[In the following essay, Womack asserts that Pericles shares similarities with earlier dramas that venerated saints, most notably the play Mary Magdalen. The critic discusses the two plays in the context of the changing critical, political, and religious sentiment in England during the 1500s and 1600s, which denigrated improbable and miraculous stories because of their connections to Catholicism.]

I

It was long ago discovered, by the industry which neglects no conceivable Shakespearean origin, that the main action of Pericles oddly resembles the King of Marcylle episode in the fifteenth-century East Anglian play Mary Magdalen.¹ In both, a monarch is shown on a ship at sea with his wife, who dies in childbirth in the midst of a storm. The sailors, believing that it is fatally unlucky to have a corpse on board, insist that the dead woman be jettisoned; the monarch loses both wife and child, but later both are miraculously restored to him. The parallels are distinct enough to be interesting, but for what Stephen Greenblatt acidly calls “the conventional pieties of source study” they are an embarrassment rather than an illumination.² Since it is quite unlikely that the Magdalen play was performed later than the 1560s, and since it was not printed until the nineteenth century, any theory that requires Shakespeare to have been familiar with it involves implausible speculation. And in any case, the theory is not needed. The source which Shakespeare positively advertises—John Gower's Confessio Amantis—includes all the details Pericles shares with Mary Magdalen. The discovery of a stage precursor thus has the character of an ingenious solution where there was no mystery in the first place. An altogether different kind of continuity is in question, not expressible in the syntax of “influence.”

The coincidence of plots is admittedly a matter of fairly conventional literary history, though not directly of Shakespearean “source studies.” The story in Confessio Amantis is that of Apollonius of Tyre, which Gower found in the late-twelfth-century Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo, and which also appeared in the Gesta Romanorum and its numerous late medieval and Renaissance derivatives.³ And the narrative source of the relevant parts of Mary Magdalen is the account of the saint in the thirteenth-century Legenda Sanctorum of Jacobus de Voragine—the “Golden Legend.”⁴ These collections were among the most copied and excerpted of all late medieval texts: thus the most cursory investigation of the sources of both plays leads into a network of transmitted, retold, summarized, and anthologized stories, a narrative reservoir for poets and playwrights alike, across Europe and over several centuries. It isn't quite a single network, of course: the Gesta Romanorum includes secular, pagan, and more or less overtly fictional tales, whereas the Golden Legend consists entirely of readings on the saints, whose fantastic details are consequently all presented as true. But the two spheres are not entirely disconnected either.

In the story of the King and Queen of Marcylle (Marseilles), the reason they are on the ship is that they are sailing to Rome, or to the Holy Land, in order to be baptized by St. Peter, having been converted to Christ by Mary Magdalen. The legend of Mary's missionary voyage to Marseilles probably emerged during the eleventh century to authenticate the Magdalen relics at Vezelay in Burgundy;⁵ the episode of the King and Queen's voyage is presumably a slightly later supplement.⁶ If so, it is an appropriate one: the relics were making Vezelay into an important object of pilgrimage, and this is essentially a pilgrim story—the King and Queen “go the stations” in Jerusalem, having been protected on their hazardous journey by the influence of the saint.⁷ Once the restored royal family returns, Magdalen's work is complete, and she retires to the wilderness to lead the life of a hermit, eventually being taken up to heaven in miraculous circumstances: in the details and iconography of this phase of the story there is evidently a crossover with an originally unconnected legend, that of Mary of Egypt, another sanctified peccatrix quondam femina.⁸ The Magdalen legend, that is, is itself a compilation, bits having been added on to it from biblical and nonbiblical sources over more than a thousand years. This fact is inscribed on the surface of the English play Mary Magdalen in the form of its extreme stylistic heterogeneity.

The story of Apollonius is a good deal older. There is some scholarly uncertainty about whether it is a lost Greek romance or a Latin imitation of Greek romance, but either way it appears that the wanderings of Apollonius were proverbial by the sixth century.⁹ And its diffusion is attested all over the place, not only in the Latin collections already mentioned: there is an Anglo-Saxon version from the eleventh century, and fourteenth- or fifteenth-century translations into all the main vernaculars of Europe.¹⁰ It is likely enough, then, that the French monastic appropriation of the composite saint Mary Magdalen should have filled out its narrative iconography by borrowing from this widely known story. If so, it is that transfer that ironically surfaces, centuries later, in the rhyme between the Magdalen play and Pericles. It is not that Mary Magdalen influenced Pericles, but that the source of Pericles influenced the source of Mary Magdalen.

