SOURCE: Mowat, Barbara. “‘I tell you what mine Authors saye’: Pericles, Shakespeare, and Imitatio.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 240, no. 1 (2003): 42-59.

[In the following essay, Mowat discusses Shakespeare's authorship of Pericles, maintaining that the dramatist integrated and innovated, within the dramatic design of his romance, the imitatio tradition of transforming authoritative sources into a new literary work.]

Near the beginning of Pericles, the Chorus introduces a shocking story of father-daughter incest with the apologetic line, “I tell you what mine Authors saye.”¹ This Chorus, “auntient Gower,” opens the play by saying that he comes to sing a familiar song:

To sing a Song that old was sung,
From ashes, auntient Gower is come,
Assuming mans infirmities,
To glad your eare, and please your eyes:
It hath been sung at Feastiuals,
On Ember eues, and Holydayes:
And Lords and Ladyes in their liues,
Haue red it for restoratiues:
The purchase is to make men glorious,
Et bonum quo Antiquius eo melius:
If you, borne in those latter times,
When Wits more ripe, accept my rimes;
And that to heare an old man sing,
May to your Wishes pleasure bring:
I life would wish, and that I might
Waste it for you, like Taper light.

(I Ch. 1-16)

He then moves into the story of the incestuous Antiochus:

This Antioch, then Antiochus the great,
Buylt vp this Citie, for his chiefest Seat;
The fayrest in all Syria.

(ll. 17-19)

It is at this point that he interrupts himself with the line “I tell you what mine Authors saye” (l. 20) as he begins the incest story.

The phrase “mine author” (along with its older but still popular variant, “mine auctor”) had at the time a variety of resonances, with editors and printers using it to refer to the writer of the work being edited or printed, and with such translators as Robert Copland promising that he had translated Kynge Appolyn of Thyre “out of the Frensshe language in to our maternal Englysshe tongue … accordynge dyrectly to myn auctour.”² Most often, though, the phrase was used in reference to a source or model or literary authority.³ This usual sense of “mine author” as the writer on whose works one claims to draw, the authority who guarantees the truth of one's story, the model one's story imitates, is directly linked to the pivotal role of the auctor in the medieval university system, where the term signified an authoritative writer whose work served as a model for other writers and was the subject of lectures and textual commentaries.⁴

When the phrase is used by the Chorus in Pericles, the appeal is first to the auctor as authority: by attributing the details of the play's opening incest story to authority figures whom he claims to be merely echoing, the Chorus authenticates the story and places the responsibility for its sordidness on his predecessors. More significantly, though, the appeal is also to auctors as writers and literary models. As such, the Chorus's citation of his “Authors” moves the authority for the story from the orally transmitted song to the written text.⁵ The citation, that is, shifts the scene of authority from “Ember eues” and “Feastiuals” (ll. 5-6) to the library. It also, and simultaneously, transforms the representation of the story's narrator: the singer of old songs with this citation takes on the mantle of a scholar whose books and manuscripts provide him with the materials from which he draws.⁶

The resulting image of Gower the Chorus—and thus, by extension, the image of the playwright—as a scholar engaged in the crafting of a literary work from the pages of previous “authors” offers up the play of Pericles as a particular kind of intertextual construction, namely, a text that, in Thomas Greene's words, “calls to the reader's [and, we might add, to the audience's] attention its own deliberate allusiveness,” and “insist[s] on [its] own intertextual composition.” Greene, citing the work of Tynjanov and Jakobson, acknowledges that “since a literary text that draws nothing from its predecessors is inconceivable, intertextuality is a universal literary constant,” but he points out that “some texts make greater structural use of [inherited] elements than others.”⁷Pericles, a work that begins by citing the authority of its literary models, not only makes use of such elements but at the outset announces its own constructedness and its rhetorical grounding in imitatio.

