SOURCE: Delvecchio, Doreen and Antony Hammond. Introduction to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, edited by Doreen Delvecchio and Antony Hammond, pp. 1-78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Delvecchio and Hammond trace the production history of Pericles from the seventeenth through the twentieth century.]

PERFORMANCE AND RECEPTION

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

From the beginning Pericles has been a play that has divided opinion. It is evident that it was a popular play on stage, and this success surely was at least in part owing to the opportunities it (like the other romances) offered for theatrical spectacle and musical embellishment. The implications for staging found in the quarto text are quite elaborate, though often ambiguous. Many of them are discussed in the Commentary, but this is a good place to remark on their scope.

The opening scene, with the grim display of severed heads, is one. Act 2 presents many challenges for staging, such as the location of King Simonides and Thaisa during the parade of the Knights and presentation of the impresas (2.2), and how exactly the stage was disposed for that scene. The royal party ‘withdraws’ at the end of the scene while the tilting takes place offstage and the main stage is set for the banquet in 2.3, an elaborate scene requiring torches and pages, and later music and dancing, all of which entail use of the maximum resources of the company. Unless 2.4 takes place on the upper stage (for which there is no evidence), there must also be a busy clearing of the banquet before the scene can take place.

Storms in the Elizabethan theatre were often accompanied by ‘effects’, of which the cannon-ball for thunder, fireworks for lightning, and some way of simulating wind sound were the commonest. In as tempestuous a play as Pericles, such effects were almost certainly used in 3.0-3.1, and probably also in 2.0-2.1. The staging of 3.1, however, demands the abandonment of all naturalistic criteria (which few editors seem capable of), so that the main stage becomes the deck of the ship, and the stage doors may be taken to lead below deck. Any attempt to use the stage otherwise would place the actors in a huddle upstage in what is plainly the ‘biggest’ scene in the play.

More elaborate staging occurs in 3.2, the sudden safe haven of Cerimon's house after the howling of the storm just ended, where in Thaisa's revival many properties are called for by Cerimon (and presumably supplied) and use is made of music. The disposition of the coffin on the stage is a bit of a puzzle, for its contents would be invisible to those in the yard unless it were raised and tilted, which seems unlikely.

There are more lively scenes in Act 4 such as the melodramatic frustration of Leonine's attempt to murder Marina by the Pirates' apparently instantaneous appearance and disappearance, and the sudden transition into the Miteline brothel; sandwiched between the two brothel scenes is the scene at Tarsus, and the visual display of Marina's tomb there, Pericles' mimed passion, and donning of sackcloth. The scenic requirements of Act 5 are complex, but probably best resolved by staging it like 3.1, with the main stage the deck of the ship, and the doors leading either to the ship's rail, or below decks, or both; this is the only scene in the play which seems to mandate use of a discovery space, though it would come in handy elsewhere (e.g. 4.4). The music of the spheres (played, no doubt, from the musicians' gallery) and the theophany of Diana comprise the single most spectacular scenic element in the play, though there is ample opportunity to make Diana's temple in the final scene a splendid tableau.

Companies in recent years who have staged the play in large, well-equipped theatres (RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company production] 1958, Stratford 1973 and 1986, National [The (Royal) National Theatre, London production] 1994) have seized upon all these opportunities, and invented many more (no director, apparently, can resist staging the Knights' joust between 2.2 and 2.3, even though the quarto is very careful to leave it out). We may confidently assume that the sharers at the Globe¹ seized with equal enthusiasm upon the play's scenographic potential, though as usual there are no useful eye-witness accounts.²

Early references to Pericles are mainly complimentary. The very rare pamphlet Pimlyco. Or, Runne Red-Cap. Tis a mad world at Hogsdon (1609, STC [A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of the English Books Printed Abroad] 19936) is influenced by the play, since it involves a tribute to Skelton, and refers to ‘learned Gower’ on b2^r; the reference to Pericles occurs on c1^r:

Amazde I stood to see a Crowd
Of Ciuill Throats stretchd out so lowd:
(As at a New-play) all the Roomes
Did swarme with Gentiles mixt with Groomes.
So that I truly thought, all These
Came to see Shore, or Pericles.(3)

The Prologue to The Hogge Hath Lost His Pearl optimistically concludes:

And if it proue so happy as to please,
Weele say tis fortunat like Pericles.(4)

The views of the contrary party emerged presently. Ben Jonson, much disgruntled at the failure of his play The New Inn, attacked contemporary popular theatrical taste in the poem, ‘The just indignation of the author …’ (sometimes known as ‘Ode to Himself’, written in 1629 and appended to the printed text of his play). He singled Pericles out for particular condemnation:

