[In the following essay, Wood uses the theme of flattery as it appears in the second act of Pericles to support an argument for Shakespeare as the play's sole author, and as the basis for the assertion that the surviving text is an amalgam of an early draft by Shakespeare and his later revisions.]

The singular play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, published in quarto as Shakespeare's in 1609, somehow failed to appear in the Folio of 1623. Though it is universally agreed that much of the latter half could have been written only by Shakespeare, his total authorship has found only sporadic acceptance. Full attribution would significantly affect our view of the poet, for it would enable us to know him as the only begetter of his closing quaternion of magnificent romances, not a mere shaper of another man's creation, much less a pupil of Beaumont and Fletcher. While some may demur to T. S. Eliot's phrase, “that very great play Pericles,”¹ all will agree that the stone which the builders rejected, if the editors of the Folio did indeed exclude it, is the cornerstone of a new Shakespearean wing.

Opinion about the authorship has altered appreciably since mid-century. In 1930 E. K. Chambers asserted, regarding the two distinct parts of Pericles, “The most obvious thing about the play is that, as it stands, it cannot all be by one writer … [most of the earlier portion] does not read like Shakespeare at any stage of development.”² A few years later George Lyman Kittredge observed, with heavier emphasis, “That Pericles is not all Shakespeare's is an obvious and undisputed fact … The first part cannot be his, except perhaps for an occasional touch.”³ However, a later trend toward an all-Shakespearean Pericles has been led by G. Wilson Knight, whose The Crown of Life was published in 1947; and the trend has continued despite the recent effort to revive the candidacy of George Wilkins as a collaborating playwright.⁴ A good many now grant that the whole play may well be Shakespeare's but insist that the version we have is a memorial reconstruction and that the language is largely that of one or more reporters. A few, however, treat the language as Shakespeare's own throughout, a view that a recent computer analysis of the style tends to support.⁵ As early as 1953 C. J. Sisson declared, “Pericles is all of a piece, and is Shakespeare's.”⁶ How? All of a piece?

It is necessary, and I believe ultimately possible, to rescue this Shakespearean text, piecemeal, from a heavy accumulation of imputations of corruption and alleged evidence of contemporary reporting and alien authorship. In the first scene, one significant passage, cited by some as the work of another poet or the garbling of a reporter, can be seen on careful inspection to be sound and distinctively Shakespearean.⁷ In the fourth scene a substantial passage, of which the true text is alleged to be irrecoverable, can be vindicated by attention to a point in Shakespearean grammar.⁸ As Sisson pointed out in 1953, “Never has a play of Shakespeare been dealt with so cavalierly by its editors.”⁹

I wish now to review a scene which has been held up as the prime example of reportorial garbling. It is the second scene of the first act, in which the young Prince Pericles is lifted from a slough of despond by a wise old counsellor and is started on his epic travels. Its theme is brooding withdrawal and swift restoration to active life. It grew, in a mind like Shakespeare's, from a glimpse, in an admitted source of the play, of the prince “withdrawing himselfe into his studie.”¹⁰ One perceptive critic has said that if this scene “was not conceived by Shakespeare, he must have had a twin.”¹¹

As the scene opens, the tender, high-minded young prince has recently returned to Tyre from Antioch, whither he had gone in high hopes of winning the hand of the daughter of King Antiochus. He loved her at first sight; but, through a rather easy riddle given to him to solve, he has discovered that she and her father are living incestuously. The king has resolved to kill him, as he has killed previous suitors whose heads decorate his premises. Pericles has hastened home under cover of night.

Now, in the second scene, Pericles is shown in seclusion, asking certain lords to let none disturb him. Like a similar Shakespearean prince caught in a situation fraught with incest and murder, he lapses into paralyzing grief, “dull-eyde melancholie.” His pensive self-description has distinct kinship with the well-known account of world-weariness that Hamlet gives to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Pericles is certain that Antiochus will overrun Tyre in order to destroy him and thus guard the heinous secret. As the prince is surrendering to utter despair, “Enter all the Lords to Pericles,” and two sycophants, very probably the lords that he has asked to guard his solitude, speak to him unctuously:

1. Lord.
Ioy and all comfort in your sacred brest.
2. Lord.
And keepe your mind till you return to vs peacefull and comfortable.

