SOURCE: Hillman, Richard. “Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of Pericles.” Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 4 (winter 1985): 427-37.

[In the following essay, Hillman compares Pericles to John Gower's Confessio Amantis. The critic maintains that the character of Pericles shares many traits with the character Amans in the Confessio and undergoes a similar journey of self-discovery.]

Shakespeare's Gower used to embarrass with his quaintness; nowadays, as often as not, he dazzles with his theatrical savoir faire. His choric role is increasingly recognized as an effective part of Pericles' dramatic method, while the effects themselves have become the chief subject of debate, most of which concerns the issue of mediation: does the Chorus create alienation or engagement, and exactly how?¹ The proliferation of aesthetic arguments parallels a welcome tendency to approach the play, whatever the circumstances of composition, as an artistic whole for which Shakespeare at least made himself responsible. Abetted, no doubt, by Gower's considerable appeal as a character—we warm to him, despite his moralizing, as we do not to the members of the romance plot itself—the momentum of appreciation has carried commentary well beyond the simple issue of his presence.

Yet a reappraisal of that issue, this time premised on Gower's success as a dramatic device, may be in order. It is nice to feel as comfortable with Gower as he evidently feels with us, but we may also be lulled into neglecting a significant aspect of the play's originality. In seeking precedents and parallels, editors and critics have naturally focused on other choric figures in Renaissance drama. A number of more or less instructive instances have been examined, with Shakespeare's own Henry V the inevitable starting point. In a few analogues, the choric figures are poets but not sources;² in what may be the closest one, The Divil's Charter by Barnabe Barnes, he is a source but not a poet. Indeed, despite the undoubted similarities discovered by F. D. Hoeniger,³ Guicciardine, the Italian historian, is a far cry from John Gower, the widely read and greatly admired figure who was part of a living tradition of English poetry. In the end, Shakespeare's approach emerges as unique, less because of what Gower does than because of who he is. To assume that the creation of Gower simply followed from an artistic need for a chorus is to reverse this emphasis. What confronts us in Pericles is not merely an unusually sophisticated choric function, but the most sustained literary allusion to be found in Shakespeare. I believe that approaching the role of Gower in these terms can illuminate both the playwright's handling of his principal source and the final achievement of the play itself.

Not that the debt to Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis has been neglected. John Dean, in particular, goes beyond more mechanical comparisons to emphasize the close affinity in “style and spirit.”⁴ He also relates Gower's use of the Apollonius story as an exemplum of unnatural love to the thematic movement in the play from destructive passion to chaste creative love, from Priapus to Diana.⁵ Nevertheless, as long as only that part of the Confessio is considered which substantially furnished the plot⁶—and, tellingly, Dean cites the work in the excerpts printed in Geoffrey Bullough's compendium of sources⁷—Gower's influence is bound to seem mainly superficial. What is most obviously missing is a precedent for Shakespeare's use of love themes as a means of exploring larger issues of human spirituality and self-realization. Taken as a whole, the Confessio strikingly furnishes such a precedent.

I

In the fictional structure of the poem, the story of Apollonius is not Gower's at all, but the final exemplum by which Genius, in his role as confessor, helps to restore the afflicted Amans-Gower to spiritual equilibrium. The key to this process is indeed the distinction between vain and selfish amor, bound up with self-delusion, and the caritas through which the sufferer finally becomes reconciled to himself and reintegrated into the human community. The tale's concern with what is natural in love and with the proper response to adverse fortune lends it a resonance appropriate to its climactic position. However, the focus is still relatively narrow, the tone straightforwardly moralistic, and the impact partial. The cure of Amans requires further direct advice from Genius and an appeal from Amans to Venus for his liberation. In evincing his spiritual growth, his new realism and perspective, that request reflects the work's broader themes.

It is unmistakably a question of identity. When, in Book I, Venus asked Amans who he was, he had replied, “‘A Caitif that lith hiere …’” (I.161);⁸ now, to the same query, his response is simply “‘John Gower’” (VIII.2321).⁹ And it is a question of accepting the basic terms of human existence, particularly mortality and the passing of time. The reminder of these realities—“‘Remembre wel hou thou art old’” (VIII.2439)—plunges him into the trance, “Ne fully quik ne fully ded” (VIII.2451), in which he has his vision of lovers past and finally receives his cure. In Venus' mirror he sees his true position in nature's cycle of creation and destruction:

And thanne into my remembrance
I drowh myn olde daies passed,
And as reson it hath compassed,
I made a liknesse of miselve
Unto the sondri Monthes twelve.

