[In the following essay, Dubrow analyzes the dynamic involving parents and children in Pericles, positing that Shakespeare's treatment of familial relationships reflected a widespread apprehension about parental loss in Elizabethan and Jacobean society.]

I

Festschriften and romance are cognate literary genres in that the bonds between generations impel and inform both of them. But if those bonds are celebrated in collections like this one, they are variously celebrated and contaminated, lost and recovered, rejected and reinterpreted, in romance. More specifically, whereas many critics are prone to associate that genre with the loss of children, the death of parents and its consequences are no less central to romance in general and Shakespearean romance in particular.

The events surrounding parental loss are, indeed, among the principal sources of danger and defeat in Pericles and among the principal sources of recovery for Pericles. The consequences of such deaths impel most of the major episodes of the play, and those effects are glossed in the extraordinary scene in which the hero recovers his armor. Hence both the cultural anxieties and the more personal preoccupations motivating Shakespeare's recurrent references to the early loss of parents emerge especially clearly in this play: so often and so rightly described as the genre of wish-fulfillment, romance here reveals the wishes and the fears associated with the early death of parents throughout Shakespeare's canon and throughout his culture, too. In so doing it also reveals the imbrication of generic conventions and questions about gender central to contemporary work in cultural studies.

The consequences of the loss of parents in early modern England were vast, with the impact typically encompassing not only emotional trauma but also material consequences.¹ In particular, many of those effects stemmed from the presence of stepparents and other surrogate guardians. A Renaissance translation of Petrarch, his Phisicke against Fortune, conflates such dangers with the devastation of fire: “Who so having children by his first marriage, bringeth a Stepmother among them, he setteth his house afire with is [sic] owne handes.”² More immediate to the early modern period are the warnings about stepparenthood in William Gouge's highly influential marriage manual Of Domesticall Duties (1622); emphasizing the responsibility of stepparents, he expresses the intense fear that they would instead prove irresponsible and exploitative. Tales of such exploitation appear in many other contemporary texts, such as the account of the eponymous hero's problems with his stepfamily, including a diminution of his projected inheritance and internecine discord, in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.³ Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos's Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England issues a shrewd warning about the accuracy of accounts of such issues written long after the event even as it acknowledges the pervasive traumas occasioned by parental loss.⁴ But whether or not one challenges the reliability of a given account like the Hutchinson memoir, it is clear that in the early modern period, as today, what are currently described as “blended families” could threaten both the domestic tranquillity and the financial stability of the child who had lost a parent.

Stepparenthood involves semiotic and semantic threats as well; it signals the complexities of representation in general and of substitution in particular and in so doing carries with it implications for arenas ranging from the workings of rhetorical tropes to the problematics of gender. Surrogate parents both are and are not the parents they represent; if the dead are absent presences, so too in this sense are the living stepparents. Thus on one level they draw attention to the vulnerability of the individual family members they replace while on another testifying to the longevity of family roles. The mother is dead, long live the mother—an emotionally charged statement whether maternity is perceived as beneficent, as suffocating, or as both at once. And such assertions are further destabilized in that the death of one mother reminds one of the vulnerability of her substitutes as well.

But bereaved children were liable not only to, as it were, wicked stepmothers and stepfathers but also to many other apparently well-meaning guardians. The records of the Court of Orphans testify to the machinations of not only unscrupulous stepfathers but also other male relatives.⁵ Uncles clearly had many opportunities for such exploitation, and it is telling that the villain in the popular ballad “The Children in the Wood” is one—as are his analogues in Hamlet and Richard III. Given the emphasis on threatening male relatives in these and other renditions of parental loss, the focus on stepmothers rather than stepfathers in so many literary texts, notably Pericles itself, provides a particularly telling instance of the gendering of anxieties.

In addition, many abuses resulted from the wardship system, which deserves more attention than it has yet garnered from students of early modern literature.⁶ In brief, if the head of an affluent household died, his minor children legally became wards of the crown, although the monarch's prerogatives and responsibilities could be and often were sold to another party. Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her husband reports that her father-in-law suffered so badly from his wardship arrangement that he sued his guardian—an action that resulted in that protector's attempt to murder his charge.⁷ Though the accuracy of this account is, again, not beyond dispute, the prevalence of complaints stemming from wardship practices is indisputable. Developed by the Tudors as a source of revenue, that system exemplifies the pragmatic efficiency of those monarchs. Wardship, which was based on medieval conceptions of financial obligation and of marriage practices, again demonstrates the need to nuance generalizations about protocapitalism with the recognition that feudal practices survived—and were skillfully deployed—in the laws regulating wardship no less than in land law. And most germane to this study is its profound effect on the material as well as the affective consequences of parental loss. Fathers sometimes attempted to avert those sorry effects through such devices as passing on property while they were still alive, but nonetheless the potentially abusive system continued to flourish.⁸

