[In the following essay, Solway examines the dreamlike qualities of Pericles.]

Some to the Lute, some to the Viol went,
And others chose the Cornet eloquent.
These practising the Wind, and those the Wire,
To sing Mens Triumphs, or in Heavens quire.

—Andrew Marvell, Musicks Empire

Pericles, despite its earlier composition and disputed status, best sums up, of all the late plays, the character of Shakespearean romance. Its schematic form, its “gaps” and archaisms, its unadorned outlines and loose texture enable the spectator to observe with minimal distraction the tragicomic Muse at work. Its subject then appears not as any peculiar or local set of circumstances—misunderstandings, departures, reconciliations—but as nothing less than the universal dream of retrieval and atonement. The romance may be regarded as a dream not only in its unrealistic or improbable character—the comedies would answer to this description too—but in its particular themes of the recovery of self and the domestication of time as well as in the curious structure which it exhibits.

If we consider Pericles sympathetically, resisting the temptation to dismiss it as partially spurious or inferior, we see that it resembles a kind of “thought experiment” or imaginary voyage through time to an atemporal destination. The voyage, pursued in two directions at once—forward to a redeemed and glorious future and backward to an ideal, lost condition—blends anticipation and memory, thought and dream, into a single mythic consummation. In the prologue to act 3 Gower poses the rhetorical question “Who dreamt, who thought of such a thing?”; and Lysimachus, in expressing his wonder and delight with Marina, uses similar language: “I did not think / Thou woulds't have spoke so well; ne'er dreamt thou coulds't.” The play is intended “to take [delight] our imagination,” but only if we empathize with the hero and consent to “think his pilot thought” as we navigate in the straits between experience and dream.

I

Marilyn French in Shakespeare's Division of Experience tells us that the romances “are shot through with dream devices like projection, surrogation, and transformation,” but she is content to let the matter rest on this level of analytic abstraction. It may be more helpful in considering the dream structure of Pericles to recall in greater detail what Freud has to say about the architectonic of the dream. Here we find that the “dream work” (the shaping of the dream out of the “dream thoughts”) is governed by the four functional principles of condensation, displacement, representability, and secondary elaboration.

By condensation is meant something like overdetermination—that is, each dream image is determined by several dream thoughts that contribute to the psychic density of that image. Such condensation is perhaps most evident in the charged latency of the pun, over which the romance enjoys no privileged monopoly but which nevertheless finds a most welcoming reception therein. For example, early in act 1 Pericles compares Antiochus' incestuous daughter to a viol played before her time and links the image with the concept of law in the locution lawful music. The suggestion is that a law has been violated, and an ear attuned to semantic concentricities may recall this earlier turbulence in Marina's “Never was waves nor wind more violent,” uttered some acts later. A similar fusion of image and thought occurs when Pericles, comparing himself to a treetop that protects its subject and nourishing roots, confesses to a royal apprehensiveness that makes his body “pine.” And Cerimon, the magus or dream-figure to whom we all appeal, clearly stands for the magical ceremony that controls, harmonizes, and redeems the elemental ferocity of Nature. Name, function, person, and idea dovetail into single presence.

Images can also be overloaded with contradictory meanings and associations. Fire is one of the “unfriendly elements” and is responsible with the other three for Marina's “chiding … nativity”; yet Thaisa is revived to music and fire, so that her “fire of life kindle[s] again.” Similarly the “fair viol” that was played before its time is then played, so to speak, after its time in Cerimon's command—“The viol once more.” From the standpoint of Nature the music to which Thaisa is revived is also not a lawful music. But where, earlier, social law had been violated, here it is natural law that is transcended by Asclepian sanction.

The image of the sea is equally susceptible of antithetic density: the destructive element, devouring ships and men with insatiable indifference, becomes “this great sea of joys” that is lethal only through its superabundance of sweetness.

Sometimes the paronomasia is not only to be found in the spry amalgamation of contraries, but in the incremental heightening of effect, as, for example, “He bears / A tempest which his mortal vessel tears” (italics mine). Here the related ideas of dismemberment and sorrow are brought close together—along with the complementary association of salt waters, uniting the violence of the sea with the bitter helplessness of its victims.

Displacement implies that the dream appears as “elsewhere centered,” requiring the dreamer to discount the manifest content of his dream in favor of its latent content, its raison d'être or substratum of meaning. The manifest content of our play is the story of tribulation and suffering through which we trace Pericles' coming of age, his passing through life's manifold stages of adolescent fancy, tragic bereavement, and mature reconciliation—helped along, albeit, by several lotterylike windfalls.¹ The latent content is not any particular series of crises or adventures but the storm of life itself, whirring us from our friends, in which we detect the perennial search for a divine father, a Cerimon whose “blest infusions” redeem us from our disenfranchisement. The pressure of the reality principle is unremitting and is explicitly acknowledged by Pericles: “We cannot but obey / The powers above us,” he admits with resignation. Yet the pleasure principle continues to operate, modestly triumphant in the numinous figure of Cerimon whom Pericles addresses: “Reverend sir, / The gods can have no mortal officer / More like a god than you.”