The transfer, though, is arguably less interesting than the transferability. The exchange of material between Hellenic romance and Christian hagiography can be shown to go back virtually to the beginning of both. Thus, for example, the second-century story of Thecla concerns a beautiful virgin who is converted by the preaching of St. Paul and braves various extremes of persecution and sexual harrassment in order to be by his side. The official genre is hagiography, and Thecla was indeed venerated as a saint, but the shape of the love story is unmistakable.¹¹ Earlier still, the biblical Acts of the Apostles can be read as a kind of Greek romance;¹² certainly Mary Magdalen's voyage to Marseilles borrows authority from St. Paul's journey to Rome, with its generically appropriate shipwreck, island, and miracle.

The Apollonius story itself offers a detailed instance of the system of exchange in the motif of the heroine's defense of her chastity. Apollonius's daughter Tarsia is captured by pirates and sold to the owner of a brothel; several clients are sent in to her, but her account of her sorrows so fills them with pity that they are unable to violate her.¹³ On the one hand, this incident echoes saints' legends such as that of St. Agnes, who is sent to a brothel by the local prefect's son after she has spurned his advances; an angel meets her there and frightens away the clients with his radiance.¹⁴ But one could also connect it with Antheia, the heroine of the Ephesiaca of Xenophon, who produces the same effect on her would-be ravishers by faking an epileptic fit.¹⁵ The mechanism of the heroine's deliverance varies interestingly between these analogues: we may wonder at the heroine's faith, or at her resourcefulness, or at the force of her personality; and these differences are clearly a function of the story's moves into or out of a sacred context. But it is not possible, except on rather speculative dating evidence, to identify one of the versions as “original”—to say that St. Agnes is Antheia sanctified, or that Antheia is Agnes secularized. Even the equivocal comedy of the situation, which is made particularly obvious by dramatization, is not necessarily incompatible with its miraculous character. On the medieval stage, for instance, the Virgin Martyrs of Hrotsvitha plays a comparable story as a clown routine: the rapist's perceptions are divinely scrambled so that he mistakes the cooking pots for the object of his lust, and ends up satisfyingly covered in soot.¹⁶

This easy traffic between sacred and profane narratives is hardly a cultural accident. The basic structure of the few extant Greek “novels,” after all, is the arbitrary separation of lovers, their quest for one another through episodes of abduction, shipwreck, and seeming death, their unshakeable devotion to one another, and their deserved reuniting by wonderfully fortunate means. Their secret mutual faith gives meaning to the random contingency of the story by turning it into a trial of love, and also empowers them to come through the trial unscathed. There is little difficulty in translating these tribulations into those that the saint experiences at the hands of a hostile world, seemingly cruel tests of faith under the ultimate supervision of a benign providence which eventually reunites the soul with Christ in recognition or martyrdom. The mechanisms that construct the hero and heroine as the pattern of love are identical with the mechanisms that construct the saint as the pattern of piety. One modern historian of Greek romance tersely and suggestively asserts that “[n] ovels and mystery religions flourished at the same time and in the same milieu”;¹⁷ and the connection between the two is amply represented by the most sophisticated of surviving classical “novels,” The Golden Ass. But of course the most significant of the mystery religions turned out to be Christianity: if romance and hagiography blur readily into each other, it is because they were never entirely separate in the first place.

So if, as has more than once been suggested, Pericles is a Jacobean miracle play in secular disguise, there is more to the conjunction than a biographical collision, such as the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic,¹⁸ or that he had seen a fugitive saint play in his youth.¹⁹ The point is rather that romance and miracle are separable but not separate manifestations of a common repertoire of plots and plot devices—a langue, as it were, in relation to which Pericles and the legend of Mary Magdalen appear as instances of parole: a sea of stories.²⁰

II

Perhaps the first impression that Mary Magdalen makes on a modern student of drama is one of technical incompetence. In the source story, Mary arrives in Marcylle and takes up lodging in a poor hut where she is without food until, prompted by angels, she appears to the King and Queen in a dream and orders them to offer her hospitality. The play stages this episode after it has shown Mary preaching to the King and Queen and destroying their heathen temple with fire from heaven; their neglect of so formidable a visitor is therefore puzzlingly absentminded. Later, when the Queen dies in childbirth on the voyage to the Holy Land, the storm, which is essential to the story, is alluded to in a couple of lines and then instantly forgotten. Then the King bizarrely deposits not only his dead wife but also his living child on a rock in the sea; then, instantly, he is shown disembarking at Jerusalem and paying off the sailors, a transaction that takes as long as his last farewell to his family did. He then proceeds to his baptism and pilgrimage as if nothing had happened, not so much as mentioning the tragedy when he introduces himself to St. Peter.²¹

And so on. We no longer believe the whiggish literary historians who depicted the fifteenth century as the infancy of English drama, from which it grew through its Tudor adolescence to Shakespearean maturity. But contemplating this exasperating mixture of redundancy and discontinuity, it is futile to pretend that we can't see what they meant. And of course, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that the writer of Mary Magdalen was just not a good dramatist, or even that dramatists of the later fifteenth century, like those of, say, the early nineteenth, were confronted by culturally posed problems of form which were not fully soluble under prevailing conditions.