Whereas the monarch might benefit financially by retaining a wardship, it was through their sales that most benefit accrued to the crown. And it was through such sales that a number of abuses indisputably arose. Ascertaining just how corrupt the national administrators of the system were remains problematical. Lord Burghley, Master of Wards between 1561 and 1598, took gifts, but so too did many other Tudor officials; weighing the evidence against him, the historian Joel Hurstfield does not wholly exonerate him but persuasively asserts that he was generally fair and judicious.⁹ Whether or not one seconds that verdict, however, it could not be pronounced on many of the guardians created by the wardship system. Anticipating the antics of twentieth-century ambulance chasers, they were known to file petitions in anticipation of the death that would turn a child into a ward. It is clear that most of these guardians were more concerned with the financial profit they could gain from their ward than the child's education or spiritual well-being; witness among many other examples the marriages into which wards were often forced.

Moreover, both the policies of the wardship system and the practices of individual guardians intensified the displacement associated with parental death. The surviving mother received little if any preference in the assignment of wardships, but the temptation merely to read this as yet another instance of the disempowerment of women needs to be qualified by the recognition that when male relatives sought to become guardians, their relationship to the child did not necessarily ensure that they would succeed. In the reign of Edward VI, only one-fifth of wardships were sold to the mother, to a relative, to trustees chosen by the father, or to the ward him- or herself; during Mary's reign the figure came close to one in three, but in the opening years of Elizabeth's reign, it declined again to one in four. In 1587-90 one third of all grants went to such parties, an improvement but hardly a reversal of a disturbing pattern.¹⁰ Because of it, a child who suffered the loss of a parent might well be forced to move far from home and in effect lose the other parent as well, thus suffering another loss. If wardship was another source of displacement, the unscrupulous guardians who benefited from it were another instance of invaders of a home, and their manipulations could turn the mourning child from the subject who pitches the reel in the game Freud termed fort-da to that object itself.

The emotional consequences of parental loss of course varied depending on the closeness of the parent and child, the child's age, and so on. But there is a clear and present danger in the current critical climate that the circus animals of cultural history will distract us from the foul rag-and-bone shop of grief. Shakespeare wrote in, to, and for a nation of mourners. Moreover, arguably in one important respect Protestantism compromised the trajectories of mourning: practices connected with Purgatory were curtailed in the course of the sixteenth century. Anthony Low finds in Hamlet's repression of references to Purgatory an enactment of that radical change.¹¹ “The emotional and psychological consequences of the abolition of the doctrine of purgatory and curtailment of prayers for the dead,” the social historian Ralph Houlbrooke observed, “constituted one of the great unchartable revolutions of English history.”¹² Yet another reminder of regionalism, the survival of older Roman Catholic customs in northern and western areas, delimits but does not deny the significance of that revolution.¹³ Houlbrooke goes on to speculate, persuasively enough, that this rejection of Catholic mourning rituals might decrease fear of suffering in the next world; but Joshua Scodel's suggestion that the same change emphasized the barrier between the dead and the living is equally persuasive and more significant to an analysis of early parental loss.¹⁴Pericles, as we shall see, attempts to remove that barrier.

II

The Antiochus episode models the challenges of discerning the traces of these and many other questions in Pericles. To begin with, the likelihood that Shakespeare was only partly, if at all, responsible for the first two acts of the play complicates any critical analyses based on traditional concepts of authorship and intentionality, and even the alternative move of positing the culture as author does not of course resolve the textual problems that bedevil critical commentary on the play. But whoever had a hand in this episode, and however its cruxes are resolved, it relates closely to the treatment of parental death in sections of the play widely acknowledged as Shakespeare's. Like Marina, Antiochus's daughter is imperiled by the loss of her mother; like Dionyza, Antiochus perverts a parental relationship (tellingly, his victim and creature is given no name save “Antiochus's daughter”). As the riddle demonstrates, incestuous parents, no less than thieves, may create a category crisis, blurring the lines between daughter and wife and between father and husband; transgression typically announces its own etymology by crossing boundaries.