                    No doubt some mouldy tale,
                    Like Pericles; and stale
As the Shrieves crusts, and nasty as his fishscraps, out of every dish,
Thrown forth, and rak't into the common tub

(lines 21-5)⁵

This poem was by no means Jonson's only diatribe against the kind of play he took Pericles to be, and the kind of play which was attracting audiences in droves, while they slighted what he regarded as his own more serious work. The best-known such attack is found in the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour (not printed in the first edition of 1601; included with the Folio of 1616):

He rather prays, you will be pleased to see
One such today as other plays should be;
Where neither Chorus wafts you ore the seas;
Nor creaking throne comes downe, the boyes to please;
Nor nimble squibbe is seene, to make afear'd
The gentlewomen; nor roul'd bullet heard
To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drumme
Rumbles, to tell you when the storme doth come

(lines 13-20)

The tenor of this objection lies against abuses of the unities, and against the use of what we now call special effects. Jonson believed Shakespeare, by abusing principled dramaturgy in this way, to be belittling the dramatist's profession.⁶ He returned to the fray in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, where the ‘author’ declares ‘Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries’ (lines 128-30). Jonson's attitude towards dramaturgy has served as a stick to beat Pericles with ever since.⁷

How long Pericles stayed in the King's Men's repertory is anyone's guess, but the continuing production of quarto editions suggests it remained popular. Two references suggest that its reputation as a successful play remained high even after the closure of the theatres. The first occurs in Samuel Sheppard's The times Displayed (1646); it is in the sixth sestiad which, unlike the others (which are religious debates), is a lament by Apollo on the degenerate state of poetry:

See him whose Tragick Sceans EURIPIDES
Doth equal, and with SOPHOCLES we may
Compare great SHAKESPEAR ARISTOPHANES
Never like him, his Fancy could display,
Witness [t]he Prince of Tyre, his Pericles,
His sweet and his to be admired lay
He wrote of lustful Tarquins rape shews he
Did understand the depth of Poesie.(8)

To be sure, this is a literary, not a theatrical, appreciation: though Sheppard began his literary life as Jonson's amanuensis in 1606, this is clearly an old man's literary retrospective (there is, for instance, no mention of the closing of the theatres).

A much more interesting, because often misrepresented, reference is found in John Tatham's prefatory poem to Brome's A Joviall Crew (1652):

There is a Faction (Friend) in Town, that cries,
Down with the Dagon-Poet, Johnson dies.
His works were too elaborate, not fit
To come within the Verge, or face of Wit.
Beaumont and Fletcher (they say) perhaps, might
Passe (well) for currant Coin, in a dark night:
But Shakespeare the Plebean Driller, was
Founder'd in's Pericles, and must not pass.
And so, at all men flie, that have but been
Thought worthy of Applause: therefore, their spleen.

(A4^v)

The whole poem is quite clever, as such things go, attacking the malice of those that condemn ‘the Beams that warm'd you, and the Stage’. If the two lines about Shakespeare are taken out of context, they appear condemnatory; in context, the implication is clear: Pericles was considered by Tatham a success.

But the climate was about to change. Downes says Pericles was acted at the Cock-pit in Drury Lane, by Rhodes's company, with Betterton in the title role, in the 1659-60 season.⁹ Following this the play's long theatrical neglect began.¹⁰ A modified version of Jonson's view prevailed: changing literary and theatrical fashion found romance plots and subjects outmoded;¹¹ and by the time Romanticism might have restored interest in Pericles, at least for its spectacular aspects, its virtue had been sullied by the doubts concerning its authorship.

NINETEENTH CENTURY

Samuel Phelps's production at Sadler's Wells in 1854, which ran for fifty-five performances, was a grand tribute to Victorian scenography. Phelps, normally a purist in his productions, cut Gower, all references to incest, and the brothel scenes; but according to the critic of the Athenaeum, the scenery was ‘several years in preparation, and the immediate expense of the production is scarcely less than 1,000 l'.¹²The Times treated the venture sardonically:

Not a single opportunity is missed for hanging on a wondrous picture or group that shall hide the paucity of the dramatic interest. When Pericles is thrown upon the sands, it is with the very best of rolling seas … when the storm afterwards rocks his vessel, it rocks in real earnest, and spectators of delicate stomachs may have uneasy reminiscences … An admirably equipped Diana, with her car in the clouds, orders his course to her sacred city, to which he is conducted by a moving panorama of excellently-painted coast scenery. The interior of the temple, where the colossal figure of the many-breasted goddess stands in all its glory amid gloriously attired votaries, is the last ‘bang’ of the general magnificence.

