SOURCE: Healy, Margaret. “Pericles and the Pox.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 92-107. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Healy asserts that in Pericles Shakespeare presented a veiled criticism of the efforts of King James I to wed his children to members of the Spanish royal family.]

Louis MacNeice's poem Autolycus (1944-7) gives aptly magical expression to the dominant apprehension of Shakespeare's late plays in our century. Autolycus evokes a picture of the Bard at the sunset of his career mysteriously moving away from the ‘taut plots and complex characters’ of the major tragedies, conjuring instead ‘tapestried romances … / With rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray’, and from them turning out ‘happy Ever-afters’ (ll. 3-6). MacNeice's words capture a certain ambivalence towards this Shakespearean sea change: indeed, the romances, with their emphasis on the production of wonder, their tendency towards straggling plots and emblematic representation, and their preponderance of ‘childish horrors’ and ‘old gags’ (Autolycus ll. 14, 15), are often experienced as charming but enigmatic and not altogether satisfying puzzles—even as regressive aberrations. The latter is most true of the ‘unwanted child’ Pericles, a play of suspect parentage, excluded from the First Folio, and only available to us through what most editors agree is a particularly bastardised quarto and its numerous offspring (it was printed six times to 1635, including twice in one year, 1609—an unusual occurrence).¹

Frequently vilified and rarely performed today, Pericles has been the focus of considerable bewilderment: why, critics repeatedly ponder, was this play so acclaimed and popular in the Jacobean age when it has proven so relatively unappealing in ours?² The title page of the first quarto of 1609 describes it as ‘The Late, and much admired Play … As it hath been divers and sundry times acted by his Majesties Servants, at the Globe’; and contemporary references suggest that it was a huge box-office success in London playhouses, a favourite for private house production, and for court performance, too.³ It was, moreover, one of two Shakespearean plays—the other being King Lear—put on by a professional company with recusant sympathies (Sir Richard Cholmeley's Players), which toured Yorkshire in 1609.⁴

When Pericles was performed by the RSC in 1990, however, one theatre critic, dismissing the play ‘as just a far-fetched fairy tale’, could only explain its early seventeenth-century appeal in the following derogatory terms:

It is fanciful to think that business had been flat at the Globe, and Burbage suggested that something with more sex and violence would pull audiences in. ‘Incest and brothels will,’ he might have said, ‘do the box-office a power of good.’⁵

Steven Mullaney reached much the same conclusion in his important book, The Place of the Stage. Contesting the popular thesis that this is an experimental play which evolved to suit the new context of the Blackfriars theatre, Mullaney argues that Pericles rather ‘represents a radical effort to dissociate the popular stage from its cultural contexts’, a shift into ‘pure’ aestheticism, and that its subsequent literary fortunes testify to ‘the limits of any work that seeks to obscure or escape its historical conditions of possibility’.⁶ For Mullaney then, this was an experiment of a different kind which went badly wrong. For him, Pericles is unalloyed aestheticism pandering to the tastes of emergent liberal humanism—any quest for dissonant voices will get short shrift here.

Sandra Billington's Mock Kings in Medieval and Renaissance Drama obliquely reinforces this perspective. In her view the character of Pericles represents kingly perfection; he is ‘an ideal courtly lord and effective prince, whose virtue does not waver despite the effects of the plot on it’. She finds Pericles an ‘exception’ in the world of plays from this period dominated by depictions of dubious and tyrannical monarchs, possibly, she suspects, because ‘the devil has the most dramatic plots’.⁷ Frances Yates and Glynne Wickham, and more recently Jonathan Goldberg and David Bergeron, also forestall a more questioning reading of the play when they argue that Pericles contains a thinly veiled likeness to James VI and I in the figure of its hero.⁸ Indeed the majority of commentators are admiring of ‘patient’ king Pericles and if they read James, his family, and the events of his reign into the play, it is almost inevitably viewed as a eulogy to James and a celebration of his rule.⁹ Such readings appear to be endorsed by the fact that the text of Pericles resonates with James's own aphorisms in his voluminous writings about kingship, a prime example from the beginning of the play being its hero's utterance, ‘kings are earth's gods’ (i, 146)—arguably the monarch's favourite tenet. Thus, once again, Shakespearean drama is construed as shoring up royal absolutism. This play's undisputed ‘happy ending’ bears witness to this: the royal marriage which allies two kingdoms is understood as a particularly fortuitous and positive outcome, the topical analogy being the projected peaceful Union of England and Scotland through James's mediation. The latter was a highly topical matter in 1607, and one which had achieved extravagant courtly representation in January of that year in The Lord Hay's Masque to celebrate the betrothal of a Scottish favourite and the daughter of an English lord. The masque opens with a fulsome address to ‘Gracious James, King of Great Britain’:

