[In the following essay, Bloom presents an overview of Pericles, concentrating on the last three acts.]

Shakespeare was occupied with Pericles in the winter of 1607-8, though scholars are not able to define the precise nature of that occupation. The first two acts of the play are dreadfully expressed, and cannot have been Shakespeare's, no matter how garbled in transmission. We have only a very bad quarto, but the inadequacy of so much of the text is probably not the reason why Pericles was excluded from the First Folio. Ben Jonson had a hand in editing the First Folio, and he had denounced Pericles as “a mouldy tale.” Presumably Jonson and Shakespeare's colleagues also knew that one George Wilkins was the primary author of the first two acts of the play. Wilkins was a lowlife hack, possibly a Shakespearean hanger-on, and Shakespeare may have outlined Acts I and II to Wilkins and told him to do the writing. Even by the standards of Shakespeare's London, Wilkins was an unsavory fellow—a whoremonger, in fact, a very relevant occupation for a coauthor of Pericles, though the superb brothel scenes are Shakespeare's work.

Pericles is not only uneven (and mutilated) but very peculiar in genre. It features choral recitations by a presenter, the medieval poet John Gower, who is atrocious in the first two acts but improves markedly thereafter. The play resorts to frequent dumb show, in the manner of The Murder of Gonzago, revised by Hamlet into The Mousetrap. Most oddly, it has only a sporadic continuity: we are given episodes from the lives of Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and their daughter Marina. The episodes do not necessarily generate one another, as they would in history, tragedy, and comedy, but Shakespeare had exhausted all of those modes. After Antony and Cleopatra, we have seen the retreat from inwardness in Coriolanus and in Timon of Athens.

It would be absurd to ask, What sort of personality does Shakespeare's Pericles possess? Libraries have been written on the personality of Hamlet, but Pericles has none whatsoever. Even Marina has every virtue but no personality: there cannot be that individual a pathos in the emblematic world of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Shakespeare was not in flight from the human, but he had turned to representing something other than the shared reality of Falstaff and Rosalind, Hamlet and Cleopatra, Shylock and Iago. Pericles and Marina are a universal father and daughter; his only importance is that he is her father, who loses her and then receives her back again, and she matters only as a daughter, who suffers separation from her father, and then is restored to him. I am not suggesting that they are archetypes or symbols, but only that their relationship is all that interests Shakespeare. Lear is everything and nothing in himself, and Cordelia, in much briefer compass, also contains multitudes. Pericles is just real enough to suffer trauma, and Marina is strong enough to resist being debauched, but both scarcely exist as will, cognition, desire. They are not even passive beings. In that sense alone, the jealous Ben Jonson was right: Pericles and Marina are figures in a moldy tale, an old story always being retold.

Both performances of Pericles that I have attended, some thirty years apart, were student productions, and both confirmed what many critics long have maintained: even the first two acts are quite playable. Except for the astonishing recognition scene between Pericles and Marina in Act V, and the two grotesquely hilarious brothel scenes in Act IV, very little in the play can be judged dramatic, and yet performance somehow transfigures even the ineptitudes of George Wilkins. This puzzles me, because bad direction and bad acting have converted me to Charles Lamb's party: it is, alas, better, especially now, to read Shakespeare than to see him travestied and deformed. Pericles is the exception; it is the only play in Shakespeare I would rather attend again than reread, and not just because the text has been so marred by transmission. Perhaps because he declined to compose the first two acts, Shakespeare compensated by making the remaining three acts into his most radical theatrical experiment since the mature Hamlet of 1600-1601. Pericles consistently is strange, but it has nothing as startling as the gap in representation that Shakespeare cuts into Hamlet from Act II, Scene ii, through Act III, Scene ii. But then what is being represented in the last three acts of Pericles?

Gower, speaking the Epilogue, tells us that Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina are “Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last,” so that the play represents the triumph of virtue over fortune, thanks to the intercession of “the gods,” which must mean Diana in particular. Shakespeare, in his final phase, frequently seems a rather belated acolyte of Diana. No dramatist, though, would have understood better than Shakespeare how impossible it is to bring off a staged representation of triumphant chastity, virginal or married. Shakespeare's poem The Phoenix and the Turtle is exactly relevant on this subject:

Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts, can so remain.

Whether the heart's reasons can be staged was always Shakespeare's challenge, and kept his art a changing one. How to represent the mystery of married chastity—“If what parts, can so remain”—remained a perplexity to the end. Shakespeare's Gower and Pericles so remove us from our world (except for the whorehouse scenes!) that the play indeed answers the Bawd's rhetorical question: “What have we to do with Diana?” (IV.ii.148).