However, ‘the personages in general do little else than walk on and walk off the stage, without betraying or exciting an emotion’.¹³ The last English production before the twentieth century was the bizarre John Coleman farrago at Stratford-upon-Avon. The veteran Coleman had produced his own revised script of Pericles, and the hard-pressed Frank R. Benson in a weak moment gave Coleman permission to produce it, and only ten days in which to do so. The results were catastrophic.¹⁴

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPECTACLE

The twentieth century has seen the revival of the play's fortunes: a slow, hesitant revival which nonetheless has led to productions of Pericles having these days become a quite common theatrical event.¹⁵ The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1947 production was a relic of an earlier age; director Nugent Monck omitted the first act, on the grounds that ‘it is irrelevant and not the work of William Shakespeare’, a curious portmanteau judgement. Barry Jackson's scenes were likewise old-fashioned. … In 1958 Tony Richardson directed a more complete version, in which Gower (Edric Connor) became a calypso singer; Richard Johnson played Pericles, Geraldine McEwan, Marina, and a young Edward de Souza, Lysimachus. The design was by Loudon Sainthill. …

Unfortunately, all productions since then by the major companies have treated Pericles as a lame-duck text, and both rearranged it and Wilkinsised it in varying degrees.¹⁶ The last main-stage production at Stratford-upon-Avon was Terry Hands's in 1969, designed by John Bradley, which featured an unchanging bare stage dominated by a hanging dodecahedron which puzzled all reviewers, and very sixties-ish costuming, or lack thereof. … Emrys James played Gower as a Welsh bard, …, but the most unusual feature of the casting was the doubling of Thaisa and Marina by Susan Fleetwood. This peculiar idea necessitated the use of another actress for Marina in the final scene, and provoked an objection from Harold Hobson. By returning Fleetwood to Thaisa's part in the final scene, and by not attempting to age her, he wrote, the impression was given ‘that Pericles is in danger of misbehaving with his own child. So the play appears to have come full circle, and to finish where it began, in incest. This is clean contrary to what I understand to be Mr Hands's intention.’¹⁷

Jean Gascon directed Pericles for the Shakespeare Festival (as it was then called) of Stratford, Ontario, in 1973, in a production that one reviewer not given to unnecessary enthusiasm called ‘superlative theatre, and an illumination of the play that came as a revelation … not conflicting with one's own response to the written text, but making one aware that, by comparison, that response was meager and imaginatively undernourished’.¹⁸ Nicholas Pennell was much admired as Pericles, as was Edward Atienza's voice-over Gower; whilst Leslie Hurry's storybook costumes also met with approval. In retrospect, however, it can be seen, even for its own time, to have been an old-fashioned production.

Arguably the best large-scale production of the play in recent years has been that at Stratford, Ontario in 1986. Director Richard Ouzounian clearly regarded the work with enthusiasm and, aided by an excellent cast, caught much of the play's appeal both as fairy-tale and as profound myth; all this despite the intrusion of some of the Oxford adaptation's fantasies. Like Tony Richardson, he emphasised Gower's otherness geographically and culturally: Renée Rogers belted out the choruses in pop—soul fashion, nearly becoming the star of the show in the process.¹⁹ The resources of Guthrie's famous stage were often used to excellent advantage, as for instance when Pericles was cast upon the angry shore in Pentapolis, hurtling up from the vomitorium as if cast by a gigantic wave. Geraint Wyn Davies, as Pericles, contrived a more convincing progression from naïve youth to exhausted age than any other recent exponent, and the central scenes (2.2 and 2.3) were deftly handled, thanks to the excellent acting of Goldie Semple as Thaisa, and the wonderfully old-King-Cole-style Simonides of the inimitable William Needles.²⁰

MINIMALISM

The tradition of spectacular production has thus been given every opportunity. The play works equally well, however, in more restrained or economical settings: it does not depend upon expensive sets and prodigies from the audiovisual departments to make its effect. Ron Daniels made his début with the Royal Shakespeare Company by directing it in 1979 at The Other Place, a carefully minimalist production, which was liked by reviewers in direct proportion to their dislike of The Merry Wives of Windsor on the main stage; Peter McEnery was much admired as Pericles. More recently, the Swan was in 1989 the venue for another directorial début, David Thacker's. This modest production, vaguely Georgian in costuming, reverted to 1958's idea of a West Indian Gower (Rudolph Walker), without the calypso music; he carried and referred to a big book, and remained on stage throughout.²¹ Nigel Terry played a measured Pericles; many reviewers took objection to Cerimon's being played by a woman (Helen Blatch), a practice which seems now to have become inevitable. This is the only RSC production to have an archival videotape; it is a scandal that the tape is so poor that only a handful of brightly lit scenes can be made out at all: a twentieth-century equivalent of a ‘bad quarto’.²²