O then, great Monarch, with how wise a care
Do you these bloods divided mix in one,
And with like consanguinities prepare
The high and everliving Union
                    'Tween Scots and English. Who can wonder then
                    If he that marries kingdoms, marries men.(10)

The ‘marriage’ of kingdoms was certainly a subject close to the king's heart throughout this decade.

The English-Scottish ‘marriage’ was not, however, the only one preoccupying James and exercising his patience c.1606-7 when Pericles was probably written. The king was simultaneously engaged in plans to ally Britain with Spain, and this projected ‘marriage’, for the majority of his subjects, was undoubtedly more pressing and more controversial. In fact, ‘the Spanish Match’ was unlikely to have won widespread public approval: James's repeated attempts to marry his son Henry to the Spanish Infanta and his daughter Elizabeth to the Duke of Savoy would hardly have been construed by the bulk of the populace (for whom Spain was the epitome of the Antichrist) as desirable, or as the stuff of happy endings and fairy-tale romance.¹¹ Building on this perspective, this chapter will argue that Pericles' ending, in particular the betrothal of Marina to Lysimachus, is far from suggestive of uncomplicated ‘happy Ever-afters’, and that analysis of this play's representations of early modern syphilis (the Pox), and its medico-moral politics, provides new contexts and substantial support for more dissonant readings.

My focus will be on the last two acts of Pericles, and in particular on the brothel scenes where discussion of the Pox and its consequences are rife and nauseatingly explicit. I should point out that there are no references to syphilis or its consequences in either of the play's two reputed sources: John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book 8) and Lawrence Twine's The Patterne of Painfull Adventures (a translation of the 153rd story of the Gesta Romanorum). Interestingly, too, George Wilkins' novel of the play, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), erases all references to the Pox, recuperates Lysimachus as a healthful and virtuous governor, and concludes by assuring its readers of the fruitfulness and happiness of this union.¹²

I will begin, though, by reminding you where we are at this stage in the action. The first three Acts of Pericles portray its hero being tossed impotently around the exotic world of the eastern Mediterranean, a prey to forces greater than himself, yet—in the manner of romance—managing to fall in love, marry and beget a child, Marina, in the process. Life is cruel but virtue flourishes in hardship: Marina, for all intents and purposes an orphan, grows up to be a paragon princess—beautiful, talented and saintly. Her tragic destiny, however, catches up with her, and her wicked guardian Dionyzia threatens her with murder at the hands of a servant just at the point she is mourning the death of her beloved nurse. Marina's suffering seems unremitting; she escapes murder through being captured by pirates, only to be sold by them to a brothel and to a fate—in her opinion—worse than violent and sudden death (‘Alack that Leonine was so slack, so slow. / He should have struck, not spoke’ (xvi, 61-2)).

Meanwhile the audience is introduced to Pander, Bawd and Bolt bewailing the poor state of their trade, caused not through a lack of customers (‘gallants’), but rather through the ‘pitifully sodden’ condition of their prostitute wares (xvi, 18). The comic potential of this scene is undermined by the tragic import of the discussion, which would not have been lost on a Jacobean audience. For early modern playgoers child prostitution and syphilis were very real and allied diseases. The audience learns how the Pox is the inevitable fate of the Bawd's poor ‘bastards’, but in this subterranean world of inverted moral values the sympathy expressed is solely for an adult lecher (the ‘poor Transylvanian’ (xvi, 20-1)) who has lain with a ‘little baggage’—an exhausted commodity grown ‘rotten’ with ‘continual action’ (xvi, 8-9). Is this to be the Princess Marina's fate?

