[In the following essay, Dean contends that Pericles is a pilgrimage tale, and outlines several literary works that may have influenced Shakespeare's creation of the drama, including two from the Bible: the tale of Jonah and the Acts of the Apostles.]

Had it been printed in the First Folio, Pericles (1608) might well have appeared among the comedies, with The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, rather than among the tragedies, with Cymbeline, which was perhaps placed there out of a feeling that it was more akin to the Roman plays or to King Lear. There was, as we know, no formal category of romance drama in Shakespeare's time.¹ Nor did he invent the kind of play whose absurdities and improbabilities were already being derided by Sidney in the 1580s² and which, as Leo Salingar has shown in detail,³ are themselves lineal descendants of medieval dramatic romances.

Given such uncertainties, and the relatively modern coinage—dating, it seems, from the 1870s⁴—of ‘romances’ as a descriptive category for Shakespeare's later work, the question ‘What kind of play is Pericles?’ still seems a reasonable one to ask, and it is reopened by a lively and provocative new edition of the play, by Doreen DelVecchio and Anthony Hammond (Cambridge, 1998, hereafter DVH). They point out that, while Pericles marks a new direction in Shakespeare's writing, it also looks back as far as The Comedy of Errors which also takes its dénouement from Gower, as well as A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and, substantially, King Lear and Macbeth (DVH notes on III. 0. 6, III. 1. 6, V. 1. 134-41, 209, IV. 3). They pinpoint the innovativeness of Pericles by saying that ‘what Shakespeare dramatises’ in that play is ‘the storytelling process itself’ (DVH, p. 8, original italics; cf. pp. 27-36). It inaugurates a specific concern with the credibility of ‘tales’, scrutinising narrative technique with what now seems a modernist self-consciousness. (This is developed into The Winter's Tale with its comment that ‘a sad tale's best for winter’, II. i. 25, and its calling attention to its own improbability: ‘so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion’, V. ii. 28-9, ‘like an old tale still’, V. ii. 60, ‘hooted at / Like an old tale’, V. iii. 116-17). It is true that Pericles is a descendant of late medieval classicism, syncretic in approach, as was the protean story of Apollonius itself,⁵ displaying affinities both with new comedic romance in its character-types, symbolic voyages, locations and properties, and with Senecan tragedy whose furor it seems almost to parody.⁶ But the central innovation—the onstage presence, as both source and character, of Gower—is not classical, and whatever one's views on the authorship of Pericles it is hard to believe that anyone except Shakespeare could have devised or sustained that. The technique is closest to Chaucer's manipulation of the framing fiction of the Canterbury pilgrimage. By making Gower narrate his own story, Shakespeare can play off different styles and perspectives against one another, in a development of the technique he had used for the Chorus in his previous play with a character named Gower: Henry V.⁷ The effect would surely have been striking to an audience at the Globe, where Pericles was first staged, since they only had to walk round the corner to Southwark cathedral to see Gower's tomb, yet here he is, a Phoenix reborn ‘from ashes’ (Prologue, l. 2), a character in a story which is both later than the past which he is retelling, and earlier than those to whom he now tells it. As Anne Barton has noted, the archaic quality of Gower's speech paradoxically makes him more remote from his auditors despite his mediating role, while at the same time making the story he presents seem closer: ‘By turning the frame inside-out in this way, planes of reality are made to shift and blur in a fashion characteristic of the late plays’.⁸ In Book VIII of the Confessio, where he tells the tale of Apollonius, Gower pays ritual homage to Godfrey of Viterbo, his ‘authority’ (ll. 271-2, 547, 1152, 1326),⁹ but his relationship to his sources is not made as imaginatively powerful as Shakespeare's is to him.

Shakespeare is also likely to have learnt from Chaucer's sense of tale-as-game, and from his overarching device of the tale-telling competition which is also ‘a game with its own rules’.¹⁰ As the Host reminds the Clerk, ‘what man that is entred in a pley, / He nedes moot unto the pley assente’ (CT IV. 10-11). Pericles exists in a nexus of puns: to tell a tale (to recount an account) is to ‘give an account’ (of oneself, for instance), to be a ‘telltale’ (narrator/revealer of secrets), maybe even a kind of fibber, ‘telling tales’ (hence, perhaps, Sidney's high-minded unease); to ‘play the game’, however, is to keep to the rules, observe the shared conventions, be honest and not cheat. Pericles insists that only through the tale—only by becoming participants in its creation through lending it our credulity—can we have access to anything approaching ‘truth’. This calls into question Anne Barton's further statement that the romances strive to ‘distinguish the fictional from the “real”, art from life, tales from truth’.¹¹ The ‘truth’ of Pericles resides precisely in its being a tale. But a tale of what kind?