That was certainly the light in which humanist writers viewed the state of drama during the 1570s and 80s—the decades when Mary Magdalen, like much of the medieval repertoire, dropped out of live theatrical use.²² In 1578 George Whetstone, in his brief sketch of the dramatic shortcomings of various nations, declares English playwrights to be “most vaine, indiscreete, and out of order”;²³ what he means by that is that they have no regard to probability, or to the unity of time and place. Sidney rehearses the same objections in the Apologie for Poetry a few years later. In such interventions there is more at stake than the fashionable promulgation of the “rules” of Italian neo-Aristotelianism. They coincide, after all, with the polemical and administrative attack on the London playhouses during the decade following the establishment of the Theater in 1576. Both Whetstone and Sidney are well aware of this context: Whetstone's dedication is an anxious defense of the moral legitimacy of comedy, addressed to the Recorder of London; and Sidney is in explicitly performed debate with assorted “Poethaters.”²⁴ For both, the lamentable state of English playwriting is a serious embarrassment; Sidney does praise the language and morality of Gorboduc, but with a slight air of clutching at straws. Clearly this case would be easier to make if one could adduce some artistically respectable native drama.

Thus Thomas Lodge, replying to Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse in 1579, concedes that contemporary theater poets “apply their writing to the people vain,”²⁵ and tries to distinguish the abuses of drama from drama itself so that he can argue for the reformation of the former instead of the abolition of the latter. This puts him in the fragile position of defending the theater for what it could be rather than for what it is, and Gosson, returning to the attack in 1582, vigorously exploits this weakness. Lodge has said, claiming the authority of Cicero, that plays are the “Schoolmistresse of life; the lookinge glass of manners; and the image of trueth.” Even if Cicero did say that (which Gosson doubts), can the sentiment really be applied to these plays?

Sometime you shall see nothing but the aduentures of an amorous knight, passing from countrie to countrie for the loue of his lady, encountring many a terible monster made of broune paper, & at his retorne, is so wonderfully changed, that he can not be knowne but by some posie in his tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkircher, or a piece of a cockle shell, what learne you by that?²⁶

Here is the sea of stories again, contemplated this time with weary distaste. Lodge's mimetic formula, reasonably convincing as a rationale for Roman comedy which conforms to the principles of the Ars Poetica, provides only very patchy cover for a popular theater dominated, as all these writers agree it is, by wandering chivalric romance. Controversialists may disagree about the lawfulness of drama in general, but they all agree that the current practitioners are no good at all. There is, to put the case at its most neutral, a lack of fit between the actually existing theater and the language available for discussing it.

What if this anomaly—this gap between theory and practice, if you like—reflects not simply artistic failure on the part of the playwrights, but the existence of a different model of theater, unarticulated in comparison with the one confidently derived from Aristotle, Horace, and Castelvetro, and, evidently, incompatible with it? If so, we might articulate something of this converse aesthetic by taking the most conceptually agile of the neoclassical theorists, Sidney, and reading him backwards.

Like Gosson, he makes merry with the conventions of dramatic storytelling:

Now ye shall have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeue the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Vpon the backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bounde to take it for a Caue.²⁷

The humor turns on the arbitrary demands the play places on the audience's belief—“we must beleeve,” “we are to blame if we accept it not,” “the miserable beholders are bounde to take it. …” The condition of the spectators seems to get more wretched as the list goes on: every concession they make is met with a further demand, more extravagant than the one before, and conflicting with it, until at last they are reduced to a state of indiscriminate credulity, having been effectively talked out of their senses. The requirement implicit in the mockery is that the show should reduce its demands on the spectator's belief to a minimum, by establishing its imaginary time and place once and then not undermining them with whimsical subsequent changes. In short, that the world of the play should be one.

There is enough detail in Sidney's comic sketch to make it clear that his target, like Gosson's, is secular romance.²⁸ However, after what has been said about the crossover between romance and hagiography, it comes as no surprise to note that his argument is an equally conclusive condemnation of the dramaturgy of Mary Magdalen. It does indeed feature a garden, a rock, and a hideous smoking Monster (though the last is in a heathen temple rather than a cave). And it inhabits a multiplicity not only of times and places but even of dramatic modes, being a moral allegory and a passion play and a miracle play. Not content with dividing its action between Palestine and France, it positively rubs our noses in this geographical extravagance by having a property ship travel, presumably on wheels, across the playing area from one country to the other, not once but three times.²⁹ So that we are at fault, you could say, if we do not conceive the platea to be the Mediterranean, and a few minutes of trundling over a flat ground to be a fortnight's voyage.