Installed in the Mytilene brothel Marina bewails her plight, only to be consoled by Bawd with the knowledge that she will ‘taste gentlemen of all fashions’—a far from edifying prospect (xvi, 75). Whilst Boult, Bawd and Pander banter about the Spaniard's mouth watering at Marina's description, at Monsieur Veroles (the French word for syphilis) cowering ‘i’ the hams' (xvi, 101)—in other words Jacobean society's foppish foreigner stereotypes of the diseased—it is native ‘gentlemen’ and ‘the governor of this country’ (xix, 58) who actually arrive at the brothel to threaten Marina's well-being. One by one Jacobean society's comforting stereotypes of the disease's victims and polluters are being undermined, ‘safe boundaries’ for the representation of the Pox are being trangressed: young children and an innocent woman are at risk from ‘gentlemen’ in this murky play world.¹³

But Marina's eloquent powers of persuasion prove more than a match for Mytilene's lecherous gentlemen, whose wayward morals she reforms in the very brothel.¹⁴ The dramatic climax of the brothel scenes is undoubtedly the arrival and conversion of none other than the ‘Lord Lysimachus’, governor of Mytilene. Bawd announces that there's no way to be ‘rid on't’ (Marina's maidenhead) but, as she puts it,

                                                            by the way to the pox.
          Enter Lysimachus, disguised
Here comes the Lord Lysimachus disguised.

(xix, 23-5)

Whilst it is never directly stated or implied by any of the characters that Lysimachus has the Pox, the language of the scene conspires to sow strong seeds of suspicion that he does. The proximity of the words ‘pox’ to ‘it’ (Marina's virginity) and the foregrounding of Lysimachus' disguise—disguise being intimately associated in early modern discourse with the Pox, which was also known as the great ‘masquerader’, the ‘secret’ disease—begin the process.¹⁵ Lysimachus requests Boult find him some ‘wholesome iniquity’ (xix, 32) with which to do ‘the deed of darkness’ (xix, 37). He hides his dishonourable intentions in a cloak of euphemistic language, but the audience is not to be hoodwinked, for Bawd replies ‘Your honour knows what 'tis to say well enough’ (xix, 39). Furthermore the brothel's mistress is ‘bound’ (xix, 60), as she says, to this governor; by implication Lysimachus is a regular customer, all too familiar with the iniquitous business in hand. This established, Bawd's words serve to highlight Lysimachus' supreme status in Mytilene society; finally she declares ‘Come, we will leave his honour and hers together’ (xix, 69). There is, of course, a pun on ‘honour’ here. Marina later appropriates Bawd's terms and upbraids Lysimachus with them. She challenges:

And do you know this house to be a place
Of such resort and will come into it?
I hear say you're of honourable blood,
And are the governor of this whole province.

(xix, 81-4)

Thus Lysimachus' honour is thrown seriously into question, and he increasingly resembles one of the hypocritical types, like Iniquity and Infidelity, who would have been familiar to many amongst the original audiences as stock vices from the morality plays. Tail between legs, the governor leaves the brothel claiming that Marina's speech has altered his ‘corrupted mind’ (xix, 128). Lysimachus' mask may have been temporarily lifted, his vice exposed, but he appears to go quite unpunished for his misdeeds; indeed, he even seems to be rewarded, for Marina's princely father eventually betroths her to this nobleman of dubious honour and health.

But is this not taking the stuff of romance, emerging from a make-believe world, rather too seriously? What may seem just good bawdy and fun to a modern audience, however, is fraught with serious implications for contemporary playgoers familiar with other stage representations of fornication and disease.¹⁶ This play, it has been repeatedly observed, returns to an emblematic form of theatre which invites spectators to search critically for understanding. The audience witnesses a series of emblematic tableaux, is called upon to make sense of the wooing knights' ‘devices’ on their shields, and listens to riddles, mottoes and endless aphorisms, especially ones about the abusive operations of power and kingship. Frequently there is a disparity between the morals the characters tritely recite and the action the audience observes on the stage. Thus sham morality, hypocrisy, is repeatedly exposed. Through these theatrical structures the audience is encouraged to observe the action with a heightened sceptical consciousness, and to be especially alert to emblematic representations.

