SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “‘The Shores of My Mortality’: Pericles' Greece of the Mind.” In Pericles: Critical Essays, edited by David Skeele, pp. 228-37. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

[In the following essay, Hopkins considers the treatment of geographical locations in Pericles, concluding that the travels depicted in the play are symbolic of an exploration of the characters' identities.]

In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the eponymous hero undertakes a convoluted series of travels which take him from Tyre to Antioch, back to Tyre, thence to Tarsus, next to Pentapolis, back to Tarsus again (en route for Tyre), to Mytilene, where he meets his long-lost daughter, who has been brought up in Tarsus, and finally to Ephesus, where he is reunited with his wife. These fantastic peregrinations may seem to align the play with some of the other narratives of travel that had proved so popular on the English stage, such as The Three English Brothers or the heroic journeyings of Tamburlaine or Faustus, but in fact the locations of Pericles are realized and represented in ways very different from the careful correspondence to the map that marks Marlowe's imagined space, or the personal experience of exotic locations that informs The Three English Brothers.¹ What we find in Pericles is not so much a Greece of the atlas as a Greece of the mind.

It used to be assumed that Shakespeare's representations of geographical locations were habitually careless: Bohemia in The Winter's Tale is gaily endowed with a seacoast, and characters in The Two Gentlemen of Verona improbably take ship from Verona to Milan.² Recently, however, growing interest in “local” or topical reading has prompted new appraisals of the degree of Shakespeare's knowledge of his foreign settings. R. W. Desai, for instance, has argued that the Sicily and Bohemia of The Winter's Tale are not so remote from reality as has been supposed,³ and the degree of local color and local knowledge displayed in Hamlet has also often been remarked.⁴Pericles, however, seems to be characterized neither by notable ignorance or notable accuracy about geographical fact, but by an indifference to the particularities of location and atmosphere that might well be thought surprising in a play so centred on travel.⁵ In Pericles, the true borders and the true journeys are of the mind, and for all the imagery of the sea, the most important shores are those that lap at the self—those that Pericles himself so memorably terms “the shores of my mortality.”⁶

At the outset of the play, Gower announces:

This Antioch, then, Antiochus the Great
Built up this city, for his chiefest seat,
The fairest in all Syria; I tell you what mine authors say.

(1.Chorus.17-20)

There is a marked lack of interest here in the specificities of Antioch. The information, in keeping with the medieval reverence for authority and authors that is being so closely imitated, is avowedly secondhand; concrete description is limited to the bland and honorific superlatives “chiefest” and “fairest.” Most telling, though, is the close association between place and person: Playing the nomenclature game so often found in connection with place names, Gower presents Antioch as virtually an extension of Antiochus's own identity—even the term “seat” can be appropriately applied to a part of the body. Moreover, personal identity and geographical identity are bound together even more closely, since, for us, Antioch is defined primarily as a place where riddles are set, and, as Frederick Kiefer points out, the riddles are inherently associated with identity: “a riddle usually defies immediate comprehension; it requires the challenger to pause and ponder—in this instance the relationship between the ‘I’ of the riddle and someone else.”⁷

Antiochus himself goes on to employ much the same technique when he presents his daughter (who, suggestively, has no name of her own, and is thus seen as a dependent of her father in much the same way as his city is): “Before thee stands this fair Hesperides” (1.1.28). Less a person than a place, the daughter is figured as containing within herself an entire garden, though it will be well worth Pericles' while to remember that the Garden of the Hesperides contained apples, symbol of the temptation and the Fall.⁸ Thus, while we may learn little about Antioch, we receive a very clear introduction to the personalities who dominate it, and thence to a play in which geographical locality will be persistently subsumed in personal identity.

Tyre is treated with much the same minimality of detail as Antioch, as we see in Thaliard's bald statement “So this is Tyre, and this the court” (1.3.1)—an assertion quite devoid of any atmosphere or particularity. On his return home, Pericles is disturbed to find that his mood continues uneasy, even though, as he observes,

                    danger, which I feared, is at Antioch,
Whose arm seems far too short to hit me here.
Yet neither pleasure's art can joy my spirits,
Nor yet the other's distance comfort me.

