that he has been so clever in flouting all conventional morality. Getting away with it is not enough: he must have praise. This, I feel certain, is the deep significance of a riddle that is no riddle. As others have pointed out, there are far more potent examples throughout the play that deserve seriously to be considered as enigmatic conundrums. Pericles face to face with Marina at the end of the play describes her in terms that deliberately contrast with Antiochus' daughter:

Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.

(V.i.112-113)

His “no man on whom perfections wait / That, knowing sin within, will touch the gate” is very powerfully suggestive of his own motives in succumbing to the temptation in the first place. That he should in any way either before or after temptation think of himself as a man on whom perfections wait is open to criticism. The remarkable imagery he uses for finally describing Antiochus' daughter:

You are a fair viol, and your sense the strings
Who, finger'd to make man his lawful music,
Would draw heaven down and all the gods to hearken;
But being play'd upon before your time,
Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime

(I.i.82-86)

operates on more than one level. Of course it functions as an encomium of chastity, as Prospero similarly suggests in his talk with Ferdinand over Miranda—“but / If thou dost break her virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be administer'd, / No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall / To make this contract grow” (V.i.14-19). But much more significantly it represents, too, Pericles' own destruction of musical harmony. Everything from now on will be discord to varying degrees until the music of Marina makes it possible for him again to hear the music of the spheres, for him again to be tuned in to the normal thoroughfare of kingly responsibilities. The play abounds with musical references and terminology. Although I consider Hoeniger's claim “Though Shakespeare was fond of music, nowhere else did he use it as often and as widely except in the great play which Pericles so clearly anticipates, The Tempest” (p.lxxix) to be a little exaggerative especially when one considers Twelfth Night, yet his attempt to draw attention to the emphasis on music in Pericles is very sound. After mastering the riddle of Antiochus' court Pericles goes on to master the riddle of Simonides.

Pericles is described by Simonides as “music's master” (II.v.30) on the basis of his “sweet music this last night” (II.v.26), his “delightful pleasing harmony” (II.v.28). Hoeniger and others are led by Simonides' remarks to suggest that “Pericles should make a brief appearance on the stage with a musical instrument, no words spoken, somewhere between the end of this scene [i.e.,II.ii] and the opening of II.v.” This is being too literal, and adds quite unnecessarily to the “textual corruption” theory which editors have for so long been at pains to “prove.” Simonides immediately asks Pericles what he thinks of Thaisa and states that Pericles “must be her master” (II.v.38), and she his scholar. It seems clear to me that the musical entertainment of the previous evening which had so delighted Simonides' ears was the dance in which Pericles chose Thaisa as his partner at Simonides' request. Professor Long cleverly suggested as long ago as 1956¹⁰ that this second dance in contradistinction to the dance of the Knights “Even in [their] armours, as [they] are address'd” (II.iii.94) is a duet involving Pericles and Thaisa only, and this is, I believe, right. Hoeniger's objection that Long in making much of the absence of “Ladies” in the scene's opening stage direction in the 1609 Quarto fails to take into account that “such omission means little in a play where so many stage directions are either missing or incomplete”¹¹ is well taken, but the argument does not stop there. It may well be as Long suggests that Pericles, having demonstrated his skills in tilting and in the artful sword-dance, is now examined for his fitness in the art of love, the last part of his “threefold chivalric test,” despite Hoeniger's claim that there is little in the play to suggest such a test in stages. Structurally such a testing could well be paralleled with other testings Pericles undergoes. But I think that what is being appealed to is the distinction between antimasque and masque. The vanquished five knights dance in their armor; they are characterized by the “loud music” (II.iii.97) of the clashing of their armor, “too harsh for ladies' heads.” That Pericles may be included in this armor dance is conceivable, of course, though I think it very unlikely. In the first place he has always drawn attention to himself by being on one side, not of the group, and secondly, Simonides specifically calls for the knights' dance in an effort to awake Pericles from his melancholy, as if it were an entertainment for Pericles. Immediately after the knights' dance Simonides approaches Pericles separately to offer Thaisa as his dancing partner. It is of course, possible, as Hoeniger suggests, that this corresponds to the revels¹² part of the masque in which the “courtier-masquers, after the ‘Main,’ danced with chosen members of their audience,” though this would be awkward since it would be relegating Thaisa to the least elevated part of the masque. Much more likely is the probability that the vanquished knights are made by Simonides to dance as a foil to the main dance of Pericles and Thaisa, an antimasque to the main. By this procedure, antimasque to main masque. Pericles is afforded great dignity. It seems to me that Simonides is fixing this procedure himself, that it is part of his shoddy treatment of the knights. Since Pericles has been successful in the tourney, there is really no need to have to apologize to the disappointed knights by cooked up excuses “That for this twelvemonth she'll not undertake / A married life” (II.v.3-4), and that “One twelve moons more she'll wear Diana's livery: / This by the eye of Cynthia hath she vow'd, / And on her virgin honour will not break it” (II.v.10-12). Ironically Thaisa will wear Diana's livery for fourteen years! Simonides is inventing an excuse for ridding himself of the other knights, but making vows to the gods as his excuse is bound to bring such repercussions. Professor Muir has suggested that Thaisa's misfortunes are brought about by Diana, the play's presiding deity, who is incensed by Thaisa's breaking of her vow. This is not strictly true, as Hoeniger points out¹³ by comparing Apollo's role in The Winter's Tale, which is a clear case of an incensed god actively interfering in human affairs. The problem with Thaisa is best tackled from Thaisa's own motivation and from her father's. The court of Simonides has its own riddle. “[P]rinces and Knights come / from all parts of the world to joust and tourney” (II.i.107-108) for the love of the King's daughter, only to be told that she will wear Diana's livery. Thaisa and Simonides seize on Pericles: Antiochus' daughter apparently approved of Pericles:

