SOURCE: Lynch, Stephen J. “The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles.” Mediaevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies 16 (1993): 361-78.

[In the following essay, Lynch argues that Gower serves as the “surrogate author” of Pericles, claiming that Shakespeare's use of Gower “involves a double strategy: a confession of authorial limitations matched with a claim to authorial elevation and mystification.”]

The presence of so ancient a figure as Gower in so late a play as Pericles poses a series of immediate questions. Why, so late in Shakespeare's career, does he resort to a chorus? Why John Gower as chorus? Most importantly, what is the relationship between the choric Gower and the text of the play?

The first two questions can be addressed with a few brief, though tentative, remarks. A chorus seems requisite in part because of the very nature of the material as Shakespeare received it. The story of Apollonius of Tyre in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book VIII) is structurally episodic, as well as temporally and geographically diverse—a sprawling and fragmented narrative requiring a framing devise in order to secure some measure of cohesion. Gower himself resorted to a type of choric framing throughout the Confessio by interjecting Latin headings between episodes of the stories.

John Gower serves as chorus primarily as an acknowledgement of literary debt. Indeed, Shakespeare follows the Confessio with notable fidelity, borrowing the plot sequence, several of the characters' names, and occasionally the very language of the poem. Moreover, Gower as chorus provides an archaic atmosphere to the play. If the woodcut illustration of Gower in George Wilkins' Painfull Adventures of Pericles (a prose romance apparently based on the play) is an accurate depiction of the choric Gower as he appeared on stage, he apparently wore an old-fashioned cap, wooden shoes, and held a staff and laurel.¹ “Ancient Gower” (1.Chor.2), in other words, looks ancient. Along with his medieval garb, Gower also makes frequent appeals to an archaic and antiquated poetic tradition which would license the loose structure, improbabilities and unsophisticated moralizing that inform and shape much of the play.²

Far more problematic, however, is the complex interplay between Gower and the text. As a conventional chorus, he is unconventionally distanced from the language of the play. In only one other play, Henry V, does Shakespeare make extensive use of a chorus, yet the chorus of the history play is far more integrated into the text, speaking the same idiom and verse form as the characters in the play proper. In Pericles, however, Gower the chorus stands “in the gaps” (4.4.8), disjointed from the play, speaking an archaic diction of end-stopped, rhymed, tetrameter couplets. Gower fulfills traditional choric obligations by providing background exposition along with much-needed temporal and geographical transitions. Yet, unlike the historical chorus, Gower appeals to distinctly outmoded aesthetic principles, and he comments on the play with an insistent and antiquated moral tone.

As author of the major source and choric presenter of the play, Gower seems strangely lacking in authority. He is often at pains to remind the audience of his literary indebtedness, that the story he presents is not his own: “To sing a song that old was sung, / From ashes ancient Gower is come,” “I tell you what mine authors say” (1.Chor.1-2,20). He offers himself as subservient mediator for an authorial tradition that precedes and exceeds him. Allusions to sources and old books are no doubt traditional, yet Gower seems not merely indebted but apologetic, as he humbly confesses his poetic limitations before an audience whose “wit's more ripe” (1.Chor.12). He will manage, as he repeatedly tells us, only with our “patience” (5.3.102). While the chorus of Henry V emphasizes the limitations of the theater, Gower emphasizes the limitations of the chorus.

The choric Gower not only mimics the language and style of the source but often exceeds, even parodies, the source. His aphoristic couplets are distinctly more rigid and formulaic than what we find in the Confessio. Instead of animating the play, Gower's choric commentary tends to restrain the play. Wonder and mystery collapse for Gower into rigid and even trite moralization:

Here have you seen a mighty king
His child, I wis, to incest bring;
A better prince and benign lord,
That will prove aweful both in deed and word.

(2.Chor.1-4)

Gower habitually reduces the dynamics of the play into simple proverbs:

I'll show you those in trouble's reign,
Losing a mite, a mountain gain.

(2.Chor.7-8)

While the chorus of Henry V imaginatively expands the play, Gower's reductive commentary attempts to contain and restrain the play within neatly balanced and overly deterministic rhymes.

