SOURCE: Hoeniger, F. David. “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (winter 1982): 461-79.

[In the following essay, Hoeniger outlines the plot of Pericles, noting the play's appeal to live audiences and paying special attention to the figure of Gower. The critic maintains that at certain points in the play, Shakespeare attempted to create a burlesque that mocked antiquated literary conventions.]

In this essay I wish to propose an entirely new approach to Pericles which arises from the conviction that critics have not yet grasped the play's highly unusual character and technique. Because large parts of the play, particularly its first two acts, seem to critical readers so obviously defective and crude, both in style and in dramaturgy, we may be surprised by the evidence that in Shakespeare's own time and for a generation after, the play was highly popular. The First Quarto of 1609 speaks of it as “The late, And much admired Play … diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side.” Other references from the time tell us of large crowds flocking to see it, and of both the Venetian and French ambassadors watching an early performance. Between 1610 and 1631 it was revived several times, not only at the Globe, but on one occasion at Whitehall before distinguished guests; it was also performed by a traveling company in the country. Moreover, the Quarto text was reprinted no less than five times, thus confirming the unusual interest in the play. By 1635, the date of the Sixth Quarto, very few other plays had appeared as often in print. We know, of course, that in Shakespeare's time other plays of little dramatic subtlety and of far less literary merit than the best scenes in Pericles could produce a great stir. Yet it does seem strange, especially in view of the play's fate on the stage from Dryden's time to the 1920s and even later, that a work which appears so dismally written and undramatic in its first two acts could experience such a success on stage, and that there was so much demand for it by readers.

But what should surprise us most is that after producers hardly ever risked staging the play for centuries, and then only in major adaptations, several impressive revivals of it during the past thirty years have demonstrated that Pericles can hold modern audiences throughout—and more, that watching it can be an enchanting experience. If these audiences had been prepared simply to accept, for better or worse, the opening parts for the sake of the Shakespearean scenes in the later acts, we could understand this response quite easily. But the audiences were those that go to Stratford-upon-Avon and Stratford, Ontario, or the summer festival at Ashland, Oregon, and their like. A large proportion of them did not know the play or any criticism of it before seeing it. They were eager to see a work by Shakespeare that until then they had only vaguely heard about. Moreover, several people who experienced these productions told me, when I questioned them, how much they enjoyed the play from Gower's first appearance on, and that they were not particularly conscious of a marked change in the third act when Shakespeare's voice, with its rich and lively resonance, is first heard in Pericles' address to the storm on board ship. Readers at this point may well exclaim “Shakespeare, at last,” but audiences of a good production evidently do not, though surely the poetry and increased life of the characters make them prick up their ears. These productions have also made us more fully aware than before how much the choric presenter, John Gower, contributes to the play's atmosphere and overall effect, besides confirming how deeply moving the scene of Pericles' reunion with Marina can be.

This new knowledge of how well the whole play works in the theatre should make us reflect on whether the traditional negative explanations that seek to account for the marked incongruity in quality of the play's scenes are at all convincing. We may well doubt that part of the play is the product of a very inferior collaborator; or that the printed text of the Quarto, the only form through which the play has reached us, was so badly corrupted by reporters that in large sections the Shakespearean original was obscured beyond recognition. The questions I will raise about both of these views familiar in criticism are not meant to ignore the clear evidence that the Quarto was badly printed, contains many manifest errors, and at points is so seriously corrupt that editors cannot hope to restore the true text with assurance. Some of the defects must be blamed on the compositors, others on their inability to understand clearly a difficult manuscript copy, which moreover was itself imperfect and evidently unauthorized by either Shakespeare or his company. Nor is it essential to my interpretation to rule out entirely the idea of collaboration.

But the notion that late in his career Shakespeare collaborated with such a hackwriter as George Wilkins (or even Wilkins together with the slightly more gifted John Day) is, on the face of it, difficult to credit. And the suggestion that a rough play composed by Wilkins and associates landed on Shakespeare's desk, and that as he perused it he became so fascinated by the possibilities of the story in the later parts that he largely redrafted them (but only them) before the whole was successfully staged, should be ruled out as preposterous. Could one imagine a Mozart or a Brahms responding to an inferior composer's quartet by rewriting only parts of its third and fourth movements, and then be happy to see the work performed?

As for the theory of extreme corruption of the text by reporters, one trouble with it is that we can infer the extent of corruption only from the Quarto itself, since no better and authorized text is available for comparison, as is the case of all other Shakespearean bad quartos, for instance those of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Not knowing what the original was like, how can one deduce with any assurance the extent of a reporter's desperate improvisations? We need to remind ourselves that the only times we are on really safe ground in concluding that a text is corrupt is when it either does not make sense or errors are manifest. Clearly, for instance, something has gone very wrong in the text and even in the order of events in the first half of the second scene of Pericles, and also in the opening dialogue of V.i. But the idea that a reporter resorted to complete improvisation in most of the first two acts, as well as in parts of later scenes, is difficult to reconcile with the evidence of how they work on the stage. Moreover, if textual corruption was extreme, then the play's early printing history furnishes an instance unique in Jacobean drama. We do know, of course, that Heminge and Condell chose not to include the play in the First Folio, but we do not know why, and as the King's Men revived the play more than once, they must have owned a text that they were sufficiently satisfied with. But we also know that the First Quarto text was reprinted five times over a period of twenty-six years, without any move by Shakespeare or his company to replace it by a more reliable text, as they did every previous time when an unauthorized and corrupt version of a Shakespearean play appeared—with the sole exception of The Merry Wives, which, however, was printed only once, and was followed by the authentic version in the First Folio. All of these considerations encourage me to assume that in spite of some evident defects and corruptions, the text of the First Quarto does in essence convey the original with some justice even in its first two acts. In short, although the original has been badly distorted in some places, the Quarto does not obscure for us the very character and style of large parts.