Of all, ’say'd yet, may'st thou prove prosperous!
Of all, ’say'd yet, I wish thee happiness

(I.i.60-61)

and though it is possible to conclude that she has said this to every suitor before, it does not diminish its effectiveness on a Pericles who imagines himself different from all the other applicants. If we concentrate on the dramatic structure of Antiochus' court and Simonides' court, likened as they are by Pericles joining in the lists and tourneying for the princess, then I think it becomes obvious that they represent two sides of one coin. At Antiochus' court Pericles is the brash, dashing, impetuous, ambitious, proud knight: at Simonides' the melancholy, retired, subdued, “mean knight.” The “gentler gamester is the soonest / winner” (Henry V, III.vi.117-118).

Pericles can take no real credit for reading Antiochus' open book. His “blind mole—poor worm” (I.i.101,103) description of himself hardly fits the facts. He would like to hide behind his need to tell the world of Antiochus' incest, to warn others of oppressors, and to hide behind his fear for his own death at the hands of the tyrant, but the mole's activity is the result largely of ambition and pride, as is clearly evidenced by Shakespeare's use of the molehill in 3 Henry VI where both Richard Plantagenet and Henry VI find themselves on molehills largely of their own making, Richard actively tunneling in the dark and casting “copp'd hills towards heaven” (Per.I.i.102), daring the force of the Lord's anointed, and Henry VI much more passively but no less inexcusably allowing Margaret and Suffolk to undermine England's power at home and abroad. Pericles' ambition to become “son to great Antiochus” and to solve the world's riddle has “cast / Copp'd hills towards heaven” and he will suffer for it by a kind of spiritual death. Antiochus, in toying with him, allowing him “[f]orty days” (I.i.117) longer, emphasizes his wilderness existence. Henceforth Pericles will “shun the danger” (I.i.143) of Antiochus, will flee from the symbol of his own destruction of peace of mind. Not an hour can “breed [him] quiet” (I.ii.6). His subjects for whom he professes kingly care sense his mental anxiety—“keep your mind, till you return to us, / Peaceful and comfortable” (I.ii.36-37), and, though they are sharply rebuked by Helicanus for “flattery” because “reproof, obedient and in order, / Fits kings, as they are men, for they may err” (I.ii.43-44), Helicanus himself “knows” (“but thou know'st this” [I.ii.78]), without being told, what Pericles has gone through at Antiochus' court as Pericles well realizes, because guilt is written all over his face.

Pericles tries to turn his anger against Helicanus' boldness in speaking disrespectfully about a king, but the anger Helicanus sees in Pericles' looks does not derive from Helicanus' breach of feudal etiquette. Pericles has “ground the axe [him]self” (I.ii.58) as much as Helicanus has, but the nearest he comes to recognizing this is to suggest that Antiochus will make pretence of wrong that Pericles has done him and all must feel war's blow “for mine if I may call offence” (I.ii.92; italics mine). His whole speech, I.ii.79-91, prior to this half-admission is full of fears and doubts acknowledging fears for his own safety but attributing doubts to Antiochus, when in point of fact it is he himself who is full of doubts too. When he delegates the responsibilities of government to Helicanus “whose wisdom's strength can bear it” (I.ii.119) and pleads that, although in exile himself and Helicanus at the head of the state, nevertheless “in our orbs we'll live so round and safe” (I.ii.122), it is not difficult to see in this a parallel with the musical imagery which opened the play on the appearance of Antiochus' daughter—“The senate-house of planets all did sit / To knit in her their best perfections.” Both are stressing harmony and order and both represent anything but that. There is a neat parallel, too, in the way Pericles' and Thaisa's dance is stopped by Simonides with “Unclasp, unclasp” (II.iii.106) and in the very next scene Helicanus is described as knit in harmony with the rest of the peers of Pericles' kingdom—“we'll clasp hands: / When peers thus knit, a kingdom ever stands” (II.iv. 57-58)—after he has successfully argued that they should wait a twelvemonth longer for Pericles and not force him to take their present wish to make him king and thus cause him to “leap into the seas, / Where's hourly trouble for a minute's ease” (II.iv.43-44).

For the rest of the play Pericles will be a figure of varying degrees of disorder and discord. Delegating his responsibilities to Helicanus is not conducive to good government, as the play very well points out when the lords of Tyre understandably pester Helicanus with their overflowing griefs and desire to know whether Pericles “lives to govern [them]” (II.iv.31).

Before Pericles once again enters the lists to tourney for a princess he is put through an instructive performance at Tharsus, which is complaining about man's infirmities and asserting that to relate tales of others' griefs hoping to learn thereby how to forget its own is like blowing at fire in hope to quench it:

For who digs hills because they do aspire
Throws down one mountain to cast up higher.

(I.iv.5-6)

This recalls the blind mole imagery of Pericles, and there are other correspondences. Tharsus, described as having towers which bore their “heads so high they kiss'd the clouds” (I.iv.24), “men and dames so jetted and adorn'd, / Like one another's glass to trim them by” (I.iv.26-27)—examples of pride similar to Pericles'—is a clear indication that a parallel with Tyre is intended. When Pericles enters Tharsus and plays savior to it by giving it “life whom hunger starv'd half dead” (I.iv.96), his cautionary remark that his gift horse should not be construed as another Trojan horse psychologically betrays him. He has opened up one casket of mischief at Antiochus' court and is trying to make amends now by opening up a casket of good. The citizens of Tharsus help to restore his former image for him by building “his statue to make him glorious” (II.ch.14), thinking that everything he utters is gospel truth. The whole process is not so much different from Bolingbroke's wish to keep his presence “like a robe pontificial” (III.ii.56) in his purpose to “lead out many to the Holy Land” to prevent people looking “[t]oo near unto [his] state” (2 Hen.IV., IV.v.212) or his son's preoccupation with religious scruples whereby he can condemn the last of the Mortimer faction, the French, and the remnants of the Eastcheap world in a hardly understood effort to show penitence, though before Agincourt's immense odds Hal does verbalize his realization that:

                                                                                                    More will I do;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth.
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.