Yet if we feel unsatisfied with the quaint simplicities of Gower, so too does Gower. Indeed, he continually negates his own interpretive authority, as he deflects our attention to the play itself. Introducing the first dumb show, he aptly remarks, “What need I speak?” (2.Chor.16), and then, as he spies the entrance of Pericles, he apologizes for his intrusion, and defers to the authority of the text over himself:

And here he comes. What shall be next,
Pardon old Gower—this longs the text.

(2.Chor.39-40)

Gower is surely a congenial guide and companion, an ever-helpful mediator between the play and the audience, but his cosmic vision leaves something to be desired. Rarely does he offer more than a track record of Fortune's ups and downs:

Till fortune, tired of doing bad
Threw him ashore, to give him glad.

(2.Chor.37-38)

But fortune, mov'd,
Varies again; the grisled north
Disgorges such a tempest forth …

(3.Chor.46-48)

His poetic sensibility seems unvaryingly mechanical. When he does stumble upon “grace” and “wonder,” he quickly scrambles to get back on solid ground, as when he introduces the mature Marina:

… who hath gain'd
Of education all the grace,
Which makes her both the heart and place
Of general wonder. But, alack,
That monster Envy …

(4.Chor.5-12)

The very instant “grace” and “wonder” enter his choric vocabulary, Gower turns upon the adversitive conjunction “But,” and proceeds to launch into an antithetical account of ‘monster Envy.’

Gower's gentle urging that we see in the play more than he sees, that we read beyond his reading, that we transcend his naive poetic sensibilities, seems eminently necessary when we are confronted by his exceedingly formulaic closing commentary on the play:

In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward.
In Pericles, his queen and daughter, seen,
Although assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserv'd from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last.
In Helicanus may you well descry
A figure of truth, of faith, of loyalty
In reverend Cerimon there well appears
The worth that learned charity aye wears.
For wicked Cleon and his wife

(5.3.86-96)

This attempt at final closure not only fails to close the play but seems strangely dissonant from the play. Gower's choric summation misrepresents more than represents what we have seen on stage. In what seems an overeager effort to achieve supreme balance and symmetry, Gower elevates quite minor characters (Helicanus and Cerimon) to major standing. The miracles in Act 5 are thwarted and restrained into strictures of end-stopped rhymed couplets. Gower becomes a chorus out of accord with the play, an author figure without authority or control over the text he presents. The sense of awe and wonder so prevalent in the play even before the final act—“What world is this?,” “Is not this strange?,” “Most rare” (3.2.108-10)—is noticeably absent in the commentary of Gower.

Shakespeare's presentation of Gower seems not only at odds with the play but at odds with Gower's presentation of Gower, or rather the narrator, in Book VIII of the Confessio. Genius, the narrator of the Apollonius story, also feels bound to an ancient and pre-existent story—“Of a cronike in daies gone … I rede thus,” “To telle as olde bokes seyne,” “as the cronikes seyne” (VIII.279-81, 1160, 1554)—but he exercises considerably more authority over the story he tells. When Genius intrudes upon the narrative, his commentary, though not absolute or definitive, is closely integrated into poem. He too may seem preoccupied with the rhythmic irregularity of Fortune:

Fortune hath ever be muable
And maie no while stonde stable.
For nowe it heith, nowe it loweth,
Nowe stant upright, nowe overthroweth,
Nowe full of blisse, and nowe of bale …

(VIII.593-97)

But unlike the mechanistic and myopic chorus of the play, the narrator of the poem is also capable of a language of wonder and marvel:

But for to speake of the mervailes
Which afterwarde to him befelle,
It is a wonder for to telle.