(VIII.2834-38)

His vain passion, which had involved defiance of time, has been dissipated. He awakes, Reason returns (VIII.2862 ff.), and, “sobre and hol ynowh” (VIII.2869), Gower redirects his energy, his impulse for love, in the direction Venus indicates:

Bot go ther vertu moral duelleth,
Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Whiche of long time thou hast write,
For this I do thee well to wite,
If thou thin hele wolt pourchace,
Thou miht noght make suite and chace,
Wher that the game is nought pernable.

(VIII.2925-31)

Her injunction to “‘preie hierafter for the pes’” (VIII.2913), together with the motto “Por reposer” (VIII.2907) on the beads she gives him, highlights the interdependence of the poet's future efforts on behalf of others and his continuing inner peace. It is a lesson he himself seems thoroughly to have learned, and there is profound satisfaction in it:

And in my self y gan to smyle
Thenkende uppon the bedis blake,
And how they weren me betake,
For that y schulde bidde and preie.
.....Homward a softe pas y wente,
Wher that with al myn hol entente
Uppon the point that y am schryve
I thenke bidde whil y live.

(VIII.2958-70)

The Confessio, then, is far more than a loose collection of tales—“mouldy”¹⁰ or otherwise—and not at all narrowly moralistic in its intellectual scope. This has been amply recognized by such admirers of the work as Derek Pearsall, who identifies its central concern as nothing less than the “art of living” and comments: “Love is the theme because it reveals man's moral nature under greatest stress.”¹¹ Viewed in this context, Gower's redaction of the Apollonius story—not obvious raw material for drama, as has been observed¹²—begins to acquire more plausibility as a fitting source for the first of Shakespeare's romances. In particular, we can see that some of the departures from that source, even as they affiliate Pericles with the other romances, also bring it more closely into line with the central pattern of the Confessio as a whole, the tortuous psychic voyage of Amans toward self-discovery.

II

The most fundamental change concerns the nature of the fictional universe. Hoeniger points out that “In neither Twine nor Gower is there any attempt to find meaning in human suffering.”¹³ The good are ultimately rewarded, the evil punished, but the operations of fortune are independent and irrational:

          Fortune hath evere be muable
And mai no while stonde stable:
For now it hiheth, now it loweth,
Now stant upriht, now overthroweth,
Now full of blisse and now of bale …

(VIII.585-89)

Even the dramatic reversal of the hero's misfortune, well-earned by any standard of justice, is pointedly made capricious:

Fro this day forth fortune hath sworn
To sette him upward on the whiel;
So goth the world, now wo, now wel.

(VIII.1736-38)

The most positive conclusion Genius can manage is that proper behavior at least offers a chance of happiness, while nothing good can come of wickedness:

Fortune, thogh sche be noght stable,
Yit at som time is favorable
To hem that ben of love trewe.
Bot certes it is forto rewe
To se love ayein kinde falle,
For that makth sore a man to falle.

(VIII.2013-18)

There is a set of moral laws to which man may cling, but not a spiritual framework actively enfolding him.

Such a framework is implicit in the pattern of suffering and redemption in Pericles—a pattern universally perceived, however variously interpreted. To judge from the Chorus' formulaic allusions, which are very much part of the pseudo-medieval flavor, fortune itself is no less arbitrary:

… fortune, tir'd with doing bad,
Threw him ashore, to give him glad.

(II.Chor.37-38)¹⁴

… fortune's mood
                                                            Varies again. …

(III.Chor.46-47)

Let Pericles believe his daughter's dead,
And bear his courses to be ordered
By Lady Fortune. …

(IV.iv.46-48)

But as the last of these references indicates, with its explicit distinction between Pericles' belief and our better knowledge, fortune's operations are firmly contained within a structure that is not arbitrary. The character of Gower, from the beginning of the play, is the chief means of establishing this structure and keeping us aware of it. He virtually stretches a safety net beneath the hero, thus enabling us to view tribulations and relief in the proper perspective. His supplying of a moral and spiritual context assures us that there is a point to growth, change, and response:

Be quiet then, as men should be
Till he hath pass'd necessity.
I'll show you those in troubles reign,
Losing a mite, a mountain gain.