I

The play opens with Gower's extraordinary appearance and speech. Comparison between Gower and the Chorus of Henry V merely serves to emphasize their unlikeness. The Chorus of Henry V operates as a spokesman for his company and is dressed in their garb. He speaks vigorous Shakespearean blank verse that whets our appetite for the heroic action of the history play. He strives to infect us with his nationalistic enthusiasm and urges us to assist the actors with our imagination. Pleasing as he is in his vigor of expression, there is yet nothing about him particularly unusual, at least in a Shakespearean drama. But if we have not been prepared for it by reading Pericles before seeing it, we are surprised by the very sight of the medieval poet John Gower, with his quaint, archaic, moralizing lines. The effect he produces will not be forgotten, for in the course of the play he reappears seven times. Even when the play's action seems to be over, he enters once more, in order to summarize it, moralize in his characteristic manner about the characters, and wish the audience joy before announcing that the end of the play has really come. There is no parallel for such a character or effect anywhere else in Shakespeare.

Fortunately, we know from a contemporary woodcut in Wilkins' Painful Adventures, a prose narrative based on the play, what Gower probably looked like on stage during the play's first performance. Evidently old, with a dark and graying beard, he appeared stout and rather short, dressed in a long plain coat, an old-fashioned cap protecting his head against raw weather, and wooden shoes. In one hand he held a staff, in the other a branch of laurel marking him as a renowned poet. Gower's stiff figure has stepped out of a world of long ago. The Elizabethans knew him as “moral” Gower, and contrasted him with his more lighthearted contemporary, Chaucer. He tells us in his opening lines that he has returned “From ashes … Assuming man's infirmities” for the sake of narrating once more a “song” that many generations ago regaled “lords and ladies” who “read it for restoratives.”¹ He expresses his hope that it may still be found acceptable by his new listeners, “born in these latter times, / When wit's more ripe.” But of course he introduces it in his own archaic style and verse. He speaks with the conviction of a poet who is accustomed to be listened to with rapt attention:

The purchase is to make men glorious
Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius.

(I. Chorus 9-10)

Gower was a learned poet, as the audience knew, and the Latin befits his authority. The line confirms that the story too is antique. Probably only a few members of the audience knew that it forms part of Gower's own Confessio Amantis. But this is unimportant, since the speech clearly conveys that he is the story's teller. We gather that the very idea of reviving the medieval poet on the stage and having him present his own ancient story was meant to appeal to an audience that had developed a liking for things old-fashioned and antiquarian. It was the time of Camden and the Society of Antiquaries. The audience could thus relish the quaint humor of the logic that the older a good thing is, the better it must be.

The effect of the opening chorus is not only striking but splendid. We become enchanted with Gower's poetry. That is attested to by our eagerness to learn at least part of the speech by heart. However heavily moral and stiff Gower appears, the impression is lightened by his songlike rhythm and by the very air of telling a story, which endow his lines with their peculiar charm. In his other seven speeches, the style and manner remain fundamentally consistent, even if not entirely uniform. I once wrote that

The predominantly end-stopped tetrameter lines of the first two choruses yield to a freer handling of the verse, with more pentameter lines and lines of nine or eleven syllables, and with significantly more syncopation and variation in the use of caesura. … The change in style is accompanied by a difference in attitude towards the audience. The later choruses, especially that of IV.iv, remind us more of the Chorus in Henry V. Gower no longer merely presents the scenes to our eyes and judgment: he asks us to cooperate imaginatively with the actors.²

But while this description may be sound in detail, it requires strong qualification if it is not to produce a misleading impression. The changes in some of Gower's later speeches amount, it should be stressed, to no more than small adjustments in his characteristic manner of speech. Once the audience had become accustomed to the reincarnation and manner of speaking of the medieval poet, the playwright wisely introduced a little more freedom into his lines. But he took care not to depart from Gower's initial manner and rhythm, and in the chorus of V.ii he even returned to the stiff tetrameter rhymes of Gower's opening speeches. Gower's archaic style was allowed to vary only enough to ensure that it would remain interesting. And as sheer poetry, Gower's opening speech is certainly no less impressive than the rest.

When audiences first see and hear Gower, they readily accept the illusion that indeed “from ashes ancient Gower is come”; in fact they relish the very conception. But seated as they are in a theatre, they are not surprised when after a brief introduction Gower calls upon actors to present the story. Yet the impression never leaves us as the scenes develop that he controls the presentation of the whole play, which merely presents his own narrative in the adaptation suitable for a revival in a theatre. The actors merely serve him as appropriate tools and aids, and not even all the time, for Gower returns again and again to narrate pieces of the story mixed with moral commentary. Further, in the acted episodes themselves, the mode only now and then becomes fully dramatic—and, as we know, more fully in the later than in the early acts, but even then not consistently. All the way through, the mode and impression remain those of a consciously episodic adaptation of narrative to stage representation.

This method of dramatization, so very unlike that of any other Shakespearean drama, is confirmed by our realization that Shakespeare, or whoever designed the play, chose to follow the order of Gower's original narrative and his characters most of the time with singular subservience. We know that Shakespeare usually took great liberties when he used a story for the plot of his comedies and romances, and that he even did so in his English chronicle plays. Thus, for the first part of Henry IV he changed the Percy of history into a youth no older than Hal himself, and found a place in the action for the totally original character of Falstaff. For Pericles, on the other hand, Shakespeare decided to maintain the pattern of numerous short episodes that follow one another, with frequent changes in locale as the tale hops from one Aegean island to the next. The result is anything but concentrated drama. It is rather a series of “adventures” and spectacles, more like Dekker's Old Fortunatus or even Marlowe's Tamburlaine than like any other Shakespearean play. Only near the end are we given slightly more complex and drawn-out episodes: the final scene of nearly 200 lines in the Mytilene brothel, and the famous scene of 262 lines showing Pericles' reunion with Marina in V.i. But even these scenes are much shorter than the longest of any other Shakespearean play. And after them, the manner reverts to its loose episodic design, true to Gower's original tale. The structure of the whole play has thus been fitted to the dramatist's conception of Gower's character and role. The story takes the form of a show of colorful episodes, introduced and linked by narrative with commentary.