Undramatic though the structure of Gower's own Confessio may be, the progressive examination of Amans' conscience by the confessor-figure Genius has a teleological impetus towards new life and a fresh start which is also possessed by Pericles, and Gower's own imagery of play has a richness by which Shakespeare may well have been struck. When Apollonius flees Tyre the city goes into mourning: ‘There was no lif which leste plaie’ (l. 486); in Tharse Apollonius learns of Antiochus' pursuit of him when he has gone out ‘to pleie’ (l. 572); he arrives at Pentapolis in time to take part in the ‘comun game’ which was ‘pleid’ before the king (ll. 678, 692), and, as one who ‘of every game couthe an ende’ (l. 697), wins renown by his skill. At the subsequent feast he is comforted in his melancholy by the harp-playing of the king's daughter, just as Saul is by David (1 Samuel 16: 14-23), but outdoes her performance and later gives her music lessons: ‘of hire Harpe the temprure / He tawhte hire ek’ (ll. 832-3). This is appropriate to his name, as Shakespeare's other major source, Laurence Twine, explicitly says: ‘he seemed rather to be Apollo then Apollonius’.¹² Having wooed the girl so that ‘what in ernest and in game, / She stant for love in such a plit’ (ll. 856-7), Apollonius marries her, and on the wedding night ‘as thei pleiden hem betwene, / Thei gete a child’ (ll. 972-3). There is none of this kind of language in Twine, whose Apollonius ‘accomplished the duties of marriage’¹³ in a highly respectable, almost Victorian, manner. Later, in the brothel, the child (whom Gower names Thaisa) is invited to a quite different kind of ‘play’, which she resists in such a saintly way that the pimp sent to deflower her weeps penitent tears rather than pursue the ‘game’ (l. 1445).

In the reunion with her father, Thaisa strives ‘To glade with this sory man’ (l. 1662) just as her mother had done (l. 759), drawing the mute stranger back to life with her playing of the harp. This is not just a matter of musicianship, however: the episode has magical overtones. Thaisa rises from the ‘underworld’ of the brothel only to descend into the underworld of Apollonius' subconscious, and, in Orphean fashion, sings him back to harmony. Shakespeare takes over these suggestions, associating Marina with Ovid's Proserpina and placing her in opposition to Tellus, the earth-goddess (IV. i. 13-17).¹⁴ He also develops the character Cerimon as a thaumaturge, calling not only upon Apollo (III. ii. 66) but on his son Aesculapius (III. ii. 106) who had learned how to raise the dead. In both Gower and Shakespeare, Marina's would-be killers construct a sham tomb for her, which Pericles is shown, so that her reappearance must indeed seem like a resurrection to him: and, of course, for Gower's readers as for Shakespeare's audience an empty tomb could mean only one thing.

If, then, the romance tale is a kind of game, it is also a kind of quest; its art is the means of psychological and spiritual metamorphosis, a route to, rather than a diversion from, truth and reality. Gower knows this just as much as Shakespeare, and employs some unforced yet profound symbolism which clearly stuck in the latter's mind. Gower's Apollonius ‘lith in so derk a place / That ther may no wiht sen his face’ (ll. 1641-2), and Prince Athenagoras has to climb down a ladder on board ship to see him (l. 1644), a significant descent into the nether regions which is imitated by Thaisa. When her attempts to reawaken his intellect by philosophical discussion fail, and he cries to be left alone,

Bot yit sche wolde noght do so,
And in the derke forth sche goth,
Til sche him toucheth.

(ll. 1690-2)

Words are insufficient; she must venture forth ‘in the derke’ and touch him. In return he strikes her, only to realise his mistake. Their loving mutual recognition a few moments later redresses a pattern of wicked parent/child relationships in the tale, of which Antiochus and his daughter are the paradigm.¹⁵ Both fathers are bereaved, one actually, the other in imagination, but whereas Antiochus in his loneliness turns to his daughter as a replacement wife (ll. 283-5), Apollonius passes through psychic death to restoration; prompted by ‘sibb of blod’ (l. 1703) he ‘loveth kindeley’ (l. 1707). Gower has Antiochus' daughter complain to her nurse that

Thing which mi bodi ferst begat
Into this world, onliche that
Mi worldes worschipe hath bereft.

(ll. 329-31)

Shakespeare turned this into the unforgettable ‘Thou that begetst him that did thee beget’ (V. i. 190), so that a physical violation becomes a spiritual regeneration.¹⁶

Gower's episode concludes nobly:

This king hath founde newe grace,
So that out of his derke place
He goth him up into the liht.