(II.Chor.5-8)

The change in Pericles' fortunes occurs with recognition of his daughter and is associated with the principle she embodies: “… thou dost look / Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act” (V.i.137-39). Various commentators, following the lead of G. Wilson Knight, have seen the achievement of some sort of transcendence through patience as an essential burden of the play.¹⁵ The power of patience over fortune was a Renaissance commonplace with a venerable Stoic lineage. Its previous use by Shakespeare ranges from the often-compared “… like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (Twelfth Night, II.iv.114-15)¹⁶ to the more dramatically functional lines of Cordelia:

For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down,
Myself could else out-frown false Fortune's frown.

(V.iii.5-6)

In the universe of King Lear, as in life, such an attitude cannot alter circumstances; indeed, this seems to be part of Shakespeare's point in showing Cordelia lost by a hair's breadth. But the world of Pericles, a potently symbolic world where the music of the spheres can be heard, responds in kind. Even when she cannot actually deter “extremity”—as, for example, she converts Lysimachus in the brothel—Marina's spiritual power over fortune is reflected in the action. Thus, when Leonine will not be put from his bloody intention, fortune, in the form of the pirate raid, intervenes to save her. The purposeful higher powers of the play—the gods, Providence—ultimately serve the premise that man's fortune varies with his attitude toward life and that in one way or another he gets what he deserves.

This concept of fortune and of the working of the universe—developed through Shakespeare's Gower, yet foreign to the Apollonius tale—is part of the frame-work of the Confessio. The confessional basis of the work implies an ongoing relation between the supernatural and the spiritual state of Amans-Gower. In contrast with Gower's Apollonius, the gods take a serious active interest in his case. The initial inward discord of Amans generates a series of corrective lessons; in response to his awakening self-knowledge, Venus and Cupid vouchsafe his cure. In the Prologue, the poet universalizes the moral of this method in terms which might have been intended for Pericles:

For after that we falle and rise,
The world arist and falth withal,
So that the man is overal
His oghne cause of wel and wo.
That we fortune clepe so
Out of the man himself it groweth.

(Prol.544-49)

This is far from the fatalistic shrug of Genius over Apollonius: “So goth the world, now wo, now wel.”¹⁷

III

Moreover, Gower's belief in mankind's collective responsibility for the state of the world, his sense of the individual as contributing his own peace or discord to the human community at large, is far closer to Pericles than to Genius' tale. In the latter, the focus is strictly upon Apollonius as an individual—and, of course, as an exemplum. Even his wife and child are developed as characters only insofar as they bear directly on his loss and recovery of happiness. Not only does Shakespeare's dramatization spread our emotional involvement more broadly, but the reunions give us the sense of harmony—figured forth in the music of the spheres—that extends well beyond the participants. The role of Helicanus, developed from a negligible figure in the Apollonius tale, reinforces the social and political dimension of the pattern. The suggestion of a new order premised on spiritual renewal, achieved through exaltation of the good and purging of the wicked, brings the play in line with the typical Shakespearean romantic movement. But such a conclusion is also sanctioned by Gower's enfolding of Apollonius' mechanical ups-and-downs (“Fortune hath evere be muable / And mai no while stonde stable”) within a larger vision of man's potential for generating an harmonious collective destiny:

                                                            … upon divisioun
Stant, why no worldes thing mai laste,
Til it be drive to the laste.
And fro the ferste regne of alle
Into this day, hou so befalle,
Of that the regnes be muable
The man himself hath be coupable,
Which of his propre governance
Fortuneth al the worldes chance.

(Prol.576-84)

Again, Gower stresses the interdependence of macrocosm and microcosm, for human nature itself is the fundamental embodiment of discord—discord which makes us individually subject, not only to fortune, but to death itself:

It may ferst proeve upon a man;
The which, for his complexioun
Is mad upon divisioun
Of cold, of hot, of moist, of drye,
He mot be verray kynde dye:
For the contraire of his astat
Stant evermore in such debat
Til that o part be overcome,
Ther may no final pes be nome.
.....Bot for ther is diversite
Withinne himself, he may noght laste.

(Prol.974-89)

This is commonplace medieval science and theology, but Gower makes more than conventional use of it in developing the healing of Amans as a paradigm that may lead to collective peace. It is a paradigm based on compromise, in that the frailty of the human condition, including its mortality, is acknowledged: “Remembre wel hou thou art old.” But through that acknowledgment, painful as it is, comes transcendence.