Essentially, there are only two deities in Pericles, Neptune and Diana, and Diana wins. What are we to make of that victory? Neptune has oppressed Pericles, almost in the pattern of Poseidon's operations against Odysseus. Northrop Frye, noting the processional form of Pericles, remarks that the play's manner of presenting its action makes it one of the world's earliest operas, and then compares it to Eliot's The Waste Land, and necessarily also to Eliot's “Marina.” I suppose that Diana's triumph is operatic enough, as is Marina's victory over both the staff and the clientele of the brothel. Frye's reading of the play, rather like Wilson Knight's more baroque interpretation, seems to me a little remote from Pericles's curious and deliberate emptiness, akin to much of The Waste Land and Eliot's “Marina.”

Such an emptying-out of Shakespeare's characteristic richness is a kenosis of sorts; the most sophisticated of all poet-playwrights surrenders his greatest powers and originalities—God becoming man, as it were. Frye calls Pericles “psychologically primitive,” but this is true only in the sense of Shakespeare's knowing abnegation of inwardness, not in asking the audience for a primitive response. Our participation is not uncritical; we give up the Shakespearean lifelike, but not the Shakespearean selfsame. Gower is there to keep telling us that this is a play, but so redundant a message takes us back from Pericles and Marina not to “mouldy tales” and the authority of the archetypal, but to Shakespeare himself. The audience does not attend without the foregrounding of knowledge as to who the playwright is, and how different Pericles is from the more than thirty plays preceding it. Nor can anyone now read Pericles without the awareness that the creator of Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra is giving us a protagonist who is merely a cipher, a name upon the page. Wonder is always where one starts and ends with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare himself, as poet-playwright, is the largest provocation to wonder in Pericles. One suspects that the scenario for the play originated with Shakespeare, but that he had some distaste for what was to go into the first two acts and casually assigned them to a crony, Wilkins.

Pericles begins at Antioch, where its founder and ruler, Antiochus the Great, gleefully piles up the heads of suitors for his unnamed daughter, executing them for not solving a riddle whose solution would reveal his ongoing incest with her. Getting the riddle right, Pericles of Tyre flees for his life. After making a voyage to Tharsus, to relieve starvation there, the colorless hero suffers his first shipwreck, and then finds himself ashore at Pentapolis, where he marries Thaisa, daughter of the local king. All this out of the way, Shakespeare himself takes over to start Act III. Pericles and Thaisa, who is about to deliver their infant daughter Marina, are voyaging back to Tyre; Neptune acts up, and we rejoice to hear Shakespeare's great voice as Pericles invokes the gods against the storm:

The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! O, still
Thy deaf'ning, dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble sulphurous flashes!

[III.i.1-6]

That is Herman Melville's Shakespeare, though Ahab, if he spoke these lines, would convert them to defiance. Pericles is no Ahab, and endures the apparent death of Thaisa in giving birth to Marina. He then yields to the sailors' superstition that a corpse on board will sink the ship, meaning that his wife's coffin must go overboard. The farewell of Pericles to his bride also found its way to Melville's imagination.

A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: th'unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells.

[III.i.56-64]

Resolute to forfeit mimetic realism, Shakespeare never lets us know whether Thaisa is dead indeed. When, in the next scene, the lady is either revived or resurrected by Cerimon of Ephesus, where her coffin apparently has landed, she comes awake with the outcry “O dear Diana,” thus invoking the particular goddess of the Ephesians. In the next scene, at Tharsus, commending the infant Marina's care and upbringing to the governor, Cleon, and his wife, Dionyza (whom Pericles had rescued from famine), the Prince of Tyre vows “by bright Diana” to remain unshorn until Marina be married. Subsequently, the restored Thaisa goes off to abide at the temple of Diana in Ephesus as the goddess's high priestess. The play's final reconciliations will conclude there, and I think it important to observe that Shakespeare avoids the patterns of Christian miracle plays in thus exalting Diana of the Ephesians. It is as though St. Paul never came to Ephesus: the divinity that haunts Shakespeare's late romances is located by him outside the Christian tradition. Shakespeare, in his dying, may have returned to his father's Catholicism, but like Wallace Steven's reputed deathbed conversion, this would have been another instance of the imaginative achievement going one way and the personal life quite another.