II

We are now ready to consider Gower's effect on the play in greater detail, but I will begin with the final act, where by general consent Shakespeare's own voice is much in evidence, and only then turn to the opening scenes, where Shakespeare appears hardly present. Act V opens, like the previous acts, with Gower:

Marina thus the brothel 'scapes, and chances
Into an honest house, our story says.
She sings like one immortal, and she dances
As goddess-like to her admired lays.

A great deal has happened to Marina since the ending of the previous scene. The story has moved on rapidly, as so often before, from extreme predicament and crisis to happiness. “Our story says”: we are once more reminded that what we are watching and hearing is Gower's own tale. He continues:

                    Here we her place
And to her father turn our thoughts again,
Where we left him on the sea.

(V. Chorus 11-13)

His ship, he tells us, is now anchored off the port of Mytilene, and as the following scene opens we learn from the dialogue that Lysimachus, having sailed with companions on a barge to the vessel, has asked for permission to step on board. In the Quarto the speech headings and text of this opening dialogue are so unclear that editors have found it difficult to sort it out. But fortunately we can trust most of the rest of the scene, which presents Marina's reunion with her father, the play's most famous episode, often praised for being in Shakespeare's best late manner. The scene reminds one both of Lear's reunion with Cordelia and of reunion scenes in the later romances. But the reader need not be told how deeply moving this episode becomes. I will merely observe how its effect is ensured by the way the episode is drawn out, with Pericles at first not reacting at all to Marina's song. Only very slowly as she persists in speaking to him does it begin to dawn upon him that she must be the daughter he had been led to believe was dead. This strategy—and of course the Shakespearean poetry—achieve the effect. But the scene concludes rapidly after Pericles' vision of Diana. When he awakes he announces that, after brief refreshments, he will proceed to Ephesus at the goddess' command. When Lysimachus asks for the hand of his daughter, he assents immediately.

We are not shown the happy celebration and meal at Mytilene. Instead Gower enters once more to tell us:

Now our sands are almost run;
More a little, and then dumb.

(V.ii.1-2)

His speech has reverted to tetrameters very much like those of his opening choruses. He asks us to imagine

What pageantry, what feats, what shows,
What minstrelsy, and pretty din,
The regent made in Mytilin
To greet the king.

(ll. 6-9)

“What minstrelsy”: the entertainment is typically medieval, of a kind Shakespeare's audience had read about in stories of old, not what they were familiar with in Jacobean England.

The final scene of Pericles' reunion with Thaisa at Ephesus follows. While the language seems Shakespearean, this second recognition can hardly be expected to move us as deeply as the first. Rather, the audience sits back, watching how the story concludes. The dramaturgy of the double recognition has therefore often been criticized, especially by contrast with how boldly and effectively Shakespeare solved the problem in the final scenes of The Winter's Tale. But any inference that Shakespeare was not aware from the beginning of how to make a double recognition more dramatic seems surely unwarranted. Once more, the order of events in Gower's original narrative was deliberately allowed to override considerations of immediate dramatic effectiveness. In fact this whole final episode is conveyed with notable perfunctoriness. I have noted how in the earlier scene Marina, ignorant that her patient is her father, has to persist for quite a while before Pericles begins to stir, and how long it then takes Pericles before he becomes convinced that Marina must really be his daughter. At Ephesus, on the other hand, Thaisa as high priestess recognizes Pericles as soon as he speaks, and it then takes only another twenty-five lines for Pericles to have proof that she indeed is his lost wife. We are very much aware that the play's story is close to conclusion, and the playwright avoids distracting us with further drama. When Pericles speaks his last lines, they appear to conclude the play in the characteristic manner of Shakespearean comedy:

                    Yet there, my queen,
We'll celebrate their nuptials, and ourselves
Will in that kingdom spend our following days.
Our son and daughter shall in Tyrus reign.
Lord Cerimon, we do our longing stay
To hear the rest untold: sir, lead's the way.

(V.iii.79-84)

We would feel prompted to applaud as the actors leave the stage had Gower not once more appeared. For the play really to conclude, the teller of its tale needs also to take his leave. Once more he makes us see this story from his own perspective, driving home the moral, though with merciful brevity:

In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward.

(Epilogue 1-2)

His summary account of what the action and characters represent even includes a reference to Helicanus, a minor character whom the audience only faintly remembers, since he has had no part in the action since the second act: “A figure of truth, of faith, of loyalty.” Nor do we really care about Cleon and Dionysa's fate, but Gower evidently feels that we should know how they are punished for their crimes. When he wishes us goodbye, “our play” really “has ending.”

This description of the development of Act V shows how much its structure and overall effect depend on the interplay between Gower and Shakespeare. Gower enters three times. And as in the rest of the play, so here only part of the action is staged. Much of it continues to be narrated in Gower's archaic rhymes. The writing of the two staged scenes is wholly or largely Shakespearean, but the dramaturgy betrays Shakespeare's brilliance more in the first scene than the last. The characters, especially Marina and Pericles, come to life as individuals far more than they do in either the source story or the play's opening acts. We become, in the first scene, absorbed with their immediate experience and feelings with an intensity we are accustomed to in Shakespeare, though less so in the scene of Pericles' reunion with Thaisa. There is therefore some real drama, not merely story and a series of pictorial effects accompanied by stylized dialogue and a sense of patterned experience representative of our essential human condition. Yet the play's pattern insists on reasserting itself, as does Gower with a perspective that is his own, quaint in its oldfashionedness and simplicity, stodgy yet charming. Such an interplay produces a unique effect in Shakespearean drama.