(VIII.984-86)

At Ephesus the sea upcast
The coffre, and all that was therin.
Of great mervaile now begyn …

(VIII.1164-66)

Gower's narrator apprehends a providential and mysterious order that lurks beyond the apparent waywardness of Fortune. Moreover, Gower's narrator, though moral, is considerably less moralistic. His closing summation of the narrative, though framed as a balanced contrast between noble Apollonius and wicked Antiochus, does not devolve into rigid formula:

And in ensample his life was writte,
That all lovers mighten witte
Howe at laste it shal be sene
Of love what thei wolden mene.
For see nowe on that other side,
Antiochus with all his pride,
Whiche sette his love unkyndely,
His ende had sodeynly,
Set ageyn kynde upon vengeance,
And for his lust hath his penance.

(VIII.2007-16)

Moral Gower, no doubt—but the verse here, as throughout the poem, is not trite, reductive, or overly mechanistic.

Shakespeare's Gower, in contrast, seems considerably more medieval, more archaic, more quaint and naive than the medieval Gower. Instead of updating his source—Shakespeare's usual practice—Shakespeare backdates his play, making the play, or at least the choric Gower, more antiquated than the Confessio would suggest. It is not surprising that Dryden mistook the play as Shakespeare's earliest work, predating Titus Andronicus: “Shakespeare's own Muse her Pericles first bore; / The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor.”³ Downplaying the more wondrous apprehensions of Genius in the Confessio, Shakespeare develops in the figure of Gower a constricted and narrowed perspective.

Shakespeare's Gower does not merely stand in the gaps of the play, but occasionally enters into the very fabric and structure of the text. His dissonant choric commentary, ironically, is integrated into the play in that the play is periodically discordant with itself. Repeatedly, the flow of the action (and how rarely it flows) comes to a sudden halt as characters pause to provide choric and moral commentary, and, as with Gower, such choric remarks are usually off key, if not woefully insufficient. In other words, the play contains internal choruses that mimic the ineptitude of the external chorus. The three fishermen, for example, prove quite adept at extracting morality from fish. Fish live in the sea, the first fisherman expounds, “as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones” (2.1.28-29). Pericles is quick to respond, “a pretty moral” (2.1.35). Yet the moral analogy of the fishermen seems partial at best—suited to the daughter-devouring Antiochus, but failing to account for the generosity of Pericles to Cleon, or the benign rule of Simonides, or even their own kindness towards Pericles.

Consistently in the play, interpretations prove misinterpretations, or at least under-interpretations. The white flags of Pericles' ships are mistaken by Cleon as signs of strategic deception. King Simonides' dissimulation with his daughter's letter seems to Pericles a scheme to undo him. Even the bawds prove hermeneutic incompetents, as they interpret Marina as a gift of fortune, only to find her more of a curse than a blessing—although finally she proves a profitable blessing but in a way they never anticipated. All of these misinterpretations, significantly, are the embellishments of Shakespeare upon the story in the Confessio.

Shakespeare also adds to the play an entire scene, without precedent in the poem, that is entirely preoccupied with interpretation. King Simonides systematically interprets and comments upon a series of emblematic shields presented by various knights. At the end of the line enters Pericles, holding a “withered branch, that's only green at top” (2.2.43). The King renders a prompt and self-confident interpretation:

A pretty moral;
From the dejected state wherein he is,
He hopes by you his fortunes yet may flourish.

(2.2.45-47)

Simonides seems to hit upon the meaning, perhaps even the precise meaning Pericles intended. Yet, the meaning of the “withered branch” is not permanently fixed by Simonides, but continues to exfoliate throughout the play, developing a semiotic richness that exceeds any single configuration. By Act 5, the branch, green at top, will come to suggest not merely Pericles' recuperation of his fortunes through marriage to Simonides' daughter, but his later recuperation of his apparently deceased daughter, as well as his still later recuperation of his wife in Diana's temple, along with his recovery of his sanity and spiritual health, the restoration and revival of his family and royal lineage, the political restitution and extension of his empire (to include not only Tyre but Pentapolis), and so forth. The branch far exceeds Simonides' reading of the branch. Like the choric Gower, Simonides fails to restrain or limit the textual free play of meaning.