Shakespeare's Gower mentions the loss of the evil king's wife a few lines before he refers to the incest, generating the speculation that the first event facilitated the second both by removing a potential protector and by denying the king the most appropriate channel for his desires. Though the evidence for the often asserted presence of incestuous drives in Shakespeare's other romances is inconclusive enough to mandate caution, the possibility of such concerns in plays that focus on the loss of parents remains suggestive.¹⁵ Arguably anxieties about increased opportunities for incest, anxieties all the more powerful for remaining largely unspoken, intensify fears of early parental death in early modern England. In any event, it is clear that as Pericles itself progresses, the link implied in the opening act between such losses and incest synecdochically comes to foreshadow a broader issue about parental death: Pericles, like Richard III and many other Shakespearean texts, repeatedly demonstrates that such events are dangerous less because of the gap they create than because of the unscrupulous people who may attempt to fill the gap.

If the reader practices the close reading skills that earlier suitors fatally lacked, not only the meaning of the relatively transparent riddle but also the relationship of this episode to the rest of the play and to Shakespeare's other analyses of parental loss becomes clearer. Whether or not Shakespeare himself actually wrote the line in question, when Pericles observes that the object of his desires is “apparelled like the spring” (I.i.12; italics added),¹⁶ he again draws attention to the dangers of the surrogacy that is variously realized in metaphoric language and in the metaphoric familial relationships of the daughter who tragically plays at wife and the guardian who assumes the role of mother. The daughter-wife in question is like the spring in the beauty and freshness of her apparel, but that clothing involves a deceitfulness amd corruption not customarily associated with the season in question. Hence this reference prepares us for the preoccupation with the deceitfulness of other kinds of surrogacy, especially that of Dionyza, and for the interest in linguistic representation culminating in Pericles's recovery of his father's armor. In so doing the line also reminds us that clothing may bestow either the protection symbolized by that armor or the illegitimate veiling associated with Dionyza's apparent good will.

A “loss more than can thy portage quit / With all thou canst find here” (III.i.35-36), Marina's apparent deprivation of her mother sparks and shapes the development of the narrative. Born at sea, Marina describes herself as living “where I am but a stranger” (V.i.114): she dwells with people who betray her, and the brothel is a demonic parody of home. Here as in other romances, that protean symbol the sea is associated both with the loss of parents and with the recovery of them in the episode of the armor. Because, as Constance Jordan has demonstrated, shipwrecks can signal political upheaval, including tyranny, it is not surprising that the storms that occasion them can symbolize as well the wrecking of families through death and the resulting exposure to the abuses of power practiced by Dionyza and the mavens of the brothel.¹⁷

If the near-miraculous return of Thaisa at the end of the play unmistakably exemplifies wish fulfillment about parental loss, her parallel rebirth under the skilled ministrations of Cerimon does so more subtly. Both the burial ceremonies and Cerimon's ritualistic healing of her (borrowed from the sources, the name he bears in this deeply conservative drama fortuitously suggests “ceremony”) repeatedly refer to the preservation of her body. Witness the insistent emphasis on odor when the coffin is first opened:

CER.
It smells most sweetly in my sense.
2. Gent.
A delicate odor
CER.
As ever hit my nostril.

(III.ii.60-62)

Though these lines explicitly refer to the spices, implicitly they counter fears of bodily decay and its distinctive smell. And the play proceeds to refer again to the spices with which she is buried, with Cerimon exclaiming shortly afterwards, “look how fresh she looks!” (79).

Northrop Frye observes that romance typically pits an idealized situation against its demonic parody, and the sweet-smelling Thaisa is thus contrasted with Antiochus's daughter, who is described as a “glorious casket stor'd with ill” (I.i.77) and whose dead body smells foul.¹⁸ This contrast, though typical of the genre, is also embedded in contemporary conditions. If Donne “saw the skull beneath the skin” with more intensity than many of his contemporaries, he was hardly alone in seeing it; recent studies of death in early modern England disagree among themselves about the extent to which theological doctrine and social ritual could control fears of that event, but references to bodily decay appear with undeniable frequency in the texts of early modern England.¹⁹ Commonplace doctrinal contrasts between the immortal soul and the corrupt and corrupting body no doubt intensified awareness of such decay, as did the infectiousness of victims of the plague, a subject to which I will return shortly. Pericles responds to such anxieties by staging not only the wish that parents who have seemed to die will be miraculously reborn but also the wish that their bodies be miraculously preserved.