(I.ii.34-35)

The prince has thus far told nobody the cause of his condition; but the two lords are soothingly acquiescing in his withdrawal and his neglect of his royal function. At this point, however, one Helicanus, an old counsellor, soundly rebukes the toadies and takes the prince in hand. A contemporary playgoer and playwright, George Wilkins, in an often dilated and occasionally metrical account of the play in 1608, when it was a stage success but was as yet unpublished tells how Helicanus

came hastily into the chamber to him, and finding him so distasting mirth, that he abandoned all familiar society, he boldely beganne to reprooue him, and not sparingly tolde him, he did not wel so to abuse himselfe, to waste his body there with pyning sorrow, vpon whose safety depended the liues and prosperity of a whole kingdome, that it was ill in him to doe it, and no lesse in his counsell to suffer him … that while he liued so shut vp, so vnseene, so carelesse of his gouernment, order might be disorder for all him.¹²

In the play, Helicanus' chiding speech begins with a word mocking the lord's blandishment:

HEL.
Peace, peace, and giue experience tongue,
They doe abuse the King that flatter him.

.....

When signior sooth here does proclaime peace,
He flatters you, makes warre vpon your life.

(I.ii.37-45)

Pericles, infuriated, dismisses all the others and turns on Helicanus, threatening him with “the dart in Princes frownes,” shadowing the confrontation in which Lear says to Kent, “The bow is bent and drawne, make from the shaft” (Lr. I.i.145). Pericles is soon checked, however, by Helicanus, who counsels him to leave Tyre for a time and thus escape Antiochus and avert the ruthless invasion that is imminent. The strategy is as simple as the scene is clear.

It would seem obvious enough, without Wilkins' florid account, that Signior Soothe's fawning wish that Pericles' mind be kept “peacefull and comfortable” “till you return to vs” alludes to the prince's seclusion and virtual abdication of his kingly office. Most editors, however, “postulate major dislocations in this scene” (Riverside Shakespeare, 1974, p. 1486) and think that “the lines seem wildly disordered” (Complete Pelican Shakespeare, 1969, p. 1264), oddly supposing that the speaker is referring to Pericles' future travels, though these are thought of only later by Helicanus, and are then begun in secret. Further, we are told that there is no “apparent reason for the following remarks by Helicanus on flattery” (Riverside ed., p. 1486), that “there has been no flattery” (Pelican ed., p. 1288). This second misapprehension, transparent as the first, is dispelled by referring to any good English dictionary. A major aspect of flattery is soothing (OF. flater, to smooth, caress), a sense particularly frequent in Shakespeare. The comforting acquiescence of yes-men contributes to the ruin of a Richard II or a Richard Nixon. On this aspect of flattery a chapter of the Genevan Bible (1560) which I believe was running in the poet's mind as he framed this scene is especially illuminating.

The sixth chapter of Jeremiah is a diatribe against false prophets who are soothing the fears of a people about to be invaded by a ruthless army. A reader versed in scripture, coming upon Helicanus' half-mocking “Peace, peace,” thinks immediately of verse 14 (made proverbial in America by Patrick Henry): “Thei haue healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people with swete wordes, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” In the margin beside this the Genevan editors make this comment: “The false Prophets comforted them by flatterings,” confirming the use of “flatter” in Pericles; but what is startling is the fact that two of the words reiterated in the dialogue of the play, “comfort” and “flatter,” seem to echo the marginal note. Apparently Shakespeare, like Milton, occasionally assimilated the marginal notes of the Genevan Bible.¹³

It has been observed by sharp-eyed Professor Jenijoy LaBelle that in the margin above Psalm 78 the Genevan editors placed the words “Mans ingratitude,” a phrase that appears in Amiens' song in the banquet scene in As You Like It (II.vii) and nowhere else in Shakespeare. She also noticed that below the heading, in the text of the psalm, it is said that God “smote all the firstborne in Egypt” (verse 51); and recalling that Jaques, just before the banquet, said “I'le go sleepe if I can: if I cannot, I'le raile against all the first borne of Egypt” (1623 Folio, II.v.60-61), LaBelle evidently inferred some possible borrowing by Shakespeare.¹⁴ We can strengthen the inference by looking a little further into the biblical text. Two other key phrases in Amiens' song, “benefits forgot” and “friend remembered not,” echo verse 42 of the psalm, “Thei remembered not his hand” and its marginal comment, “The forgetfulnesse of Gods benefitts.” This blending by Shakespeare of Genevan text and margin is similar to what we have noticed in Pericles.

