SOURCE: Semon, Kenneth J. “Pericles: An Order Beyond Reason.” Essays in Literature 1, no. 1 (spring 1974): 17-27.

[In the following essay, Semon argues that Pericles conveys a world where moral rules do not apply and where most of the characters respond to events with a sense of unexplained wonder. According to the critic, the only exception to this rule is Gower, who offers a strictly moral perspective that is inadequate in explaining the play's unusual events.]

Like the tragedies, Shakespeare's last plays work toward evoking the dramatic effect of admiratio, or wonder.¹ But the effect of wonder in the tragedies depends upon the actions of a central character, usually those leading to the suffering and death of a great man; whereas, in the last plays, wonder derives from the fantastic and unexpected nature of events. The experience of wonder unique to Pericles derives not only from the nature of events but more specifically from the tension between the structure and content of the play—between Gower's mechanical understanding of the actions as he presents them, and the fantastic events which defy such a mechanical understanding.

The world of Pericles is morally inscrutable, and the audience, like the characters, can only respond with admiration for the fantastic reconciliations at the end of the play. Gower, who tells a tale of the trimph of the virtuous and the destruction of the vicious, tries and fails to impose a moral on those actions.² And during the course of the play many of the characters, besides Gower, seek to impose some kind of formula or rational explanation upon the fantastic events. All of their attempts fail. Only when one accepts the events without trying to explain or control them does one come to some kind of understanding; and that understanding is always beyond any rational explanations.

In Pericles one finds a number of scenes in which Shakespeare defines how things happen, and one also finds that how things happen cannot be explained with any consistency by resorting to the various conventional ways of explaining causality. The audience cannot respond to the events with Gower's dull piety but responds with wonder like that of various characters within Gower's presentation. “What world is this?” and “Is not this strange?”³ seem altogether more appropriate than Gower's long moralistic Epilogue. The wonder expressed within the play, as opposed to Gower's “authorial” statements, shapes and controls the audience's experience of wonder at the end of the play.

I

Throughout Pericles occur references to the commonplace ideas of order in the world: for example, the king stands above all men in his kingdom as the gods stand above all men. Simonides expresses this idea when speaking to Thaisa: “for princes are / A model which heaven makes like to itself” (II.ii.10-11). At the banquet following the tournament Pericles observes this same idea of order operating in the court of Simonides:

Yon king's to me like to my father's picture,
Which tells me in that glory once he was;
Had princes sit like stars about his throne,
And he the sun, for them to reverence.

(II.iii.37-40)

Earlier, while in Antiochus's court and after having read the riddle, Pericles addresses the king:

Kings are earth's gods; in vice their law's their will;
And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?

(I.i.104-05)

The proper response to a king is obedience, whether one believes the king is right or wrong, and this response is parallel to the proper response to the gods.

During the storm scene Pericles is told of Thaisa's death, and like a tragic hero he rails against his fate:

                                                            O you gods!
Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,
And snatch them straight away? We here below
Recall not what we give, and therein may
Use honour with you.

(III.i.22-26)

His question is central to Shakespearean tragedy where the commonplace notions of order seem to work, but inappropriate in this play where the stated notions of order do not work consistently. One idea of order in the play is clearly based on the analogy that the gods rule over men as kings rule over kingdoms. The relation between kings and men is clear enough and can be shown to be operating in the play: for example, Pericles is aware of Antiochus's sin, but he is also aware of the necessity for political order and makes no attempt to violate it (“And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?”). In the same way causal relations in the temporal order are clear and may be demonstrated: Antiochus, for example, knows that Pericles has discovered the answer to his riddle, hence his desire to have Pericles murdered. But the causal relations between gods and men are not clearly represented; they may only be posited, not observed. Helicanus attributes the death of Antiochus and his daughter to the wrath of the gods (II.iv); but one cannot state that such is unequivocally the case—it may just be one of those fantastic events which take place so frequently in this play and are beyond any understanding. Even more difficult to reconcile is the fact that according to the commonplace notion expressed in the play that the stars somehow govern our lives, the death of Antiochus's daughter is an impossibility. We learn in the first scene of the play that Antiochus's daughter was born while

The senate-house of planets all did sit
To knit in her their best perfections.