IV

This brings us to the overtones of rebirth and resurrection associated with Pericles' change of fortune. The basic structure has been carried over intact from the tale of Apollonius, who also moves both literally and symbolically “out of his derke place / … into the liht” (VIII.1740-41). But significant details form a stronger link with the experience of Amans-Gower. The first of these is the condition from which the characters are revived. Apollonius is merely a stylized embodiment of extreme grief, an active rather than a passive figure: his weeping is emphasized, both before and during his encounter with his daughter (VIII.1605, 1688). Pericles, on the other hand, has entered a trancelike state closer to the swoon of Amans, “Ne fully quik ne fully ded.” This is far more effective for stage purposes, but there is also a telling difference in the spiritual condition it reflects. Pericles has passed beyond the simple pain of Apollonius into a state of spiritual death. His grief signifies abject surrender of selfhood in the face of death's overwhelming power. Amans describes his collapse, when confronted with his own subjection to mortality, in terms of a similar onset of existential despair:

Tho wiste I wel withoute doute,
That ther was no recoverir;
And as a man the blase of fyr
With water quencheth, so ferd I;
A cold me cawhte sodeinly,
For sorwe that myn herte made
Mi dedly face pale and fade
Becam, and swoune I fell to grounde.

(VIII.2442-49)

Shakespeare, moreover, invests the awakening of his hero with a spiritual significance reminiscent of the healing of Amans. There is no suggestion of this in the case of Apollonius, whose mellowing toward his unknown daughter comes merely from being “so sibb of blod” (VIII.1703). By contrast, Pericles is not only opened to revelation by her example of patience, but opened to that example by an initial impulse of pity, as she cites her own misfortunes:

                                                                                … she speaks,
My lord, that, may be, hath endur'd a grief
Might equal yours. …

(V.i.86-88)

It is highly characteristic of Shakespeare to mark a movement toward spiritual maturity by a character's new ability to feel for others: Lear's concern for the Fool and his prayer for the “poor naked wretches” (III.iv.28 ff.) comprise the locus classicus, but the pattern runs throughout his work, from the deposed Richard II's parting with his Queen to Prospero's decision to forgive his enemies. Certainly, the choric Gower's final praise of Helicanus (“A figure of truth, of faith, of loyalty” [Epil.8]) and Cerimon (“… The worth that learned charity aye wears” [l. 10]) confirms the centrality of selflessness in the play's moral scheme. In the Confessio, such selflessness is explicitly a condition of the renewal of self experienced by Amans-Gower.

Indeed, in making his hero's spiritual state more clearly the issue, Shakespeare introduced another more specific parallel. What sets the seal on Pericles' recovery of identity is his declaration, “I am Pericles of Tyre” (V.i.204), when Marina asks his “title” (l. 203). The thematic significance of the statement coincides with its dramatic impact: since we are equally engaged in Marina's feelings, it forms the natural emotional climax of the scene. In the Apollonius story, as recounted by Gower (as well as Twine), there is no such questioning of father by daughter, no comparable affirmation. Only the reply of Amans to Venus, his resumption of the identity of “John Gower,” furnishes a model. And it is a more exact model because of the parallel between the female figures. Marina's restorative power, after all, is ultimately the power of human love. Through that power, supported by the convention of immortality through children, she becomes “another life to Pericles thy father” (l. 207).¹⁸

V

From the vantage point of a comparison between Pericles' spiritual renewal and that of Amans-Gower, it is possible to see more clearly into a problematic feature of the play. While the redemption of Pericles is clearly the deserved gift of the gods, and easy enough to associate with the triumph of patience over fortune, it is hard to accept his previous suffering as having been brought on himself. Pericles' behavior seems morally impeccable from first to last. To argue, as Knight was the first to do,¹⁹ that he is tainted by the incest from which he instantly recoils, is to import an incongruous theological premise. In refuting this argument Hoeniger finds it sufficient that the suffering in the play, like Job's, becomes meaningful through human responses to it.²⁰ Yet Job's sufferings, if equally undeserved, are never meaningless: they possess the intrinsic justification of proceeding from the divine will. In Pericles, we are still left with the difficulty of accepting a universe that is first arbitrarily hostile, then purposefully benevolent.