Lychorida's life and death draw attention to other forms of preservation. Here, as in the sources, she assumes the parental role of protecting Marina, and her death, like the treachery of Dionyza and the hypocrisy of the governor who does not govern his own lusts, represents the failures of protection that are associated with loss in this play. Moreover, in a genre that delights in repetition and reduplication and a play that mirrors its own action through choric summaries and dumb shows, the death of this surrogate mother echoes that unfortunate daughter's loss of her biological mother, much as she in effect loses a father too because of Pericles's travels and travails.

If Pericles opens on the distorted surrogacy of Antiochus's wife-daughter, Dionyza perverts the maternal role of Thaisa and Lychorida. “Have you / A nurse of me” (IV.i.23-24) she implores, recalling the no less villainous Claudius's suggestion that Hamlet see his uncle as a second father.²⁰ In the same speech Dionyza chillingly expresses concerns for her charge's health—“Walk with Leonine, the air is quick there / And it pierces and sharpens the stomach” (27-28)—as a ploy in the plot to murder her. Here, as so often in Shakespeare's canon, loss is associated with a failure or perversion of the responsibility to protect.

Though Dionyza is not of course Pericles's wife, her behavior unmistakably recalls that staple of romance and fairy tale, the evil stepmother. Yet we have repeatedly observed how the play dovetails the transcultural meanings sometimes attributed to romance with the distinctive cultural and social conditions of early modern England; in this instance, the detail that the bodies of Antiochus and his daughter stink despite the purgative force of fire, which is not present in the sources, again recalls fears of infected bodies in a time of plague.²¹ Similarly, Dionyza's behavior demonstrates as well how those ahistorical plot devices may be deployed as at once commentary on and construction of local historical situations. Following Bruno Bettelheim's analysis, readers often assume that the contrast between the good mother and the wicked stepmother expresses a child's bifurcated image of his female parent.²² Perhaps. But in early modern culture other valences were as powerful—arguably even more powerful—in shaping interpretations of that odd couple the mother and stepmother. Children fearing that the woman their widowed father had married would exemplify the depraved figure variously delineated in fairy tales and the hortatory passages of marriage manuals might be pleasantly surprised by a supportive addition to the family; interpretations of the actions of a stepmother might seesaw between constructing her as villain and as savior. Hence, I suggest, when Pericles and other texts in early modern England juxtapose a saintly mother and a villainous stepmother figure, they present not only two perspectives on the mother but also two constructions of a stepmother, with the latter of particular interest in a country whose mortality crises had generated a large number of stepmothers. Once again generic norms interact in complex and surprising ways with cultural and social history, drawing on, as it were, the familial unconscious. Once again, too, the figure of the stepmother expresses gendered ambivalences.

But gender is more deeply and more immediately implicated in the presentation of Dionyza. In Gower's version, Dionyse arranges the murder but her husband willingly participates in the cover-up; in Twine's Patterne of Painefull Adventures (1594?), Dionisiades is responsible and Cleon's counterpart, Stranguilio, abhors her action but nonetheless participates in the cover-up and eventually dies for the crime; in George Wilkins's Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), the husband is also innocent of the murder but nonetheless executed for it without remark. Shakespeare's Pericles similarly offers inconclusive and unstable evidence about who is responsible for the attempted murder, but it further confounds the degree of Cleon's guilt. His involvement in the scheme is nowhere suggested in Gower's prologue or in the original dialogue between Leonine and Dionyza. The would-be murderer explains his motivation as “To satisfy my lady” (IV.i.71). Later, in a replay of dialogues between Macbeth and his unladylike lady, Shakespeare's Cleon, like his counterparts, expresses scruples; it is not completely clear, however, whether or not he had any part in the planning of it, and Dionyza's anticipation of his complicity after the fact if not before (“yet I know you'll do as I advise” [IV.iii.51]) hints at a culpable degree of moral cowardice and weakness. In any event, the epilogue nowhere suggests that he does not deserve to be executed. One explanation for these confusions is that the play merely follows those of its sources. Yet Shakespeare reshaped and added to those texts in accordance with his interests; witness above all the speech about Pericles's armor. Here he retains the ambiguities of the sources, I suggest, because they play out the ambivalences in his own gendering of evil. Shakespeareans have traced a diachronic shift in his canon between intense loathing and rejection of the female in general and the mother in particular in a number of plays, notably the tragedies, and a reconciliation in the romances.²³ The slippages between blaming only Dionyza and shifting some of the guilt to her husband enact synchronically a cognate pattern within Pericles itself.