That “the imitation of models was a precept and an activity” that, in 16th- and 17th-century England, “embraced not only literature but pedagogy, grammar, rhetoric, esthetics,” and many other fields is a familiar idea to students of early modern poetry.⁸ The imitative method was built into the grammar-school program, and authorities from Roger Ascham to Ben Jonson proclaimed the central importance of this methodology for schoolboy and poet alike. Ascham urged a grounding in the study of classical authors and those on whom they themselves modeled their work, instructing students to lay “two places of Homer and Virgil or of Demosthenes and Tully together” and determine what is retained by the later writer, what left out, what augmented, what diminished, what reordered, and what altered “either in property of words, in form of sentence, in substance of the matter, or in one or other convenient circumstance of the author's present purpose.” This “foresaid order and doctrine of imitation,” he promised, “would bring forth more learning and breed up truer judgment than any other exercise that can be used.”⁹ Ben Jonson, citing Quintilian's Imitatio marginally, declared “imitation” to be requisite “in our poet, or maker,” and defined it as follows: “to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use: … to draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers with the bee, and turn all into honey, … make our imitation sweet, observe how the best writers have imitated, and follow them: how Virgil and Statius have imitated Homer … and so of all the rest.”¹⁰

Despite our knowledge of the crucial role of imitatio in the pedagogy and the poetics of early modern England, students of the era's drama, and especially of Shakespeare's plays, are likely to be surprised by the implications of the Gower Chorus's citation of his “authors,” in part because recent intertextual models have foregrounded reception rather than composition¹¹, and in part because “the scene of Shakespeare writing,” when it escapes its “Shakespeare-in-Love” image of the “self-generating Romantic genius,” has, in recent years, been represented as rather that of the collaborative playhouse or shared desk than the individual study or library.¹² Yet the Gower Chorus's gesture toward the books behind the play is a revealing one, as I will argue in these pages—not only for what it shows about Pericles, but also for its corrective reminder about Shakespeare and his own “auctors.” Many scholars, I know, would insist that Pericles can teach us nothing about Shakespeare's practice as a playwright, since in their view the play contains little written by Shakespeare; moreover, the very line in which the Chorus cites his “authors” is found in a part of the play that most scholars insist was the work of another playwright.¹³ Thus, the authorship and authority of Pericles must eventually be addressed. I will for the moment, however, defer such consideration, and with it the attendant matter of the Shakespearean relevance of the line in question, and focus on the play itself, assuming for the interim a single author (that is, writer) of the play and, when it is necessary to name him, calling him “Shakespeare.”

I.

The first thing to remark about the Chorus's “I tell you what mine Authors saye” is its accuracy in shifting the location of authority from the oral tradition to the library and in citing multiple “authors.” No doubt the story of Apollonius of Tyre—which Shakespeare converts into the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre—was to some extent orally transmitted. However, its primary means of transmission was by way of the written word, first through centuries of manuscript dissemination and then in print versions beginning in 1470 in Latin, 1471 in German, and 1483 in English. (Carol Gesner calculated that “between 1470 and 1642 Apollonius was issued in one form or another possibly sixty-four times,” but Elizabeth Archibald's recent and extremely useful translation and study of the work notes that Gesner's calculations about printed versions is far too low.¹⁴) First written in about the 3rd century C. E.—perhaps in Latin, perhaps in Greek—the Historia Apollonii is extant today in more than a hundred Latin manuscripts, the oldest of which date to the 9th century; and the story's early move into the vernaculars is confirmed by an extant 11th-century Anglo-Saxon translation and 13th-century manuscripts in Danish, Old French, Spanish, and Norse.¹⁵ John Gower, in writing his version in the early 1390s for inclusion in the Confessio Amantis, had several manuscript versions on which to draw.¹⁶ He has his narrator cite Godfrey of Viterbo's 12th-century Pantheon as his authority for the Apollonius story, but the Confessio actually draws details from several other versions as well, including the Latin Gesta Romanorum and the 11th-century Latin prose version that was Godfrey's own authority.¹⁷ When the narrator of the Confessio Amantis later cites what “olde bokes sein”¹⁸, he speaks more accurately than when he claims to be simply recounting the story as found in Pantheon.