(1.2.7-10)

Antioch here is quite clearly a place rather than a person: It has an arm, and it governs the relative pronoun “whom” rather than “which” (though Shakespeare, as has been much oberved in the recent debates over the authorship of the Funeral Elegy for William Peter, is by no means always consistent on this point). However, “the other's distance”—suggestive phrase—cannot “comfort,” because Pericles has in effect internalized his own Antiochus:

                              The great Antiochus,
'Gainst whom I am too little to contend,
Since he's so great can make his will his act,
Will think me speaking, though I swear to silence;
.....With hostile forces he'll o'erspread the land,
And with the ostent of war will look so huge
Amazement shall drive courage from the state,
Our men be vanquished ere they do resist,
With care of them, not pity of myself,
Who am no more but as the tops of trees
Which fence the roots they grow by and defend them,
Makes both my body pine and soul to languish,
And punish that before that he would punish.

(1.2.16-33)

The fear of Antiochus's punishment makes Pericles punish himself; Antiochus bulks large indeed in his mind, overspreading the whole land; while Pericles himself reaches only to the tops of the trees. It is abundantly clear that, as in the play's descriptions of place, these are terms that reflect psychic rather than physical realities of size and proportion. It is also clear that in this play, what has effectively happened is that places do not stay in one place: Indeed Constance Relihan argues that “Tyre … becomes identifiable with Antioch, and its ruler, Pericles, becomes analogous to Antiochus,”⁹ while Alexander Leggatt suggests that all Pericles' later relationships are “touched by shadows from Antioch.”¹⁰

Helicanus's solution to Pericles' difficulties is that he should travel. At the same time, though, Helicanus also reasserts the strength of the person-place bond in his assurance that should Antiochus attack while Pericles is away, “We'll mingle our bloods together in the earth, / From whence we had our being and our birth” (1.2.113-114). The ease of “mingling” and the bringing of the sentence to rest on “being” and “birth” make this ostensible image of death a strangely soothing part of the cycle of personal identity, and the same soothing note is heard even more strongly in Pericles' reply:

I'll take thy word for faith, not ask thine oath;
Who shuns not to break one will sure crack both.
But in our orbs we'll live so round and safe
That time of both this truth shall ne'er convince,
Thou showedst a subject's shine, I a true prince.

(1.2.120-124)

It may well be objected that there is something palpably amiss with either the author of this speech or its transmission: The verse seems uncommonly regular, even plodding, for late Shakespeare, and what is “a subject's shine”? Nevertheless, one part of it is absolutely of a piece with this play's consistent imagings of space: Pericles counterpoises his talk of breaking and cracking with the extraordinary, lulling evocation of the two round, safe orbs, a foreshadowing of the transcendent reassurance of a supernatural order of things that will be afforded when he later hears the music of the spheres. The idea of the “orb” links to the speech's main thrust of confirming Helicanus's temporary sovereignty, of which an orb is the symbol, but it also confirms our growing sense of the extent to which, in this play, every man is his own world.

Immediately after Pericles' departure, Thaliard, the would-be assassin sent by Antiochus, arrives. Discovering that his intended prey has eluded him, Thaliard is resigned: “since he's gone, the King's seas must please; he ‘scaped the land to perish at the sea” (1.3.26-28). For Thaliard, the sea is the king's—his king's—and he thus continues the imaging of Antiochus as huge, outstretching. Pericles, meanwhile, is on his way to Tarsus, which, for all its distance, will turn out to be, in many ways, almost interchangeable with the places he has left: Indeed Constance Jordan comments that “[at] Tharsus, Pericles contends with the economic consequences of Antioch,”¹¹ and many other recent critics have similarly observed the elaborate system of correspondences and equivalences which structures a play once thought fragmentary. Ruth Nevo observes the extent to which so many aspects of the play “possess a degree of unity bordering on the obsessive,”¹² and this is particularly true of its representation of its geographical locations. Although Tarsus is currently differentiated by the famine from which it is suffering, Cleon points out that this is a characteristic which could well prove purely temporary:

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 Tarsus may be theirs.