(I.i.11-12)

She was born at the “most propitious time,” Hoeniger notes, “and would thus all her life remain under the beneficial influences of the planets.” Yet, she is struck by the same lightning bolt as her father.⁴ The events in Pericles, then, are unlike the events in a tragic structure; there can be no ultimate answers given to questions of why things happen as they do—things simply happen as they do and they happen in an unpredictable way. There is no answer to the question Pericles raises; there is no rational explanation for his suffering. He has not sinned, and in the context of the play it would be difficult, if not ludicrous, to say that the gods are testing his virtue.

By the last act of the play it is clear that as a result of his experience Pericles has come to a new understanding. Like one of the fishermen who helps him in II.i, Pericles learns that “things must be as they may” (l. 112), and that there is no other explanation, no other consolation. When he discovers Thaisa in Diana's temple he expresses his thankfulness:

                    You gods, your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports. You shall do well,
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen.

(V.iii.40-43)

The audience cannot see his past miseries as “sports,” but still his new found joy overshadows his past suffering. He no longer questions but simply accepts. His response is one of wonder; he does not ask the gods how this has come to be but directs his questions towards Thaisa, who may be able to explain things:

Now do I long to hear how you were found,
How possibly preserv'd, and who to thank,
Besides the gods, for this great miracle.

(ll. 56-58. Emphasis mine.)

In this world no possibility is closed, no explanation final, and what is lost may be found again. The restoration of his wife and daughter is wondrous to Pericles and to the audience: wonder is finally the only response to events of this magnitude and in this kind of world. Although they are beyond expectation, they are a part of the wondrous order of things as that order is expressed in the play.

II

In most plays with a chorus figure the relationship between the chorus and the action is simple and without irony. His vision is necessarily more complete and more accurate than that of any of the characters who move within the bounds of his presentation: the chorus controls the action, presents what he wants his audience to see, and summarizes action of little dramatic importance. Consequently the audience's point of view depends significantly upon the things he shows and tells them, and in every instance the audience remains in harmony with him. Shakespeare used such a figure conventionally in Henry V. But in Pericles he fashioned a chorus unlike most others; for Gower is unable to understand, except in a limited way, the nature of things in the world of the play. The words he uses to describe the action are inadequate, and he fails to perceive the essentially wondrous order that pervades the play.⁵ Whereas Pericles learns by the end of the play that the nature of events cannot be understood rationally, Gower persists in his attempts to impose his own moralistic order and meaning on events.

At the beginning of the play Gower calls on the audience not only to use its imagination in viewing the play, but also to judge his “cause”:

What now ensues, to the judgment of your eye
I give my cause, who best can justify.

(I.Chor.41-42).

Thus we are to judge the credibility of the story and the validity or truth as it applies to “reality.” Gower is concerned with teaching, and it is clear that he serves as a guide who is able to “stand i' th' gaps to teach … / The stages of our story” (IV.iv.8-9), and as a moral instructor.⁶ But in fulfilling his responsibilities as a moral instructor he is limited by the inability of his narrow moral statements to explain events represented in poetry. At several points in his narrative he presents us with his own judgments, but never with more vigor than in the Epilogue.⁷ In Pericles, he tells us, we have seen “Virtue” “assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,” “preserv'd from fell destruction's blast” (Epilogue 4-5), and we have heard how “wicked” Cleon and his wife came to ruin for their “cursed deed.” One does not question the validity of Gower's judgments so much as one questions their ability to explain either the characters (it is too easy to call Cleon wicked, for example) or the significance of the characters' actions. Gower's comments are inappropriate (just like Pericles's “tragic question”) except to his own limited perspective. His comments are not true to our more complicated response to the actions of the play. The effect of his summary is merely to emphasize his own lack of imagination and to strengthen our response of wonder to the fantastic events at the end of the play. His summary works as a foil by suddenly returning us to the “common sense” rationality of the world outside the play where every event would seem to have a moral explanation.