The tendency in the play for characters to assume a Gower-like stance of not-so-authoritative choric authority is most evident in Pericles himself as he habitually pauses to interpret, and misinterpret, his experiences. After washing ashore in Pentapolis, he feels like a tennis ball randomly knocked about in the “vast tennis court” (2.1.60) of the sea, only to find his father's rusty armor has not-so-randomly been recovered in a fishing net. He then scrambles to reinterpret: “Thanks, fortune, yet, that, after all my crosses, / Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself” (2.1.123-24). Yet his reinterpretation proves but another in an ongoing series of interpretations of the nature of fortune and the sea.

Indeed, the sea is an almost constant presence in the play, and evolves as a recurrent metaphor that stubbornly eludes final interpretation. Fluid, tempestuous, protean—the sea suggests itself in a dizzying array of manifestations: tennis racket wielding Neptune as well as mother goddess and redeemer, tempestuous and tranquil, giver and taker of life, divider and reuniter of families, home to kings, maidens, and pirates. Especially in the early seventeenth century, the sea—in its geographical expansiveness and unfathomed depths—would suggest a realm of mystery and wonder, beyond final definition or containment. Even the more solid and substantive “ooze” (3.1.60) in which Thaisa is deposited, suggests an elusive fluidity. Appropriately, the god of the sea is described as “mask'd Neptune” (3.3.38)—hidden, inscrutable, beyond full comprehension.⁴

A sense of irreducible enigma is introduced in the very opening scene of the play, not just in the riddle, which seems surprisingly unenigmatic (especially compared to the more challenging riddle of the poem), but in the persistently enigmatic and slippery world that confronts Pericles. In the opening scene, Pericles, before interpreting the riddle, interprets the face of the princess of Antioch—and gets it all wrong:

See where she comes, appareled like the spring,
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king
Of every virtue gives renown to men!
Her face the book of praises, where is read
Nothing but curious pleasures.

(1.1.16-17)

Her pleasures, however, prove a bit too curious, and so Pericles is compelled to reread and reinterpret: “this glorious casket stor'd with ill” (1.1.78). As internal and inept chorus, Pericles persistently under-reads the texts of his world. He likewise mistakes the music of Antioch as heavenly and divine—mistakes it for the music of the spheres that will sound in Act 5.

Moreover, Pericles under-interprets the death's heads that hang as iconic and emblematic riddles on the wall in Antioch, taking them merely for a conventional momento mori: “For death remembered should be like a mirror, / Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error” (1.1.46-47).⁵ Pericles neglects to see any further association between the heads on the wall and the amorous impulses that drove him to Antioch. The heads of the failed suitors, however, might pose a riddle not just of human mortality but of the relations between love and death, signifying that illicit love leads to sterility and death. Pericles' “inflam'd desire … To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree” (1.1.21-22) clearly suggests an allegorical reenactment of spiritual death and the Fall of Man. Though Pericles makes a quick exit, never tasting the fruit, never actually falling into sin, he slips nevertheless by mistaking a lesser good for a greater good, attempting to find in the face of the princess—“beyond all wonder” (1.2.76)—a substitute for the wonders of heavenly paradise.

Pericles' initial hermeneutic failures cast doubt upon his supposedly definitive reading of Antiochus' riddle. His decoding of the riddle may function in the play not as an absolute confirmation of his role as reliable interpreter, but as a foil to his tendency to misread or under-read the more elusive riddles that confront him. Though Antiochus is impressed with Pericles' interpretive skill—“He hath found the meaning” (1.1.144)—Pericles untangles the riddle of Antiochus only to miss the riddles in his own life. He outwits the sphinx to stumble over his own feet.

The following scene strongly suggests that Pericles may not have fully resolved the riddle in Antioch. He enters the stage bemoaning for thirty-three lines his condition of “dull-ey'd melancholy” that “Makes both my body and soul to languish” (1.2.2,32), and he expresses bewilderment for the lack of any direct or immediate cause. He proceeds to consider and then dismiss a series of speculative causes for his melancholy, until he finally settles on what he takes to be the definitive root cause—fear of a military invasion by Antiochus. As a master of riddles, Pericles' interpretation of his aching melancholy seems remarkably unsubtle. It is worth noting that his melancholy is Shakespeare's addition to the story. In the Confessio, melancholy is felt not by the hero, Apollonius, but by the citizens of Tyre after they hear of his departure:

Whan that thei wist he was ago,
It is a pitee for to here.
They losten lust, they losten chere,
They toke upon hem suche penance,
There was no song, there was no daunce,
But every myrthe and melodie
To hem was then a maladie.