(ll. 1739-41)

Apollonius learns about the need for patient submission to the will of Providence, but also about how to play the game of familial and social relations, or as Gower sums it up, how to be ‘wel grounded’ (l. 1992), a metaphor of musical, social and cosmic stability. Our natural feelings are also reverberations of the profoundest rhythms of being. Shakespeare carries this point to the extreme of having Pericles hear ‘the music of the spheres’ (V. i. 223) just before the theophany of Diana, to the consternation of the other onstage characters, who hear nothing.¹⁷

Gower's powerful imagining of the psychology of redemption contrasts with his lack of interest in explaining it. He offers a medley of conventional causalities: the fickleness of Fortune (ll. 585-91, 642-4, 2013-15), the wrath of Neptune (ll. 622-3), the benevolent oversight of Providence (ll. 628-9) or God (ll. 1158-60, 1788-9), poetic justice (l. 1962), even a shoulder-shrugging che sera sera (l. 1172)—all are pressed into service at one time or another. The tale, with its journeys across undulating seas, appears simply mimetic of the revolutions of Fortune's Wheel, the sudden changes of destiny and the caprices of human feeling. Pericles has often been slightingly criticised as similarly episodic. Yet the journeys in Gower's tale are pilgrimages, and there is a destination, a moment of resolution, however well and long it may be concealed. Gower recognises that the best response to a contradictory universe is contradictory behaviour. When Apollonius is shown what he believes to be his daughter's tomb,

He curseth and seith al the worste
Unto fortune, as to the blinde …
Bot sithe it mai no betre be,
He thonketh god and forthe goth he.

(ll. 1584-5, 1589-90)

This perfectly sensible reaction is the same as that of the sailors when they throw Thaisa's coffin overboard, trusting that ‘the corps shal wel aryve’ (l. 1139). Gower's tale, with its recurring claustrophobic interiors from which liberation always comes (the ships' cabins, the coffin, the brothel, the mock-tomb, Apollonius' hiding-place), presents a Boethian world in which contingency subserves the purposes of destiny. Faced with the absence of a single explanation for why things happen as they do, the one imperative is to be open to fresh experience, all of which, including suffering, can be a means of growth. We may feel we are riding chaos, but we cannot know where we will be thrown ashore.

Shakespeare, in incorporating Gower into his play, supplies a guarantee of ultimate control, and so a means of detachment; Pericles' ‘courses’, Gower the character assures us, are ‘ordered / By Lady Fortune’ (IV. iv. 47-8). Yet he also emphasises darker patterns of history and society, for example the predatoriness of humanity in the First Fisherman's parable (II. i. 27-8), the depredations of Time who is ‘the king of men: / He's both their parent, and he is their grave’ (II. iii. 44-5), or the inexorability of ‘We cannot but obey the powers above us’ (III. iii. 10), or the helplessness expressed by Marina when she calls the world ‘a lasting storm / Whirring me from my friends’ (IV. i. 20). The closeness, noted earlier, of Pericles to Lear is important; so near allied are disaster and joy, a feather will turn the scale. Paradoxically, the play's most moving moment, the reunion of Pericles and Marina, is one of utter stillness: ‘On a ship that does not move, the greatest journey is thus travelled in an instant's recognition’ (DVH, p. 61). Yet the ship never ‘moves’: indeed, ‘the ship’ does not exist; it is our job, as Gower bids us, ‘In your imagination’ to ‘hold / This stage a ship’ (III. 0. 58-9). This is an audacious metadramatic injunction, but it makes it impossible for us to hold back from participating in the psychological and spiritual journeys of the protagonists. To assent to the rules of this particular game is to enact its logic in our own minds and lives. If we will not play God, as Puck and Prospero in their closing speeches also tell us, there can be no miracle.

John F. Danby long ago argued that Pericles, again like Lear, is in some sense a play about Christian patience.¹⁸ That theme is not explicitly addressed by Gower in the Confessio, although Twine describes Lucina (his name for Shakespeare's Thaisa) as ‘having learned the true trade of patience’ (Bullough, VI. p. 473) through her service in Diana's temple. Pericles is patient in that he waits, and in that he suffers: his waiting is his suffering, and he suffers the more in that his suffering has no cause. Gower prays for us that ‘On your patience evermore attending, / New joy wait on you’ (Epilogue, ll. 17-18, my italics)—a very deep pun. Pericles, echoing Viola to Olivia, tells Marina that she looks ‘like Patience, gazing on kings' graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act’ (V. i. 135-6). Everything comes to him or her who waits, though we cannot predict whether the coming things will be welcome or unwelcome.