(Henry V, IV.ii.308-311)

For Pericles the sojourn at Tharsus must necessarily be brief. The play's use of a Dumb Show to indicate Helicanus' warning to Pericles that “in Tharsus was not best / Longer for him to make his rest” aptly suggests that no matter how hard Pericles tries to give expression to his “savior” needs the real cause of his distress will not be dumb. Thoughts of what he did at Antiochus' court mount in virulence against him, tempests toss him, and symbolically strip him naked on the shores of life like Lear and Macbeth upon the blasted heath of their own making, but unlike them refusing to acknowledge openly any sinning but only being sinned against. His observation that “earthly man / Is but a substance that must yield” (II.i.2-3) to the elements and that he as “fits [his] nature” (II.i.4) does obey recalls Lear's similar submission to the elements and is another example of frail mortality being made to know itself. It looks like passiveness, putting up with bad fortune because that is all man can do, but the fishermen commenting on the situation draw attention to man's dual nature, half beast, half flesh, almost in terms of Lear's recognition:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's.

(IV.vi.126-129)

The fishermen keep such a “jangling of the bells” (II.i.41) in the belly of the rich miser of a whale that the causer of the oppression cannot possibly forget how he has behaved. Pericles is moved to comment how “[t]hese fishers tell the infirmities of men” (II.i.49), thus affording us a link with the play's opening chorus, and yet he does not realize that in praising them for exposing men's wrongdoings, for they “recollect / All that may men approve or men detect” (II.i.50-51), he is ironically commenting upon himself. He the huge whale in his “wat'ry empire” has devoured all the “poor fry before him” in his determination to prove the only survivor of the Antiochus riddle, and at one mouthful too, one rapid stroke. One may indeed search the calendar in vain for an honest man as the fisherman suggests, and the sea was certainly a drunken knave casting Pericles in their way when they are discussing what honesty is. Lear's “to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain” (III.i.11)—“the tempest in [Lear's] mind” (III.iv.12)—becomes in Pericles a “vast tennis-court” (II.i.60), in which the waters and the wind have made Pericles “the ball / For them to play upon” (II.i.60-61). The tennis metaphor aptly fits Pericles, who must suffer many more setbacks before he realizes there is something wrong with his tennis-playing. The tennis metaphor tends to rob its user of the dignity he is striving for. Henry V is no more successful in trying to turn the Dauphin's tennis-balls to gun-stones because he claims he will “play a set / Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard” (I.ii.262-263), when in point of fact as the play shows and as Henry VI goes on to emphasize with his revealing

I'll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind;
And would my father had left me no more!

(3 Henry VI, II.ii.49-50)

things “evil got had ever bad success” (3 Henry VI, II.ii.46). The end result of Henry V's tennis is to strike Bolingbroke's crown into the hazard.

Pericles reborn from the sea has not yet learned that he has “suffer'd like a girl” not like a man “[e]xtremity out of act” (V.i.137;139). His determination to enter the lists for good Simonides' daughter is basically to try to convince himself that his first entering of the lists in the play was equally as honest. The savior episode at Tharsus stilled his conscience for a while: the shipwreck episode makes him think of starting afresh all over again; but the episode with the fishermen ironically comments on the situation with “what a man cannot get, he may lawfully deal for with his wife's / soul” (II.i.113-114). The fishermen obviously refer first to a man's willingness to rent out his wife to another man in order to prosper in the world. When this is seen as a reflection on Pericles one is faced with the conclusion that Pericles is out to get something unlawfully at the expense of his “wife” to be. The last words of Pericles at this juncture, “This day I'll rise, or else add ill to ill” (II.i.165), surely emphasize the ironical overtones of what the fishermen have been saying. The rusty armor which they provide for him from the seas, this “garment” which they make for him “through the rough seams of / the water” (II.i.148-149), should remind him of his common humanity, his link with the ebb and flow of human suffering, but he turns it to his proud advantage in several ways. Identifying it as the armor of his father it becomes the symbol of his discovery of an identity, a father image, his evolution from a “wat'ry grave” (II.i.10) to a new life, which will soon find its expression in his attitude toward Simonides. Disastrously he treats it as an indication that his “shipwreck now's no ill, / Since [he has] here [his] father gave in his will” (II.i.132-133), and he clothes himself in steel despite “all the rapture of the sea” (II.i.154) and once more becomes in his own mind the knight-errant “looking for adventures in the world” (II.iii.83), mounting himself upon “a courser, whose delightful steps / Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread” (II.i.157-158), which powerfully recalls the concentration on outward magnificence contrasted with inward worth which the play emphasizes throughout. When Pericles has to admit that his equipment is yet “unprovided of a pair of / bases” (II.i.159-160) and has to accept a pair from one of the fishermen who brings him to the court himself this should be another reminder of his “human infirmity,” instead of which “What [he has] been [he has] forgot to know” (II.i.71), and he behaves like the rich miser driving the poor fry of the fishermen before him and at last devouring their use at a mouthful.