We need not dwell unduly upon either of the two remaining structural rules since they are largely self-evident. The dream cannot tolerate abstraction but must be representable in visual and aural terms. Consequently any play resembles a dream in its sensuous manifestation, but the romance with its visions, hieratic choreography, and musical interludes would satisfy the dream criterion more vividly and appositely. As for secondary elaboration—the papering over of lacunae to give a semblance of logic or coherence—we have in Pericles the choric device of Gower to explain or explain away illogicalities, asking pardon for using “one language in each several clime” (for convenience) and declaring that he stands “i' th' gaps” in order to inform or “teach” his audience.

We note as well the preponderance of other recognizable dream features: time elasticities (see the beginning of act 4 in both Pericles and The Winter's Tale), sudden changes of place, unwarranted knowledge (Diana's revelation—or Jupiter's “book” in Cymbeline), magical retributions, and the like. But these are not, properly speaking, principles of organization. Here it suffices to say there can be little doubt that the four basic structural principles adumbrated by Freud—condensation, displacement, representability, and secondary elaboration—can be distinctly observed leavening the dream thought (or the play thought) into the finished product itself.

Admittedly these principles of organization may also apply to literature in general and to poetic drama in particular, but they are most robust and ubiquitous in the romance play with its patently thaumaturgic elements, its unabashed reliance on miracle and revelation, and its congenial atmosphere of transcendent intercessions.

II

Dreams, we are told, are circuitous and intricate ways of expressing fundamental conflicts in the human soul. Occasionally a solution is offered, waiting upon decipherment; more often, perhaps, the dream presents an impossible resolution that can be experienced only at one remove from reality, in the locus amoenus of a region without geotemporal coordinates (second star to the right and straight on till morning). The conflict in the dream that is Pericles is the eternal one going on between the destructive and capricious realm of Nature, the elemental world indifferent to human desires (signified by the tempest, the realm of the “masked Neptune”), and the world of spirit or imagination, of human longing for harmony and election (signified by music and vision).

The spectator responds to the play in precisely the same way as Pericles reacts to Marina's narrative: “This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep / Did mock sad fools withal.” We recognize a world in which dreams, bearing their “goddess argentine,” are visionary and evangelical and “wishes fall out as they're willed.” But, if Pericles thinks he is dreaming Marina and the events she recounts, as in some sense he surely is, we may then ask: Who is dreaming the play? The author in his creative fit, we may reply; but we might also decide that the play is dreaming itself and that the characters are dreaming one another—or at least that both play and characters seem intended to give that impression. The play may be said to be dreaming itself in so far as it is a dream whose content is another dream—the dream of resolution, restoration, happiness, accompanied by celestial music. Further, if we are not consciously accountable for our dreams, there exists a very real sense in which our actual dreams may be conceived as dreaming themselves, that is, they proceed without the intervention of the controlling sensibility.

But the dreamer and the dream, the dancer and the dance, subsist in a web of complex intersections that cannot be so readily sundered, as Augustine had hoped when he thanked his God that he was not responsible for his dreams. So the play, as is more or less the case with every pastoral romance, represents the collective dream of desiring, impoverished humanity. Ultimately it is the spectator who is dreaming the play. Time becomes the medium of reunification: obstacles are overcome and discontinuities annealed. Illogicalities are explained away, suffering is redeemed, death conquered, envy and resentment transmuted by the dream alchemy into reconciliation and requited love.

The riddle with which the play opens, alluding to Antiochus' incestuous daughter as both a mother and a wife, finds its resolution toward the end in the (similar yet different) magnanimous contradiction of a daughter giving birth to a father: “Thou … beget'st him that did thee beget.” Marina is restored to her father, restoring him in the act of restoration, and preparing for the climactic reunion with the mother and wife who is Thaisa. It is here that the authentic riddle—the riddle of time, loss, and separation—is solved in the dream of a sublime atonement. Thus the cherubim at the gate put down their flaming swords and receive the exile, “led on by heaven and crowned with joy,” into his lost inheritance.

When the curtain falls, the dreamer awakens to find himself once again banished into the world of conflict and bereavement. But the memory persists of a magical compensatory realm in which Lord Cerimon, “this man / Through whom the gods have shown their power,” may once again, as we dream the dream at two removes, “from first to last resolve” us.

Note

1. G. Wilson Knight (The Crown of Life) suggests that the play can be seen as providing “a panorama of life from adolescent fantasy and a consequent fall, through good works to a sensible and fruitful marriage, and thence into tragedy, with a reemergence beyond mortal appearances into some higher recognition and rehabilitation.” Derek Traversi (Shakespeare: The Last Phase) thinks the play records “a symbolic pilgrimage in search of an ideal expressed in terms of devotion to chivalrous love.” (Although as Traversi also thinks that Marina is betrothed to Cerimon rather than Lysimachus, one is a little disposed, perhaps, to question his authority.)