Normally one would think of Job in the context of patience, but at least one medieval writer, the Gawain-poet, thought of Jonah. No-one would claim Patience as a Shakespearean source, but it is an illuminating exercise to read it alongside Pericles. At the height of its storm the sailors call upon ‘Diana deuout and derf [dread] Neptune’ (l. 166).¹⁹ Neptune is not surprising (cf. Gower, ll. 623, 1595, 1614), but Diana is. Neither is in the biblical book of Jonah, but that tale, which Shakespeare certainly knew, seems pertinent to his play. When Jonah, disobeying God's command to denounce the wickedness of Nineveh, flees from Joppa on a boat to Tarshish, God raises a storm at sea. The sailors invoke their gods, and awake Jonah, who had ‘gone down into the sides of the ship’ (1: 5)²⁰ to sleep, commanding him to call upon his god. A divination by lots indicates that his presence has caused the storm, and the others are not slow to act on his suggestion that he be thrown overboard. At once the storm ceases, and they give thanks. Jonah is swallowed by a ‘great fish’, as prearranged by God, and he spends three days and nights inside it, at the end of which he utters a prayer expressing confidence in God's deliverance, whereupon the fish vomits him up onto dry land. Making his way to Nineveh he delivers the divine message; the king and people fast and pray, and God forgives them. Jonah, apparently irritated at being made to look a fool, retires to sulk in the desert. To protect him from the pitiless heat, God shades him with a miraculous tree, which he then causes to be devoured by worms the following night. Next day, assailed by wind and sunshine, Jonah says he would be better off dead. He never accepts, not even at the end, that God knows best. But God points out that, if Jonah thinks him wrong to have destroyed one tree, how much more wrong it would have been to have destroyed a city of 120,000 people.

There the story abruptly stops. It is a weird little tale, full of puzzles and symbols. Jesus refers to it as a prefiguration of his own story: ‘For as Jonas was three days and nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12: 40), i.e. in the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the period during which, traditionally, the Harrowing of Hell took place.²¹ To walk the length of Nineveh takes Jonah three days and three nights (3: 3), reinforcing the parallel. The processes of descent and ascent are prominent in Jonah as in Gower and Shakespeare; Jonah ‘goes down into’ the ship, then further down into its sides, then further still into the ‘sides’ of the fish, and makes his prayer as from ‘the belly of hell’ (2: 2); his supposed escape is a cul-de-sac, a descent into Sheol, the underworld.²² His sleep during the storm would recall, for a Christian reader, the similar action of Jesus (Mark 4: 35-41; Matthew 8: 23-7), except that Jonah's sleep, like Pericles' inertia, ‘suggests paralysis rather than faith’.²³ Moreover, as F. D. Hoeniger noted in his edition of Pericles, Pericles' prayer, ‘Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges’ (III. i. 1), uses the same verb which Mark (4: 39) and Matthew (8: 26) use of Jesus' action towards the storm.

The poem Patience also uses this typology. Jonah imagines himself crucified, like Jesus, in Nineveh, ‘On rode rwly to-rent with rybaudes mony’ (l. 96); the whale is a ‘warlow’, the Devil (l. 258), its maw like Hell-mouth in the mystery plays or in medieval wall-paintings.²⁴ Jonah is not allowed to stay in the ship or the whale; his feelings of safety in those places are delusions, which he must see as such. He feels insecure in Nineveh, where he is perfectly safe, but learns no lesson from the penitence of its inhabitants, who adopt the traditional death-symbols of sackcloth and ashes. ‘Whereas Jonah's disobedience precipitated his descent to the world of the dead, Nineveh's symbolic death is part of a return from its evil way’.²⁵ God's destruction of the tree by a ‘worm’, recalling the serpent in the Garden of Eden,²⁶ shows that Jonah can expect no external security, and should emulate the divine pity rather than feeling personally aggrieved. James S. Ackerman has attractively proposed that the book of Jonah be seen as a kind of satire on inappropriate human expectations of God, analogous to the classical satire being written contemporaneously in the Mediterranean region.²⁷

Pericles seems to allude to the story of Jonah in a number of places. We might think of Pericles' initial desire ‘To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree’ (I. i. 22, a line Milton surely remembered), Antiochus' daughter, whom her father likens to a ‘fair Hesperides, / With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched’ (I. i. 28-9). His immediate reaction to the threat posed by Antiochus is flight to Tarsus, Jonah's intended destination, and his ultimate discovery is Jonah's too: ‘We cannot but obey the powers above us’ (III. iii. 10). Like Jonah, Pericles addresses the celestial powers who have ‘thrown’ him ‘from your watery grave’, craving only ‘death in peace’ (II. i. 10-11); instead he meets three fishermen whose king is Simonides. As Marion Lomax has argued, this is surely meant to make us think of Simon Peter, and of Jesus' commission to the disciples to be ‘fishers of men’ (Matthew 4: 19, Mark 1: 16).²⁸ The scene (II. i) is reminiscent of Jonah's story too: the behaviour of humans is like that of fish, ‘the great ones eat up the little ones’ (II. i. 27-8), and the Third Fisherman says that if he had been inside the belly of the whale he would have made such a commotion that the whole parish would be vomited up (II. i. 34-40 and DVH note). The Sailors' plea to Pericles to cast his wife's corpse overboard (III. i. 48-52) echoes Jonah 2 (DVH note on III. i. 50) and a few lines later Pericles imagines ‘the belching whale’ keeping her coffin company (III. i. 62). When the coffin is thrown ashore, Cerimon remarks, ‘If the sea's stomach be o-ercharged with gold, / 'Tis a good constraint of fortune it belches upon us’ (III. ii. 53-4). But, like the leaden casket in The Merchant of Venice, this coffin contains a human rather than an inanimate treasure.²⁹