When next we see Pericles he is playing the “mean Knight,” the psychological opposite of his role in Antiochus' court. Now everything is humility. He counts on discerning people noticing how

Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan
The outward habit by the inward man

(II.ii.55-56)

and once again attempts to show up all the other “princes and Knights come / from all parts of the world to joust and tourney” (II.i.107-108) for a princess's love, but this time by excessive modesty, humility, and an appeal to inner worth. His reticence and non-participation make Simonides think that his “court / Ha[s] not a show might countervail [Pericles'] worth” (II.iii.55-56). He even goes so far as to tell Simonides that he “never aim'd so high to love [his] daughter” (II.v.47), which is almost in flat contradiction of his statement to the fishermen.

The tournament of Knights is a masterpiece of set organization. To consider this, however, as merely another piece of colorful pageantry as so often unfortunately is the prevailing approach,¹⁴ as for instance is the case with the tournament in Richard II, is to miss the careful symbolism of the whole. The five Knights in the city of Pentapolis obviously call for careful scrutiny, and for us as well as Thaisa “to entertain / The labour of each Knight in his device” (II.ii.14-15). Thaisa is described at this point as “Beauty's child, whom Nature gat / For men to see, and seeing wonder at” (II.ii.6-7), which is a clear enough parallel with the description of Antiochus' daughter:

Nature this dowry gave: to glad her presence,
The senat-house of planets all did sit
To knit in her their best perfections.

(I.i.10-12)

The general description of the princely Knights as a “model which heaven makes like to itself; / As jewels lose their glory if neglected, / So princes their renowns if not respected” (II.ii.11-13) takes on particular significance in Pericles' case, for in the immediately preceding scene Pericles, girding himself with a rusty armor, refers to his new-found equipment as a “jewel hold[ing] his building on [his] arm” (II.i.155). Pericles has certainly lost his glory by neglecting matters that truly concern princes as models of heaven. His own actions have set him on a course not unlike that of an unruly meteor that cannot be brought back into obedient orb until its motion is linked again with the harmony of the spheres.

To compare the dramatist's description of the five Knights and their devices with the various descriptions and mottoes in Wilkins' Painfull Adventures, and then to suggest strongly that “Q provides an imperfect report with some lines missing and others replaced”¹⁵ is surely to miss the point. Nor is the difference between the full description of the Knights in Wilkins and the less full description in the play to be explained away as “deliberate, in the interest of brevity.”¹⁶ The deliberate alteration of what passes for source material is usually attributable to dramatic necessity in a constructional sense. The alteration of Hotspur's age is effected not simply to telescope history and battles, but to afford a dramatic comparison and contrast between Hal and Hotspur of the same age and to make it possible for Bolingbroke to see in Hotspur an image of his own youthful ambition. I suggest that the play's alteration of the description of the Knights and their mottoes is deliberately calculated to take it out of categorical pointing, mere automatic listing, and to point the emphasis elsewhere. In one sense the description is obviously satirical. The elaborate outward show of the Knights contrasts immediately with the “rusty outside” of Pericles' outward show, but does it more accurately reflect the inward man of Pericles' inward show in five stages eventually summed up by the sixth? The technique is not all that different from the tedious brief show in A Midsummer-Night's Dream where the lovers are looking on at Pyramus and Thisbe without recognizing how much they are looking in a mirror.

The first, a Knight of Sparta with the black Ethiop reaching at the sun, and his motto of Lux tua vita mihi is interpreted by Simonides very simply as “He loves you well that holds his life of you” because Simonides considers it only from Thaisa's angle. More accurately surely this would mean Spartan courage of a stranger presuming to reach at the “Fair glass of light”—Pericles in Antiochus' court. If so, then “He loves you well that holds his life of you” ironically parallels Pericles' last summation of his love for Antiochus' daughter before the riddle is given to him: “But my unspotted fire of love to you, / Thus ready for the way of life or death, / I wait the sharpest blow” (I.i.54-56). The black Ethiop reaching for the sun figures the darkness and ignorance of the stranger seeking the light, and this again points rather to Pericles than to any other Knight, and to Pericles' own estimation of how he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Some of the Lords commenting later on Pericles make much of his being a stranger and of his appearance befitting one who has “practis'd more the whipstock than the lance” (II.ii.50).

The second contender, an armed Knight from Macedon “that's conquer'd by a lady,” bearing his motto Pue Per doleera kee per forsa,¹⁷ is not commented on by Simonides. That the motto is described by Thaisa as Spanish is perhaps best interpreted as Thaisa's mistake rather than the Quarto's. Macedon is surely meant to recall Alexander the Great; certainly Fluellen makes a great fuss over Macedon and Alexander “for / there is figures in all things” (Henry V, IV.vii.34-35), and it seems clear to me that the dramatist has deliberately cut down on the derivations of the five Knights so that Macedon and Sparta are the only two Greek ones remaining, Corinth and Athens having been dropped. Sparta and Macedon have immediate application in Spartan courage and Alexandrian cutting of the Gordian knot. “More by gentleness than by force” is surely more applicable to Pericles than to any of the five Knights, as he plays the gentler game. That he should be conquered by a lady might be interpreted also as an early indication that the overtures to love are made by Thaisa helped by her father, both of them intrigued by Pericles' obvious appeal to the inward rather than the outward man.

The third Knight, uncommented on by Simonides, and described as coming from Antioch, “his device, a wreath of chivalry” and his motto “Me Pompey¹⁸provexit apex” is surely a clear reflection of Pericles himself, who has come from his chivalric “adventure” at Antiochus' court where he hoped to reach the crown of triumph in solving the riddle.