Mary Magdalen, then, is paradigmatic of the kind of drama Sidney regards as absurd and indefensible. The play sank into oblivion without finding an apologist in its turn. However, having decided to invent one, we can surely think of things for him to say. One is that the first dramatic purpose of Mary Magdalen, obviously, is to embody and animate the image of the saint. Unity is conferred upon the play's extreme stylistic and structural miscellaneity only by this central figure. And a saint is by definition a mediator between worlds: to realize this idea on stage absolutely requires that one shatter the unity of time and place, because it is constitutive of the saint's identity that she exists both in heaven and on earth, in time and in eternity, in Jerusalem and Provence and, if it comes to that, Chelmsford. Even if the makers of the drama had been familiar with the rule that one should only ask the spectators to believe in one dramatic world, they would have been obliged to transgress it by the very nature of their object of representation.

And then secondly, the primary means of dramatizing the saint's identity, at least in the legendary section of the play, is the representation of miracles. The destruction of the idol, the survival of the child, the raising of the dead mother—each significant episode is centered on the audience's witnessing an astonishing event that discloses divine power. The improbability of these actions—their arbitrary eruption through the earthly texture of causes and effects—is precisely the point of their enactment. One of the basic criteria for the recognition of a miracle, after all, is that it should be contra naturam;³⁰ consequently, anything in its presentation helping to reconcile it with the natural course of events would have the effect of blurring its outlines. To object that the play asks too much of the spectators' capacity for belief is beside the point, since to nourish that capacity is the very raison d'etre of the spectacle.

In other words, this is a theater in which the Aristotelian criteria of formal unity and probability are not merely not observed, but necessarily and militantly negated. It is not that the play fails to be probable and consequential, but that it fully intends to transcend consequence and baffle probability. To Gosson's sarcastic observation that the hero is so “wonderfully changed” that nobody can recognize him, it implicitly retorts that wonderful changes are the essential business of the performance.

At this point, however, we need to remember who Sidney was really arguing with: not the exponents either of saints' plays or of chivalric romances, but fellow Puritans who needed to be convinced that poetry in general, and theater in particular, had any place at all in a reformed and godly commonwealth. As Patrick Collinson has argued, the familiar denunciations of the stage—Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubbes—are documents from a “second phase” of the English Reformation, one marked by increasing hostility, not only to images directly representative of the Catholic past, but to images in general.³¹ Thus Gosson's attack on improbable romances is not really the cry of an outraged Aristotelian, but an opportunistic debating point in the course of a very differently grounded argument to the effect that all plays are evil, because “every play to the worldes end, if it be presented vp on the Stage, shall carry that brand on his backe to make him knowne, which the devil clapt on, at the first beginning, that is, idolatrie.”³²

Theater is idolatrous in its first beginning because it originated in the worship of pagan gods. But it is also idolatrous in its essential nature because it works by setting up false images with the intention that they should be taken for truths. This line of attack makes it clear how consciously the condemnation of theater is part of the Reformation. To describe plays as incorrigibly idolatrous is to conflate them with late medieval Catholic culture as it appeared to those who destroyed it in the 1530s: the pageantry of the saints, the magical bones and phials of dubious blood, the theatricality of the liturgy, the superstitious populace—an impure mixture of magical belief, deception, and buffoonery, including, for Gosson, “the corruption of the Corpus Christi Playes that were set out by the Papistes … where some base fellowe that plaide Christe, should bring the person of Christ into contempt.”³³ However assiduously it proclaims Protestant doctrine, the theater is still a Catholic kind of thing in its suspect reassigning of substance: a brown paper effigy is a dragon; some base fellow is Christ; wine is blood. Reforming drama in the manner of Bale or Wager doesn't begin to meet this case, because the popery it denounces is a matter, not at all of content, but of form.³⁴

Sidney's implicit program can be seen in this context as a strategy for decatholicizing the theater. By proscribing arbitrary transubstantiations of the stage properties, he draws a clear dividing line between dramatic illusion and pseudo-miracle. By drastically restricting the demands placed on the spectator's credulity, he establishes a parallel difference between theatrical belief and superstition. And by insisting on a single stage world, he effectively calls for a secularized theater, devoid of heaven, hell, allegory, theophany, and magic.

Such a program of purification entails, as we have seen, a reimagining of the theater's relationship with story. This becomes clearer when Sidney is anticipating some practical objections to his neoclassical rigor:

But they will say, how then shal we set forth a story, which contains both many places and many times? And doe they not knowe that a Tragedie is tied to the lawes of Poesie, and not of Historie? not bound to follow the storie, but, having liberty, either to faine a quite newe matter, or to frame the history to the most tragicall conueniencie. Againe, many things may be told which cannot be shewed, if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing.³⁵

This extends Sidney's armory of binary oppositions with two thoroughly Aristotelian distinctions—between tragedy and history (in tragedy the form is mandatory and the “matter” is freely disposable, whereas in history it is the other way round); and between diegesis and mimesis (one can be here and talk about Peru, and then change the subject to Calicut without difficulty, whereas to move between these places “in action” one needs “Pacolets horse”—that is, the magical repertoire of romance).