The parallel with Amans-Gower highlights the issue of Pericles' reconciliation to the human condition itself, including the limitation of mortality. The new sense of meaning and identity to which both Amans and Pericles awake is associated with a spiritual triumph over death premised on acceptance of death's power over physical life. This is a vital dimension of Pericles' patience. After all, the blows he has endured have been direct manifestations of death's power, stripping him of his wife and child, who had furnished him with a sense of self: Thaisa's love transformed him from anonymous knight, bereft of all but his father's armor, to heir-apparent; the birth of his daughter, symbolic instrument of both her mother's immortality and his own, enabled him to cope with Thaisa's loss. Again, a modification of the Apollonius tale sharpens the thematic focus: in Genius' redaction, it is not by itself the supposed death of his daughter that plunges the hero into despair; his initial stoical reaction (“Bot sithe it mai no betre be, / He thonketh god and forth goth he …” [VIII.1589-90]) gives way only in the face of another storm at sea.

Amans is in need of existential redirection because his selfish love flies in the face of the realities of age and time. It constitutes, in effect, a false claim to immortality. Once we realize that Pericles, morally innocent though he is, may be making a similar claim through his emotional investment in the lives of others, his dependence upon them for his sense of self, then his persecution by fortune no longer seems so arbitrary. Nor does the mainspring of the action—his initial encounter with what Genius presents as the ultimate example of love acting self-indulgently and contrary to nature.

It is important to take Pericles at his word when he describes his purpose in courting Antiochus' daughter:

                                                            … I went to Antioch,
Whereas thou know'st, against the face of death
I sought the purchase of a glorious beauty,
From whence an issue I might propagate,
Are arms to princes and bring joys to subjects.

(I.ii.70-74)

The imagery of the episode, beginning with the vivid spectacle of the previous suitors' heads, insists upon the connection between gaining his object and defying death.²¹ So thoroughly transported is he that he can

                                                            … with a soul
Embolden'd with the glory of her praise,
Think death no hazard in this enterprise.

(I.i.3-5)

Her goddess-like entrance, accompanied by music (the false forerunner of the music of the spheres), helps to convey Pericles' imaginative transformation of her into a virtual symbol of immortality. His prayer at this point is not only selfish and self-deluded, but evasive in making the gods responsible for his passion:²²

You gods, that made me man, and sway in love,
That have inflam'd desire in my breast
To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree
Or die in the adventure, be my helps,
As I am son and servant to your will,
To compass such a boundless happiness!

(I.i.20-25)

This has little to do with Apollonius, but it has much in common with the initial position of Amans:

O Venus, queene of loves cure,
Thou lif, thou lust, thou mannes hele,
Behold my cause and my querele,
And yif me som part of thi grace. …

(I.132-35)

The strong paradisal overtones of the “fruit of yon celestial tree” point up the role of Antiochus as diabolical tempter and destroyer. He tempts Pericles not only directly, by stage-managing his daughter's appearance and exalting her attractions, but indirectly, by reminding him, with supposed concern for his welfare, of the fate that waits on failure. Pericles' response to this warning sheds further light on his existential motive:

Antiochus, I thank thee, who hath taught
My frail mortality to know itself,
And by those fearful objects to prepare
This body, like to them, to what I must;
For death remember'd should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error.

(I.i.42-57)

The reminder of death is an incitement, not a deterrent, because it conveys the meaninglessness of life in the shadow of mortality. Pericles, like Amans, is at odds with the most fundamental condition of existence. Ironically, his attempt to project himself beyond mortality dramatically renews the threat of death. In solving the riddle of incest, he is confronted with a disillusioning but necessary truth—that there exists a secret and sinister alliance between death's destructive power and the meretricious hope of escape. The enmity of Antiochus has a very long reach, the power to deprive him, in essence, of his identity. He is thus started on the painful journey toward the rebuilding of selfhood and a transcendence of death premised on recognized acceptance of it.

VI

The audience already has its assurance that transcendence is possible.²³ The miraculous appearance of John Gower pointedly combines, Phoenix-like, the conquering of death and the resuming of mortality:

To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man's infirmities …

(I.Chor.1-3)

And if, as we have argued, the playwright has summoned him not only as mouthpiece but also as muse, even this has a precedent of sorts in the Confessio. There the poet invokes the transforming power of a yet more ancient singer—the ability of Arion, who also by his song was saved from death, magically to create universal harmony:

And every man upon this ground
Which Arion that time herde,
Als wel the lord as the schepherde,
He broghte hem alle in good acord;
So that the comun with the lord,
And lord with the comun also,
He sette in love bothe tuo
And putte awey malencolie.

(Prol.1062-69)

Gower's own route toward what he clearly hopes will be a similar achievement must take his human limitations into account:

          I may noght strecche up to the hevene
Min hand, ne setten al in evene
This world, which evere is in balance.