Pericles is particularly partial to trotting out mottoes and adages about kingship (much like King James himself), but there is one that he omits which educated Jacobean playgoers may well have been thinking about when witnessing Pericles' rather casual consignment of his daughter to Lysimachus' care. As Gower relates, Lysimachus entertains the king with ‘pageantry’, ‘feats’, ‘shows’, ‘minstrelsy and pretty din’, which so impresses Pericles that he rewards the governor of Mytilene with a wife—his daughter, the heir to the throne of Tyre (xxii, 6-12). It is my contention that many among the original audiences of Pericles would have responded with horror to this marriage outcome, to this ‘unequal match’, because of their familiarity with the horrors of contracting syphilis and the intense and prolonged suffering associated with the most dreaded chronic disease of the Renaissance. Those with at least a grammar-school education would have been familiar, too, with widely disseminated Erasmian views on such hazardous ‘matches’, and some spectators would undoubtedly have seen a popular emblem which illustrated a ‘Nupta contagioso’.

This emblem first appeared in a collection by Andrea Alciato (Emblemata) published in 1550; it was subsequently adapted, translated and distributed widely throughout Europe. It depicts a king on a dais overseeing a man and woman being bound together on the floor with a rope. As the accompanying poem describes, this is a savage deed comparable to that committed by a cruel Etruscan king who was in the habit of punishing his victims by tying them to a corpse. It reveals that for a dowry this king has purchased a son-in-law seared by the Gallic scab, apparent in the dreaded sore on his face: through self-interest he has committed his daughter to a living death, a ‘Nupta contagioso’. This horrific emblem about the Pox was undoubtedly influenced by an Erasmian colloquy published in 1529 entitled The Unequal Match or A Marriage in Name Only, which was among the dramatic dialogues that English pedagogues recommended all boys should read.¹⁷ Erasmus' colloquies were a tool to teach schoolboys colloquial Latin but they were also intended, in Erasmus' own words, to impress on ‘young people … [the] safeguarding of their chastity’.¹⁸

The two participants in The Unequal Match, Gabriel and Petronius, discuss, with horror, how a beautiful, talented girl with winning manners has just been married off by her father to a rotting corpse—unmistakably a chronic syphilitic—because of his title. This wayward nobleman's dicing, drinking, lies and whoring have apparently earned him this ‘living death’ which will now be inflicted upon his young wife. Gabriel's words are hard-hitting. He exclaims:

But this outrage—than which you could find nothing more barbarous, more cruel, more unrighteous—is even a laughing matter with the governing class nowadays, despite the fact that those born to rule ought to have as robust health as possible. And in fact, the condition of the body has its effect on mental power. Undeniably this disease usually depletes whatever brains a man has. So it comes about that rulers of states may be men who are healthy neither in body nor mind.

(p. 407)

This colloquy thus functions as a powerful rebuke to parental, and especially princely parental, selfishness, greed and folly.

Pericles, I wish to argue, is a satirical play with the same cautionary message as The Unequal Match. The potential polluter of a beautiful young woman is a luxurious gentleman who abuses the privileges that his nobility favours him with. Through marriage, an innocent young woman will be placed at his disposal by the very person who should most seek to protect her—her father. Marina's response to the intended match is articulate silence. It is informative to read this outcome in relation to Petronius' condemnation of the ‘unequal match’ in Erasmus' dialogue: ‘Enemies scarcely do this to girls captured in war, pirates to those they kidnap; and yet parents do it to an only daughter, and there's no police official with power to stop them!’ (p. 408). Marina has escaped rape and murder at the hands of her enemies, has survived her passage with her pirate-captors intact, and then just when the audience is relaxing, thinking her safely delivered to the protection of her family, her father subjects her to an ‘unequal match’. As Gabriel declares in the dialogue, such dubious matches reflect badly on the parents and have important implications for the commonwealth and its government: ‘[a]s private individuals, they're disloyal to their family; as citizens, to the state’ (p. 408). Irresponsible father-rulers are putting both the health of their offspring and the state in jeopardy through this ‘madness’.

The medico-moral politics of Pericles depend to some extent on the audience's experience of this tragic and widespread disease of the Renaissance—its unsightly, disfiguring, disabling and painful progress—and on their knowledge of popular humanist texts surrounding it. The Pox was in fact the most widely written-about disease in the Renaissance. These contexts are clearly not readily available to modern audiences and consequently the potential serious import and impact of Pericles' late scenes have been considerably watered down, even erased.