(1.4.52-55)

The one thing that sets Tarsus apart from the cities we have so far encountered could, then, become instead an attribute of theirs, and the potential for geographical displacement is further emphasized when Cleon refers vaguely to the danger posed by “Some neighbouring nation” (1.4.64) rather than naming a specific one.

We certainly hear of nothing else to help us register the specificity of Tarsus. Dionyza, wife of its governor, speaks of landscape early in the scene, but it is in purely metaphorical terms: “For who digs hills because they do aspire / Throws down one mountain to cast up a higher” (1.4.5-6). The governor himself does characterize the town, but it is in notably bland terms:

A city on whom plenty held full hand,
For riches strewed herself even in her streets,
Whose towers bore heads so high they kissed the clouds,
And strangers ne'er beheld but wondered at.

(1.4.22-25)

All we really learn from this is that Tarsus was splendid and had high towers; and these are not particularizing or distinguishing details—indeed, John Pitcher argues that the lines “cannot but remind us, grimly, of the suitors who had tried in vain to solve the incestuous riddle, and whose heads were left impaled on the walls of Antioch.”¹³ Equally, the emphasis on the height of the towers could well seem to have been borrowed from the standard description of Troy. This is a suggestion which is perhaps reinforced when Pericles reassures Cleon that his ships are not “like the Trojan horse” (1.4.93), but even that likeness is undone when the grateful inhabitants of Tarsus respond by blessing Pericles with “The gods of Greece protect you!” (1.4.97): If his identity is so securely perceived as Greek, why might he have been acting like a Trojan?

These twinned references to the Trojan horse and to the gods of Greece might at first suggest that the play is exploiting the resonances of that other journey around the Mediterranean in quest of a wife and a child, the Odyssey—we do, after all, hear of a character called Nestor (3.1.65).¹⁴ However, any such development is rapidly aborted, for our next port of call is Pentapolis. Kiefer notes that “when Pericles arrives in Pentapolis, he finds himself in a world resembling Antioch,”¹⁵ but there is at least one difference, for in Pentapolis the fishermen speak not of the gods of classical Greece but of “bells, steeple, church, and parish” (2.1.42)—a set of terms that in fact serve to take us straight back to England. (We may indeed already have thought of England in this play when Gower invites us to look at severed heads [1.Chorus.40] just like those on London Bridge, while the law made by Antiochus to “Keep men in awe” [1.Chorus.35] may have reminded us of the alleged heresies of Marlowe.) Moreover, Pentapolis, like those cities that have preceded it, proves to have a strange reluctance to define an exclusive identity for itself—Constance Relihan notes that “Pentapolis is typically imagined as ‘a group of five cities on the northern coast of Africa,’ but their exact location remains obscure.”¹⁶ Pericles, like a curious traveller, inquires of the fishermen about local customs—“Why, are your beggars whipped then?” (2.1.90)—but the Second Fisherman answers him not in local terms but in general, quasi-transcultural ones: “O, not all, my friend, not all, for if all your beggars were whipped, I would wish no better office than to be beadle” (2.1.91-93). Taking “all” in the sense in which Hamlet employed it when he spoke to Horatio of “your philosophy,” the Second Fisherman drains it of any specific applicability to Pentapolis; he simply assumes that he and Pericles, wherever the latter may come from, inhabit a shared world.