A remarkable student production (professionally directed: Mimi Mekler) by the joint Erindale-Sheridan Theatre and Drama Studies programme of the University of Toronto at Erindale showed how the minimalist approach can be carried to a surprisingly successful extreme (1993). The tiny, wingless theatre, and the small cast (eleven) were treated as opportunities for theatrical inventiveness, rather than as limitations. Cuts were relatively few: more of the text was retained, and in the original order, than in any of the professional productions described here. The small cast of course entailed elaborate doubling; the only actor who did not double was the Pericles. The set was a bare stage with one corner curtained off, with a raised platform, to become scenes ‘within’. A cloth backdrop became a wall with the heads of the unsuccessful princes in 1.1 (leaning against it from behind, the actors seemed like bas-reliefs). The director's best ideas came in the Pentapolis scenes, the fairy-tale comic centre of the play, which Mekler treated admirably as a series of children's play-acting games. So, the rusty armour in 2.1 was a mesh gown with tin can tops sewn into it, which looked funny until all the Knights appeared so clad; their shields were dustbin lids, and their procession before Simonides and Thaisa joked up with swingy music; the combats were included, the funniest being when Pericles and a Knight shook hands, and then made their forefingers their swords. The brothel scenes were aided by the addition of two girls acting as tarts most suspicious of the unwanted newcomer; the appearance of the ‘disguised’ Lysimachus in a huge crow-beaked mask reduced the cast to hysterics. The sexual politics of the last Cleon-Dioniza scene were emphasised by having them in bed, with Dioniza using her sexuality to overcome Cleon's feeble moral resistance: a nice idea in juxtaposition with the brothel. All in all, this was a remarkable achievement, considering the limitations of the forces involved.²³ Perhaps Pericles' future fortunes lie in directions such as these.

NATIONAL 1994

Curiously, the National (now Royal National) Theatre had not mounted Pericles until Phyllida Lloyd's production at the Olivier Theatre, May 1994. And certainly, this, the most recent staging of the play at the time of writing, gives cause for thinking that minimalism is the better choice. The production has become notorious for its cost (shades of Phelps) and for its problems with stage technology, which caused the cancellation of the first preview, and its opening without a dress rehearsal. A useful account of the production has been published²⁴ which, besides chronicling some of the difficulties, is helpfully illustrated.

The production epitomised the difficulties that the current approach to main-stage productions of the classics blunders into. It is assumed that today's visually oriented audiences, brought up on blockbuster movies and musicals, will tolerate classical theatre only if it is produced in a spectacular fashion. The technical facilities of modern theatres make directors feel obliged to use them (the tilting revolve in the Olivier was the cause of much of Lloyd's misery), and since for all sorts of practical reasons the cast has very little time to accustom themselves to their costumes, the lighting, and other technical aspects, the traditional ecology of the theatre—that it is a place for acting—is once more threatened, as it was in the worst days of nineteenth-century pictorialism. The play becomes the excuse for the display of technological gee-whizzery, rather than the technology's being placed at the service of the play. It is a sad tale, apologetically documented by Reynolds. …

The production earned mixed reviews and smallish audiences. Michael Billington rightly complained that Lloyd's emphasis on dance and music left the language undervalued, and that ‘propulsive narrative is too often sacrificed to arresting detail’ (Guardian Weekly, 26 June 1994). Others were referring to it as Pericles—the Musical; Benedict Nightingale in The Times (23 May 1994) gave a full, and devastating, description of all the visual effects in language recalling his predecessor's report on Phelps, 140 years before. However, despite the difficulties created by the staging, by some very strange costuming, and by the interpolation of some perfectly gratuitous ‘production numbers’, such as the roaring twenties musical interlude beginning the brothel scene, the performance had all sorts of genuine theatrical imagination. The use of simultaneous staging, especially of 3.3 and 3.4, was imaginative …, and at last there was a real theophany. … Though generally under-cast, there were some good performances, most especially Henry Goodman's audience-engaging, charming Gower. But overall, Lloyd's was as much an adaptation of the play as Lillo's, Phelps's, or Coleman's.