The interaction between the generic and the cultural in the relationship between mother and stepmother is manifest as well in Dionyza's motivations. Like her analogues in the sources and like Duke Frederick, she is driven by a competitive urge: Marina outshines her daughter, and the literal hunger she describes in her first appearance is no sharper than the hunger for reflected glory. Rivalry dominated and indeed in a sense defined many arenas in early modern England: the struggles that could occur in a blended family, the challenges of literary imitation, the jostling of a patronage system that was as much a buyer's market as the academic job market in the 1990s. Moreover, throughout this study we have seen how rivalry inflects loss, though Shakespeare's own interest in that subject still has not received the attention it deserves from Shakespeareans. His sonnets demonstrate both his preoccupation with rivalry and his strained attempts to transcend that obsession. In Pericles, I suggest, he deflects his own competitiveness onto a figure indisputably presented as evil, thus at once expressing and repressing it.

But it is the episode in which the eponymous hero recovers his father's armor—a scene absent from the sources and hence all the more revealing—that best demonstrates the interplay between generic norms and immediate historical conditions that shapes this play. Although the authorship of this section of the play is again not beyond dispute, the concerns of the scene are bodied forth in language in which one critic finds “an authentic Shakespearean ring”²⁴; and Pericles's speeches here echo patterns of loss and recovery we have been tracing throughout this study, increasing the likelihood that Shakespeare wrote or rewrote the scene in question.

Losing a gift from a dead parent is particularly painful because it duplicates the loss that is death; if the dead threaten not to stay in place, the missing object realizes the threat. And conversely, finding that talismanic legacy may be experienced as the magical recovery of the deceased, as it is here:

An armor, friends? I pray you let me see it.
Thanks, Fortune, yet that after all thy crosses,
Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself;
And though it was mine own, part of my heritage,
Which my dead father did bequeath to me,
With this strict charge, even as he left his life,
“Keep it, my Pericles, it has been a shield
'Twixt me and death”—and pointed to this brace—
“For that it sav'd me, keep it. In like necessity—
The which the gods protect thee from! may defend thee.”
It kept where I kept, I so dearly lov'd it,
Till the rough seas, that spares not any man,
Took it in rage, though calm'd have given't again.
I thank thee for't. My shipwrack now's no ill,
Since I have here my father gave in his will.

(II.i.120-34)

The pattern of speech acts in these lines implicitly enacts the very process of material and emotional recovery that the passage explicitly describes: the shift from questions and requests to declarations, whose authority is buttressed as well by the shift to couplets, stages Pericles's recovery of power by means of the type of armor tellingly called a “brace” (127). The couplet form also serves to mime the events being described: like parent and child and like Pericles and his armor, its two lines are bound together. Loss, as we have seen throughout this study, is typically associated with a loss of control, and here the literal recovery of an object enables the recovery of control manifest in Pericles's speech. The armor will allow him to seek and marry a king's daughter not only because it is de rigueur for the well-dressed knight, not only because it signals his social status, but also because it permits a restoration of confidence.

Pericles proceeds to request the armor from the fisherman, with his assurance “I know it by this mark” (138) linking it to the identifying birthmarks that figure so prominently in romance. In so doing he also implicitly contrasts the evidentiary certainty and epistemological clarity that the armor both permits and represents with the threats to categories (alive vs. dead; fish vs. man) that the sea effects. But lest we become too charmed by the reassurances associated with the armor, the fishermen's promptings about financial compensation for it yet again introduce the quotidian.

Shortly afterwards, our eponymous hero encapsulates the significance of the brace:

By your furtherance I am cloth'd in steel,
And, spite of all the rapture of the sea,
This jewel holds his building on my arm.

(154-56)

In the first line of this passage, which again emphasizes protection, the literal and metaphoric cling to each other as closely as the armor encases the arm: Pericles wears sturdy metal and in so doing figuratively wears his father's strength. At the same time the image of the jewel functions proleptically: the jewel-like armor will allow its wearer to gain the hand of Thaisa, who is repeatedly associated with jewels and who, like the armor, will herself be lost at sea and recovered.