(VIII.484-88)

Shakespeare displaces the melancholy in his source from the citizens of Tyre to Pericles. The play thus renders the cause of Pericles' melancholy problematic, for while the citizens in the poem have a direct and definite cause for their melancholy, Pericles has not. Following immediately after his departure from Antioch, his melancholic depression seems linked, dramatically and psychologically, to his encounter with incest. His extreme revulsion—“my thoughts revolt” (1.1.72)—may emerge not only from the discovered putrification in his object of desire (the princess), but from an unconscious recognition of a potential putrification in his own desire. The “danger, which [he] fear'd, is at Antioch” (1.2.7) may not, after all, be confined to Antioch but may be lurking in himself, in a hidden and irrational obsession with incest—an enigmatic “sea” in his own nature. His melancholy, which he is quick to interpret and define, seems far more mysterious, far more of a riddle, than he comprehends.

Pericles' desire to find in the princess a “boundless happiness” (1.1.25) may indicate as well an unacknowledged longing for an illicit boundary-crossing happiness. An excessive passion, if not an incestuous passion, also characterizes the hero of the Confessio as he sets sail for Antioch:

Appolinus the prince of Tyre,
Whiche hath to love a great desire,
As he whiche in his high moode,
Was likinge of his hote blode,
A yonge, a freshe, a lustie knyght. …
To ship he goeth, the winde him driveth.

(VIII.383-93)

“Hote blode” and “winde” are conventional markers of unhinged and dangerous passions. A troubled sexuality also seems indicated in Apollonius when he leaves his daughter with Stangulio and Dionyse (Cleon and Dionyza), pledging never again to shave until his daughter is married:

And this avowe to god I make,
That I shall never for hir sake
My berde for no likynge shave,
Till it befalle, that I have
In covenable tyme of age
Besette hir unto mariage.

(VIII.1309-14)

He will not shave “for her sake.” Such a course of action seems curious to say the least, and might suggest, whether Gower intended it or not, a fear in the hero of an incestuous fate—a fate that can best be avoided by assuming an uncouth and undesirable appearance until his daughter is wed and he is in the clear.

Shakespeare may have read, or misread, the Confessio as suggesting an incest anxiety in the hero.⁶ Indeed, the play develops and expands upon such a possibility:

Till she be married, madam,
By bright Diana, whom we honor, all
Unscissor'd shall this hair of mine remain,
Though I show ill in 't.

(3.3.29-32)

Pericles' vow to grow his hair takes the form of a vow to Diana—thus becoming, at least implicitly, a vow of chastity as well. Pericles will grow his hair, transform into a ragged outcast, and live chaste until his daughter marries. The goddess of chastity, barely mentioned in the source, emerges as a major figure in this play about the unchaste threat of incest. Diana is prayed to by Marina in the brothel and even appears to Pericles in a dream (an anonymous god appears in the poem). The chaste Diana protects Marina from the bawds and Pericles from himself.

In the final act, Shakespeare also expands upon the incestuous suggestions in his source. In the Confessio, father and daughter are reunited in an atmosphere that could lend itself to illicit temptations. The “yonge Thaise” enters alone into Apollonius' cabin, “so derke a place,” to play music and “By all the weies, that she can, / To glad with this sory man” (VIII.1649-70). In his solipsistic despair, Apollonius rejects her, and even strikes her with his hand. She defends herself with an appeal to her noble lineage—an appeal that might evoke a sense of courtship:

Avoy my lorde, I am a mayde,
And if ye wyst, what I am,
And out of what linage I cam,
Ye wolde not be so salvage.