When we move on to the tournament, we discover that Pentapolis is in fact a strikingly cosmopolitan society. The first knight we see comes from Sparta, “And the device he bears upon his shield / Is a black Ethiop reaching at the sun” (2.2.20-21); the second is from Macedon, and his shield bears a motto in Spanish (2.2.27); the third, from Antioch, has his motto in Latin (2.2.30), as do the unidentified fourth and fifth, and Pericles himself, who makes the sixth. Even more to the point, the entire event transports us well away from Greece to the heart of the court culture of Renaissance England, just as the Pentapolis fishermen echo English rustics.¹⁷ This court/country polarity—the first we have encountered—is further developed when Simonides, pretending to disparage Pericles, calls him “a country gentleman” (2.3.33). Pericles, in turn, thinks Simonides is “like to my father's picture” (2.3.37), which further confirms our impression that, however noticeable the divide between court and rustic culture, kings of any country are largely interchangeable. Simonides does, however, go on to provide one of the play's very few indications of geographical particularity when he says that “I have heard you knights of Tyre / Are excellent in making ladies trip” (2.3.101-102), though this might well be thought to be a nonce-view occasioned by Pericles' person and Simonides' developing plans for him.

As Pericles progresses toward marriage with Thaisa, it seems that his travels will now come to an end. Even before we learn that they will not, however, a new motif of travel is introduced as Pericles' lords resolve to seek him. The terms of their decision are in line with the “small world” depicted by the play as a whole: The First Lord declares “If in the world he live, we'll seek him out” (2.4.29). Helicanus persuades them to defer their journey, and when they agree he closes the scene with “When peers thus knit, a kingdom ever stands” (2.4.58): Again personal and national identity are inextricably interwoven. The visual image created by Helicanus and the three lords holding hands is soon echoed verbally in Gower's description of “the four opposing coigns / Which the world together joins” (3.Chorus.17-18). The Third Chorus seems to me in general a masterly piece of writing, catching the flavor both of Gower's speech and of the panic of the sea voyage, and I take the architectonic concreteness with which the round world's corners are imagined to be a very deliberate part of its archaicizing strategies, which may well shed light on why, throughout this play, the author is so patently uninterested in more contemporary geographical perspectives and information.¹⁸

With the storm that diverts Pericles' ship from Tyre to the Ephesian coast and thence to Tarsus, it first seems that now, at least, the facts of the physical world are exercising a decisive influence over the characters and their fates. In many ways, however, that initial impression is not an entirely accurate one, for the storm can clearly operate as a symbolic manifestation of the birth throes of Thaisa, as well as of the great life changes that the birth of a baby represents; Marina suggests something similar later when she says, “This world to me is as a lasting storm, / Whirring me from my friends” (4.1.19-20). Moreover, the diversion caused by the storm is also a symbolic as much as a physical one, since it takes Pericles back both to a place he has revisited and also, effectively, to an earlier stage in his life, before he had a wife. It is, then, fitting that the child who is born in the storm is given a name that elides personal and geographical identities: In a change from Shakespeare's sources, where the daughter was called Tarsia or Thaise, she is named Marina, a name that associates her not with where she grows up but where she was born.¹⁹ From now on, “the sea” will be, in one sense, wherever Marina is, and in the same way the influence of Ephesus, which now enters the play, will also not be confined to the geographical location of Ephesus itself. Ephesus was a setting that Shakespeare had used before, in The Comedy of Errors, and there he makes much of the town's traditional associations with witchcraft, with Diana, and (like Tarsus) with St Paul. These resonances appear to be drawn on again when Thaisa comes to herself and exclaims, “O dear Diana! / Where am I?” (3.2.103-104). Her question virtually answers itself: She is in Diana's land—but the physician who treats her there models his practice not on anything indigenous but, at least in some versions of the text, on what he has heard of Egypt (3.2.83). Moreover, Pericles in Tarsus also invokes Diana (3.3.28), and so, later, does Marina in Mytilene (4.2.142)—the symbolism being underlined by the Bawd's scoffing response, “What have we to do with Diana?” (4.2.143). The atmosphere of Ephesus spreads far beyond Ephesus, an effect further enhanced when Gower's reference to Marina's “mistress Dian” (4.Chorus.29) is almost immediately followed by his comparison of her with a “dove of Paphos” (4.Chorus.32): Paphianism and Ephesianism are both, it seems, to be found as much in Tarsus as in their respective home territories.