III

What we have learned from our study of the fifth act may help us as we turn back to consider Acts I and II. But there, of course, we face a different style. One cannot speak here of an interplay between Gower and Shakespeare. Neither the crude dramaturgy nor the quality of writing would warrant it, with the possible exception of some of the prose by the fishermen in II.i. The humdrum verse of the play's opening scene, and indeed of most of the two acts, does indeed smack of a hackwriter: as drama the scene is singularly weak. And yet the early scenes work much better in the theatre than critical-minded readers of the text have assumed. The main reason, I think, is that Gower's opening chorus prepares us for a manner and style in the staged episodes which follow that are quite unlike those we are accustomed to in Shakespeare. After Gower's introduction of his ancient story in quaint archaic rhymes, the audience does not expect the characters who enter to speak like those in Antony and Cleopatra or Twelfth Night. If the staged episodes between Gower's opening chorus and his second speech had been conveyed in Shakespeare's characteristic blank verse and splendid dramatic manner, the effect, I think, would have been jarring. When the dramatist thought about how to fit the whole technique and manner of writing of the play to the unusual device of its archaic narrator, it appears that he concluded that in the early scenes the adjustment needed to be extreme; only when the audience had become completely used to the play's peculiar mood and style could he afford to compromise in the interest of liveliness. At first, Gower as presenter largely had to determine the play's style. Yet of course, it would hardly have been sensible to make the characters of the acted scenes speak in Gower's own pseudo-Middle English and sing-song rhythm—the Jacobean audience at the Globe would rapidly have wearied of it. Rather, a form of speech and dialogue was needed that was old-fashioned and in some ways similar to Gower's, yet more familiar and normal for the actors. And we know the form it took.

The chief differences between the verse of Gower's opening chorus and that by the characters in the play's first staged episode, at Antiochus' court, are that the characters speak in a more contemporary idiom and use prevailing pentameter lines. But much in their speeches does remind one of Gower's manner: the stiffness of the lines, the frequent moralizing, the kind of imagery, and the rhythm. A high proportion of the characters' lines are rhymed. At times the similarity becomes particularly marked, as in Pericles'

One sin, I know, another doth provoke;
Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke.
Poison and treason are the hands of sin,
Ay, and the targets to put off the shame.

(I.i.138-41)

“As flame to smoke”: Gower might use exactly the same image and expression. The great liberty taken with the rhyme “sin/shame” can be paralleled in Gower's second chorus, where he rhymes “sin” with “him” and “ship” with “split.” The moralizing, too, is Gower-like; there is a great deal of it in the first two acts. Every opportunity for moral comment is seized. For instance, Pericles concludes his dialogue with Helicanus in the second scene:

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

(I.ii.120-24)

When in II.ii some of Simonides' lords scoff at Pericles' rusty armor, the King responds:

Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan
The outward habit by the inward man.

(II.ii.55-56)

There is more of the same in II.iv, the scene showing Helicanus with other lords of Tyre. The rhymes turn the conventional morals into tags that Gower would wish us to remember, tags that strike us as naive in their simplicity and patness, as do his own.

Our first impression of Pericles is that of a prince singularly bold. The display of the heads of precious suitors provides gruesome warning that failure to solve the riddle means certain death, yet Pericles is not frightened. But when Pericles reads out the riddle's lines aloud, we find that far from hiding their secret they give it away:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child:
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.

(I.i.65-72)

The first four lines reveal the meaning, the rest seem hardly needed. Yet anyone who concludes that the riddle is either inappropriate or improvised by the reporter will thereby merely show his ignorance of a folktale convention. Sensing by then, as we should, the nature and spirit of Gower's tale, we can accept it without question, untroubled by all those previous suitors who failed to see the obvious. The riddle's jingle is authentic, and continues the air of naive artistry established by Gower. Whoever composed the riddle showed a sense of decorum.

Thirty lines later occurs an image which some critics have liked so much that they have attributed it to Shakespeare:

                    The blind mole casts
Copped hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is thronged
By man's oppression, and the poor worm doth die for't.

(ll. 101-3)

Yet the image was a commonplace of the time, and what matters is that the lines are congruent with the rest of the scene. They do justice to Gower's fame as a poet. But in the main the scene continues in this measured, stiff way of writing until Pericles' exit. After that, the style loosens up and includes even some prose, but without gaining in distinction.

The second scene does not lend itself to the purpose of my discussion, since, as both Philip Edwards and I have shown (in my edition of the play), its text is manifestly corrupt, especially in the first half. In the original, Pericles may well have had more dialogue with the Lords at the beginning, followed by his monologue in a state of depression, and in turn by his encounter with Helicanus. In the defective text of the Quarto, Pericles' monologue begins with several lines that are markedly irregular in rhythm, and while most of his speech is unrhymed, it includes three couplets that repeat one or even two words, and that stand out awkwardly even in the writing of the early scenes: done/done (ll. 15-16), honour him/dishonour him (ll. 21-22), being known/be known (ll. 23-24). In the scene's second half, more than once a line seems to have been lost, but its overall style and rhythm resemble those of the opening scene.

The third scene, which presents Thaliard's arrival at Tyre, is lucid, unproblematical, and swift-moving. Thaliard's opening monologue in prose is quite lively and half comic. The rest is in the kind of verse we have by now become accustomed to. Thaliard uses three asides, and as that technique is used still more abundantly in Act II, I will comment on it then. Helicanus, as we now see, deserves Pericles' trust, for he is not only honest but also astute. While most of the verse is unrhymed, Thaliard breaks out into a lighthearted tag when he realizes that Pericles has escaped:

But since he's gone, the king's ears it must please,
He 'scaped the land, to perish at the seas.

(ll. 27-28)

The same or a closely similar rhyme occurs twice more in the play, and at short intervals. When in his second chorus Gower comments on Pericles' voyage after leaving Tharsus, he remarks:

He, doing so, put forth to seas,
Where, when men been, there's seldom ease.

(II. Chorus 27-28)

And four scenes hence, Helicanus resists the pressure of the lords of Tyre to assume the throne with

Take I your wish, I leap into the seas,
Where's hourly trouble for a minute's ease.