Clearly, the ecological balance between acting and mise-en-scène has swung to an extreme at present; it's time for another Jonson (or Guthrie, or Peter Brook) to give everyone what for, and begin the return swing.

Notes

1. There is a commonly held view that the scenographic characteristics of the last plays imply that they were originally written for the Blackfriars. But Per. [Pericles], which shares these characteristics, is too early for the Blackfriars; as the title page of the quarto makes clear, it was a Globe play. This casts doubt on the whole theory.

2. Hoeniger [Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, 1963 (Arden Shakespeare)], p. lxvi, quotes a letter from Sir Gerald Herbert, with its account of a court performance of Per. on 20 May 1619, but Herbert was much more interested in the fancy banquet than the play; the only useful information is that the long interval was taken after Act 2.

3. ‘Shore’ is perhaps the lost play by Chettle and Day performed by Worcester's Men in 1603, about Jane Shore, King Edward IV's celebrated mistress.

4. a3^v (STC [A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of the English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640. First compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. Second edition, revised and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katherine F. Pantzer, 3 vols., 1986, 1976, 1991] 23658). The play was seen by Sir Henry Wotton on 21 February 1613.

5. The ‘common tub’ consisted of the unattractive leftovers from City feasts, collected for the poor.

6. The date of this Prologue is in dispute; Herford and Simpson [C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, II vols., 1925–52] believe it to have been written during or shortly after the War of the Theatres, but there is no external evidence for this, and it might well express Jonson's mature dislike of the romances.

7. Most recently in Benedict Nightingale's review of the National 1994 production, which follows the grand tradition of theatre reviewing in berating Pericles' plot for its lack of realism (The Times, 23 May 1994).

8. Stanza 9, p. 22 (c3^v).

9. Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage, 1708, p. 18.

10. Broken only by the three performances of Lillo's Marina in 1738.

11. Not that the other romances did better: WT [The Winter’s Tale] was not performed; Cym. [Cymbeline], adapted by D'Urfey, was given twice. Only Temp. [The Tempest], first adapted by Davenant and Dryden, and subsequently further humiliated by Shadwell, and Webberised into a musical, was a roaring success.

12. October 1854. A thousand pounds in 1854 would have been the equivalent of perhaps £250,000 today.

13. 16 October 1854.

14. J. C. Trewin has a very entertaining account of it in his Benson and the Bensonians (1960), pp. 115-19.

15. No attempt is being made here to record all productions of the play. Productions in translation, and many professional, as well as semi-professional and amateur productions (with one exception), are necessarily and deliberately excluded. Details of many of these can be found in Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals, ed. Samuel L. Leiter, 1986, pp. 555-67; and in vol. xxi of Gale's Shakespearean Criticism series (1991).

16. In his chapter on Pericles, Roger Warren (Staging Shakespeare's Late Plays, 1990) provides an overview, often in fascinating detail, of the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company production] 1969 and 1989 and Stratford 1986 productions, but his missionary view of the Oxford adaptation colours and distorts many of his statements and all of his opinions.

17. Sunday Times, 6 April 1969. No theatrical judgement, however sane, can 'scape whipping. Warren contrives to argue that incest ‘is a possibility raised by the text itself, a danger narrowly averted’ (p. 233). This seemingly incredible misprision arises from a doggedly post-modern misreading of 5.1.190 (see Commentary).

18. Berners W. Jackson, ‘Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario, 1973’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 24 (1973), 408.

19. It is curious that no director has attempted to do the obvious, that is to show Gower as a familiar figure from the past, a celebrated storyteller whose speech and looks are of a previous age.

20. It is most regrettable that the absurd conditions imposed by Canadian Equity and endorsed by the Stratford Archive make it impossible to include photographs of this remarkable production.

21. A useful caution against over-reliance on reviews emerges here: Michael Coveney (Financial Times, 14 September 1989) condemned Walker as ‘haltingly half-comprehensible’; Michael Billington (Guardian, same date) says he articulated beautifully. Billington was right: the videotape confirms it.

22. The tape of Stratford 1986 is equally frustrating, in a different way: for a vast chunk of the play the sound track is audible, but the video picture has disappeared in a jumble of mistracking. A plague on both their houses.

23. It seems to have shared many features with Ultz's production for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1983): see Leiter, Shakespeare Around the Globe, p. 557.

24. Peter Reynolds's Pericles: Text Into Performance, published by the Education Department of the National Theatre (undated, but obviously 1994).