At the same time, though, the play does seem to register a sharper sense of geographical differences from act 4 onward, perhaps partly as a consequence of a greater immediacy and fewer overtones of myth in Marina's perils than in Pericles'. Dionyza tells her guest, “I love the king your father and yourself / With more than foreign heart” (4.1.32-33), and the wordplay works only if we are prepared to accept, for the first time in the play, a concept of foreignness that assumes it to be hostile. This is followed by Marina and Leonine discussing which way the wind blows (4.1.51-52), which invites us to register, again in a way that is new, the specific location of Tarsus and the importance, to a maritime population, of wind direction. Historical Tarsus is, though, unlikely to have been plagued by a pirate called Valdes (4.1.97), any more than historical Mytilene provides a credible home for a Transylvanian (4.2.20)—not to mention the improbability of its having chequins as its currency (4.2.25). Here we are back to an indifference to national distinctions that is also figured in Gower's broadly general “bourn to bourn, region to region” (4.4.4). Indeed Gower in this speech deliberately downplays difference, prefiguring the alienation effect as he casually remarks that “We commit no crime / To use one language in each several clime / Where our scene seems to live” (4.4.5-7)—a point that is neatly underlined when, with a typically English insouciance about the correct pronunciation of foreign names, he rhymes “Mytilene” with “then” (4.4.50-51).

In the scene when Marina confronts Lysimachus, the blurring of person and place takes on new point. The Bawd tells Marina that Lysimachus is “the governor of this country, and a man whom I am bound to” (4.6.50-51); Marina replies, “If he govern the country, you are bound to him indeed, but how honourable he is in that I know not” (4.6.52-53). Surely implicit here is a pun on “cunt”; Marina may indeed doubt Lysimachus's honor if he is responsible for the government of the collective “cuntry” of the brothel, and Boult seems to play on the same meaning when he tells her that her “peevish chastity … is not worth a breakfast in the cheapest country under the cope” (4.6.120-121). Boult also images Marina herself as a country when he resolves to deflower her: “An if she were a thornier piece of ground than she is, she shall be ploughed” (4.6.142-143).

If Marina is a thorny piece of ground for Boult, she appears very different to Pericles, when they are finally reunited; even before he is sure of her identity, he says “thou seemest a palace / For the crowned truth to dwell in” (5.1.121-122).²⁰ He wants to know her parentage, but he is also insistently inquisitive about her geographical affiliations: “What country-woman?” (5.1.101); “Where do you live?” (5.1.113); “Where were you bred?” (5.1.115). His final question, though, shows that, once more, what is at stake is less an interest in national than in personal identity: “Where were you born? / And wherefore called Marina?” (5.1.155-156). When Marina answers “Called Marina / For I was born at sea” (5.1.5-6), and then adduces additional proofs of her parentage, the landscape of this play becomes its most definitively that of the mind as Pericles fears “Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me / O'erbear the shores of my mortality / And drown me with their sweetness.” (5.1.193-195).

The close of the play continues to show this. After Gower once again breaks the illusion to transport us, as in Henry V, on a journey that is overtly mental rather than physical (5.2.19-20), the governance of the various countries that have now fallen under Pericles' purview is arranged with fairy-tale indifference to realpolitik: Marina is to marry Lysimachus at Pentapolis and then reign in Tyre, while Pericles and Thaisa are to stay in Pentapolis—an arrangement which leaves neither of the two rulers, Pericles and Lysimachus, in their original states, and which leaves Mytilene completely rudderless, as also are both Antioch and Tarsus.²¹ Pericles' exchange of Tyre for Pentapolis and Lysimachus's of Mytilene for Tyre, though, do no more than confirm the deliberate flattening of geographical difference that has all along so consistently marked the play. Even racial difference seems to count for little—Antiochus sleeps in “his bed of blackness” (1.2.89), which may well seem like a pointed displacement of racial marking, and Marina is promised “the difference of all complexions” (4.2.76), but this “difference” turns out to be no more than that between a Frenchman and a Spaniard. This is indeed a world where accidents of geographical particularity have little impact compared with the force of the storm that blows inside the mind; within the shores of his mortality, each man is an island, in Tyre, of itself.