(II.iv.43-44)

As Gower's lines fit perfectly into his speech, one might be suspicious about the two other rhymes and blame them on the feeble invention of a reporter. But they do not jar in the least in their context, and they represent only a minor example in a play that is marked by a great deal of repetition. Gower will repeat a point whenever he likes it, however well we know it already. And during the play Pericles travels so often from island to island that by the time we hear of his fifth or sixth voyage, the effect becomes somewhat comic. (Indeed in one production I have seen, it was turned into farce by having a ship painted on cardboard carried across the stage each time.) Further, the rhymed tags are, like other features of the play's language and style of presentation, a spillover from Gower into the enacted episodes.

As the play's fourth scene, which shows Cleon and Dionyza commenting on the famine at Tharsus, is also marked by signs of major textual corruption, I will merely point out how it contrasts in mood and color with the surrounding scenes, and how in it the action stands entirely still for the first fifty-five lines, while Cleon and Dionyza echo each other's lament, until the lord enters announcing the sight of Pericles' ship. We watch Cleon and Dionyza as part of a tableau rather than a drama, the dialogue serving as an accompaniment to what we take in through our eyes. That technique, as we will see, marks several later episodes of the play.

Gower's second chorus first summarizes the contrast between Antiochus' incestuousness and Pericles' goodness, then invites the audience to wait patiently until he shows how “those in troubles reign, / Losing a mite, a mountain gain,” before he narrates the ensuing action up to the point of the opening of the next scene. In meter, rhythm, and idiom, the speech is like his previous one. This time, however, he chooses to convey in mid-speech some of the happenings in the highly stylized form of a dumbshow. He does so again at the opening of Act III, and in the middle of Act IV. The old-fashioned semi-dramatic device, popular in plays two generations earlier, suits Gower and his ancient rambling tale perfectly. The three dumbshows, of which two occur in the later, “Shakespearean” acts, provide, like some of the other devices, bridges between the play's archaic presenter and an audience familiar with a subtler and more complex drama.

The prose dialogue of the fishermen Pericles encounters in II.i is, as has generally been agreed, of a higher quality than the surrounding verse. The fishermen's lively wit certainly comes as a welcome change in a play which at this point stands in need of more vigorous and earthy expression if it is to hold the audience's attention. And yet these fishermen are as much a part of the play's story world as the other characters. They are quaintly conceived. Vividly and fancifully as they express themselves, they have no counterpart in life. And Pericles' responses aside as he overhears them suit the play's conventions:

3. Fish.
… Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
1. Fish.
Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a' th' land, who never leave gaping till they swallow'd the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.
PER. (aside)
A pretty moral.
3. Fish.
But master, if I had been the sexton, I would have been that day in the belfry.
2. Fish.
Why, man?
3. Fish.
Because he should have swallow'd me too; and when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a jangling of the bells, that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again.

.....

PER. (aside)
How from the finny subjects of the sea
These fishers tell the infirmities of men!

(II.i.26-49)

Such light moralizing on what for Jacobean audiences was a familiar comparison between the commonwealth of man and that of fish suits the spirit of a play in whose scenes the action is often made to stand still so that we can take in the new situation and picture. On the modern stage the technique was revived by Brecht.

We noted how both in the scene of the fishermen and in the earlier one at Tharsus, a large part serves not to advance the action but merely to present us with a new tableau in a new setting and with new characters whose dialogue, in cooperation with what we see, establishes the episode's new mood. Only in the later part of these scenes does the action begin to move. But between the scenes, off stage, it moves very swiftly. Therefore, it is not merely Gower's reappearances and his narration of some of the story's events, but also the choice and techniques of the staged episodes, their frequent change in locale from one Mediterranean island to another, and our sense of how much Pericles moves about between the scenes that produce the impression that what we are witnessing is Gower presenting his story mainly in the form of a guided progression of selected shows rather than as a drama. This basic manner of the play holds essentially for its entire length, however much it is qualified by the livelier dramatization of some of the later episodes.

By the opening of II.ii, we find ourselves at Pentapolis, where, on a public way leading to the lists, six knights are passing one by one by a pavilion where King Simonides and his daughter Thaisa are seated. The first five knights, in splendid array, are accompanied by their squires, who hold their shields and hand them to the princess. Each time, she describes the device and reads aloud the motto before passing it on to her father, who, sometimes with a brief comment, returns it through her to the squire. But the entrance of the sixth knight, Pericles himself, comes in sharp contrast, for he wears rusty armor and is unaccompanied. He bears a simple device but presents it, as Simonides comments, with “graceful courtesy.” It is a highly colorful but, apart from the obvious contrast, undramatic scene. It happens to be the only episode of the play for which there was no suggestion in the source. Yet a more suitable addition to Gower's story during its revival in 1607 can hardly be imagined. The vogue of tournaments was reaching its high point in popularity at the time. Knights parading past King James's or Queen Anne's pavilion before entering the lists, and presenting to them their elaborately adorned shields with emblematic devices and mottoes, were a frequent spectacle. Sometimes the shields of painted paper were exhibited long after the tournaments. In connection with the scene in Pericles, a surviving record from 1613 is all the more intriguing. It tells us that Shakespeare and Burbage received handsome payments of over forty-five shillings each for preparing and painting what were called imprese, with emblems and mottoes, for the Earl of Rutland, for use at the tilts on the King's anniversary day of accession. Did Shakespeare paint some of the knights' shields for Pericles?

We note the brevity of this scene and, especially, how quickly it ends. The first knight passes by the pavilion after line 16, and by line 46 Simonides has commented on the “pretty moral” of Pericles' device. Then follow merely a few comments by the lords in attendance, answered by the King, which indicate to us sketchily and in stylized form that, unlike them, the King does not underestimate Pericles' worth because of his drab appearance. This takes a mere twelve lines more before the scene ends with shouts from the lists off stage signaling that the tilt is over and Pericles the victor. While the characters on stage talk leisurely, an action of surely more than an hour's length occurs off stage. Such a technique fits both the story, with its multiple “adventures,” and the manner of its presentation.