Simonides' comments on the fourth Knight's device of a burning torch turned upside down and the motto Qui me alit, me extinguit that this shows “beauty hath his power and will, / Which can as well inflame as it can kill” (II.ii.34-35) indicate how Simonides is interpreting it as he did the first Knight's, that is, from Thaisa's point of view. However, if we look at it as another description of Pericles it is not difficult to see how appropriate it is that Pericles should be extinguished by the self-same wax which was the cause of his light. In Antiochus' court he carried his torch aloft: in Simonides' he is turning it upside down—his elevated pride is turned to submissive humility.

The fifth and last of the Knights, uncommented on by Simonides, and described as a “hand environed with clouds, / Holding out gold that's by the touchstone tried” with a motto Sic spectanda fides is surely a neat summation of the need for Pericles to be tested not by words and aspirations only but by actual deeds also. Pericles has borne his head so high to kiss the clouds, hoping to seize the golden apples of Hesperides at Antiochus': now he must be put to the test of deeds not riddles at Simonides' court.

The derivations, where given, and the emblems and devices of all five Knights suggest ironical comments on Pericles' own condition. When he himself is introduced as a stranger with the device of a “wither'd branch, that's only green at top” and the motto In hac spe vivo, Simonides' interpretation of this pretty moral as “[f]rom the dejected state wherein he is, / He hopes by you his fortunes yet may flourish” (II.ii.45-46) makes the parallel with Antiochus' court—“That would be son to great Antiochus”—very effective. The black Ethiop reaching at the sun, the armed Knight that's conquered by a lady, the Knight drawn to this enterprise by the crown of the triumph, the burning torch upside down, the hand from the clouds holding gold to be tried—all reach their conclusion in the branch that's withered but yet maintaining a little life at top. Pericles on “set purpose” (II.ii.53) is trying to dissociate all the Antiochus experiences from himself and to revert to the significance of his father's rusty armor for confidence, and his emblem and motto represent the wish that he has not completely ruined his life but left a small vestige of hope.

I think it is entirely possible that the five Knights may represent the five senses. The first with his concentration on light (sun, lux) representing sight; the second with his emphasis on gentleness of a lady suggesting either touch or smell, but since the fifth clearly stands for touch, the second could presumably be smell. The third concentrates on drawing people from afar to this chivalric enterprise, and thus may be hearing. The fourth's concentration on feeding and extinguishing is obviously taste, and the fifth with its references to hand and touchstone clearly could stand for touch. If this allegorization is possible then it would certainly afford a very smooth yet subtle transition into the next scene—a banquet at which Thaisa is described as “queen o' th' feast” (II.iii.17).

Simonides and Thaisa have not made comments on each of the contenders, and I think the explanation of this lies in quite a different quarter than is represented by Hoeniger's asseverance that “It is a good guess that the King explained the motto in similar words [to those in Wilkins] in the uncorrupted text.”¹⁹ The dramatist is surely deliberately having Simonides and Thaisa impatient with all the Knights except Pericles, and Simonides' final statement of how foolish it is to “scan / The outward habit by the inward man” is a careful enough indication where he is prepared to exercise patience. Before long the play reveals how Simonides has had suspicions that the stranger “for aught [he] know[s], / May be (nor can [he] think the contrary) / As great in blood as [he] [him] self” (II.v. 77-79), and it is presumably on this intuition that he has been acting in promoting his daughter's advances to Pericles, and in commending her choice and decision to “wed the stranger knight.” The whole business is not unlike Prospero's machinations whereby Ferdinand is secured for his daughter Miranda, though it is not so easy to see the initial stages of the process with Simonides. By the time he bids his daughter make advances to Pericles by taking the “standing-bowl of wine to him” (II.iii.65) even against her outward expression that this is unbecoming to a lady and even impudent:

                                                                                if befits not me
Unto a stranger knight to be so bold;
He may my proffer take for an offence,
Since men take women's gifts for impudence

(II.iii.66-69)

though, of course, her aside shows that she is secretly delighted at the opportunity to make advances to Pericles (II.iii.72), Simonides' interference is being clarified. Its real extent is not revealed, however, until Simonides palms off the other contenders for Thaisa's hand in marriage with spurious excuses. Thus he plainly shows his hand in securing this stranger, not a “wheeling and extravagant stranger” as in Othello where Brabantio hardly recognizes how he is “fixing” his daughter's marriage despite his “dream” of such a likely accident (I.i.142), but a Knight-errant who “only by misfortune of the seas / Bereft of ships and men, cast on this shore” (II.iii.89), according to Pericles' own report. The strength of the Quarto's use of “only” is obvious in this interpretation. One need not resort to suggestions that “only may well be corrupt,”²⁰ or to emend it to “newly” as Elze²¹ conjectured.

Pericles hides behind his father figure, Simonides, and allows himself to be manipulated, deliberately keeping in the background and letting Simonides and Thaisa manage things the way they wish. He describes himself as a “glow-worm in the night, / The which hath fire in darkness, none in light” (II.iii.43-44). It is the radiance of Simonides' court which recalls his own father's splendor who “[h]ad princes sit like stars about his throne, / And he the sun” (II.iii.39-40) and contrasts with his own poor light. By this means he tries to eradicate from his mind his own self searching for a wife on his terms—the disastrous Antiochus affair—and tries to convince himself that the wife he is now gaining comes with his father's blessing and approval. Thaisa represents in this sense his tie and bind, his attempt to convince himself that he is part of normality, of normal human affairs. It is yet another attempt to combat his sense of guilt over his Antiochus experience.