How, then, does this scene gloss parental loss in Pericles and the many imbricated questions about gender and subjectivity? To begin with, the workings of armor here draw attention to the valences of protection throughout the genre of romance. On the characterological level, its hero protects, and the magical accoutrements so often associated with him, whether they be Pericles's brace or the extraordinarily equipped wristwatches that “hold their building” on James Bond's arm, in turn protect him. Not the least contrast between the heroes and the villains in these black-and-white woodcuts is that the latter are often associated with the perversion of protection, whether that action takes the form of a Dionyza who threatens her charge or an Archimago who revealingly offers shelter. On the level of plot, what is often described as a movement from loss to recovery could instead be recast as a shift from the loss to the restoration of shields, literal and otherwise, or from absent or false protection to the genuine article. And on the level of genre, romance itself protects its plots from tragic closure. All this explains why the genre is so well suited to represent both the deepest fears and hopes connected with parental death.

Protection is also more immediately relevant to this play and its valuation of the armor. It literally protected Pericles's father in battle and may protect our hero in that way as well, but in addition it figures the stability and shielding that home should provide but too often does not—notice the repetition of “keep” and its cognates (126, 128, 130), as well as the resonances of a phrase that appears shortly afterwards, “holds his building” (156). The armor enables Pericles to become a knight, a role often associated with guarding others, and in so doing it guards him as well.²⁵ In short, here as in King Lear, recovering from loss involves recovering the ability to protect and be protected.

On one level, this conservative genre here celebrates conservative sources—in several senses of the adjective—for that recovery. Thus here, as in The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare demonstrates that the ideologies of protection may screen the desire to dominate. The reference to the “strict charge” (125) of a dying man draws attention to the authority of his father, suggesting that the armor is the material equivalent, the outward and visible sign as it were, of the spiritual armor forged by parental advice in the mother's manuals and the strictures of the ars moriendi. As analyses by Coppélia Kahn and other psychoanalytic critics would suggest, the armor is clearly implicated in a struggle for masculine identity.²⁶ Arguably, too, the stress on masculine power here, however it is problematized, may well represent a recoil from the gendering of power in the figure of Dionyza. And there is no question but that the emphasis on the father's “strict charge” (125) draws attention to the danger that an absent parent will continue to dominate, a threat that recurs throughout Shakespeare's canon.

Yet the scene primarily suggests that Pericles is controlling that threatened authoritarianism: in placing the armor on his arm Pericles in a sense dominates the symbol of potential domination. Compare the ambiguous and unstable shifts of power back and forth when a knight wears his lady's favor, or the late twentieth-century commodification and inversion of that event, the trophy wife displaying jewelry purchased by her husband.²⁷ In all three instances, the apparent subordinates who display a token of someone else's power at the same time augment their own, in part by demonstrating they are, as it were, attractive enough to attract such a gift. Moreover, in the passage at hand, the armor delimits parental power even while it is established: if the dead are frightening, and frighteningly powerful, precisely because they may not stay in place but instead keep coming back, this episode insists that the synecdochic representation of the father will be firmly and stably located in a clearly defined section of the body. Thus Pericles controls the return of his father—and does so by placing the brace on the bodily part associated with his own agency. In regaining and positioning the brace, Pericles asserts control over death and over the father who is in some sense attempting to control him.²⁸

These paradoxes can be glossed with one of the most important additions to the classical Freudian analyses of mourning, the influential recent work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which has been supplemented by the writing of their English language editor and collaborator, Nicholas Rand.²⁹ Their books mime their own subject matter by at once challenging and reaffirming connection with the author of “Mourning and Melancholy.” Building on the work on introjection developed by Freud himself, by Sandor Ferenczi, and by Nicolas Abraham's predecessor Karl Abraham, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok develop a distinction between introjection, a healthy process that involves assuming some characteristics of the dead person, and incorporation, its pathological analogue characterized by a secret internalization of the dead. Thus they extend the problematical hierarchy of normal and distorted mourning.

The buried secret, which shapes not only other writings by Abraham and Torok but also Torok's collaborative venture with Nicholas Rand, the book Questions for Freud,³⁰ is arguably a less common component of mourning than the proponents of this thought-provoking theory at some points imply; but the theoretical framework provided by Abraham, Torok, and Rand explicates how wearing the armor restores power to Pericles. In theorizing the relationship of space and place, Yi-Fu Tuan, among other writers, associates the former with uncontrolled amorphousness and the latter with specificity.³¹ A textbook instance of introjection, Pericles's act of donning the brace creates, as it were, a chain of links to the past, hence performing the temporal equivalent of turning space into place in Yi-Fu Tuan's sense. Pericles acknowledges and glories in his relationship to his father and the past that progenitor represents, so to speak wearing his heart together with his armor on his sleeve.