However, yet further Renaissance contexts require amplification before modern readers can appreciate the range and density of meanings and resonances circulating, often in partially submerged form, in this richly layered play. Whilst reforming intellectuals like Erasmus worried and wrote about the savage effects of this disease and called for preventive health measures to combat it, they were also not averse to utilising knowledge about its painful and horrific effects for propaganda purposes. Intent on foregrounding what he viewed as the corruption and decay of the Catholic Church, Erasmus began to disperse images of syphilitic priests throughout his writings. His message was that the clergy had grown so corrupt their fornication was spreading the new disease among them, to their innocent victims, and throughout the globe. Lutheran reformers seized upon Erasmus' powerful metaphor of church corruption, and English polemicists like John Bale, John Foxe, Lewis Wager and William Turner quickly appropriated the emblematic syphilitic body for the Protestant cause.

The mid sixteenth-century Edwardian stage displayed spotted, decaying and disabled ‘Pocky’ bodies lamenting their disease and proclaiming it to be the consequence of fornication encouraged by Catholic Vices such as Infidelity and Iniquity, who inevitably disguise their corruption and hypocrisy under their religious vestments. The early Protestant dramatists clearly recognised and exploited the compelling theatrical value, the tantalising erotic and comic possibilities, of sin: ‘godly myrth’ was extremely bawdy. As John King has argued, in the Protestant interlude fornication tends to become ‘a composite symbol for the seven deadly sins’.¹⁹ He cites as the main reason for this John Bale's development and popularisation for the English context of the Lutheran identification of the Whore of Babylon of Revelation with the Church of Rome: dramatic bawdry thus came to symbolise ‘the spiritual fornication’ of Roman ritualism.

When, therefore, the audience witnessed the seduction and fall of young virgins in the Protestant interludes, they were simultaneously engaging with the plays' allegorical levels of meaning, in which, according to the Protestant reformers' version of history, the True, undefiled Church was sullied and temporarily superseded by the corrupt False Church of Antichrist. Naturally the harlot Church, like her lascivious priests, had a special imagined affinity with venereal disease. In his propaganda pamphlet, provocatively entitled A New Booke of Spirituall Physik for Dyverse Diseases of the Nobilitie and Gentlemen of Englande (1555), the Marian exile William Turner reconstrues the origins of the ‘pokkes’ in a ‘noble hore’ of Italy: ‘Ther was a certeyne hore in Italy, whych had a perillus disease called false religion … all the kynges and nobilitie of the earth … they committed fornication wyth her … and caught the Romishe pokkes.’²⁰

This symbolism and allegorising surrounding the Pox, fornication and the Romish church was alive and flourishing in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Thomas Dekker's play The Whore of Babylon, staged by Prince Henry's Men probably about a year before the first production of Pericles, bears strong witness to this. Indeed The Whore of Babylon provides an important additional context to illuminate some of the fading emblematic resonances in Pericles. As the preface to the text explains, The Whore of Babylon is designed to lay bare the ‘blody stratagems, of that Purple whore of Roome’ in the reign of Elizabeth I.²¹ However, its real thrust was undoubtedly to persuade Jacobean spectators that the iniquitous forces of Antichrist continued to pose a substantial threat to England and the Reformed Church, and to encourage a more militant stance against Rome. It features the lustful harlot the Empresse of Babylon, alias Rome, strumpet to her slaves, the kings of Spain, France and the Holy Roman Empire, and her Cardinal entourage. She is also served by her Bawd, Falsehood, who wears the garb of Truth (a gown of sanctity) but whose hypocrisy is evidenced by her red pimples—she, like her mistress, as Plain Dealing informs us, has a bad case of the Pox. Babylon's design is none other than to ‘swallow up the kingdome of Faiery’ (IV, iii, 37), whose queen is Titania (Elizabeth I), served by spotless Truth and her fairy lords.