Of the last three scenes of the second act, it could well be said that brevity, ensuring quick movement from one episode to the next, is their only redeeming feature. Any attempt to defend them as literature would be absurd, for they offer little delight to the critical reader. Yet here too, even what seems worst does not seem to prevent them from being quite tolerable theatre. Both their kind of verse and some of their crude dramaturgical devices resemble those of previous scenes, though the sheer whimsicality of King Simonides in the third and especially the fifth scene is a new element. Both scenes include no fewer than four asides, not all of which are needed for the audience's understanding, a method encountered before in the play. The moralizing and the imagery in Simonides' following lines addressed at his daughter remind one both of Gower and of earlier speeches in the play:

Princes in this, should live like gods above,
Who freely give to every one that come to honour them:
And princes not doing so are like to gnats
Which make a sound, but kill'd are wonder'd at.
Therefore …

(II.iii.60-63)

The audience should be by then well used to this manner of speaking by characters who, as it were, extend Gower's didactic purpose.

The third scene, in particular, is marked by its several brief and quaint comparisons. It also furnishes an instructive example of how repetition is used in the play. When Pericles is entertained during the banquet, he has not yet revealed his name or background. Simonides therefore asks Thaisa to find out from him who he is. Pericles answers her:

A gentleman of Tyre; my name Pericles;
My education been in arts and arms;
Who, looking for adventures in the world
Was by the rough seas reft of ships and men,
And after shipwreck driven upon this shore.

(II.iii.81-85)

The audience notes Pericles' caution in describing himself simply as a gentleman, not as Tyre's prince. Then, however, follows a speech of a kind that dramatists normally do their best to avoid. Returning to her father, Thaisa communicates to him Pericles' answer, shortening it by only a third:

He thanks your grace; names himself Pericles,
A gentleman of Tyre,
Who only by misfortune of the seas
Bereft of ships and men, cast on this shore.

(II.iii.86-89)

And yet the cumbersome-seeming repetition, with only slight variation, seems appropriate in Pericles. The same device had been employed abundantly in Peele's Old Wives Tale to deliberative purpose. There as well as here, it suits the manner in which the tale is told.

But what are we to make of Simonides' whimsical pretenses, once he senses how attracted Thaisa is by Pericles, in this and even more in the fifth scene? When the latter scene opens, Simonides informs us in a monologue that he has rid himself of the other knights and that Thaisa has sent him a letter revealing her affection for Pericles. The unlikelihood of a daughter who lives in the same palace as her father communicating with him that way is consistent with the nature and spirit of the story. Simonides welcomes her choice and assertiveness: “Not minding whether I dislike or no.” Yet when Pericles enters, Simonides decides to “dissemble it,” and over fifty lines of melodrama follow. He begins by praising Pericles, who has still not revealed that he is a prince, as a musician. Pericles reacts to this by slighting his artistic skill with a deference befitting a servant. When Simonides then asks him whether he finds Thaisa attractive, Pericles persists in cautious, noncommittal answers until the King thrusts her letter angrily into his hands. Now the melodrama starts in earnest, with Pericles falling on his knees and protesting innocence while Simonides pretends to become still more irate. When Pericles finds himself called a villain and a traitor, however, he rouses himself to a response worthy of a nobleman, yet only to catch himself short at the thought that Simonides is both the King and Thaisa's father:

Even in his throat—unless it be the king—
That calls me traitor, I return the lie.

(II.v.55-56)

Whereupon Simonides expresses in an aside how pleased he is with the response: “Now, by the gods, I do applaud his courage.” But he has not done yet; he continues his act after Thaisa arrives, and with yet another aside when he takes her harshly to task:

Yea, mistress, are you so peremptory?
Aside. I am glad on't with all my heart.—
I'll tame you, I'll bring you in subjection.

(II.v.72-74)

Another ten lines, and Simonides asks them to join hands and to kiss.

The two chief characteristics of this extraordinary episode are the arbitrary whimsicality of the King's act and the interruption of the act by asides which the audience does not need, knowing as it does from the start that the King is dissembling, and requiring no reminder. The King's conduct looks like a piece of crude and desperate characterization for the sheer sake of achieving some excitement in what has been a singularly static, undramatic play. But as we are made all the more conscious of the crudity of dramatic technique by the series of supererogatory asides, the effect may well be intentionally burlesque. I suggested earlier that Shakespeare's audience was particularly attracted by the antiqueness of Gower as well as of his story. But an audience whose “wit's more ripe” and is used to sophisticated Jacobean drama must have been bemused by the naive simplicity of Gower's outlook and art. Because his tale and manner are so ancient, antiquius, they are not therefore better, melius. So the dramatist, aware that this was bound to be part of their response, made a point of catering to it directly from time to time, though of course not so much that they would miss the tale's real enchantment and moving moments. As for ourselves, the sense that the play as a whole reflects on fundamental human experience should not make us overlook all its sheer comedy. At any rate, the sheer corniness of the scene just discussed can have its appeal for actors.

IV

The end of Act II is an obvious point for an intermission. For the action of Pericles falls clearly into two parts. During the first two acts, Pericles' fortunes reach a low point when, escaping from his own country, he is shipwrecked and deprived of both companions and means, but from then on they rise rapidly up to his betrothal to the beautiful Thaisa. Similarly, in the second part, Pericles' fortunes sink to their nadir. He loses first his wife in childbirth, and later also his daughter, which causes him to fall into a chronic state of depression. But the final act presents his happy reunion with both Marina and Thaisa. Gower's comment, “I'll show you those in troubles reign, Losing a mite, a mountain gain,” applies alike to both parts of his story. The opening of Act III therefore comes almost like a new beginning. And we happen to know that on an early occasion, in 1619, the play was staged at Whitehall in two parts, with the French guests enjoying refreshments before the third act.