There is a further link with the Jonah story, although a more elusive one, in Shakespeare's use of the name ‘Marina’. His way with names in this play is typically tantalizing. The etymology of the sea-born girl is insisted upon (III. iii. 13, V. i. 154, 191-3), although she is never named during the Mytilene episodes but only recovers her name when she recovers her father.³⁰ Gower called Apollonius' daughter Thaisa; Twine called her Tharsia. Shakespeare transferred the name Thaisa to her mother whom Gower left nameless and Twine called Lucina—the name of the Abbess of the Temple of Diana in Gower (l. 1849). Lucina is also the name given to Juno in her role as goddess of childbirth, and Pericles invokes her when Marina is born (III. i. 10). ‘Marina’ itself is not a name Shakespeare invented. F. D. Hoeniger sought to align Pericles with the medieval miracle play, particularly the late fifteenth century Digby Play of Mary Magdalene (see his edition of Pericles, pp. lxxxviii-xci).³¹ This features a woman giving birth during a storm, the husband's mistaken belief that both mother and child are dead, their casting overboard, and their subsequent miraculous preservation and reunion with the husband. Hoeniger's case is not finally persuasive, since the play dramatises episodes from the Golden Legend, which Shakespeare could read independently (it was first printed in 1483 with several subsequent editions), and in any case the tone and atmosphere of the two plays are quite different. Nevertheless, there is sense in seeing the Marina sections of Pericles in terms of the saint's-life genre, and perhaps in terms of this specific group of plays; as has been noted, the Digby play of the Conversion of St Paul is presented by a character called Poeta, as Pericles is presented by Gower.³² Hoeniger observes that St Marina, also known as St Margaret, St Pelagia, and the Pearl of the Sea, was a virgin martyr of Antioch, but adds, ‘it seems improbable that Shakespeare had heard of her’ (p. 4). Does it? The coincidence of name, character and location is, at least, remarkable. Moreover, not only was Marina/Margaret one of the most popular saints in medieval England, she was also the patron saint of childbirth,³³ and the subject of a major medieval prose work, the thirteenth century Seinte Marharete, one of the so-called ‘Katherine Group’ of hagiographical texts which, like the Digby plays, draw upon the Golden Legend. The most celebrated episode has Margaret swallowed by a devil in the shape of a dragon, whose belly then bursts asunder.³⁴ It would be rash to insist too much on connections between this legend and Pericles: Marina is not vowed to perpetual virginity. Yet her saintly resistance to temptation to lose it prematurely associates her with her namesake, as also with St Agnes who spent some time in a brothel without being defiled (cf. Bullough, p. 352). She is clearly presented as a holy figure, like her mother a votaress of Diana (IV. ii. 121), who persuades the brothel's clientele to ‘go hear the vestals sing’ (IV. v. 7) and defies the Governor of Mytilene as Margaret defied Olibrius, the Governor of Antioch; Boult reports with comic dismay that ‘she sent him away as cold as a snowball, saying his prayers too’ (IV. v. 128).

Like Jonah, St Marina was preserved in the midst of her enemies, and swallowed by a demonic monster only to be vomited up again. The monster, like the fish in the biblical book, was all the time under God's control, and could do her no harm. In Shakespeare's play, Marina is similarly protected, but is only one of several characters who enact Jonah's symbolic death and resurrection. Her story, like Jonah's in the medieval poem, is an exemplum of patience, the suffering waiting which is rewarded with fulfilment. Shakespeare's Christian treatment of this subtext is thrown into relief if one compares it with a play which he almost certainly did know, Lodge and Greene's A Looking-Glass for London and England (c. 1588), which dramatises the Jonah story among much other material in order to preach repentance to Elizabethan England, lest it be visited by the wrath of God. The concluding lines of this play, spoken by Jonas, are as follows:

Repent O London, lest for thine offence,
Thy shepherd fail, whom mighty God preserve,
That she may bide the pillar of his Church,
Against the storms of Romish Antichrist:
The hand of mercy overshade her head,
And let all faithful subjects say, Amen.(35)

For Shakespeare, the story of Jonah is not the occasion for scoring sectarian points. Like the fisher-disciples, he casts his net wider than that.