I have been stressing power struggles between father and son; but in another sense the armor also marks the limits to the power of both its original owner and his son. However firmly positioned it may be, the brace is rusty. Much as Hermione must have her wrinkles and Paulina must settle for a second husband in a play that, despite all its other miraculous restorations, does not bring back her first one, the rustiness of the armor hints that the strategies for recuperating from parental loss, like other forms of restoration of romance, are limited. Fort-da, here played with a reel that miraculously returns itself rather than being cast away by the child, is a game whose victories involve not total mastery but partial control.

Representation and symbolization are, however, among the surest strategies for success in fort-da, and the armor restores power, though limited, to Pericles not only because of what it literally is and does but also because of what it symbolizes. And indeed, it represents representation itself in that it is not the recovered father but a signifier of and surrogate for him. Earlier psychoanalytic readings that position this episode as a stage in its hero's maturation should be further revised to acknowledge that here he encounters the Law of the Father in several intertwined senses: the strict commandment of his father, the association of masculinity with heroic enterprise—and the realm of symbolization. Entering that realm, he plays fort-da according to Lacan's rules in that the armor that is reeled in stands for the very act of substituting a representation of the father for that warrior himself. But much as the threats suggested by the father's “strict charge” (125) seem less potent than the power provided by the restoration of his armor, so too language empowers more than it limits in this recovered symbol. If parental death challenges representation in the ways detailed above, the restoration of the part restores representation as well.

If on some level the armor represents language, it also represents the genre of Pericles. The brace is found by fishermen, and romance is connected with folk traditions rather than sophisticated literary practices. The brace is an object from the past that has been restored, and romance is a literary form associated with the past, an association in this case intensified by the choric function of Gower, an author who returns from the past and speaks what might justly be called a rusty language. More specifically, indeed, romance comes back from the tumultuous ocean of Shakespeare's canon, which has included its anticipations in A Comedy of Errors and King Lear. And in the romances the effects of parental death, one of the most persistent of Shakespeare's revenants, return yet again from their earlier incarnations in All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Love's Labour's Lost, and so many other texts in the canon.

The ending of Pericles is not without its troubling undercurrents; in particular, though Lysimachus attempts to distance himself from the miasma of the brothel, reminding one of nothing so much as his latter-day incarnations who claim to read Playboy for the interviews, that atmosphere leaves a cloud around his name. Nor does Pericles completely erase the threat of parental death: in a version of the message from Marcade, we learn in the last few moments of the play that Thaisa's father is dead. But Pericles's response signals the distance the play has travelled:

Heavens make a star of him! Yet there, my queen,
We'll celebrate their nuptials, and ourselves
Will in that kingdom spend our following days.
Our son and daughter shall in Tyrus reign.

(V.iii.79-82)

This speech reminds us how different the effects of losing a parent can be when the child is established in life: Marina is all at sea when her mother apparently dies, while Thaisa faces that event fortified with a supportive family and evidence that the line will continue. Thus parental death is associated not with the violent and untimely “rapture” (II.i.155) but with orderly succession and the inheritance of a throne. If each Jack has his Jill at the end of romantic comedy, here each royal couple has its crown. In short, as at the end of Cymbeline, doubts and dangers are not absent, but neither are they intrusive.³² The emphasis remains on restoration, including the fulfillment of a fantasy no doubt held by the many members of the audience who had lost a parent: the missing mother is restored to her husband and daughter. During most of the play, interpretive certainties are buffeted, if not shipwrecked, by a storm of indeterminacies, but the play concludes on dry land. And as we survey that terrain, we realize that this is no country for poststructuralists.

III

Pericles, then, gestures toward the perspectives on parental loss that recur throughout its author's canon. Such deaths are perilous less because they leave canyons of emptiness in the lives of children than because unscrupulous guardians like Richard III and the Queen in Cymbeline are all too ready to fill such abysses. Those evil figures characteristically manifest their untrustworthiness above all by their distortions of protectiveness. But if the surrogacy of a stepparent or an ironically named Lord Protector demonstrates the perils of losing a parent, other forms of surrogacy, whether staged by more trustworthy parental figures such as the Countess of Rossillion or by language itself, can bring resolution and reconciliation—on some but by no means all occasions and in some but by no means all genres. And in yet other instances, the emotional upheavals of losing a parent are mimed by the moral instabilities created by guardian figures like Falstaff and Titania, whose behavior toward their charges demands complex and shifting judgments.