(VIII.1704-07)

In the play, Pericles is revived from despair and reunited with his daughter in a scene that more explicitly develops an atmosphere of wooing and seduction. Like Leontes in the Winter's Tale, looking upon his grown daughter as a possible mate—“I'd beg your precious mistress, / Which he counts but a trifle” (5.1.223-24)—Pericles finds his daughter appealing for her resemblance to his beloved wife—“for thou lookest / Like one I loved indeed” (127-28). After being pushed away by Pericles, Marina appeals not only to her lineage but to her beauty, modesty, and power to elicit desire:

I am a maid, my lord, that ne'er before
Invited eyes, but have been gazed on
Like a comet …
My derivation was from ancestors
Who stood equivalent with mighty kings.

(5.1.87-94)

When Pericles finally recognizes Marina, he responds in a language of erotic rapture:

O Helicanus, strike me, honor'd sir,
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget.

(5.1.195-200)

The cryptic final line, in which Pericles sees himself as both father and son to his daughter, recalls the perverse family relations in the riddle of Antiochus. Likewise, the evasive and riddling language of Marina earlier in the scene associates her with Antioch.⁷ Amidst the background and looming threat of an erotics of incest, Pericles achieves an erotics of faith. Pericles and Marina re-enact the Christian mystery in which Christ proves, paradoxically, both father and son to Mary. Marina, a name repeatedly linked with the sea, can now be reinterpreted in association with the celestial virgin.

Sea imagery returns once again, with insistent repetition—“great sea of joys,” “shores of my mortality,” “drown me,” “Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tharsus, / And found at sea again!” (5.1.197-202). A thoroughly inexplicable and wondrous sea delivers Pericles from the threat of incest—a near miss—and redeems him from his desperate melancholy. This wonder of unbounded grace is then redoubled in the “great miracle” (5.3.59) of the final scene as Pericles is reunited with his wife in Diana's temple.

By tracing a series of incestuous suggestions in the text, I do not mean to argue that Pericles can be seen as a latent pervert who deserves all the suffering he gets until he is purged of wayward sexual desires. Indeed, how can we fault Pericles for not acknowledging in Act 1 an incestuous desire for a daughter he has yet to conceive? Such an analysis would reproduce the formulaic and reductive moralizing of the choric Gower. My point is not that incest is the firm ground that renders the text fully readable, but rather that incestuous desire lurks in the text as an elusive possibility—a possibility that belies the hasty and overly deterministic interpretations of Pericles. The riddle of incest that confronts him in Act 1 is not definitively unraveled and left behind in Antioch, but continues to surface in the semantic richness and free play of the text—despite the myopic limitations of the internal chorus, Pericles, and the external chorus, Gower. Beyond the riddle of Antiochus, lurks the riddle of Pericles, that neither Pericles, nor Gower, nor we can ever fully contain or resolve.

The play continually depicts Gower, along with the internal choruses, at odds with the dynamics of the text. Choric interpretations devolve into misinterpretations and under-interpretations. The text persistently eludes Gower's formulations of the text. His choric commentary always remains other than and less than the text itself. Gower functions in the play not as an ultimate frame, a fixed hermeneutic resting place of semantic equilibrium, but instead as a myopic foil to a text that proves too slippery and suggestive for choric authority or control.⁸

Yet the play does not merely parody Gower, for his role as authorial presentor inevitably suggests an association with the author of the play, Shakespeare—especially if Shakespeare played the role, which he probably did. As one of only two major choruses in Shakespeare's works, and the only chorus who is an author, Gower as chorus seems closely akin to Shakespeare as author. We know that at least one of Shakespeare's contemporaries blurred the identities of chorus and author: the title page to Wilkins' Painfull Adventures reads, “the true history of the play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower.”

The romances in general seem concerned with the role and nature of the author, and often project author figures into the plays. Paulina appears in the final scene of the Winter's Tale as on stage playwright and director, orchestrating and commenting upon the action. Likewise, Prospero in the Tempest appears with book and staff (suggesting pen), writing and directing the internal plays within the play. If Gower appears as a surrogate for the author, what might Gower indicate about Shakespeare's sense, after some twenty years in the business, of his own authority over his texts?