Mention of the disciples recalls another biblical pilgrimage narrative which has long been recognised as an influence on The Comedy of Errors and may also have been formative for Pericles: the Acts of the Apostles.³⁶ The earlier play's description of Ephesus as a town

                                                  full of cozenage,
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin

(I. ii. 97-102)

derives from Acts 19, in which Ephesus is populated by ‘exorcists’ (v. 13), practitioners of ‘curious arts’ (v. 19) and worshippers of Diana, whose image in the temple they believe ‘came down from Jupiter’ (v. 35). Paul has gone to spread the gospel in Ephesus (leaving behind in Corinth, incidentally, a disciple named Apollos). Disputes arise about his preaching, which threatens the trade in trinkets and statues of the goddess, so that ‘the whole city was full of confusion’ (v. 29). In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare supplies Christian colouring, replacing Diana's Temple by a priory whose abbess is Egeon's long-lost wife, yet, as confusions multiply, he also strongly suggests the dark powers which rage through the city. When Pericles reinstates Diana's Temple, it also returns to Acts.

Shakespeare could hardly fail to notice that Acts combines third-person narrative with some first-person, the so-called ‘we-sections’ (chapters 16, 20, 21 and 27, describing St Paul's voyages) which have traditionally been seen not only as salvation-history but also as autobiography,³⁷ although, intriguingly, other scholars have discerned purely literary debts to Hellenistic romance.³⁸ Such a combination of reported and dramatised material chimes with Shakespeare's technique in Pericles. There is also some shared geography: in Acts 20: 14 the ship arrives at Mytilene, in 20: 16 it skirts Ephesus, in 21: 3 it calls at Tyre. In 27: 14 the voyagers run into difficulties caused by ‘a stormy wind, called Euroclydon’, or as the Vulgate has it Euroaquilo, a name which the poet of Patience remembered.³⁹ The writer of Acts seems to be deliberately reversing the story of Jonah, substituting Paul whose presence not only saves the ship and its inhabitants but is essential to their preservation, fulfilling rather than avoiding God's intentions, as is confirmed by Paul's vision of an angel who tells him, ‘thou must be brought before Caesar’ (27: 24). Shakespeare, as it were, combines Jonah and Acts into a single action. Gower had given Apollonius an ‘Avisioun’ (l. 1801) in which ‘he that wot what schal betide, / The hihe god’ (ll. 1788-9), commands him to go to Ephesus; Twine's Apollonius is visited by ‘an Angell in his sleepe’ (Bullough, p. 471) with similar instructions. Shakespeare brings Diana herself onstage, perhaps descending from the heavens, like Jupiter in Cymbeline, as DVH suggest (in support of this we might recall the Ephesians' belief that her image ‘came down from Jupiter’). Marina is a kind of angelic visitor, whom Pericles compares to Juno (V. i. 107) and fears may be the messenger of ‘some incensed god’ (V. i. 140), but, as she insists, she is ‘mortally brought forth’ (V. i. 99). With a fine irony, Pericles' fear that her appearance is a ‘dream’ (V. i. 158) is doubly disproved: the greatest reality is reserved for the moment of vision. This is quite different from what we find in The Comedy of Errors, where, although the Temple of Diana happens to be the scene for the final recognitions and reunions, there is a strong sense of providential direction, but no theophany. Glyn Austen has related the resolution of Errors to the doctrine of the ‘new man’ created by grace in the Epistle to the Ephesians.⁴⁰ This idea is increasingly prominent in Pericles, which presents the reunited family as a restoration of wholeness and an expansion of being, a rebirth which is also a resurrection (cf. DVH, pp. 75-8). Marina twice states her belief that her mother's death coincided with her own birth (V. i. 155-6, 206-7), so that her reappearance provokes that of her mother; Pericles' ‘O come hither, / Thou that begetst him that did thee beget’ is later counterpoised by:

PERICLES:
O come, be buried a second time within these arms.
MARINA [kneels]:
My heart leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom.
PERICLES:
Look who kneels here: flesh of thy flesh, Thaisa …

(V. ii. 41-3)

Not only does this echo the Prayer Book marriage service and the text from Ephesians which underpins it, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh’ (5: 31), but it also harks back to the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus in St John's Gospel:

Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said unto him, ‘How can a man be born which is old? Can he enter into his mother's womb again [AV has ‘the second time’], and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh: and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every man that is born of the Spirit’.