When at the beginning of Act III the dumb show and chorus report “Antiochus and his daughter dead” and Pericles urgently summoned back to Tyre to prevent the men of Tyre from mutinying and placing the crown on Helicanus' head, it is highly significant that Pericles' attempts to comply immediately run him into a violent storm off Tharsus. The death of Antiochus and his daughter frees Pericles from the fear of death at Antiochus' hands, but does not free him from the conscience effects of that association. Try as hard as he can to get back to Tyre successfully with his bride, as if the whole Antiochus affair had never taken place, as if Thaisa were the bride he set out for in the first place and was bringing home to be his consort, the microcosmic storm belies his attempt to think all is as it had never been. How eloquently he calls upon the god of the great vast to rebuke the surges, to bind the winds in brass, to still the deafening, dreadful thunders, and to quench the storm's sulphurous flashes, but all this is “as a whisper in the ears of death / Unheard” (III.i.9-10). The storm that is within him will not subside. That which he gained so easily,²² Thaisa, is just as rapidly snatched away, and his sea-sorrow is given visible embodiment in Marina. His grief has lingered long in the chambers of the sea, but now it is given birth, a local habitation and a name, and he must cast for ever from him the comforting thought that Thaisa made up for Antiochus' daughter, that his credit ledger with the gods cancels out his debit. All is suffering till ripeness be all. His “priestly farewell” (III.i.69) to Thaisa with Nestor (the cup) and Nicander (man's victory) as priestly assistants, attended by Lychorida (unbinding and loosing), is full of ceremonial implications that he must sacrifice (cup) his victory, his gaining of Thaisa, and give it to the gods. Temporarily his heart is in the coffin there with Thaisa, or already in the sea:

Ay me whilst thee the sounding seas and shores
Wash far away wherere thy bones are hurled. …
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world

(Lycidas)

with the “belching whale.” In some sense he has “ravin[ed] up / [His] own life's means” (Macbeth, II.iv.28-29), has devoured the poor fry before him, has engulfed others in his own tempestuous seas. His short-lived victory had been wrested out of his first sea-wrecking; the sea symbolically claims it back. And he finds himself willingly going back to Tharsus, ostensibly to leave his babe at “careful nursing” (III.ii.80) there, but subconsciously to take refuge in a place which still thinks of him as a savior, a place that had erected a statue to his glory. What irony it is that the next time he visits Tharsus, fourteen years later, he is presented with a monument with epitaphs in “glitt'ring golden characters” (IV.iii.44) expressing general praise of Marina. Since the audience knows Marina is alive Pericles' confrontation with a glorious statue monument is powerfully suggestive of mirror techniques. Pericles is made to see his life's statue, his savior role, turned into his death's monument, the destruction of his attempts to hide behind good deeds and to blame all his difficulties on the “wayward seas” (IV.iv.10). Deprived of Thaisa and Marina, he is back again in mind at Antiochus. He “bears / A tempest, which his mortal vessel tears” (IV.iv.29-30).

The concentration on Diana at this part of the play deliberately contrasts the unchaste atmosphere of the Antiochus affair, which will soon be set in very sharp relief by the brothel. Pericles is careful in his instructions to Cleon and Dioniza to look after Marina till she be married and to swear

By bright Diana, whom we honour, all
Unscissor'd shall this hair of mine remain,
Though I show will(23) in't.

(III.iii.28-30)

His wife Thaisa through the connivance of her father had put off his rivals by making a vow “on her virgin honour” to wear Diana's livery for twelve more months, and promptly married Pericles. There should be no wonder that when Thaisa is revived by Cerimon her first expression should be “O dear Diana” (III.ii.106), and her resolved intention to take a vestal livery in Diana's temple. Thaisa has offended against Diana and in her own mind will go on making reparation to Diana until Pericles come to Diana's temple and claim her in all proper religious propriety. Like Leontes in The Winter's Tale Pericles will “[n]ew woo [his] queen” (III.ii.156), but this time under the auspices of Diana.

The vision of Diana that comes to Pericles is surely prompted by his hope that by propitiating her deity for his part in the transgression—wedding a votaress of her order before the twelvemonth was up—he might somehow have Thaisa as miraculously restored to him as Marina was. Psychologically, too, it is obvious that he would make for Ephesus near whose coast Thaisa had been cast overboard. His mind is functioning not just along the lines of recovering a wife, however, but of a bridegroom meeting a bride as his very ready response to Lysimachus' hint that when they come ashore Lysimachus has a suit to prefer to Pericles indicates. Lysimachus “shall prevail, / Were it to woo [his] daughter” (V.i.259-260). That Pericles' explanation to Diana for his journeying in the past is little better than his explanation to Thaisa in her father's court should not disturb us. Pericles' awakening, recognition, restoration to harmony is worked out almost totally symbolically. He does not have glimpses of his real self, of his real wrongdoing as Lear does, but then he has the vision of Diana. The nearest he is made to come to an admission of disturbance is his expression that he was “frighted from [his] country” (V.iii.3) and then went on to wed Thaisa. At Simonides' court he had hidden behind the chivalric statement that he was trained in “arts and arms” (II.iii.82) and had been “looking for adventures in the world” when he was washed up on Simonides' shore. “Frighted” is nearer the truth, but a long way from it. His Antiochus affair in the House of Death, his Simonides' court affair in the House of “the gentler gamester is the soonest winner,” his abandonment of Marina to the place where his image is made glorious—all these are nearer to the truth. He “puts on sackcloth” (IV.iv.29), swears never to wash his face, nor cut his hair—and these are “but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Hamlet, I.ii.86). They are indeed “actions that a man might play” (I.ii.84). Hamlet's indictment against the “inky cloak” as one of these actions could well be paralleled with the “banners sable” of Pericles' ship which is “trimm'd with rich expense” (V.Ch.19). He plays the man of grief in excessively rich outer show.