Most obviously, Gower suggests Shakespeare's professional role as rewriter and dramatizer of ancient stories—stories composed by a succession of diverse authors. The text of Pericles provides a particularly good case in point: based on Gower's Confessio, the play was begun perhaps by another dramatist, and given to Shakespeare to revise and complete. Shakespeare's texts, even when his own, are not fully authorized by him, but are re-presentations of “olde bokes” and “cronikes” (VIII.1160,1554)—which are themselves re-presentations of still older texts. From a still wider cultural perspective, even Shakespeare's originality is not original but intertextual—enabled by and dependent upon multiple forms of cultural discourses. Language speaks, not the author. As Roland Barthes comments,

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.⁹

Like Gower the chorus, Shakespeare the author does not autonomously create but rather intervenes in a pre-existent field of discourse that always precedes and exceeds authorial formulation and containment.

Even more, as a man of the theatre, Shakespeare would exercise rather limited control over his works. Not only were the plays the property of the theater company, but, as live performances, his plays would be subject to the manifold uncertainties and contingencies that flesh is heir to—the variability of actors and acting conditions, as well as inevitable differences in audience response (both within any single audience and between different audiences). As a working playwright, Shakespeare must have repeatedly encountered an inevitable dissonance between authorial intention and dramatic execution, compounded by wide and often inexplicable differences in audience reception—a bewildering complex of variables, all shaping the performance and reception of a work, yet for the most part outside Shakespeare's range of authorial control. While a script on paper appears the same from day to day, performances on stage are always and inevitably different. Regardless of authorial intention—which itself would be diverse, inconsistent, and not fully conscious—the plays would generate their own free-floating textual and performative meaningfulness.

Off stage as well, Shakespeare's works, at least the printed poems and plays (in quarto editions), would achieve a high degree of textual autonomy. With the rise of printing in early modern Europe, mass-produced texts, severed from authorial presence and control, could be read and construed in an infinite variety of ways. The concurrent rise of Protestant individualism would only exacerbate the tendency, as texts (Scriptural or otherwise) would be subjected to private reading and an endless array of interpretive possibilities.

As presenter of a text that exceeds him; Gower may function as a confession of Shakespeare's authorial limitations. Yet at the same time, ironically, Gower may function as a claim to authorial control and mastery of another sort. For if the plays tended to mean other than what Shakespeare intended, they would also have meant more than he intended. Complementing the author's inability to control and restrain free-floating textuality is the author's ability to generate free-floating textuality. One of the great miracles in Pericles is that Gower, in spite of his limitations, manages to mediate a play that aspires to transcendent and timeless truth—even if the moments of transcendence remain outside his field of vision. Gower presents the text, and the text produces a bounty of surplus meaningfulness and semiotic excess beyond Gower's intentions. His narrow and naive perspective does not finally prevent the text from achieving a rarefied aesthetic status. The play does not pronounce the death of the author (or rather the stillbirth of the author as he emerged in early modern Europe), but rather makes a discreet claim to authorial transcendence.

Shakespeare's use of Gower thus involves a double strategy: a confession of authorial limitations matched with a claim to authorial elevation and mystification. Like Gower, Shakespeare serves as humble author function through which stories are told and retold again, yet like the choric Gower, Shakespeare, in spite of limitations, functions as an authorial medium through which eternal truth speaks.¹⁰

In the final act of the play, Pericles finds in Marina, even before he recognizes her, a truth transcending his desperate and confused melancholy:

Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou lookest
Modest as Justice, and thou seemest a palace
For the crown'd Truth to dwell in.

(5.1.123-25)

                                                                                                    Yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on king's graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act.

(5.1.140-42)

Beyond Pericles' muddled world shimmers transcendent and Platonic truth—a beatific vision as Marina transfigures from fleshly self to radiant symbol of eternal virtues: Justice, Truth, Patience. It is one of several hieratic moments in the play when the shadowy world of existence figures forth a realm of pure essence.