(John 3: 3-8)

The echoes in Shakespeare (‘a second time … my mother's … flesh … flesh’) are noteworthy, and Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus ‘by night’, embodies the darkness in which, in the Prologue, John says the light shines. Literal-minded, he has to be instructed, in Frank Kermode's words, that ‘the knowledge which belongs to generation, genesis, flesh, becoming, is irrelevant to the being of eternal life’.⁴¹ The wind bloweth where it listeth, as Pericles, Marina and Thaisa discover. Safely in harbour, Thaisa can hear of her father's death (V. iii. 74) and belong wholly to Pericles, Marina can leave her father and mother and cleave unto Lysimachus, and all can quit Diana's Temple in an un-Pauline spirit, ready to forsake chastity and the cloister for possibly higher virtues.

I have been arguing that the ‘medieval’ element in Pericles extends beyond the use of Gower—that, without the need of positing yet more, and more improbable, Shakespearean ‘sources’ we nonetheless gain by reading the play in a pre-Reformation literary and scriptural context. It is not then surprising to learn that, as a still under-explored document attests, Pericles, together with King Lear, was acted by Sir Richard Cholmeley's Players, a troupe of Catholic recusants, at Gowthwaite Hall, Nidderdale, in Yorkshire on the feast of Candlemas (2 February) 1609.⁴² The players were brought before the Court of Star Chamber on a charge of sedition because they had acted a play on the life of St Christopher; it looks very much as though they thought of the two Shakespeare plays as belonging to the same category. We know exasperatingly little about this, but it seems likely that the choice of Pericles related in some way to the feast.⁴³ Candlemas, as the commemoration of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Christ to Simeon, brings together a virgin-mother, a miraculous child, and a temple. The pre-Reformation proper Mass of the feast began with words from Psalm 47, ‘We wait for thy loving-kindness, O God, in the midst of thy temple’.⁴⁴ This psalm also says, of the earthly rulers whose power over Jerusalem God will bring to an end: ‘Fear came there upon them, and sorrow, as upon a woman in travail. As with an east wind thou breakest the ships of Tarshish, so were they destroyed’ (vv. 6-7). Candlemas was the last great feast of the Christmas season; its juxtaposition of the aged Simeon and the infant Jesus underscored the themes of renewal and regeneration, while the elaborate processions involved each parishioner carrying a candle, symbolising the holy child, which was blessed and regarded as an aid against the forces of darkness.⁴⁵ Cholmeley's Players, one may reasonably suggest, divined something in the miraculous patience of Pericles which has been obscured to modern eyes.

Notes

1. Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds.), Later Shakespeare (1966), p. 49.

2. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (1965), p. 134.

3. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 28-75.

4. See Edward Dowden, Shakspere (1877), pp. 55-6, cited in The Winter's Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1996), pp. 2-3.

5. Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, pp. 62-6.

6. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford, 1994), pp. 143-55, and Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford, 1992), pp. 194-9.

7. Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (1995), notes on III. vi. 25 that Pistol's use of ‘buxom’ in its medieval sense, in Captain Gower's first scene, is paralleled in Shakespeare only in Gower's Prologue to Pericles, l. 23.

8. Anne Barton, ‘“Enter Mariners Wet”: Realism in Shakespeare's Last Plays’, in her Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, 1994), p. 202.

9. Quotations, with references in text, are from The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. ii (EETS ES 82, Oxford, 1900).

10. W. A. Davenport, Chaucer and his English Contemporaries: Prologue and Tale in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (1998), p. 71.

11. Anne Barton, ‘Leontes and the Spider: Language and Speaker in Shakespeare's Last Plays’, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, p. 178.

12. Twine, ‘The Patterne of Painefull Adventures’ (1594?), reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. vi (1966), p. 438. Metrically, the first use of the name in Gower, ‘Appolinus the Prince of Tyre’ (l. 375), requires accentuation on the second syllable, bringing out the echo. Cerimon invokes Apollo in Pericles, III. ii. 66.

13. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, p. 444. Subsequent references to Bullough are given in the text.

14. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), pp. 220-1.

15. Arestratus of Pentapolis and his daughter, who becomes Apollonius' wife, foreshadow Apollonius and Thaisa, while Dionysa and Strangulio, who plot Thaisa's murder, are Antiochus-like figures.

16. See C. L. Barber, ‘“Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget”: Recognition in Pericles and The Winter's Tale’, Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 59-68.

17. Whether we, the audience, hear it too, as DVH assume (‘music must be played here’, V. i. 218 (s.d. n.) and supplementary note, p. 196) is open to question. A stage direction for music was first inserted by Dyce in his edition of 1857. DVH argue that we are privileged to share Pericles' special insight, but an at least equally mysterious effect could be obtained if we remained as deaf as Pericles' companions.

18. See Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill (1952), reprinted as Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (1965), pp. 87-103.

19. Quotations are from Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson (Manchester, 1969), who emends the manuscript's ‘Nepturne’ which he attributes to confusion with Saturn.