Psalm 78 is a review of the account in Exodus of God's wonderful works in delivering the enslaved Israelites, followed by a jeremiad against their thanklessness. Prominent in the earlier half of the psalm is God's provision of food. After the people had walked dryshod across the bed of the Red Sea, they “spake against God.” Could he “prepare a table in the wilderness?” they murmured (verse 19). I suggest that it was the preparation of a table in the Forest of Arden that drew the snatches of the psalm and its margin into the context of the play. To Jaques' remark about the firstborn of Egypt, Amiens replies that he is off to join the Duke, because “his banquet is prepared.” Orlando then enters with Adam, who is keeping his vow to follow him “to the last gasp.” Adam had given five hundred crowns, his life savings, to Orlando, saying

Take that, and he that doth the Rauens feede,
Yea prouidently caters for the Sparrow,
Be comfort to my age.

(II.iii.43-45)

(The raven is in Luke xii. 24; the sparrow is in Matt. x. 29.) The moment has now arrived for Adam to find the bread he has cast upon the waters.

Much has been said of late about Shakespeare and divine providence. Of course, in “Bible times” the laws of nature could be countermanded. For the Israelites a table was prepared in the wilderness when manna was sent down like rain (verse 24 of our psalm); and on a later well-known occasion loaves and fishes were multiplied. These we call miracles. In Shakespeare's romances, however, as in the modern world, God's bounty comes only through human agency or the operation of natural processes; yet it may be described as divine providence nonetheless. In the Judeo-Christian view nothing in life is purely accidental. Orlando and Adam arrive famished in the wilderness as a banquet is about to be served; Pericles' daughter Marina, like Hamlet, is saved by pirates from imminent death; Pericles arrives with a cargo of corn even as Cleon is praying for bread. These cases are simple; but the whole career of Pericles can be taken as a miracle play to show that, as he acknowledges at the opening of the second act, when washed ashore after shipwreck, the higher powers are good but inscrutable and must be accepted on faith.

The burden of Psalm 78, ingratitude, is notably recurrent in Shakespeare from first to last; and in Pericles, where manna is a conspicuous godsend, the treatment of the sin of sins is primitive and severe. Cleon, after receiving the cargo of corn, says to the prince that if any

pay you with vnthankfulness in thought,
Be it our Wiues, our Children, or our selues,
The curse of heauen and men succeed their euils.

(I.iv.102-104)

This is prophetic. Cleon's wife schemes (IV.i.) to murder Pericles' daughter and, in a scene (IV.iii.) distinctly suggesting Macbeth, persuades Cleon to condone the crime. The plot fails, but the conspirators are burned in their palace by their outraged subjects.

Our inspection of the second scene of Pericles, together with the new insights to which the study has led, asks greater editorial respect for the textual integrity of the play and for the accumulating evidence that Pericles is, as Sisson averred, all of a piece and is Shakespeare's. The statement of Chambers that a large part of the play “does not read like Shakespeare at any stage of development” declares its own subjectivity; it accords with the traditional view that Shakespeare began with the Henry VI plays and The Comedy of Errors. But such plays must have been preceded, I should think, by a good deal of practice. It is well known that Dryden said Pericles was Shakespeare's first play; Edmond Malone once thought that he wrote it about 1590-91, and I am not aware of any firm evidence that the original Pericles was written at a later date or by any other particular playwright. On the other hand, I have reason to believe that Shakespeare was acquainted with the main sources of the play when he wrote The Comedy of Errors. F. D. Hoeniger, the careful editor of the New Arden Edition, grants that there may have been a version of Pericles by Shakespeare extant in the 1590's.¹⁵ I not only concur; I submit that we probably have the first two acts of it, virtually unchanged, in the 1609 quarto, as well as some pieces of the last three acts scattered among the superb revisions he made about the time of King Lear.

How the old manuscript of Pericles may have been preserved is an interesting speculation. There is reason to suspect that about 1604 it was in the company's archives or was at any rate accessible to John Day and George Wilkins.¹⁶ Both C. J. Sisson¹⁷ and Hardin Craig¹⁸ have discovered evidence that the printer's copy for the 1609 quarto was at least in part in Shakespeare's handwriting. I think it all may have been; I am not an expert in Shakespearean spelling, and I know no one who is, but I have noticed a number of curious spellings common to the quarto of Pericles and other texts thought to be proximate to Shakespeare's autograph. At the point where the revising of the play begins, he seems to have taken a fresh sheet of paper for a thorough revision of the whole first scene of Act III where Pericles, on a ship's deck, rages Lear-like against the storm as his dying wife is giving birth to a daughter. From there on in the play, new work is mingled with old. Its printers may not have been very intelligent, but they seem to have been conscientious: only slight alterations were made when the quarto was reset for another printing by the same publisher in the same year. It would appear that the manuscript was not good printer's copy and not even a prompt copy of the play, but something a good deal more primitive.