It is a moment Pericles only barely understands, and Gower the chorus seems to miss altogether. Outside Gower's field of vision, the text intersects the divine. Gower succeeds not as controller or interpreter of the text but as mediator of truths beyond even his own apprehension. His lack of understanding may even serve as testimony to the supreme value of the text he presents—for the truth of the text proves too rarefied for ordinary or even choric comprehension. Through the use of Gower as surrogate author, Shakespeare reduces the role of the author to humble and unknowing mediator while mystifying the author as medium through which absolute truth speaks—if not loud and clear, then at least through a textual glass darkly. In a strategic move that finds its counterpart in Ben Jonson's publication of his collected works—a bold claim to literary standing—Shakespeare, a man who succeeded in elevating his civic status to that of gentleman, aspires beyond the craft of playwriting to a mystique of literary transcendence.

Notes

1. See F. David Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982): 463.

2. For studies of Shakespeare's use of the choric Gower in Pericles, see Hoeniger, pp. 461-79; Kenneth J. Semon, “Pericles: An Order Beyond Reason,” Essays in Literature, 1 (1974): 17-27; Walter F. Eggers, Jr., “Shakespeare's Gower and the Role of the Authorial Presenter,” Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975): 434-43; and Richard Hillman, “Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985): 427-37. For textual evidence of Shakespeare's use of the Confessio Amantis, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 6 (London, 1966), pp. 349-74. All references in this essay to the Confessio Amantis are from Bullough, pp. 375-423. References to Pericles are from Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (London, 1980).

3. Quoted in Bullough, p. 349. The archaic style that apparently led Dryden to mistake Pericles for an early work could also be attributed to dual authorship. I do not intend to address the sticky issue of authorship in Pericles, except to say that if the first two acts were written by another dramatist, Shakespeare, in his revision and completion of the play, appropriated the style of the first two acts into the last three, thus achieving an overall unity and cohesion. The three dumb shows of the first half, for instance, are complemented by two more in the second half. Likewise the archaic Gower appears throughout (three times in Act 5), and though he speaks more lines of contemporary pentameter in the second half, his language is always distinctly old-fashioned. For studies of the play's deliberately archaic and medieval design, see Hoeniger, pp. 460-79, and Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972), pp. 143-76.

4. For a discussion of “mask'd Neptune,” see C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley, 1986), p. 311.

5. The iconic heads and other iconic stage images in the play are examined by Mary Judith Dunbar, “To the Judgement of Your Eye’: Iconography and the Theatrical Art of Pericles” in Shakespeare, Man of the Theatre, ed. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer (Newark, 1983), pp. 86-97.

6. For a study of literary influence as a process of an author “misreading” his predecessor, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London, 1973). Bloom argues that only poets after Milton felt such anxiety, but the tendency holds for Shakespeare as well.

7. As Coppelia Kahn remarks, Marina's “oblique, cryptic, enigmatic mode of speech links her to the riddling, incestuous princess of Antioch.” See “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore, 1980), p. 232.

8. The Confessio itself, with its structure of Latin headings interspersed throughout the text, might have suggested for Shakespeare the interplay between the choric frame and the text in Pericles. As Robert F. Yeager comments, “Gower's Latin hexameters attempt to enforce a single meaning on their context, while Chaucer's fictive narrators insist upon the opposite. … Yet each poet succeeds at his task: we are required to read the text itself as ‘other,’ as autonomous presence, actual and active—as sign, in short—rather than as transparent conduit or medium beyond, or through, which the fictive world potentially unfolds.” See “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower” in Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, 3 (1987), p. 261.

9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 146.

10. Steven Mullaney, examining Shakespeare's plays in light of the location of the Globe theater in the marginal and disreputable Liberties of London, also argues that Shakespeare aspires in Pericles to a transcendent status: “Pericles represents a radical effort to dissociate the popular stage from its cultural contexts and theatrical grounds of possibility—an effort to imagine, in fact, that popular drama could be a purely aesthetic phenomenon, free from history and from historical determination.” See The Place of the Stage (Chicago, 1988), p. 147.