(I.1-3)

His solution is to become his own most comprehensive, and extremely human, exemplum. It is this previous incarnation that most clearly qualifies Shakespeare's Gower to present his tale as a source of “restoratives,” whose “purchase is to make men glorious” (I.Chor.8-9). In view of the profound tribute implied by the larger debt of Pericles, we should not be surprised by the Chorus' spiritual generosity, his willingness to interrupt his “final pes.” Nor should we mistake it for anything less than the cost—and the reward—of mortally aspiring to Arion's luminous role: “I life would wish, and that I might / Waste it for you like taper-light” (ll. 15-16).

Notes

1. Recent studies include F. D. Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 461-79, and Richard Paul Knowles, “‘Wishes Fall Out as They're Will'd’: Artist, Audience, and Pericles's Gower,” English Studies in Canada, 9 (1983), 14-24, who usefully discusses previous criticism taking this approach.

2. Skelton in The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, by Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday, cited by John Dean, Restless Wanderers: Shakespeare and the Pattern of Romance, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 86, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979), pp. 178-79; Homer in Heywood's plays of the three ages, which evidently postdate Pericles—see F. D. Hoeniger's Introduction to his Arden Pericles (London: Methuen, 1963), p. xxi.

3. Hoeniger, ed., pp. xxi-xxiii.

4. Dean, p. 171.

5. Ibid., pp. 174-75 and 271-77.

6. Commentators agree that the influence of Lawrence Twine's The Patterne of Painefull Aduentures was relatively small—see Hoeniger, ed., pp. xiv-xvi. In none of the instances examined in this study have I found it necessary to take Twine's version into account.

7. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VI (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

8. The Confessio Amantis is cited throughout in the edition of G. C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), II-III.

9. This point is made by Russell A. Peck in the Introduction to his (abridged) edition of the poem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp. xxvii-xxviii. Peck similarly emphasizes the spiritual reorientation of Amans as the structural principle of the work.

10. Ben Jonson's notorious jibe at Pericles (in his “Ode to Himselfe”) is not indicative of his opinion of Gower, who is one of the chorus of great poets in The Golden Age Restored and, as Peck points out (p. v), the author most frequently cited in the English Grammar.

11. “Gower's Narrative Art,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 476.

12. Hoeniger, ed., p. xvi.

13. Ibid., p. xvii.

14. All references to Pericles are from Hoeniger's Arden edition.

15. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; rpt. London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 65-67; Hoeniger, ed., pp. lxxxiii-lxxxv; Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (1955; rpt. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 32-41; Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 56-60; G. A. Barker, “Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Pericles,” English Studies, 44 (1963), 407-10 and 413-14; and J. M. S. Thompkins, “Why Pericles?” Review of English Studies, NS 3 (1952), 317-18.

16. References to Shakespearean plays other than Pericles are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

17. Gower's attack on fortune and emphasis on human responsibility are stressed by George R. Coffman, “John Gower in his Most Significant Role,” in Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, Univ. of Colorado Studies, Ser. B, Vol. II, No. 4 (Boulder: Univ. of Colorado, 1945), pp. 52-61.

18. There is compelling evidence for the widely accepted emendation, first proposed by Mason, of the 1609 Quarto's “like” to “life”—see Hoeniger, ed., V.i.207 n.

19. Knight, pp. 38-40. See also Barker, pp. 401-14; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 149, and “Shakespeare's Miracle Play,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 18 (1967), 366; W. B. Thorne, “Pericles and the ‘Incest-Fertility’ Opposition,” SQ, 22 (1971), 43-56; and John P. Cutts, “Pericles' ‘Downright Violence,’” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 275-93.

20. Hoeniger, ed., pp. lxxxi-lxxxvi.

21. The death-motif in this scene has been stressed mainly by critics tracing the “tainting” of the hero—e.g., Knight, p. 38; Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, pp. 147-49; and Cutts, pp. 275-76. Several commentators see Pericles as seeking some sort of spiritual fulfillment involving self-knowledge and transcendence of humanity. See Traversi, who speaks of a “search for an ideal expressed in terms of devotion to chivalrous love” (p. 20), and John Arthos, The Art of Shakespeare (London: Bowes, 1964), pp. 140-42.

22. Knight, p. 38, makes a similar point.

23. On Gower's as the first of the play's restorations, see Knowles, pp. 17-18, and Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide and Tempest (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1973), p. 73.