Just as John Gower drew on multiple written authorities in crafting his version of the Apollonius story, so too did the author of Pericles. By the time that play was written—probably in late 1607 or early 1608—the story had been printed and reprinted in English in several versions. Gower's Confessio Amantis was printed by Caxton in 1483, and Berthelette had reprinted it in 1532 and again in 1554, augmenting Caxton's printed version with additional material from manuscript sources.¹⁹ In the meantime, Robert Copland's translation from the French, which I mentioned earlier, had been printed in 1510 by Wynkyn de Worde as the prose romance Kyng Apollyn of Thyre. And by 1576 Lawrence Twine had written the story in the form of a novel—The Patterne of painefull Aduentures—translating from a French version of the Gesta Romanorum.²⁰ Twine's novel was printed in 1594 and reprinted in 1607.²¹

Nowhere does Gower the Chorus mention the Confessio Amantis as authorizing the play he presents, nor does he represent himself as an author.²² Instead, he points to other authorities and claims merely to stand “with gáppes” to teach us the stages of the story (IV.iv.7-9). But there can be little doubt that scholars have correctly seen his onstage presence as a clue leading directly to the Confessio Amantis as the primary authority for Pericles. The very verse form in which the Chorus generally speaks—iambic tetrameter couplets—is that of John Gower's narrator, who begins his version of the Apollonius story by saying:

Of a cronique in daies gon,
The which is cleped Pantheon,
In loves cause I rede thus,
Hou that the grete Antiochus,
Of whom that Antioche tok
His ferste name, as seith the bok,
Was coupled to a noble queene …

(ll. 271-77)

In Pericles, the Chorus's introduction of the story includes parallel information set in similar tetrameter couplets:

This Antioch, then Antiochus the great;
Buylt vp this Citie, for his chiefest Seat;
The fayrest in all Syria.
I tell you what mine Authors saye:
This King vnto him tooke a Peere …

(I Ch. 17-21)

The phrase “his chiefest Seat” and the reference to Syria are to be found not in John Gower but in the opening paragraph of Twine's Patterne of painefull Aduentures²³, but most of the details and the verse form are modeled on the Confessio Amantis, a verse form that was, interestingly, already somewhat archaic when Gower elected to use it in 1390.²⁴ The play brings “ancient Gower” onstage eight times, using him to move the play geographically around the Mediterranean and chronologically from the hero's youth through his trials and losses to final reunion with his supposedly dead daughter and wife, with one chorus, for example, efficiently placing the hero in Tyre, his wife in Ephesus, and his daughter in Tarsus, and taking us forward fourteen years as the Chorus “carr[ies] winged Time, / Post one the lame feete of [his] rime” [IV Ch.1-50, esp. 47-8].

The Chorus's narrations alternate throughout the play with enacted scenes and dumb shows, and at most points the story aligns itself with the version recounted in the Confessio Amantis. Several scenes, though, as scholars have long known, pull in material from the version printed in Twine's novel. It was from Twine, for example, that the black-comic brothel scenes were drawn.²⁵ In its weaving of material from the Confessio Amantis with that from Twine, Pericles pulls together two of the major exemplars of the Apollonius story—one that descended through Godfrey of Viterbo to Gower and the other through the Gesta Romanorum to Twine.

But the larger weaving together of these two authorities is not the most interesting use of “auctors” in Pericles, as we see when we examine Shakespeare's elaborations of particular scenes, for this is where the play's plurality of authority most clearly reveals itself. In, for example, the shipboard scene in which Pericles' wife Thaisa dies and her body is put overboard, the Gower Chorus sets up the scene by describing the rising storm and the onset of the queen's labor, drawing details from the Confessio—the wind rising from the north, the queen's anguish—adding from Twine only the detail that she falls into labor through fear of the storm's impact. The enacted scene then opens with Pericles on what purports to be the deck of a tossing ship, praying in soliloquy to the gods of the sea, wind, and thunder:

The God of this great Vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heauen and hell, and thou that hast
Vpon the Windes commaund, bind them in Brasse;
Hauing call'd them from the deepe, ô still
Thy deafning dreadfull thunders, gently quench
Thy nimble sulphirous flashes …

(III.i.1-6)

This soliloquy, like the play's placing of the hero on the deck of the ship, is an innovation in the Apollonius tradition, and the language of the soliloquy, if it is an echo, echoes only King Lear—though, in contrast to Lear, who orders the winds to blow, Pericles begs that they be bound “in Brasse”. The scene's key incidents—Pericles' despair at the news of his wife's death, the demand of the sailors that the dead body be put overboard, the discussion of a proper coffin, the decision to sail to Tarsus instead of Tyre—all agree with the Confessio and with Twine in general outline. In tone and detail, though, the scene moves away from the Apollonius tradition, going in a direction not followed in previous versions (with one exception, to which I will return). One set of anomalous details that significantly affect the tone of the scene centers on the hero's concern for the newborn baby. Gower's hero does not mention the baby, and Twine's says only that he wants the baby “nursed with all diligence,” since he wishes to present it to his father-in-law as a kind of replacement for the lost daughter (p. 34).