When I think of Pericles, I remember first not the final scene in Diana's temple, where Thaisa is reunited with Pericles and Marina, but the two superbly vivid episodes of Marina's defiance in the brothel, and then the sublime recognition scene between Marina and Pericles on board ship at the onset of Act V. If the remainder of Pericles were worthy of these great confrontations, then the play would stand with the strongest of Shakespeare's, which, alas, it does not. Act IV, at its best and worst, reads like a Jacobean Perils of Pauline, with Marina always on the verge of being either murdered or raped. For the crime of outshining their natural daughter, Marina's guardians arrange for Marina to be slaughtered by the seaside. In the nick, pirates arrive and rescue her, but only to sell Marina to a brothel in Mytilene. The great Flaubert, in his final days, is reported to have been considering for his next novel the ideal setting “a whorehouse in the provinces.” Returning to the spirit of the wonderfully rancid Measure for Measure, Shakespeare surpasses all possible rivals in the gusto with which he portrays the oldest profession:

PAND.
Boult!
BOULT.
Sir?
PAND.
Search the market narrowly; Mytilene is full of gallants. We lost too much money this mart by being too wenchless.
BAWD.
We were never so much out of creatures. We have but poor three, and they can do no more than they can do; and they with continual action are even as good as rotten.
PAND.
Therefore let's have fresh ones, whate'er we pay for them. If there be not a conscience to be us'd in every trade, we shall never prosper.
BAWD.
Thou say'st true; 'tis not our bringing up of poor bastards, as I think I have brought up some eleven—
BOULT.
Ay, to eleven; and brought them down again. But shall I search the market?
BAWD.
What else, man? The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden.
PAND.
Thou sayest true; there's two unwholesome, a' conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.
BOULT.
Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms. But I'll go search the market.

[IV.ii.1-23]

Only in the brothel scenes does Shakespeare's mimetic art return, wonderfully refreshing in the stiff world of Pericles. Pandar, Bawd, and Boult have personalities; Pericles, Marina, and Thaisa do not. Before the formidable, indeed divine (being Diana-like) virtue of Marina, these splendid disreputables must yield, while inaugurating a mode of irony frequently imitated since. Pandar presages the stance of Peachum and Lockit in Gay's The Beggar's Opera: “If there be not a conscience to be us'd in every trade, we shall never prosper.” The wind of mortality blows upon overworked whores and their Transylvanian client, and upon Shakespeare also (by some accounts). Anticipating a high market—a wealthy prospective client—for Marina, the Bawd makes the most poetic remark of the play: “I know he will come in our shadow, to scatter his crowns in the sun.” But they do not know that Marina is in fact their nemesis. Men march out of the brothel asking one another, “Shall's go hear the vestals sing?,” and soon enough the three worthies are in the position of the unhappy kidnappers in O. Henry's “The Ransom of Red Chief”:

PAND.
Well, I had rather than twice the worth of her she had ne'er come here.
BAWD.
Fie, fie upon her! she's able to freeze the god Priapus, and undo a whole generation. We must either get her ravish'd or be rid of her. When she should do for clients her fitment and do me the kindness of our profession, she has me her quirks, her reasons, her master-reasons, her prayers, her knees; that she would make a puritan of the devil, if he would cheapen a kiss of her.
BOULT.
Faith, I must ravish her, or she'll disfurnish us of all our cavalleria, and make our swearers priests.

[IV.vi.1-12]

They are already defeated, and they know it; their comic despair exceeds their bravado, and neither they nor we believe that Boult will ever ravish her. The governor of Mytilene, Lysimachus, arrives, intending to be the designated taker of Marina's maidenhead, and departs in love with her, and in revulsion at his own purpose. Boult next falls before her, and goes forth to advertise to Mytilene that Marina will teach singing, weaving, sewing, and dancing, after she is lodged “amongst honest women,” as soon she is. Clearly we have to regard Marina's chastity as being mystical or occult; it cannot be violated, because Diana protects her own. Marina, after her family's reunion, can be married to Lysimachus, both because he now knows that her social rank is at least as high as his own, and also because Diana (in Pericles) accepts married chastity as an alternative for her votaress. The comedy in the brothel scenes is among Shakespeare's most advanced; only the irony of Marina's invulnerable status maintains the dramatic structure's coherence, since we observe three sensible sexual pragmatists confronted by a magical maiden whom they cannot suborn, that being well beyond their power. They discover that indeed they have to do with Diana (to answer the Bawd's earlier question), who necessarily undoes them.