The Empress's first stratagem is to send her kings off to woo Titania/Elizabeth. When they arrive at her court Titania asks them if they've come to ‘strike off a poore maiden-head’ (I.ii.85), that is to rape her. The sexual manoeuvres and language of this play have the political meanings common to sixteenth-century Protestant discourse: raping a virgin signified a state adhering to the Reformed, true faith being engulfed forcibly by a Romish power. Rome is a rapist as well as a harlot in Protestant polemics. However, the kings reassure Titania that marriage rather than ravishment is their aim, but it does not matter which of the three Titania chooses because their desire is simply to please the Empress by wedding the forces of Babylon to those of Fairyland. Thankfully, Titania is not fooled by this suspect marriage proposal. She declares (and I think these words will throw a very important light on the marriage proposal in Pericles):

When kingdoms marrie, heaven it selfe stands by
To give the bride: Princes in tying such bands,
Should use a thousand heads, ten thousand hands:
For that one Acte gives like an enginous wheele
Motion to all.

(I, ii, 162-6)

The marriage alliance rejected, Babylon and her followers turn grisly: the Spanish Armada is sent into action and a plot is hatched to murder Titania with the aid of recusant spies. At the close of the play the forces of Truth triumph but, importantly, Babylon is not eradicated, just temporarily subdued: the Poxy threat persists.

Many among the original London audiences would probably have shared Dekker's perspective on the threat posed by Popishness and Spanish ambitions; and the Shakespearean play, as represented by the virtually identical 1609 quartos, is undoubtedly engaging in a more subtle way with the same concerns. This is how Pericles addresses Marina in the recognition scene:

                                                            Prithee speak.
Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou look'st
Modest as justice, and thou seem'st a palace
For the crowned truth to dwell in.

(xxi, 108-11)

Pericles' words identify his daughter as an embodiment of Truth: Truth which the audience has observed being captured by a pirate with the same name, Valdes, as one of the Spanish Armada captains in The Whore of Babylon; whom they have seen threatened with but fending off rape; and who is about to be betrothed to a probably Poxy spouse by her negligent father. Pericles certainly does not use ‘a thousand heads’ in choosing his son-in-law.

All of this has important negative implications for how we read the character of Pericles in the Jacobean context. Pericles is a prince who is seldom in his own state (Tyre is a troubled kingdom ‘without a head’ (viii, 34));²² who flees from danger rather than confronting it; who readily commits his young daughter to the care of rather dubious others; whose wallowing in self-pity comes dangerously close to incurring a charge of effeminacy (‘thou art a man, and I / Have suffered like a girl’ (xxi, 125-6)); and who, through betrothing Marina to a potentially diseased son-in-law, is putting both her health and his future princely heirs' at stake. He may, unwittingly, through neglect and poor government, be introducing ‘corruption’ into the virgin body of his daughter and his kingdom.

Indeed, on the latter points King James himself had been nothing if not voluble in his treatise of advice to his son Henry, Basilikon Doron (1599), which specifically warns about the dangers of bodily pollution:

First of all consider, that Mariage is the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie … By your preparation yee must keepe your bodie cleane and unpolluted, till yee give it to your wife … For how can ye justly crave to bee joyned with a pure virgine, if your bodie be polluted? Why should the one halfe bee cleane, and the other defiled?²³

The Basilikon Doron's constructions resonate with Erasmian maxims, and the above illustration suggests that James may well have been familiar with one of the numerous reproductions of Alciato's emblem. The treatise proceeds to rail against lust and fornication, reminding the young prince that the right end of sexual appetite is ‘procreation of children’, and stressing monarchical duty: ‘Especially a King must tymously Marie for the weale of his people … in a King that were a double fault, as well against his owne weale, as against the weale of his people [to] … Marie one of knowne evill conditions’ (p. 35). Crucially, there then follows a protracted discussion about religion, marriage and monarchy, in which James advises Henry, ‘I would rathest have you to Marie one that were fully of your owne Religion’, and warns about the hazards of ‘disagreement in Religion’. The betrothal of two princely ‘members of two opposite Churches’ can only ‘breed and foster a dissention among your subjects, taking their example from your family’ (p. 35).