In contrast, Pericles, at the height of his grief for the dead Thaisa, turns even so to the newborn Marina and says:

          Now mylde may be thy life,
For a more blusterous birth had neuer Babe:
Quiet and gentle thy conditions; for
Thou art the rudelyest welcome to this world,
That euer was Princes Child …
Thou hast as chiding a natiuitie,
As Fire, Ayre, Water, Earth, and Heauen can make,
To harould thee from the wombe …

(III.i.27-34)

This acknowledgment of what the storm and birth at sea meant for the newborn and motherless “Princes Child” introduces a powerful variation into the Apollonius tradition, as does a connected detail at the end of the scene where, after Thaisa's body is put overboard, Pericles, in contrast to his predecessors, explains his motive for ordering the ship to alter course and sail immediately to Tarsus. (In some versions of the Apollonius story, including Twine's [p.38], God and/or Fortune takes the ship to Tarsus; in others, including John Gower's [ll.1141-45], Apollonius orders this new destination on a seeming whim.) In Pericles, the hero, learning that the ship is near Tarsus, orders: “O make for Tharsus … for the Babe / Cannot hold out to Tyrus” (III.i. 78-80).

This loving concern for the baby reveals in Pericles, I would argue, threads woven into the fabric of the play from another, though linked, authoritative tradition—another auctor. The way to that auctor is found through David Hoeniger's discussion of the resemblance between Pericles and a medieval mystery play known as the Digby Mary Magdalene.²⁶ That play leads in turn to the Mary Magdalene legend, which the mystery play dramatizes and which, as disseminated in the immensely popular Golden Legend, parallels the Apollonius story at many points, most significantly in the embedded story about the ruler of Marseilles.²⁷ In this story, Marseilles's ruler and his pregnant wife, after their conversion by Mary Magdalene, set off by ship for Rome; a terrible storm arises, and the wife gives birth, dies, has her body removed from the ship by superstitious sailors, and is later miraculously saved and restored to her husband and supposedly dead child. The resemblances to the Apollonius story are obvious, and in the scene of childbirth and death aboard ship, the two stories converge almost precisely. The differences in detail are therefore of interest. As Caxton translates the pertinent moment in the Golden Legend:

this lady [that is, the queen of Marseilles] whyche was grete and nygh the tyme of her chyldynge … hadde grete anguysshes for the grete waves and troubling of the see: and soone after began to traveyle and was delyuerd of a fayr sone by occasyon of the storme and tempest: and in her chyldyng deyed, and when the childe was born he cryed for to haue comforte of the tetes of his moder and made a pyteous noyse. Alas what sorowe was this to the fader: to haue a sone born whiche was cause of the deth of his moder, and he myght not lyue: for ther was none to norysshe him. Alas what shal this pylgrym do that seeth his wyf dede and his sone cryeng after the brest of his moder.²⁸

Aside from the baby's sex, the details that distinguish this part of the scene from the otherwise parallel moment in the Apollonius story are the cries and the “pyteous noyse” of the hungry baby, the father's sorrow on behalf of the baby, and his fear that it will die for lack of nourishment. It is these details that I find implicated in Pericles' anomalous pity for his baby daughter and his frantic desire to get to shore to find a wet-nurse.²⁹

The pattern of construction that crafts the scene of Thaisa's death in Pericles, then, is the weaving together of material from two major authorities while substantially transforming the tone through authorial innovation and details from a different, though related, authority. This same pattern can be found in the powerful recognition scene between Pericles and his lost daughter, which interweaves material from Gower and Twine, adds innovative details that prefigure Shakespeare's yet later plays, and reaches out to other authorities. For example, as both Philip Edwards and Elizabeth Archibald have persuasively argued, for the memorable line in which Pericles addresses Marina as “thou that begetst him that did thee beget” (V.i.197), Shakespeare brings in language from a very different tradition, that of Marian rhetoric.³⁰ Edwards, who considered this line “the key to the play, and perhaps to the whole group of Shakespeare's late Romances,” points out that the figure of speech used by Pericles, that of the daughter begetting the father who begot her, “was an ancient Christian paradox for the miracle of God the father becoming the son of his virgin daughter.”³¹ Archibald shows that the figure of speech elaborating this mater et filia topos was available in any number of texts—in Dante's Paradiso (“Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio”), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (where the Second Nun refers to Mary as “thow mayde and moder, doghter of thy sone”), and in countless medieval romances, poems, and hymns.³² “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” pushes beyond any language one finds in the inherited Apollonius tradition; further, it serves the play structurally by linking and contrasting the father and daughter at the end of the play with the incestuous pair at the beginning, where Antiochus is riddlingly described as his daughter's “Father, Sonne, and Husband milde” (I.i.68). I will return to this link and contrast in a moment.