The first of these—the opposition between tragedy and history has the effect of dissociating drama from the category of referential truth, and so disposing of the accusation that its images, like those of idolatrous religion, are false. The story told by a play is required by Aristotle to be probable; it is not required to be true. If it is improbable, it is no defense to say that it is true: improbable things do sometimes happen, but that does not make them probable, and so does not make them suitable subjects for drama. Once again, Mary Magdalen offers an exact mirror image: in the saint play, it is positively required that the story should be improbable and true. The hagiographer is “bound to follow the storie,” and the play's lumpy, undermotivated progress from one miraculous “point” to the next is, among other things, the sign that it is doing just that.

And then this explicit secondariness, this conspicuous deference to the authority of the story, undermines the distinction between “reporting and representing.” Which, for example, is this: the moment when the Queen dies in childbed on the ship?

REGINA.
An hevy departyng is betwyx vs in syth,
Fore now departe wee!
For defawte of wommen here in my nede,
Deth my body makyth to sprede.
Now Mary Mavdleyn, my sowle lede!
In manus tuas, Domine!
REX.
Alas, my wyff is ded!
Alas, this is a carefull chans!

(1760-67)

This is certainly enactment: the King and Queen are aboard the property ship with the sailor and his boy, and the Queen's last line clearly cues a physical representation of dying. But the decisive speech acts are narrative ones: “now departe wee,” “deth my body makyth to sprede,” “my wyff is ded.” The actors are not being asked to enter the world of the characters, but to show the events of the story—verbally and gesturally—to the audience. The conditions of performance are necessary context here: almost certainly this is an outdoor amphitheater performance on a festival occasion. The spectators are thus highly present—visually, in that they wholly or partly surround the playing area and define its limits; and culturally, in that their having assembled is an integral part of the event. The performance thus has the character of a public demonstration; the performers are not in the business of creating the illusion of a present experience; rather, they are telling an old story in a mode which includes “doing the actions.” Passing instantly from one significant action to the next is therefore no more problematic than turning a page or saying, “Then the King did this.” In other words, the stage action has the narrative character which Sidney reserves for verbal discourse. The representing is a kind of reporting.

One could put it this way: Mary in the play is already a saint. The devotional discourse which attaches to her is no less part of her stage being than the events of her life: what is staged is not a person about whom there will later be a legend, but the legend itself. It is consistent with this that many of the lines are not interlocutory dialogue, but general announcements, sermons, or prayers to God or the saints—that is, they are words which can be uttered as validly and appropriately in Suffolk on the day of the performance as in Marcylle on the day of the historical event. Even the dialogue often has this transhistorical character. For instance, when the King and Queen are welcomed home by Mary, they kneel to her, and the Queen says:

Heyll, thou chosyn and chast of wommen alon!
It passyt my wett to tell thi nobyllnesse!
Thou relevyst me and my chyld on the rokke of ston,
And also savyd vs be thi holynesse.

(1943-46)

Again, this is a dramatic interchange in a way. The Queen arrives home and greets her friend and teacher. But the communicative acts—kneeling, hailing her, naming her, rehearsing her goodness—are those of prayer: the discourse also belongs to a late medieval devotee of St. Mary Magdalen. So that “the rokke of ston,” although it is a reference to a specific location in the world of the story, also sounds like a generalized emblem of hardship, and the Queen's “death” on it a universal experience. The story takes place in a performative present, dissolving Sidney's opposition between here and elsewhere, now and then, a thing done and a thing reported.

On all these central questions, then—time, space, unity, history, and representation—Mary Magdalen is informed by a coherent model of theatrical communication which is the antithesis of the neo-Aristotelian model proposed in the Apologie. Moreover, this antithetic model is fundamentally and inextricably Catholic: if the theater is to be rendered fit for performance in a godly commonwealth, the form of a play like Mary Magdalen has to be rejected—consigned to the past, to the “undramatic,” and to the cultural dustbin of the “popular.” To some extent this is indeed what happened: although the “unities” have long been as archaic as the dramaturgy they were seeking to reform, Sidney's underlying assumptions about what constitutes drama still survive in the form of common sense—which is why Mary Magdalen strikes us as incompetent. But the program of reform, like others in the Elizabethan settlement, only went so far. In 1614, when Shakespeare had already retired, Ben Jonson, as the conscious inheritor of Sidney's poetics, was still finding it necessary to denounce the theater of rambling and miraculous storytelling, as represented by those who continued to “beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries.”³⁶ “Renaissance drama” was persistently haunted by its pre-Reformation alternative: Sidney and Jonson constructed a theoretical embankment between the theater and the sea of stories, but it leaked.