As we have observed, Pericles explores these and other questions about parental loss by rooting the norms of romance in the soil of early modern England. Sometimes the social and cultural pressures connected with the early loss of parents appear in the play only very indirectly—“the mnemonic flicker / Of the wave of lost particulars,” as the modern poet Amy Clampitt writes of dreamwork (“The Burning Child,” 1-2).³³ But Clampitt also acknowledges that “[t]he dream redacted cannot sleep; it whimpers / So relentlessly of lost particulars” (14-15), and at a number of points in Pericles, particularly passages engaging the fear of dangerously self-serving guardians, the specificities of cultural anxieties unmistakably emerge, neither whimpering nor whispering but rather firmly enjoining us to recognize their complex imbrication with the plot of the play.

Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see my book Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 5.

2. Francesco Petrarch, Phisicke against Fortune, trans. Thomas Twyne (London, 1579), sig. Nviii^v.

3. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 24-25.

4. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 49-50.

5. See Charles Carlton, The Court of Orphans (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), esp. 44.

6. For a useful overview of wardship, see H. E. Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); Joel Hurstfield, The Queen's Wards: Wardship and Marriage Under Elizabeth I, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1973). Exceptions to the neglect of this system by students of early modern literature include the brief but useful commentaries on wardship and inheritance in Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, England: Harvester Press and Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 80-84; Marilyn L. Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 61-64.

7. Hutchinson, Memoirs, 16.

8. The ante mortem passing on of property is the central thesis of Lloyd Bonfield, “Normative Rules and Property Transmission: Reflections on the Link between Marriage and Inheritance in Early Modern England,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

9. Hurstfield, The Queen's Wards, chaps. 10, 12, 13.

10. Bell, Court of Wards, 115-16.

11. Anthony Low, “Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father,” ELR, 29 (1999): 443-67. I thank the author for making his manuscript available to me before it appeared in print.

12. Ralph Houlbrooke, “Death, Church, and Family in England Between the Late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge in association with the Social History Society of the United Kingdom, 1989), 36.

13. On that survival, see Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 45; and David Cressy, “Death and the Social Order: The Funerary Preferences of Elizabethan Gentlemen,” Continuity and Change 5 (1990): 102.

14. Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21.

15. Many critics have argued for allusions to incest throughout the romances. See, for example, C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 301, 312-13; Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare's Other Language (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. 59, 93-94.

16. I cite Gwynne Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

17. See Constance Jordan, “‘Eating the Mother’: Property and Propriety in Pericles,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret R. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 346.

18. On the contrast between idealizations and their demonic parodies, see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 110.

19. The many recent studies of responses to death in the period include James L. Calderwood, Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Bettie Anne Doebler, “Rooted Sorrow”: Dying in Early Modern England (Rutherford, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1994); Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

20. Compare Anthony J. Lewis's observation that the play contrasts good and bad nurturing (“I Feed on Mother's Flesh: Incest and Eating in Pericles,” Essays in Literature 15 [1988]: 154).

21. George Wilkins's Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608) offers a partial parallel, however, in that the guilty couple is struck by lightning and their countrymen disdain to bury them.

22. Bettelheim argues that aggression originally intended for mothers is redirected toward stepmothers, in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), esp. 66-73.

23. For an influential and nuanced version of this argument, see Barber and Wheeler, The Whole Journey; they also note the survival of gendered antagonism in some romances (see, for example, 335).

24. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (London: Hollis and Carter, 1954), 24.

25. Douglas L. Peterson suggests that both the father's armor and Marina's presence draw attention to Pericles's responsibility to protect legacies (Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances [San Marino, Calif: Huntington Library, 1973], 95).

26. See Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 211-14.

27. I am indebted to Gwynne Blakemore Evans for the parallel with knighthood.

28. For a different but not incompatible argument about the genealogical significance of the armor, see David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 131. Bergeron suggests that the armor represents the royal family as well as Pericles' own heritage and that its rustiness may be an emblem of peace. Constance Jordan also relates the armor to the imperiled royal heritage and notes that it was rescued by subordinates, the fishermen (Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997], 52).

29. See two studies written by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok and translated by Nicholas T. Rand: The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 37 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

30. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok, Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

31. See Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), esp. chap. 1.

32. For an opposite view of the ending that stresses its instability, see Clifford Leech, “The Structure of the Last Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958): 22-23.

33. I cite Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Portions of this essay appeared in Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation, published by Cambridge University Press. Kind permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.