II.

Thus far I have described the crafting of Pericles as an exercise in imitatio—an interweaving of material from two versions of the Apollonius story with elaborations from other traditions and with what I have suggested are Shakespearean innovations—some that echo earlier plays by Shakespeare and some that prefigure plays that Shakespeare had yet to write. Many decades ago, T. W. Baldwin sketched a similar picture of Shakespeare at work, focusing on the writing of Comedy of Errors:

In The Comedy, Shakspere is to write a play of mistaken identities. His grammar-school training had been insistent that he must gather into notebook and mind materials out of which later to compile by imitation his own work. So here he assembles in his mind all accessible plays on mistaken identity. … These he will imitate into a play of his own, using from other sources still other themes to supplement his ideas. … This lesson he had learned in grammar school, so that he is found using it at the threshold of his career, as he continues to do throughout. It was a fundamental canon of the grammar-school method, applied systematically to all subjects.³³

As I noted at the outset, such an account of “the scene of Shakespeare writing” is hard for many scholars today to accept, positing as it does an individual playwright bent over his books in place of one creating ex nihilo in a “furor poeticus” or, alternatively, working in the statistically approved collaborative fashion in the bustle of the playhouse.³⁴ But, even for those willing, for the sake of argument, to accept this picture of Shakespeare the scholar crafting Pericles from the pages of earlier auctors, there remains the significant problem that George Wilkins published a novel in 1608 called The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, in which we find the same anomalous details we have observed in Pericles. (In the novel, e.g., “At the naming of which word Babe, Pericles looking mournfully vpon it, shooke his head, and wept”; and in the recognition scene with Marina, Wilkins's Pericles “thanketh Lysimachus that so fortunately had brought her to begette life in the father who begot her.”³⁵) This duplication of detail in a novel that predates the 1609 Pericles quarto explains my earlier qualification concerning the uniqueness—or the precedence—of Pericles' departures from the Apollonius of Tyre tradition. Wilkins's novel claims, on the title page and in Wilkins's “Argument of the whole Historie,” that the novel gives the reader “The true History of the Play of Pericles” “as it was vnder the habite of ancient Gower the famous English Poet, by the Kings Majesties Players excellently presented.”³⁶ Wilkins, that is, says that his novel recounts a story as previously dramatized by “the Kings Maiesties Players.” Hammond and DelVecchio take him more or less at his word: “It is evident,” they write, that Wilkins's “novella is indeed a recollection of the performed play, with additional material taken verbatim from Twine's novel.”³⁷ Many scholars, though, prefer to think that Wilkins, instead of recalling the play, actually wrote most of it—and certainly wrote the first two acts.³⁸ Such scholars would inevitably see the anomalous details shared by the play and the novel as originating with Wilkins.

Conflicting assumptions about Wilkins's connections with Pericles become particularly urgent when one tries to understand the most important of such anomalous details, namely, those that dominate the account of the incestuous Antiochus and his daughter that opens the story. In Pericles the Chorus presents a picture of a father-daughter couple locked in incestuous pleasure. Pericles' Antiochus, taking a liking to his daughter, “her to Incest did prouoke: / Bad child, worse father, to intice his owne / To euill, should be done by none: / But custome what they did begin, / Was with long vse, account'd no sinne” (I Ch. 26-30). This story of seduction—of a father enticing his child to incest—differs radically from the opening incest story in the other versions of the Apollonius story, except for Wilkins's.