What his inner self should have been like is revealed by the play's concentration on Marina's “lasting storm,” and how she endured it (IV.i.19). The fourth act is almost entirely devoted to her sea-changes, which she later claims “might equal” the stranger King's “if both were justly weigh'd” (V.i.88), and even Pericles is moved to believe that a comparison between her sufferings and his is possible, though, of course, his must be the greater or else she has suffered like a man and he like a girl.

When Marina, faced with her murderer-to-be, stresses her innocence in that she did never hurt Dioniza's daughter in all her life, never spoke a bad word, “nor did ill turn / To any living creature” (IV.i.75-76), never killed a mouse, hurt a fly or “trod upon a worm” (IV.i.78) against her will, she pleads from an innocence that is never in doubt, and contrasts sharply with her father's position in which he claims that like the poor worm he must die for telling the earth it is wronged with man's oppression. Marina's confrontation with Boult's court, the Mytilene brothel, is also in sharp distinction with her father's in Antiochus' court. The “sore terms” the brothel “stand[s] upon with the gods” (IV.ii.32) are known to the proprietors and customers of the establishment, whose one redeeming feature is that they acknowledge they would not do thus if they could “pick up some pretty / estate” (IV.ii.30-31), and thus keep their doors closed, because theirs is neither profession, trade, or calling. And indeed Boult is very willing to speak for himself and for the Pander and the Bawd in finding gold “tractable enough” (IV.vi.198).

What irony it is that the gold Marina thus buys herself out of the brothel with and with which the brothel people can begin to restore some kind of respect to themselves came from Lysimachus! Marina has indeed been brought to the brothel by “wayward fortune” that did “malign [her] state” (V.i.89), but has not lost faith in the gods whom she does not accuse but calls on their defence and commends her chastity into Diana's keeping (IV.iii.147). Her beauty is promulgated abroad through the market of the world as was Antiochus' daughter's, and prospective clients have been lured to “joust” for her, Monsieur Verolles, the pox, to try to “cut a caper at the proclamation” (IV.ii.105-106), a Spaniard to mouth-water “to bed to / her very description” (IV.ii.98-99), and “of every nation a traveller” (IV.ii.112) to scatter his crowns in the shadow of the brothel's sun. Each knows precisely why he is visiting a brothel and each is presented with some kind of riddle to try to excuse his presence there. The first two gentlemen clients visit what they took to be a bawd and hear “vestals sing” (IV.v.7), but could they not be said to be feeding on “mother's flesh which did [them] breed” (I.i.66), especially with regard to Monsieur Verolles who “brought his disease / [T]hither: here he does but repair it” (IV.ii.108-109). Lord Lysimachus (end of the battle for Marina and Pericles!) comes “disguis'd” to “do the deeds of darkness” (IV.vi.29) with some “wholesome iniquity” that a man “may deal withal, and / defy the surgeon” (IV.vi.24-25), as if “after a long voyage at sea” (IV.vi.42), and is faced with the riddle of how Marina could have been at the same trade “[e]'er since [she] can remember” (IV.vi.72), and tries to argue his way out of his embarrassing presence in a brothel by pleading an incorrupt mind, but the gold he gives her is another way of scattering his crowns. His very presence is his indictment.

The brothel episodes thus function as a foil for Pericles' behavior particularly in Antiochus' court. The riddle that man goes to solve is basically the riddle of his own going. It would be better not to let one's feet travel in that direction in the first place, but if one does fall then it is better to be able to buy oneself out by pleading

best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad.

(Measure for Measure, V.i.437-439)

The clients visiting the brothel exhibit “man's infirmities” on a far smaller scale than Pericles visiting Antiochus' court. A little gold washes them clean, but Pericles' hands that opened Pandora's box “will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red” (Macbeth, II.ii.60-62) wherever he travels. Coming back to reclaim his daughter after fourteen years of absence he does “[s]ail seas in cockles”²⁴ (IV.iv.2) trying to thwart the “wayward seas” (IV.iv.10) rather than admit his own waywardness, piloting his ship to Tharsus as modern emendators of the text will have us read whereas the original Quarto quite clearly suggests in its spelling and capitalization of “Pilat” (“this Pilat thought,” IV.iv.18) a pun on the state of mind in which he is going to Tharsus, trying to wash his hands clean of any thought of not having done the right thing. And he symbolically finds his glorious image is dead, reads his own epitaph in Marina's monument—“wither'd in her spring of year” (IV.iv.25) recalling the withered branch again—and retreats into his scallop shell of unquiet while his lost innocence, Marina, will “never stint, / Mak[ing] raging battery upon shores of flint” (IV.iv.42-43), making “a batt'ry through his deafen'd ports, / Which now are midway stopp'd” (V.i.46-47).

It is fitting that it should be a Lysimachus who must persist in bringing the maid of Mytilene to the dumb statue of Pericles to try to breathe life into it once more. Like the fishermen earlier Lysimachus makes up this garment for Pericles through the rough seams of Mytilene's waters. The fishermen presented Pericles with the rusty armor of his father and equipped him with a pair of bases: Lysimachus presents him with a jewel of a maid who reminds him of his wife and daughter (V.i.106-108) and furnishes him with “her sweet harmony” (V.i.44). They both “tell the infirmities of men” (II.i.49) and the need for condolements, and both hope if Pericles thrives that he will “remember / from whence [he] had them” (II.i.150-151).