III

So when Jonson, writing in 1629, famously dismissed Pericles as a “mouldy tale,” noun and epithet were both carefully weighed.³⁷ Not only is this particular story extremely old, but also the type of story (voyages, shipwrecks, arbitrary separations, and reunions across years and countries) is exactly the kind of thing we saw being excluded from drama proper in the 1580s—the episodic stringing together of devices from that collective medieval repertoire which I have called the sea of stories, but which Jonson less picturesquely describes as “Scraps, out of every dish, / Thrown forth and raked into the common tub.” Moreover, the play's mode of presentation, switching between enactment and gauche choric links, subordinates the stage action to the logic of narrative, breaking up, all over again, the unity and completeness of the dramatic image. Jonson's immediate context is a diatribe against the vulgarity and ignorance of audiences, and it is not hard to see how the success of Pericles seems, from a “Sidneian” point of view, to prove his point. In fifty years the theater-going public had apparently learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

A curious set of records enables us to locate this obstinacy within a wider conservatism. In 1610, when the performance of saints' plays had effectively been illegal for decades, a show about St. Christopher was allegedly presented at Gowthwaite Hall, the home of a Yorkshire recusant named Sir John Yorke. The allegation was investigated by a commission of the Star Chamber, who questioned the principal actors, also themselves recusants. Part of their complicated and sometimes contradictory defense was that they always played from printed books, and one of them added that the plays they had in fact taken to Sir John Yorke's and other gentlemen's houses at the time in question were “Perocles prince of Tire” and “king Lere.”³⁸

These are formidable plays for a company of semiprofessional, provincial strolling players of dubious legal status, and John L. Murphy, in his study of these materials, plausibly suggests that the actors may have had some sort of sponsorship from the Jesuit mission to England, which was certainly active among exactly this network of Catholic Yorkshire gentry. We know that the English Jesuit college at St. Omer occasionally performed sacred plays, and that in 1619 its library, which mostly consisted of devotional and controversial works, possessed a copy of Pericles.³⁹ It starts to look as if the play was, so to speak, leading a double life.

To understand the capacity of the script to do this, we could start with the little scene which rounds off the role of Thaisa in the first half of the play. Having “died” in childbed at sea, like the Queen of Marcylle, she is cast overboard in her coffin, and then miraculously revived by the physician Cerimon. She explains to him:

That I was shipp'd at sea
I well remember, even on my eaning time;
But whether there deliver'd, by the holy gods,
I cannot rightly say. But since King Pericles,
My wedded lord, I ne'er shall see again,
A vestal livery will I take me to,
And never more have joy.

(III, iv, 4-10)

If Jonson ever inspected the play in detail, this is the kind of thing to which he will have taken exception. Thaisa has no recollection of whether her child was safely delivered or not; and the situation as she is aware of it gives her no reason to suppose that Pericles is dead, or that if he is alive, he has done anything except return sorrowfully to Tyre, where it would surely be feasible to send him a message. So why does she declare that she will never see him again? Because the “mouldy tale” requires her to stay out of the way while Marina grows up so that father, mother, and daughter can all have their wonder-filled reunion in the fifth act. Thaisa's improbable incuriosity about the people she is supposed to love is a symptom of the blind subordination of the dramatic action to the story.

This reductive answer is not absurd. As the play's most recent editors point out at length, the play positively insists on its status as a kind of storytelling: it not only executes, but self-consciously dramatizes, the primacy of narrative.⁴⁰ But there is another, less general way of interpreting Thaisa's strange gesture. When she was first revived, she asked, “What world is this?” (III, ii, 107). And when she says that she will never see her lord again, she is holding a scroll, addressed from him to whoever finds her, asking them to give her burial. In other words, it is not so much that she supposes her husband and child to be dead; rather, it is as if she herself had died. Her “terrible childbed,” her burial at sea, the grief of Pericles, and the motherless childhood of Marina—these things amount to the story of Thaisa's death, so the Thaisa we see on stage obeys the logic of that story, even though there is also another story in which she has survived. Dead and living at once, she enters a liminal state, represented by her withdrawal from the world into Diana's temple. There cannot be a question about the probability of her actions, because she is not in the world where action takes place. As in the saint play, the journeying, episodic plot and the dislocated temporality are the sign and condition of access to multiple worlds.