This act opens, of course, once more with Gower and his archaic tetrameters. But then, as everyone knows, the style changes startlingly, when Pericles on shipboard addresses the storm. The reason is that Shakespeare's voice is clearly heard for the first time and continues to sound through much of the remainder of the play. Whether in the blank verse of Pericles' own speeches or in the comic and salacious, “realistic,” prose of the Mytilene bawds in the fourth act, or in the poetry of the reunion scene with Marina, the new vibrancy, richness of expression, and variety of rhythm infuse the episodes and their characters with life. No longer are they just pasteboard or pantomine, but living human beings. And after the change occurs, we can assume that at least some of the time the audience move forward in their seats toward the actors—even though, as I pointed out near the beginning, a theatre audience is not startled into immediate consciousness of the change, as readers are when they first read the play.

In any event, one should beware of thinking the change to be larger and more absolute than it actually is. If we set Pericles' opening lines in Act III against some typical lame speech from Act I or Act II, the impression is certainly one of sharp contrast. But when we watch the play, the change occurs smoothly. And there are several reasons for this. The action of the first two acts holds its audience by its sheer spectacular quality, and by the speed with which it moves from one episode to the next. Its mode, as I have tried to show, is fitted to Gower, whose speeches and manner establish the atmosphere. He and the very nature of the story lure the audience to be content for a while with watching a series of scenes written in a manner and style that does not bring the characters to full life. The second reason is that the change is far from complete. For neither in dramaturgy nor in style are the play's last three acts consistently “Shakespearean.” As was indicated earlier, this is not the case in the final act. For Gower re-enters from time to time, and the style in the acted scenes varies—thrilling at some moments as only Shakespeare can be, flat at others. In Act III, the new vigor of speech, characterization, and drama which marks its opening scene does not continue uniformly. The verse shows greater flexibility, yet at times the former, stiffer mode returns. In each of scenes ii, iii, and iv, what one would proclaim as Shakespearean writing with confident assurance is intermittent while the accustomed highly episodic presentation of the story continues, the scenes moreover remaining very short; III.iii has 41 lines, III.iv a mere seventeen. Act IV seems still more decidedly Shakespearean and benefits both from its new subject matter with Marina and from its contrasts in style. Marina's lyrical poetry in IV.i is followed by the comic lively talk of Pandar, Boult, and Bawd in the second scene. Yet during this rather longer act, Gower makes sure that we do not forget him. He even directs yet a further dumbshow. Now, however, his speech and show are set in sharp contrast with the surrounding scenes, particularly that which follows. Gower concludes:

… while our scene must play
His daughter's woe and heavy well-a-day
In her unholy service. Patience, then,
And think you are all in Mytilen.

(IV.iv.48-51)

As he leaves, two gentlemen enter from the brothel:

1. Did you ever hear the like?
2. No, nor never shall do in such a place as this, she being once gone.
1. But to have divinity preached there! Did you ever dream of such a thing?
2. No, no. Come, I am for no more bawdy-houses. Shall's go hear the vestals sing?

(IV.v.1-7)

From Gower's narrative, this dialogue takes us right into Shakespeare's London, though not for long. For when in the next scene (scene vi) Lysimachus meets Marina, we are, though still in the same setting, back in the world of sheer story. In deference to Gower, Shakespeare transformed the story only part way, producing thereby a singular effect.

We are happy that from the third act on Shakespeare did give more of a hand to Gower, and produced a livelier, more complex, and more profound drama. If he had not, the play might well have been doomed to a place in his apocrypha. It may then seem idle to think of reasons why he chose to do so rather than have the play continue in its earlier manner throughout. Perhaps he realized that two such short acts were enough; that the play would be sure to hold its audience only if he endowed some of its later action with greater vibrancy; and that the resulting interplay between Gower's style and manner of telling and his own afforded him with the opportunity of indulging in an intriguing theatrical experiment.

V

Close to the beginning of this article I stated that the two standard theories which serve to account for the marked incongruity in the sheer quality of style in Pericles deserve our skepticism. But however valiantly I may have argued my alternative thesis, most readers may well react to it with even greater disbelief. If they enjoy my reasoning at all, they will likely take it to be a jeu d' esprit, not a view to be taken seriously. I can imagine the response: “I will accept this only if you can tell me of a similar instance where a great writer or artist resorted for a large part of or an entire work to a style so unworthy of his own.” The reader knows well that I cannot furnish him with any such instance from Shakespeare's other plays. Nor am I able to produce a similar case from any major Elizabethan or Jacobean or other drama. But fortunately, Gower's famous contemporary, Chaucer, comes to my rescue.³

Chaucer included himself among the storytellers of his Canterbury Tales. But when his turn comes, he starts with the silly tale of Sir Thopas in jingling rhymes, which appears to go nowhere until the Host interrupts with disgust and calls an end to it:

‘Namoore of this, for goddes dignitee,’
Quod oure Hooste, ‘for thou makest me
So wery of thy verray lewednesse
That, also wisly God my soule blesse,
Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche;
Now swiche a rym the devel I biteche!
This may wel be rym dogerel’, quod he.
‘Why so?’, quod I, ‘why wiltow lette me
Moore of my tale than another man,
Syn that it is the beste rym I kan?’
‘By God’, quod he, ‘for pleynly, at a word,
Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord; …’(4)

“Rym dogerel” would serve well enough to describe some of Gower's own as well as some of the play's couplets, and the Host's sentiment, especially that of the last two lines, has been echoed by many commentators on the first two acts of Pericles. Chaucer appropriated for his Rime of Sir Thopas lines and phrases from several “romances of prys” composed by common rhymesters, and he wove them into a nonsense that evidently becomes too much for the sophisticated and “modern” Host, who is so irritated by the jogtrot that he misses the intent, which is pure burlesque. That, of course, makes Chaucer's approach to his tale fundamentally different from that of the author of Pericles. But we have seen how Shakespeare too may be winking at his audience in some of the play's most absurdly devised episodes, for instance in II.v. And if all the play had been written in the manner of its first two acts, a producer might well be justified in thinking that it could only succeed on stage as burlesque. Indeed I saw a production of Pericles⁵ in that spirit, which proved hilariously entertaining without persuading me that this is how the play ought to be staged. Yet if Shakespeare or whoever wrote the play's first two acts had a chance to respond to the likes of Ben Jonson and later critics who misunderstood their spirit and method and sneered at the “mouldy tale,” might he not protest, like Chaucer to the host: “why wiltow lette me / More of my tale than another man, / Sin that it is the beste rym I can?”