If the neglectful manner of rule of Pericles' royal protagonist bore resemblances to James VI and I's style of administration c.1607-9, some pointed comments about Jacobean power politics are thinly concealed in this play. James's management of the country was being heavily criticised in this period; not least because his instinct and drive was to make peace with Spain, exercise a policy of leniency towards recusants, and seek Catholic Spanish marriages for his devoutly Protestant children, Henry and Elizabeth. The Venetian ambassador to London confided to the Doge and Senate in 1607, that: ‘His majesty … loves quiet and repose, has no inclination to war … a fact that little pleases many of his subjects … The result is he is despised and almost hated.’ Furthermore, throughout 1607 the Venetian ambassador (Zorzi Giustinian) sent anxious reports to his masters about the unsettled British populace, who ‘would clearly like to, on the excuse of this rumour of a Spanish Armada’, disturb ‘the calm’. His dispatches repeatedly lamented: ‘They [the populace] long for a rupture with Spain.’²⁴ Meanwhile their monarch was negotiating marital alliances with the enemy, which could well lead to ‘dissention’ (see above quotation from Basilikon Doron) among his subjects. It seems that James, like Pericles, was an expert purveyor of adages about kingship, but for many of his subjects he too seldom put them into action. He would have done well to take note of the emblem and motto of the fifth knight in Pericles: ‘an hand environèd with clouds, / Holding out gold that's by the touchstone tried’ and ‘Sic spectanda fides’ (vi, 41-3), which might be rendered as, ‘the trial of godliness and faith is to be made not of words only, but also by the action and performance of the deeds’.²⁵

But all this begs the question of why a Yorkshire company of players with recusant sympathies should choose to stage Pericles in 1609. Perhaps it was for counter-propaganda purposes? The very fact that an Erasmian text is glanced at in this play would make it a prime target for appropriation by both sides of the religious divide. The preface to William Burton's translations of seven of the Colloquies (1606) is illuminating in this respect, for it reveals a religio-political intent partly motivating his project: readers will readily perceive, he declares in his preface, ‘how little cause the Papists have to boast of Erasmus as a man of their side’. Ownership of Erasmus (with all the authority that implied) was hotly contested by English Catholics and Protestants in this period. Furthermore, Cholmeley was accused in 1609 of staging anti-Protestant plays, and the Star Chamber trial documents lend strong support to the view put forward by Sissons in 1942, that the company interpolated and omitted scenes, and improvised, according to ‘the religious colour of their audience’.²⁶ This should perhaps serve as a timely reminder that plays are highly slippery art forms, and that ultimately their meanings reside with their equally unstable audiences. There is no way of knowing, for example, how closely a version of Pericles played at the Globe resembled the Yorkshire version(s) or, indeed, a production at Whitehall before distinguished guests: but it is easy to see how with a little fine tuning Pericles in performance could be construed as a pro-Jamesian play.

What can be said with certainty is that with its roots deep in the Jacobean cultural context, and engaging critically but obliquely with its power politics, Pericles—as represented by the 1609 quartos—has been wrongly consigned to the scrapheap of unalloyed aestheticism and ‘happy Ever-afters’. Pericles is not a bastion of royal absolutism, though to discern its heterodox perspectives we need to penetrate its mirror-like surface, which appears to be reflecting Jamesian orthodoxy. As Pericles reminds its audiences, this was an age in which kings were ‘earth's gods’ (i, 146), one in which saying ‘Jove doth ill’ (i, 147) was fraught with danger. Indeed, as Philip Finkelpearl reminds us in an important essay on stage censorship, ‘from 1606 it became a crime to speak against dignitaries even if the libel were true’.²⁷ Criticism of the reigning monarch was certainly best kept partially occluded, and, in skilful hands, the emblematic characterisation, straggling plots, exotic locations and make-believe worlds of romance were perfect structures for ‘artistic cunning’ and veiled comment.²⁸ Pocky bodies, medico-moral politics and dubious marriages were, I have argued in this chapter, powerful stage vehicles for coded dissent: c.1607-9 men could not say the king ‘doth ill’ but they could seek to reveal it, or at least gesture towards it, through dramatic representation.

Notes

1. Shakespeare probably collaborated with at least one other playwright in writing Pericles—the second writer remains a matter for speculation. I can see no justification for the designation of Q1 as a particularly corrupt, ‘bad’ quarto.

2. For a taste of this ‘vilification’ see theatre reviews for April 1990 (Royal Shakespeare Company) and May 1994 (Royal National Theatre) in London Theatre Record.

3. Hoeniger, ‘Gower and Shakespeare’, p. 461.

4. Sisson, ‘Shakespeare quartos’, pp. 136-7.

5. Shulman, ‘Review of Pericles (RSC)’, Evening Standard, 17 April 1990.

6. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, pp. 147-51.