Marina's song certainly begins to soften the shores of Pericles' flint. The statue comes alive, and it is as if it has all been a dream. A sea of joys rushes in upon Pericles “[o]'erbear[ing] the shores of [his] mortality” (V.i.193). The recognition of another's griefs, his daughter's caused by his own misdeeds, makes him no longer boast that nothing could prove even the “thousandth part / Of [his] endurance” (V.i.135-136), but acknowledges of Marina, “[She] that beget'st him that did [her] beget” (V.i.195), the true answer to the riddle “[on] mother's flesh which did [him] breed,” the recognition that man himself destroys the music of his life, and forgets the source from whence it came. When he hears the music of the spheres he is mentally back again in tune with the world and with the gods, and from there it is an easy transition to his vision of Diana.

The end of the play is full of echoes of its beginning. The Antiochus affair looms very large. That Pericles should be in conference with Marina shortly after the drama has shown her visited by the two Gentlemen and Lysimachus might vaguely suggest that Pericles is in their line, too. Indeed were he really tempted to do her violence as his initial pushing her back made her suspect, and her asking him “Whither will you have me” (V.i.176) echoing as it does the same question to Boult about to ravish her (IV.vi.153) shortly after she has related to him the story of the plot on her life and of the pirates bringing her to Mytilene, then the play's initial theme of incest would be rounded out in an extraordinary way. The kind of wife Pericles was looking for in Antiochus' court was a daughter image rather than a peer, a co-equal partner. As far as he himself was aware his pursuit of Antiochus' daughter was a means to Antiochus' wealth, a strong enough impediment to a marriage of true minds. When Marina's sea-sorrow fuses daughter and wife in one image for him it makes possible the beginning of the search for a real wife for herself alone. The return of his daughter could never be a sufficient substitute. In the temple of Diana all impurities of excessive material impediments in a plus sense as represented by the Antiochus' court affair, and of excessive material impediments in a minus sense as represented by the Simonides' court affair, are purged away, but man is still left with his infirmities that glorify the blessed gods. His mortal weakness is the gods' immortal strength.

Notes

1. See F. D. Hoeniger, ed., Pericles (New Arden Shakespeare, Cambridge, Mass. 1963; rev. ed. 1966), Introduction, p. lxxxi.

2. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London, 1958), pp. 32-75.

3. See Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (New York, 1960), pp. 80-81.

4. Hoeniger, Introduction, pp. lxxx-lxxxi.

5. Thelma N. Greenfield, “A Re-Examination of the “Patient” Pericles,” Shakespeare Studies, III (1967), 51-61, rightly takes exception to the prevalent view of Pericles as a type of the patient man, and less convincingly substitutes a view of Pericles as “the Renaissance descendant of the wily Greek traveler, a solver of riddles, a master of escape and incognito, skilled in the arts, and in his accomplishments and understanding a born ruler of men.” Pericles is by no means a Ulysses, nor is he an Oedipus, but a prince of dark corners, avoiding, and retreating from princely responsibilities. I am grateful to Professor J. Leeds Barroll for allowing me to see Professor Greenfield's paper in galleys.

6. See Natalis Comitis, Mythologiae (Venetiis, 1568; foreword dated 1567—B.M. copy 704.d7), Liber Septimus, Cap. VII, 38-40, Sig. Iiiv. The version in the 1581 edition is the same.

7. See Douglas Bush, Mythology & the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1963, new rev. ed.), p. 94 for the general importance of the Mythologiae for the Renaissance, and p. 98 for this allegorical interpretation of the golden apples.

8. See J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, eds., The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (London, rep. 1963), II, Canto VII, 44, p. 104.

9. See Hoeniger, Introduction, p. lxxxvi.

10. See S. H. Long, “Laying the Ghosts in Pericles,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], VII (1956), 39-42.

11. See Hoeniger, p. 64 fn.

12. “Measures” line 103 but “revels” line 93. See Hoeniger, p. 65 fn. carry over.

13. Hoeniger, p. 70 fn.

14. Hoeniger lists Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda together with Middleton's Your Five Gallants. His only Shakespearean analogy is Troilus and Cressida, I.ii, which is quite different in technique. Most critics tend to ignore this part of the play, or concentrate only on Pericles' own emblem, and that in a rather perfunctory manner. See Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (Stanford, Cal., 1955), p. 24.

15. Hoeniger, pp. 51-52, footnote to beginning of II.ii.

16. Hoeniger, p. 182.

17. This has caused quite unnecessary confusion (See Hoeniger, p. 54). Critics have emended it to Spanish and to correct Italian. Hoeniger suggests that “the reporter or anyone else” may be responsible for these corruptions. In point of fact the Q spells the Italian words as they sound, as for instance is the case later in this scene where Q has “Pompey” for “Pompae” and in IV.vi where the Q has “Caualereea” for “cavalleria.” The only “corruption” is the first “e” of “doleera” which should be emeded to “c”; “e” for “c” is an Elizabethan common error.

18. I suggest “Pompey” may well indicate how the word was to be pronounced. See previous note.

19. Hoeniger, p. 55 fn.30.

20. Hoeniger, p. 63 fn. 88-89.

21. See Englische Studien, IX (1885), 282.

22. See Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest (New Arden Shakespeare, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, 6th ed.), III.i.n.1-2 for the relevance of a passage in St. Augustine's Confessions: “Yea, the very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties. … It is … ordered, that the affianced bride should not at once be given, lest as a husband he should hold cheap whom, as betrothed, he sighed not after” (Book VIII.7-8).

23. Hoeniger accepts Theobald's and Malone's conjecture “show ill” and finds support in Wilkins, The Painful Aduentures: “himselfe in all vncomely,” but I think this is quite unnecessary emendation. Pericles does show “will” in many ways, and showing “will” is showing “ill.” If we emend do we not lose the possibility of the double meaning?

24. Not just the fairy tale atmosphere of the play as Hoeniger's note to line 2, p. 121, suggests.