After stopping Chaucer's doggerel, the Host of the Canterbury Tales permits the pilgrim to redeem himself, but insists that his new tale be without “drasty” rhymes and include “some mirthe or som doctryne.” Chaucer obliges with “a litel thing in prose,” which turns out to be The Tale of Melibeus, nearly a thousand lines long. It contains no mirth whatever, but repetitive doctrine ad infinitum. Mockingly, Chaucer satisfies the needs of a more serious-minded audience. Though this second effort is equally burlesque, the Host is this time so pleased that he wishes his wife could have heard the story and been suitably instructed by it. The fun for the reader, of course, arises from his awareness of the contrast, both in style and in narrative artistry, between Chaucer's own two tales and those he wrote so splendidly for his other pilgrims. Again, the case of Pericles is obviously different. And yet the play was performed by Shakespeare's company, and it seems probable that many of those who saw it on the Jacobean stage thought that the creator of Falstaff and Hamlet was at least in large part responsible for it, in spite of all its “rym dogerel” and the moldiness of its tale. Nevertheless Heminge and Condell may have been wise to omit the play from the First Folio, sensing as they did that readers of future generations would be prone, without benefit of seeing the play performed in its original spirit, to misunderstand its technique and intent.

Robert French's comment on Chaucer's tale of Sir Thopas, which could be likewise applied to the tale of Melibeus, may help us to understand why in one of Shakespeare's last plays the art is so very different from that of his other work, and in a large part seems so grossly inferior to it:

The Rime of Sir Thopas belongs unquestionably to a late period in Chaucer's career. Only the master craftsman can appropriate the ineptitudes of an inferior art and turn them to ridicule so effectively. The very unevenness of the meter is evidence that the poet has attained such mastery over his medium that he could trifle with the laws of rhythm.⁶

French was answering Skeat, who speculated that Chaucer in his youth may have “tried his hand at such romance writing in all seriousness.” Today we are convinced that Shakespeare worked on Pericles late in his career, but Skeat's unwarranted guess about Chaucer's tale reminds one of Dryden's claim that “Shakespeare's Muse her Pericles first bore.” From the very beginning of his career, Shakespeare's plays were remarkably experimental and innovative. That is clear from both his earliest comedies and history plays as well as Titus Andronicus. But only the mature Shakespeare would have seriously considered writing or rewriting a play based on a story so episodic and therefore unsuited to dramatic adaptation, using moreover ancient “moral” Gower as presenter and adhering closely to the narrative's own order. Only then was he prepared to compose a play whose style and dramaturgy were deliberately adapted to an “inferior art.”

Yet the work he then created is still far more extraordinary than Chaucer's burlesque tales. And it suggests that when Shakespeare was turning after his tragedies once more to works of an entirely new kind, the romances, his imagination and experimentation took a dazzling turn so great that most producers and critics have failed to understand what happened. We know that after the episodic and simple-seeming Pericles, Shakespeare devised for his next romance, Cymbeline, a form so extremely complex that it has perplexed critics and producers who regard the play as interestingly experimental but not a success. Among the play's extraordinary features are: the intermingling of stories and characters from ancient Britain and Renaissance Italy; the grotesquely ironic treatment of Imogen, the romantic heroine, when she mistakes the headless body of Cloten for that of her husband; the scene of Posthumus' dream, so unusual in style and content, where the ghosts of his family berate Jupiter for his unfair treatment of their noble descendant; and the long final scene with its series of revelations and submission by Cymbeline to Rome, in spite of his victory. These make Cymbeline a play almost as different as Pericles from any that Shakespeare had written before. Cymbeline was followed by another “tale” in two parts, The Winter's Tale, remarkable too for its techniques, though more tightly constructed and dramatic than Pericles. Leontes' jealousy, unlike Othello's, arises with a sudden violence, as surprising to his companions as to us, though some critics and psychoanalysts have offered dubious explanations. The stage direction, Exit, pursued by a bear, has no parallel elsewhere in Shakespeare, marking as it does the shift in the play's mood from tragedy to comedy, even though we soon learn that Antigonus did not manage to escape. But what, for Shakespeare, is above all surprising in this play is the way he deceives the audience about Hermione's death, and yet, in spite of the trickery, turns the revival of her statue in the final scene into a moving experience. The Winter's Tale was followed by The Tempest, the most poetic and richly inventive of Shakespeare's romances, with a story that is as mere a tale as the others, but this time resonant with echoes of the immediately contemporary accounts of the experiences by voyagers to America, and fettered by a tight classical construction.

The romances recreate old tales, and it appears that when Shakespeare turned to this new form of drama he realized that for the sake of creating their proper atmosphere he needed to experiment with styles and techniques boldly different from those of his other plays. Further, he decided as he set out that it was desirable to begin by imitating the very manner of early storytellers and plays and even, though of course only part way, their lack of sophistication and crudity of devices and writing. So he revived Gower and his tale, and had him retell it for a while largely in his own manner before making his own presence and art felt. Then, in the plays which follow Pericles, Shakespeare step by step discovered the ways of creating a new art entirely his own.

Notes

1. All passages from the play are quoted from the text in my own New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1963), except that I have conveyed past tense “ed” in the normal modern unelided form.

2. Pericles, New Arden ed., p. lv.

3. It was Professor Judith Kennedy who alerted me to this.

4. Cited from F. N. Robinson's edition of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Student's Cambridge Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), p. 200.

5. Toronto, summer 1971, at the Studio Theatre of the Centre for the Study of Drama; directed by Stephen Katz.

6. Robert French, A Chaucer Handbook (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1929), pp. 243-44.