We may compare the conflict between Gower's inadequate summary and the emotional force of the play with the tension between the structural and emotional movement of a Shakespearean tragedy. Structurally, the tragedies move from chaos to order. But the fact that Fortinbras is to rule Denmark is no compensation for the loss of Hamlet and all which that loss signifies. Fortinbras, then, functions as one way of structurally “rounding off” the play, and some have argued that we are to rejoice that the political order has been reestablished. Yet the audience is awe-stricken. Fear and sorrow have led them to admiration, to wonder, and that response is much too strong to be mitigated by a set speech. Similarly, at the end of King Lear, although the state may now enjoy the benefits of renewed order, we, like Kent, remain awed by the magnitude of the suffering we have witnessed: “The wonder is he hath endur'd so long” (V.iii.316). The contrast between our sense of wonder and the insignificance of the “proper” structural response heightens our initial response of wonder. In the same way, Gower's obsession with rationality—he is the only one in the play who doesn't learn—and with morality (in its most limited sense), leads us to experience more fully the wonder of the play.

Gower's purpose is to teach and to delight (I.Chor.7-16), and in order to accomplish that purpose he feels it necessary to supply the audience with his own judgment. He has emphasized our responsibility to use our imagination and judge the action, and in doing so we find his moralistic judgments inadequate: they cannot explain our wonder at the fantastic turn of events. Other characters within the play attempt to impose meaning and structure on events, and except for Marina, they fail to find a significant explanation.

At the beginning of I.iv. Tarsus is in the midst of a famine. Cleon, the Governor, laments the condition of his city. In searching for a way to deal with his desperate situation he resorts to a rather morbid rationalization in which he would ease his own sorrow by thinking upon the sorrow of others (ll. 1-3). Yet Dionyza points out the inconsistency of his position; to think on the sorrows of others would only intensify his own grief. Then Cleon describes his city's fall from a thriving place in which “towers bore heads so high they kiss'd the clouds, / And strangers ne'er beheld but wond'red at” (ll. 24-25), and recounts the terrible plight which has befallen the city. He does not seek reasons for the misfortune Tarsus suffers. Rather he deals with his situation by holding forth in a manner reminiscent of “moral Gower”:

O, let those cities that of plenty's cup
And her prosperities so largely taste,
With their superfluous riots, hear these tears!
The misery of Tharsus may be theirs.

(ll. 52-55)

He acts as if he were presiding over a de casibus story in the Mirror for Magistrates and searching for something meaningful, or beneficial, for his audience. Yet the immediate context of his pronouncement is not that of a moral tale, and thus it is no more than a cry of anguish in an apparent void. He can make no sense of his condition.

Directly after his expression of despair a group of ships is sighted heading for Tarsus. When Cleon hears of the ships, he states, reasonably, that when a country is weak, another country will invade and conquer; Cleon is unable to imagine any other motive, and he feels his thinking is unassailable. When he is told that the ships are flying white flags and seem to come in peace, he reasonably states another commonplace: “Who makes the fairest show means most deceit” (l. 75). If one has drawn any moral lesson from the first episode of the play (in which Pericles learns this lesson at the court of Antiochus), it would justify Cleon's belief in this instance; and so it is ironically apparent when Pericles greets Cleon and proclaims his good intentions, that such lessons are not of any great value:

And these our ships, you happily may think
Are like the Trojan horse was stuff'd within
With bloody veins expecting overthrow,
Are stor'd with corn to make your needy bread. …

(ll. 92-95)

Pericles acknowledges Cleon's fear that things may not be as they seem, and in context his point is ironic: that things are what they seem, though not as they had seemed to Cleon. Like Gower's moralizing, Cleon's quasi-rational assumptions about events lead him to false conclusions—conclusions which do not account for the essentially wondrous nature of things in the world of Pericles. The pattern of unexpected and seemingly miraculous deliverance from suffering first begins to take shape in this scene. In a sense this pattern teaches us more than Gower can about how to respond to the events of the play. Cleon has exhausted his rational abilities, and when he learns of Pericles's mission he is speechless. His reaction is to drop to his knees, and he never questions Pericles's generosity or the reasons behind that generosity.

Along with the examples of Gower and Cleon, one finds other instances of ironic rationality or the ineffectiveness of quasi-rational efforts at understanding within the play. Perhaps the most obvious case occurs in II.i, the scene in which the fishermen discover Pericles after he has been shipwrecked. The first fisherman, a man of worldly wisdom, uses one of his friend's statements as a cue for some homespun philosophy:

3 FISH.
Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
1 FISH.
Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a' th' land, who never leave gaping till they swallow'd the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.
PER. [Aside.]
A pretty moral.
3 FISH.
But, master, if I had been the sexton, I would have been that day in the belfry.
2 FISH.
Why, man?
3 FISH.
Because he should have swallow'd me too; and when I had been in his belly, I would have kep such a jangling of the bells, that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again.