What remains is the summit of Pericles, the magnificent recognition scene between father and daughter, the one crucial event toward which the entire play has been plotted. Pericles, having been told by Cleon that Marina is dead, is in trauma. Unkempt and barely nourished, he lies on the deck of his ship, rather like Kafka's undead Hunter Gracchus on his death ship. But Gracchus is the Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman, caught forever in cycle, and Pericles at last is on the verge of release from his passive yielding to a procession of catastrophes. Critics rather oddly compare Pericles and Marina to Antiochus the Great and his incestuous paramour, the nameless daughter, the supposed point being that Pericles and Marina evade incest. The danger is only in the critics, and not in the play, since it is Lysimachus who authorizes Marina to act as therapist for Pericles, and the reformed governor both is in love with the maiden and hardly desires to join himself to the profession of the gaudy trio of Pandar, Bawd, and Boult. It is in her mystical vocation as votaress of Diana that Marina approaches the comatose Prince of Tyre. Doubtless there is an implied contrast between incest and chaste father-daughter love, but it is too obvious for critical labor.

The 150 lines of the recognition scene (V.i.82-233) are one of the extraordinary sublimities of Shakespeare's art. From Marina's first address to her father—“Hail, sir! my lord, lend ear”—and his first traumatic response of pushing her back, through to Pericles's falling asleep to the music of the spheres, Shakespeare holds us rapt. I use that archaic phrase because of my experience as a teacher, observing the intense reaction of my students, which parallels my own. It is a lesson in delayed response that Shakespeare teaches, in this prolonged revelation of kinship. As the dialogue goes forward, it crests initially in Pericles's gathering awareness of the resemblance between his lost wife and the young woman standing before him:

                                                                      I am great with woe
And shall deliver weeping. My dearest wife
Was like this maid, and such a one
My daughter might have been: my queen's square brows;
Her stature to an inch; as wand-like straight;
As silver-voic'd; her eyes as jewel-like
And cas'd as richly; in pace another Juno;
Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.

[V.i.105-13]

This begins by recapitulating the spirit of Marina's birth at sea, with the apparent death of Thaisa. But the accents of a man permanently in love with his wife's eyes, gait, voice break through in curiously Virgilian cadence (deliberate, I would think), and prepare us for a further tribute both to mother and to daughter:

                                                                                yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act.

[V.i.137-39]

“Extremity” sums up all of Pericles's catastrophes; awe is a proper response to the tribute father makes to daughter, as her smile undoes the whole history of his calamities. Both here and ongoing, it is remarkable that Shakespeare never once allows Marina any affective reaction as the mutual recognition progresses. Pericles weeps as the names, first of Marina and then of Thaisa, are spoken by his daughter in her all-but-final lines in the play. But Marina remains grave, formal, and priestess-like, somberly saying, “Thaisa was my mother, who did end / The minute I began.” By now we have accepted her occult status, and Pericles at least comes alive:

O Helicanus, strike me, honour'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;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tharsus,
And found at sea again. O Helicanus,
Down on thy knees! thank the holy gods as loud
As thunder threatens us: this is Marina.

[V.i.190-99]

It is as though, emerging from trauma, he requires a proof of his own fleshly mortality. His subsequent vision of Diana bids him on to Ephesus, and to a second scene of recognition, where he gratifies us by crying out to his wife, “O come, be buried / A second time within these arms.” Here, at last, Marina expresses emotion, when she kneels to her mother: “My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom.” That formal kneeling somewhat qualifies her sentiment, since to kneel is not quite to leap into one's mother's arms. Still, Shakespeare has exhausted himself, and us, with the epiphany of Marina to Pericles, and wisely the play subsides with the announcement that Marina will marry Lysimachus, and the two will reign in Tyre. Pericles, after destroying Cleon and his wicked wife Dionyza, will take up royal rule in Pentapolis, where Thaisa's father has conveniently died. Gower comes on to wish us “New joy wait on you,” and this inauguration of Shakespeare's late romances has reached conclusion. As M. C. Bradbrook observed, Pericles is “half spectacle and half vision.” That is a very problematical formula, and Shakespeare took a high risk with this play. But what remained for him to accomplish? He had revived European tragedy, and vastly perfected comedy and dramatic chronicle. What remained was vision, tempered by the necessities of stage presentation. He went well beyond Pericles in the romances that followed it, but this play was the school where he learned his final art.