7. Billington, Mock Kings, p. 238.

8. Wickham, ‘From tragedy to tragi-comedy’, p. 44; Goldberg, James I; Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances, p. 23; see also Tennenhouse, Power on Display, pp. 182-3.

9. Two notable exceptions are Dickey, ‘Language and role’, and Relihan, ‘Liminal geography’.

10. Campion, The Lord Hay's Masque, ll. 15-20.

11. See Gardiner, History of England, vol. I, p. 343; in July 1605 Spain suggested that if Prince Henry married the eldest daughter of the King of Spain, Spain would surrender to the young couple its claims to a large portion of the Netherlands. Spain later retracted the offer, raising objections to the Infanta marrying a Protestant. Also Gardiner, History of England, vol. II, pp. 22-3; in 1607 the abortive scheme for the marriage was renewed, together with a demand for the conversion of Prince Henry to Catholicism. The offer was refused because of the latter demand. However, in October of the same year James suggested an alternative plan: that his daughter Elizabeth be married to the son of Philip's brother-in-law, the Duke of Savoy. See also Calendar of State Papers: Venetian, Vol. XI, 15 August 1607: ‘the Ambassadors of Spain are putting it about that by a matrimonial alliance and the death of the Archdukes the States might well come under the dominion of the King of England’ (p. 23).

12. Gower's, Twine's and Wilkins' texts are in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. VI.

13. On safe boundaries for the representation of syphilis see Helms, ‘The saint in the brothel’, and Gilman, Disease and Representation.

14. On syphilis and declamation, see Helms, ‘The saint in the brothel’.

15. See Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 21.

16. The topic of my forthcoming monograph, ‘Fictions of Disease: Bodies, Plagues and Politics in Early Modern Writings’.

17. See Watson, English Grammar Schools, pp. 328-9, and Clarke, Classical Education, p. 47.

18. Erasmus, ‘De Utilitate Colloquiorum’, Colloquies, p. 629, quoted by Thompson in the same edition, p. 154.

19. King, English Reformation Literature, p. 283.

20. Turner, A New Booke, fol. 74^r.

21. Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, p. 497.

22. On this matter one of Erasmus' adages famously declared: ‘Sheep are no use, if the shepherd is not there … the common people are useless unless they have the prince's authority to guide them’, Adages, II, vii, 26.

23. James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, p. 34.

24. Calendar of State Papers: Venetian, Vol. X, p. 513; and State Papers: Venetian, Vol. XI, pp. 17, 27, 39.

25. Pericles, ed. Hoeniger, II, ii, 38n. (p. 56), citing Claude Paradin, Devises Héroiques, trans. P.S. (London, 1591), sig. O3 (p. 213).

26. See Star Chamber Proceedings, PRO, STAC 19/10; 12/11. Sisson, ‘Shakespeare quartos’, p. 142.

27. Finkelpearl, ‘“The comedians' liberty”’, p. 123. Finkelpearl suggests that ‘the employment of arcane codes mastered by the cognoscenti’ may have operated in Jacobean England, p. 138. See also Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation. Indeed satire against the king had led to Jonson, Chapman and Marston being imprisoned in 1605 for their parts in Eastward Ho!; and in 1606 ‘sundry were committed to Bridewell’ for producing The Isle of Gulls.

28. The expression is Finkelpearl's, ‘“The comedians' liberty”’, p. 138.

Bibliography

Primary

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75)

Campion, Thomas, The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), in David Lindley (ed.), Court Masques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Dekker, Thomas, The Whore of Babylon, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), vol. II (1955)

Erasmus, Desiderius, The Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965)

Erasmus, Desiderius, Collected Writings of Erasmus: Adages, II.vii.1 to III.iii.100, trans. M. M. Phillips (Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1982)

James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, in Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965)

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Secondary

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Gilman, Sander, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to Aids (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1988)

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Mullaney, Steven, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988)

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Tennenhouse, Leonard, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (London: Methuen, 1986)

Watson, Foster, The English Grammar Schools to 1660 (London: Frank Cass, 1968)

Wickham, Glynne, ‘From tragedy to tragi-comedy: King Lear as prologue’, Shakespeare Survey, 26 (1973), 33-48