(II.i.26-43)

Pericles's comment, which I take to be spoken seriously (he is too exhausted for irony), as well as the metaphor the first Fisherman uses, are undercut by the absurd reasoning of the third Firsherman. Though based upon a too literal understanding, his reasoning is sound enough and makes a travesty of the first Fisherman's metaphor. The metaphor by which the first Fisherman seeks to explain a fact in life is simply limited in application: for example, it cannot accout for Simonides's actions. Like Gower's summary in the Epilogue and Cleon's conclusions about “seeming,” the metaphor cannot withstand experience because it is too exclusive. I would not say there is no element of truth in the elder Fisherman's “pretty moral”; but his metaphor does not explain as much as either he or Pericles seems to think. The world does not operate according to proverbs.

Pericles himself is subject to the limits of reason in II.v, when Simonides presents him with a letter in which Thaisa speaks of her love for “the knight of Tyre.” In some respects the situation is parallel to that of I.i. Pericles reads the letter as he had read the riddle, and fears for his life. He first pleads his innocence, and when the king calls him a traitor he rallies his courage and almost gives the king the lie. From his previous experience in the court of Antiochus, and his inability to see that the king is toying with him, Pericles misunderstands his situation. He really need not fear that he is too low to marry Thaisa; he need only inform Simonides of his true rank. The problem is resolved comically when Thaisa enters and Pericles asks her to

Resolve your angry father, if my tongue
Did e'er solicit, or my hand subscribe
To any syllable that made love to you.
THAI.
Why, sir, say if you had, who takes offence
At that would make me glad?

(ii.v.67-71)

Thus, for Pericles, as well as for other characters in the play, that which seems clearly to be the case is not always so. Past experience and common knowledge cannot always be relied upon in order to explain either the present situation or the way in which one should deal with it. This is not to say that experience and knowledge have no value, merely that their value is limited in developing a true understanding of the world.

In contrast to the other characters in the play, Marina never tries to impose a false order on the events of her life. She alone seems to intuit the wondrous nature of the play's world. Her birth, in contrast to the birth of Antiochus's daughter, takes place under the worst possible conditions. When Lychorida first presents the infant to Pericles she tells him: “Here is a thing too young for such a place, / Who, if it had conceit, would die” (III.i.15-16), and Pericles expresses a similar opinion about Marina's poor start in life. When we first see Marina “full-grown” at Tarsus, we learn that she too reflects upon the storm at her birth and views it as a fitting metaphor of her life, at least up to this point:

                                                            Ay me! poor maid,
Born in a tempest, when my mother died,
This world to me is as a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends.

(IV.i.17-20)

Like Pericles in the storm scene, she laments her existence, and like him she is subject to intense suffering and injustice throughout the action of the play. Except for the scene with Pericles on board the ship, she appears on stage only when her life is threatened: by a murderer, by pirates, and in a brothel. But the tone of her lament is more gentle than that of Pericles at the nadir of his fortunes; and it is at once a recognition and an acceptance of her situation. She neither rails against the gods nor seeks reasons for her misfortunes; Marina does not give up, as Pericles does.

I am a maid,
My lord, that ne'er before invited eyes,
But have been gaz'd on like a comet; she speaks,
My lord, that, may be, hath endur'd a grief
Might equal yours, if both were justly weigh'd.

(V.i.84-88)

Even as she faces her father and has gained the “conceit” Lychorida spoke of, she does not consider death. She perceives her life differently from the way Pericles perceives his, and she seems to possess a quality which sets her off from all of the other characters in the play.

Gower notes this quality in Marina, and in the prologue to Act IV he mentions that she is the source of “general wonder” (IV. Chor. 11).⁸ Even the unimaginative Gower becomes lyrical when he speaks of her accomplishments:

She sings like one immortal, and she dances
As goddess-like to her admired lays.
Deep clerks she dumbs, and with her neele composes
Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,
That even her art sisters the natural roses;
Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry. …

(V. Chor. 3-8)

Gower describes the quality related to her acceptance of her existence as the element of wonder, and we are moved to admiration when we see her acceptance of “awkward casualties” in the same way the people of Tarsus are moved by her grace and “deep clerks” are moved by her accomplishments.