Saints' legends are made up of four basic possible gests: conversion, martyrdom, miracle, and withdrawal from the world. They are fairly freely combinable: Mary Magdalen, a very rich example, contains all of them except martyrdom; some of the shortest of the stories in the Golden Legend focus on only one. The impact of the Reformation on this combination was selective. The miracle was redefined as idolatrous, as we have seen; and the withdrawal from the world was identified with monasticism—both of these therefore became signs of popery rather than of holiness. Conversion and martyrdom, on the other hand, not only retained their validity, but acquired new intensity from their special Protestant meanings. Thus Foxe's Actes and Monuments is constructed almost entirely around the gest of martyrdom, and Lewis Wager's Protestant dramatization of the Mary Magdalen legend (1566) drops both the miraculous story and the eventual sanctification in the wilderness, leaving what is essentially a play about conversion.⁴¹ The effect on these developments of the late-sixteenth-century secularization of the stage was consequently an ironic one. The gests of conversion and martyrdom were still sacred and therefore excluded from the theatrical repertoire. But the other two—miracle and withdrawal—had been desanctified and were therefore available, so to speak, for secular dramatic use. It is hard to think of plays that exploit this somewhat inadvertent and asymmetrical opportunity as fully as the Yorkshire recusants' selection: King Lear and Pericles.⁴²

In her elegantly structural account of early saints' narratives, Alison Goddard Elliott distinguishes between hagiographic epic and hagiographic romance. Epic centers on martyrdom: it is about the saint's death, it takes place in foro, amid human institutions, and it is agonistic, pitting good against evil; it therefore entails assertion on the part of the saint. Romance centers on ascetism: it is about the saint's life, it takes place in the wilderness, among angels, demons, and animals, and it is gradational, charting a progression from sanctity to greater sanctity; it therefore entails submission on the part of the saint. “One of the most significant contributions of hagiographic romance,” then, “was the enshrining of the concept of liminal space.”⁴³ Between the world where we live and the world to which we go when we die, there is the place belonging to both and neither: the desert, the forest, the island. Sometimes the saint even joins with this environment to the point of becoming less or more than human: hairy, naked, buried in the earth, or communing with strangely amiable lions and bears.

It is easy to see how this binarism corresponds with the opposition I have suggested between reformable and unreformable saintly gests. The elements of “epic” hagiography are the Protestant ones, conversion and martyrdom: they happen in this world. Those of romance are the gests of Catholic sainthood, miracle and withdrawal: they intimate an encounter between this world and another, fracturing the unity of the dramatic image. It is as romance, then, that the theater of saints penetrates Elizabethan and particularly Shakespearean drama. Thaisa in her lightly paganized nunnery; Pericles on the sea, unkempt, unwashed and wordless; Marina, living incognito far from her imposing tomb at Tarsus—all inhabit varieties of liminal space, providentially relieved, you could say, on the rock of stone, none of them engaged in anything Aristotle would recognize as an action, all awaiting a miracle which outruns the category of action because it does not belong to any of them, but to the legend that contains them. When Pericles recognizes Marina

O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tharsus,
And found at sea again

(V, i, 194-97)

the moment is theophanic. His rehearsal of the elements of her life—birth, burial, finding—makes it sound as if they were the fulfillment of a prophecy, as if he had discerned a divinely composed design in what had seemed until this moment to be meaningless contingencies. In fact there is no such prophecy in Pericles;⁴⁴ the mystery of which he becomes ecstatically aware in this moment is more diffused than that. It is, precisely, a formal illumination: Pericles realizes that what is happening to him is a story.

It is easy to imagine, then, how Sir John Yorke's Christmas guests, watching St. Christopher one night and Pericles the next, could have felt themselves to be in the same dramatic world. The saint play had found its way through a complicated set of internal and external determinants to a post-Reformation form, at once displaced, popular, and sophisticated. To suppose this, it is not necessary to think of Pericles as a crypto-Catholic pièce à clè, a saint play in protective disguise. The likelier story is vaguer but more interesting: that the decatholicizing of theater was only ever partly feasible, because the codes of miracle playing were carried into Protestant English drama in the formal structures of plays and their performances. It therefore remained possible for a Catholic audience to reconnect with sacred drama just by the way it watched these legally published plays about things that are lost and then return.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1963), xc. References to Pericles are to this text; those to Mary Magdalen are to Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall Jr., eds., The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, EETS o.s. 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The “Marcylle” sequence, which is my focus of interest, occupies lines 1349-1956.

2. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 94.

3. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 6:351-54.

4. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:374-83.

5. Louis Reau, Iconographie de l'art chretien, 3 vols. in 6 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955-59), 3:846-48.

6. Both parts of the story were sufficiently established by the thirteenth century to feature in the windows of chartres. See Joseph Szoverffy, peccatrix quondam femina: A Survey of the Mary Magdalen Itymns,” Traditio 19 (1963): 84.