Notes

1. For the connection between Pericles and The Three English Brothers, see H. Neville Davies, “Pericles and the Sherley Brothers,” in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 94-113. Davies points to “significant similarities” between the two plays (98-99), but also argues that “the two plays are worlds apart” (112).

2. For other such instances, see Ton Hoenselaars, “Europe Staged in English Renaissance Drama,” Yearbook of European Studies 6 (1993), 85-112.

3. R. W. Desai, “‘What Means Sicilia? He Something Seems Unsettled,’” Comparative Drama 30:3 (Fall, 1996), 311-324.

4. See, for instance, Keith Brown, “Hamlet's Place on the Map,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1956), 160-182; Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Martin Holmes, The Guns of Elsinore (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964); Gunnar Sjogren, “A Contribution to the Geography of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 100-101 (1964-1965), pp. 266-73; and my own “Discovered Countries: Hamlet and Europe,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 6 (October, 1996), 39-45.

5. For a very vigorously developed argument to the contrary, though one which I do not ultimately find convincing, see Constance C. Relihan, “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place,” Philological Quarterly (Summer, 1992), 71:3, 281-299.

6. William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Philip Edwards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), V.i.194. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text. Although I am aware of the various speculations about the presence of a second author in Pericles, the pattern and nature of images of place seems to me consistent throughout the play, and I have not therefore engaged with issues of attribution.

7. Frederick Kiefer, “Art, Nature, and the Written Word in Pericles,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61:2 (1991-1992), 207.

8. See Alexander Leggatt, “The Shadow of Antioch: Sexuality in Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” in Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama 1580-1680, ed. Louise and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 167-179.

9. Relihan, “Liminal Geography,” 286.

10. Leggatt, “The Shadow of Antioch,” 174.

11. “‘Eating the Mother’: Property and Propriety in Pericles,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghampton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 345.

12. Ruth Nevo, “The Perils of Pericles,” in The Undiscover'd Country: New Essays on Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, ed. B. J. Sokol (London: Free Association Books, 1993), 150-178, 151. On similar lines, Anthony Lewis argues that the whole of Pericles “enacts one theme” (“‘I Feed on Mother's Flesh’: Incest and Eating in Pericles,” Essays in Literature 15 [1988], 147-163,); Neville Davies comments on the play's symmetricality (Davies, “Pericles and the Sherley Brothers,” 110); and W. B. Thorne remarks on its circularity (“Pericles and the Incest-Fertility Opposition,” Shakespeare Quarterly 22 [1971], 43-56), as does Douglas L. Peterson (Time, Tide and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances [San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1973], 80-81).

13. John Pitcher, “The Poet and Taboo: The Riddle of Shakespeare's Pericles,” Essays and Studies 35 (1982), 16-17. Pitcher is very illuminating in general on equivalences and doublings in the play. For other such patterns and repetitions, see Maurice Hunt, “Pericles and the Emblematic Imagination,” Studies in the Humanities 17:1 (1990), 1-20.

14. Sara Hanna similarly suggests similarities between Antiochus's daughter and Helen (“Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles,” The Upstart Crow 11 [1991], 95).

15. “Art, Nature, and Language in Pericles,” 212.

16. Relihan, “Liminal Geography,” 290.

17. On the links between this scene and English court culture, see Alan R. Young, “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 453-456, 454, and F. David Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), 461-479.

18. Richard Hillman, however, sees Gower not as an archaicizing figure but as one reminiscent of the historian Guicciardine—another analogy that undoes particularities of nationality (“Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 [1985], 427-437).

19. On the sources' names, see Elizabeth Archibald, “‘Deep Clerks She Dumbs’: The Learned Heroine in Apollonius of Tyre and Pericles,” Comparative Drama 22:4 (Winter 1988-89), 293.

20. For discussion of this emblem see Deborah Willis, “The Monarch and the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Ceremony for the Healing of the King's Evil,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 164.

21. For comment on this see Relihan, “Liminal Geography,” 291.