Marina's ability to evoke wonder in those around her is directly responsible for her “escape” from the brothel. In IV.v, two gentlemen who are leaving the brothel vow that they are “for no more bawdy-houses,” and they set off to hear the vestals sing. The comic use of hyperbole in this brief scene emphasizes Marina's special quality; that the scene verges on hilarity in no way detracts from the effect. The hyperbole functions to approximate, perhaps even to set an outermost limit upon, the quality of her character and her ability to move others to wonder.

Marina's ability to evoke wonder is most clearly (and seriously) illustrated during the recognition scene on Pericles's ship. Pericles has not spoken to anyone for three months, since the time Cleon had told him of Marina's “death.” Lysimachus, the Governor of Mytilene, describes Marina's powers to Helicanus and assures him that she will “make a batt'ry through [Pericles's] ports” (V.i.46). The audience by this time in the play has witnessed the association between healing and music in Cerimon's restoration of Thaisa (III.ii), and Gower has told of Marina's musical abilities which, “when to th' lute / She sung … made the night-bird mute” (IV. Chor. 25-26). We are prepared for Marina's song to restore Pericles's mental state, but at the end of that song Pericles only stirs and pushes Marina back. After she says that she too “hath endur'd a grief / Might equal yours” (V.i.88-89), Pericles begins to come to his senses. He responds to her presence and begins to question her. Marina replies:

If I should tell my history, 'twould seem
Like lies, disdain'd in the reporting.

(ll. 118-19)

Pericles protests:

Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou look'st
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace
For the crown'd Truth to dwell in. I will believe thee,
And make my senses credit thy relation
To points that seem impossible; for thou look'st
Like one I lov'd indeed.

(ll. 120-25)

                                                            Tell thy story;
If thine consider'd prove the thousandth part
Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I
Have suffer'd like a girl; yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act.

(ll. 134-39)

Pericles recognizes not only that “My dearest wife / Was like this maid” (ll. 106-07) but also the quality particular to Marina herself. She is able not only to stir him from his melancholy but also to evoke a response that moves from the physical action of pushing her away to a confused verbal action (“My fortunes—parentage—good parentage—/ To equal mine—was it not thus?” ll. 97-98), to a moment of wondrous joy:

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.

(ll. 190-94)

Her honesty, her endurance, her parentage all prove a source of wonder to Pericles, and the scene itself evokes wonder in the audience.⁹

III

The pattern we first witnessed with Cleon and Pericles, a movement from sorrow to questioning, from questioning to wonder, is repeated several other times during the process of the play. And during those other episodes the audience is taught to respond appropriately to the world of the play.

One of the many fantastic events is narrated by Helicanus:

Antiochus from incest liv'd not free;
For which, the most high gods not minding longer
To withhold the vengeance that they had in store,
Due to this heinous capital offence,
Even in the height and pride of all his glory,
When he was seated in a chariot
Of an inestimable value, and his daughter with him,
A fire from heaven came, and shrivell'd up
Their bodies. …

(II.iv.2-10)

Escanes, who has been listening to the narration, presumably responding in awe, anticipates our own reluctance to believe that such things can happen: “'Twas very strange” (l. 13). Since he can react this way within the play, we are more willing to accept the event, and we agree that, indeed, it was very strange.¹⁰

The world of wondrous events which most fully embodies the order of things in this play is apparent in Ephesus, where Cerimon works his magic and where Thaisa awaits Pericles. After the stormy night when Thaisa dies and is cast off the ship, her coffin is washed upon Ephesus's shore and brought to Cerimon. The coffin is “wondrous heavy” and from it pours forth a “delicate odor,” and the whole scene is, as the Second Gentleman observes, “Most strange!” Even more miraculous is that the possibility for recovery exists. As Cerimon returns Thaisa to life our response to the scene is carefully guided by the observers on stage:

The heavens, through you, increase our wonder,
And set up your fame forever.