7. The Golden Legend version actually refers to the King as “the Pilgrim” once the Holy Land episode is under way.

8. Golden Legend, 1:227-29; Reau, Iconographie, 3:855.

9. Laura A. Hibberd, Medieval Romance in England (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 164-73.

10. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 6:353.

11. The story is summarized, and discussed in these terms, in Tomas Hagg, The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 154-62; and Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), 48-50.

12. Stephen P. Schierling and Maria J. Schierling, “The Influence of the Ancient Romances on Acts of the Apostles, The Classical Bulletin 54 (1978): 81-88.

13. Told in this way, for example, in Gower, Confessio Amantis, Book VIII, lines 1431-39, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 6:407.

14. Golden Legend 1:101-4. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 6:352, points out the connection.

15. See Hagg, The Novel in Antiquity, 32, 147-53.

16. In The Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, trans. Katharina Wilson (New York: Garland, 1989).

17. Hagg, The Novel in Antiquity, 104.

18. The biographical case for Shakespeare's Catholic background is set out in, for example, E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: “The Lost Years” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).

19. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 145, 166.

20. The image is Salman Rushdie's. In his children's story Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books with Penguin, 1991), the sea is not merely whimsical; it represents the heteroglot tradition that sustains the art of the hero's father, a professional storyteller. The culture of such performers, in which the storyteller's distinction consists of his ability to retell and combine stories rather than to make them up, is analogous to the one within which Shakespeare, Gower, and the makers of Mary Magdalen all meet.

21. The source in the Golden Legend makes better sense of some of these points: the events at Marcylle are in the right order; the baby is left with the mother on a coast, where there is some prospect of its finding succor; and the King relates his misfortune to St. Peter, who comforts him.

22. If John Coldewey's conjectures are correct, the last known performance was at a summer festival at Chelmsford in 1562. See John C. Coldewey, “The Digby Plays and the Chelmsford Records,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 18 (1975): 103-21. The subsequent history of the script is pursued in Baker, Murphy and Hall, eds., The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and F Museo 160, x-xiv. In 1574 the playbook was still being held by the churchwardens, presumably with the possibility of occasional performances in mind. Some time after that they must have concluded that the script was not going to be of any further use, and it seems that it passed into the possession of Myles Blomefylde, who was the keeper of the churchwardens' accounts between 1582 and 1590, and died in 1603. From his collection it traveled by an unreconstructable route to that of Sir Kenelm Digby, where it arrived at some point between 1616 and 1633. It is difficult to pinpoint the moment in this somewhat speculative narrative when the manuscript ceased to be a functioning playscript and became an object of antiquarian curiosity; the best guess is some time during the 1580s.

23. Dedication to Promos and Cassandra, in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:59.

24. Ibid., 1:181.

25. Ibid., 1:83.

26. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, in Arthur E Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan Studies 4 (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 161.

27. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:197.

28. The extant example which comes closest to the description is Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes; it is discussed as such by Brian Gibbons in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 207-12. The play itself is accessible as Clyomon and Clamydes (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1913).

29. John Coldewey flirts with the idea of a waterway (“The Digby Plays,” 117) but thinks it impracticable in Chelmsford. Glynne Wickham is similarly noncommittal while canvassing Ipswich in “The Staging of Saint Plays in England,” Sandro Sticca, ed., The Medieval Drama (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), 112. A floating boat is not out of the question-unambiguous Continental examples are cited in Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, eds., The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), 98-99. But it seems less likely than a wheeled pageant, and, in any case, an artificial pond would if anything draw attention to the nonidentity of theatrical signifier and oceanic signified even more brutally than dry land.

30. A fifteenth-century formulation, cited in Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), 54.

31. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988), 98, 112-14.

32. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, 179.

33. Ibid., 178.

34. See Peter Happe, “The Protestant Adaptation of the Saint Play,” in Clifford Davidson, ed., The Saint Play in Medieval Europe (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 205-40.

35. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:198.

36. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, Induction, line 115, in vol. 4 of the Complete Plays, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). The affiliation to Sidney is more clearly seen in the prologue to Every Man in His Humour, which was probably written at about the same time.

37. Ben Jonson, “Ode to Himself,” in The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 282.

38. The commission records are summarized in John L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and “King Lear” (Athens: Ohio University Press), 93-118; and less reliably in C. J. Sisson, “Shakespeare's Quartos as Prompt-Copies with Some Account of Cholmeley's Players and a New Shakespeare Allusion,” Review of English Studies 18 (1942): 129-43.

39. Willem Schric, “‘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.

40. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. Doreen Delvecchio and Antony Hammond, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27-36.

41. Lewis Wager, The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, ed. E J. Carpenter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902).

42. They were arguably remiss in failing to pick up Timon of Athens.

43. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, 204.

44. A prophecy of this kind, of course, is fulfilled at the corresponding point in The Winter's Tale.