E. K. Chambers' rejection of portions of Pericles as un-Shakespearean is in keeping with the consensus of his time; the recent transparent misapprehension of the second scene is harder to explain. True, there is a time-honored tradition among scholars that the text of the play is extremely corrupt (asserted by Malone, reaffirmed by Chambers),¹⁹ which perhaps predisposes some to believe the worst about it; but this view is coming to be recognized as an exaggeration. Some of the appearance of corruption is due to old idiom and grammar, and some is due to the printer's copy with its difficult handwriting and intermittent revisions. But, if the language is direct Shakespeare, as I think it may well be, the theory of reportorial garbling is a chimera. Certainly I can think of no reason to believe the Riverside general editor's statement that “there is every reason to believe the quarto represents a memorially reconstructed version” (p. 1511). This theory, based partly on the attribution of wild disorder to the second scene, has prospered since the publication of an article by Philip Edwards in 1952.²⁰ Its curious survival serves to illustrate a tendency among editors (lately described as pathological)²¹ to adopt plausible interpretations without critical examination.

While the verdict of a computer and a handful of scholar-believers may not find immediate wide acceptance among readers of Pericles, it may encourage greater editorial caution, and perhaps respect, in dealing with this hitherto undervalued text. In my own opinion, the text shows Shakespeare beginning to do to his own primitive play what he was doing, or perhaps had just done, to the chronicle history of King Leir. Pericles now stands, as it were, like a canvas of some great painter's apprenticeship, which the mature artist took from his attic and deftly perfected in a few prominent areas.

Notes

1. See G. Wilson Knight, Neglected Powers (London, Routledge, 1971), p. 490.

2. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1930), I, 521.

3. G. L. Kittredge, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1936), p. 1377.

4. See Roger Pryor, “The Life of George Wilkins,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972), 137-52; and Willem Schrikx, “Pericles in a Book-List of 1619,” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), 21-32.

5. See Louis Marder, “Stylometric Analysis and the Pericles Problem,” SNL 26 (Dec. 1976), 46.

6. C. J. Sisson, William Shakespeare, the Complete Works (New York, Harper, 1954), p. 1206.

7. See my note, “Shakespeare's Hand in Pericles,” N& Q [Notes and Queries] 219 (Apr. 1974), 132-33.

8. See my article, “The Shakespearean Language of Pericles,” ELN [English Language Notes] 13 (Dec. 1975), 98-103.

9. Sisson, loc. cit.

10. Laurence Twine, The Pattern of Painefull Aduentures, Geoffrey Bullough, ed., The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, VI (London, Routledge, 1966), 429.

11. D. A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, Norton, 1949), p. 347.

12. George Wilkins, The Painefull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, ed. Kenneth Muir (University Press of Liverpool, 1967), p. 21.

13. A marginal note in the Genevan Bible seems also to underlie the reading “base Judean” in Oth., V.i.347. See Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (London, Norton, 1935), pp. 90-93.

14. See Hallett Smith, Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, The Huntington Library, 1972), p. 89.

15. F. D. Hoeniger, ed. Pericles, the new Arden Edition (London, Methuen, 1963), p. lxiv.

16. See my note cited above in footnote 7.

17. Sisson, loc. cit.

18. Hardin Craig, “Pericles and The Painful Adventures,” SP [Studies in Philology] 45 (Oct. 1948), 605.

19. See Hoeniger, p. xxxii; and Chambers, I. 520.

20. Philip Edwards, “An Approach to the Problem of Pericles,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Study and Production] 5 (1952), 25-54, esp. 26-27. The theory of radical corruption in this scene had appeared earlier. See Sina Spiker, “George Wilkins and the Authorship of Pericles,” SP 30 (Oct. 1933), 560. My previous comments on the myth include “The Running Image in Pericles,” ShakS [Shakespeare Studies] 5 (1969), 241, and “Pericles, I.ii.” N&Q 212 (Apr. 1967), 141-42.

21. John C. Meagher, “The Pathology of Editorial Annotation,” Shakespeare 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 244-59.