(III.ii.98-99)

2 GENT.
Is this not strange?
1 GENT.
Most rare.

(ll. 108-09)

Though Cerimon seems confident of his power to restore her, and assures the gentlemen who watch him that such events may be within the realm of possibility (“I heard of an Egyptian / That had nine hours lien dead, / Who was by good appliance recovered,” ll. 86-88), he too responds with wonder at Thaisa's fantastic beauty:

                                                            She is alive!
Behold, her eyelids, cases to those
Heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost,
Begin to part their fringes of bright gold.
The diamonds of a most praised water
Doth appear to make the world twice rich. Live,
And make us weep to hear your fate, fair creature,
Rare as you seem to be.

(ll. 99-106)

And like Thaisa, having witnessed the first miraculous event on stage, we ask, “What world is this?” (l. 107)

Thaisa's question is central to the play. One cannot divide the play into several worlds as one can with The Merchant of Venice where one speaks of the “world of Belmont” and its relationship to the “world of Venice,” or in Romeo and Juliet where one speaks of the “world of the lovers” and the “world of society”; wondrous things happen in Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, and Ephesus. The “world” of the play is constant and is a world where the best explanation of events seems to be that things happen because they do; no amount of questioning can delve any further. When the characters meet their proper and respective moral rewards, we are as satisfied as Gower; the way their ends are achieved causes considerable surprise and satisfaction, even though Gower assures us early in his narration that

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

(II. Chor. 7-8)

Just as the world of the play is constant, so is our response to that world. We are filled with wonder at Thaisa's restoration; we are filled with wonder for Marina; and the recognition scene between Marina and her father, and later, between Pericles and Thaisa, affect us with the greatest awe. And though we have been presented with various explanations that seem, if only for a moment, to be valid, we cannot accept any of them as final. We return to our world with something of Marina's and Pericles's understanding that one can only note one's own suffering and joy, and never come to any final understanding. The morally inscrutable world we see on stage is deeply related to the inscrutable forces which shape our own lives.

Notes

1. For the importance of the idea of wonder in Shakespeare's tragedies see J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1951). For the importance of wonder in the last plays see Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972). Her introductory chapter and the chapter on Cymbeline are especially relevant, pp. 18-33, 61-103. Also, see my article, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare's Last Plays,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly.

2. It is possible that Shakespeare inherited Gower from an earlier version of the play. However, such speculation is outside the scope of this essay. The best summary of the texual problems may be found in F. D. Hoeniger's New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. xxiii-lii, passim. J. P. Brockbank, in a recent article, felt the need to bring up the matter of the text but gracefully entered into a critical reading of the play, saying, “In what follows I have expressed a disposition but abstained from arguing a case,” in “‘Pericles’ and the Dream of Immortality,” Shakespeare Survey, 24 (1971) 106. I follow suit. For another discussion of the problem see Hartwig, pp. 181-83.

3. Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963), III.ii.107 and 108. All references to the text are to this edition.

4. Compare the conditions surrounding Marina's birth:

   For a more blusterous birth had never babe. …
   Thou hast as chiding a nativity
   As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make,
   To herald thee from the womb.

   (III.i.28, 32-34)

   If astrology were a reliable indication of the state of affairs, Antiochus's daughter would have had better fortune and Marina would never have lived to share in the reconciliations and wonder at the end of the play.

5. See John Arthos, The Art of Shakespeare (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1964), for an opposite view of Gower's understanding. Arthos feels that Shakespeare uses Gower to “tell us what this strange succession of adventures means, and what, especially, it means to him, an ancient poet brought back from death to put the play on” (p. 147). It would be interesting to compare Gower's perception of “his play” with the view of the Chorus in Dr. Faustus.

6. This function, of course, is conventional.

7. See also II. Chor. 1-4, and IV. Chor. 37-45.

8. One should distinguish between Gower's use of wonder as an attribute, and my use of wonder as a dramatic response.

9. Though Marina is a source of general wonder both to the characters in the play and to the audience, she never becomes an abstraction. This is partly because of her more “worldly” knowledge, her ability to get out of a difficult situation (the brothel, for example, where she uses what the bawd calls “virginal fencing”), and the fact that of all the characters in the play her immediate motivation is the most clearly drawn; she is paradoxically the most “realistic.”

10. Cf. Hippolyta's “story of the night” speech in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, V. i, or the Gentlemen in The Winter's Tale, V.ii.