20. Quotations (spelling modernised) are from The 1599 Geneva Bible, a facsimile reprint (Ozark, M., 1990).

21. Anderson, p. 18, compares the reference to Jonah in the Cappers' Play in MS Harley 2124 of the Chester cycle. See The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (EETS SS 3, 9), 2 vols. (Oxford, 1974, 1986), i. 478, ll. 345-60.

22. The three days and three nights Jonah spends in the fish's belly are ‘the traditional time it takes to reach the underworld’ according to James S. Ackerman, ‘Jonah’, in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), p. 237.

23. Ibid., p. 236.

24. Noted in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (1978; revised edn., Exeter, 1987), on Patience 258.

25. Ackerman, ‘Jonah’, p. 239.

26. Ibid., p. 241, where Ackerman also notes that the name ‘the Lord God’ (4: 6) is the same in Hebrew as that used of God in Genesis 2.

27. Ackerman, ‘Jonah’, p. 242.

28. Marion Lomax, Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford (Cambridge, 1987), p. 81.

29. The parallel with Merchant is noted by Lomax, Stage Images, pp. 47-8, who also sees allusion to Pandora's box.

30. Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford, 1990), pp. 148-9. Lomax, Stage Images, p. 52, sees analogies with Venus Anadyomene and with the Christian Maria maris stella.

31. The play is included in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall (EETS OS 283) (Oxford, 1982); for the date, see p. xl. Recently, Piero Boitani has interpreted the reunion of Pericles and Marina as a theophanic recognition recalling the meeting between Jesus and Mary Magdalen in St John's Gospel, ch. 20; see Boitani, The Bible and its Rewritings (Oxford, 1999), pp. 160-72.

32. The link was made independently by Howard Felperin, ‘Shakespeare's Miracle Play’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 365, and David L. Jeffrey, ‘English Saints' Plays’, in Neville Denny (ed.), Medieval Drama (1973), p. 73. But the Digby plays' provenance is East Anglia (Baker, Murphy and Hall, pp. ix-xv) and Hoeniger sensibly stopped short of insisting that Shakespeare must have known them.

33. David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 3rd edn., 1992), p. 318, s.v. ‘Margaret of Antioch (Marina)’.

34. Seinte Marharete, ed. Frances M. Mack (EETS OS 193) (Oxford, 1934), p. 24, ll. 7-19.

35. A Looking-Glass for London and England, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1932), ll. 2404-9, with spelling modernised. Cf. Lomax, Stage Images, p. 81.

36. The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (1963), pp. xxix, 113-15.

37. F. F. Bruce, ‘Acts of the Apostles’, in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford, 1993), pp. 6-10, esp. p. 7.

38. James M. Robinson, ‘Acts’, in Alter and Kermode (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 469.

39. God summons the winds ‘Ewrus and Aquiloun’ against Jonah (Patience, l. 133 and Anderson's note). Tyndale, in his translation of 1534, cuts the names, but his word for the wind, ‘a flaw’ (Tyndale's New Testament, ed. David Daniell (Yale, 1989, 1995), p. 204), is also used by Pericles at III. i. 40.

40. Glyn Austen, ‘Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in The Comedy of Errors’, Journal of Literature and Theology, 1/1 (1987), 62. This epistle contains matter relevant to Pericles too, notably the statement that the ascended Christ ‘descended first into the lowest parts of the earth’ (4: 9), a text which is often interpreted as referring to the Harrowing of Hell and, by analogy, to Jonah. There is also much use of imagery of darkness and light (5: 8-14), and teaching on the mutual responsibilities of married couples and their children (5: 22-6: 4).

41. Frank Kermode, ‘John’, in Alter and Kermode (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 450. Boitani, The Bible and its Rewritings, also insists on the importance of the Johannine themes of becoming and being in Pericles: see especially pp. 152-5, 166-9.

42. C. J. Sisson, ‘Shakespearean Quartos as Prompt-Copies, with some Account of Cholmeley's Players and a New Shakespeare Allusion’, Review of English Studies, 18 (1942), 138. W. Schrickx, ‘Pericles in a Book-List of 1619 from the English Jesuit Mission and some of the Play's Special Problems’, Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 21-32, speculates that the play was in the repertory of the Jesuit theatre at St-Omer.

43. Twelfth Night, also acted at Candlemas in 1602, draws on some of the same liturgical material as Pericles: see Paul Dean, ‘The Harrowing of Malvolio: The Theological Background of Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 2’, Connotations, 7/2 (1997/98), 203-13.

44. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 15-16.

45. Ibid., pp. 15-18. The episode is dramatised in all the extant mystery cycles and also in the Digby Killing of the Children, the play presented by Poeta. In the cycles the play is followed by, or merged with, that of the child Jesus astonishing the doctors in the Temple with his wisdom, much as Marina does the citizens of Tarsus in Pericles IV. 0. 5-29.