In the traditional manuscript and print accounts, the father brutally rapes the daughter and leaves her helplessly weeping. The line with which Godfrey of Viterbo ends his description of the rape could serve to summarize all the traditional accounts: “res habet effectum, pressa puella dolet” (“the deed was done, and the violated girl grieved”).³⁹ After the rape, as the story traditionally goes, the nurse finds the girl in despair and, after much persuasion, convinces her that, since the rapist is both her father and her king, she must face facts and give in to his lusts. As time passes, the father so enjoys being his daughter's husband that he forgets that the act is sinful; the deeply wounded daughter continues to participate in the incest because she has no choice. As the language of the Confessio Amantis puts it: “Thus hath this king al that him liste [i.e., everything that pleased him] … And such delit he tok therinne, / Him thoghte that it was no sinne”; and the daughter dared not oppose him (“And sche dorste him nothing withseie”) (ll. 342-47).

Midway between the seductive father one finds in Pericles and the violent rape one finds in Gower, Twine, and others is Wilkins's account. Wilkins follows Twine almost verbatim until the moment the father first enters his daughter's room. Wilkins then departs from Twine—and the tradition—by adding dialogue in which the father tries to seduce the daughter. When she is merely puzzled, not even understanding his words, he rapes her. In describing the rape and the father's departure from her room, Wilkins again follows Twine's text. With the nurse's return, Wilkins departs from Twine and has the daughter refuse to answer the nurse's frantic questions. As the daughter sits stubbornly silent, weeping, Wilkins has the father come back into the room, send the nurse away, and give the speeches of persuasion that, in the tradition, are assigned to the nurse. By the end of this post-rape seduction scene, Wilkins can write: “So with these and such like perswasions preuayling with his daughter, they long continued in these foule and vniust imbracements, till at last, the custome of sinne made it accompted no sinne.” (p. 13)—a version that transforms Twine's account of the scene (“the nurse … beganne to assuage [the daughter's] griefe with comfortable wordes … [while] this wicked father … reioyceth that he hath played the part of an husband with his daughter” [p. 10]) by combining it with language that appears in the play (“But custom what they did begin / Was with long use accounted no sin”)—language which itself is a variation on the Confessio's “And such delit he tok thereinne / Him thoghte that it was no sinne.” Those who believe that Wilkins wrote the early acts of the play would, if they thought to place it in the Apollonius tradition, surely argue that it was Wilkins who altered the incest story, and they would probably explain his motivation in terms of his other writings. Those who agree with Hammond and DelVecchio that the Wilkins novel is “a recollection of the performed play” supplemented with verbatim language from Twine, would see Wilkins as faced with contradictory accounts of Antiochus and his daughter—one provided by Shakespeare's play, the other by Twine's novel—and would explain Wilkins's version as an attempt to reconcile these accounts by turning the father into a rapist who tries, unsuccessfully before the rape and then successfully after it, to “intice his owne / To euill,” as the Chorus in Pericles puts it.

III.

If, as I would argue, the best reading of the evidence posits Wilkins as here reconciling two violently conflicting auctors, the corollary is that it was Pericles' playwright who altered the initial incest story. If that playwright was Shakespeare, one must wonder why he made such a change. Since Shakespeare did not scruple to deal with violent rape in other works—think of Lavinia and of Lucrece, for example—it was not squeamishness or prudishness that governed his decision. The answer may perhaps be found in that link and contrast I mentioned earlier between the relationship of Pericles and Marina, at the end of the play, and that of Antiochus and his daughter at the beginning. Philip Edwards certainly saw that link as significant:

With the line ‘Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget’, it is scarcely possible not to think back to the relationship between Antiochus and his daughter. The figure of speech which Pericles uses equates the spiritual renewal which Marina brings about in him with her physical birth for which he was responsible … [F]ather and daughter are bound in a reciprocal bond of affection, each owing life to the other, each aware of the need of the other. In Antioch, father and daughter also confused their relationship, but the reciprocity of their affection was in sexual need and the perversion of the natural relationship.⁴⁰

If, as Edwards argues, the seemingly miraculous father-daughter reunion is to contrast with the unholy union at the play's beginning, then it may follow that the initial union should be one of reciprocal (if unnatural) need and affection; the tradition's violent rape and the daughter's continuing grief might, in this context, distract and blur.

This explanation is, of course, speculative, but the echo of Antiochus's riddle in Pericles' response to Marina shows a link between the ending of the play and important authorial choices at the play's beginning, thus bringing us back to the question of the play's authorship. The link, that is, suggests a single authorial mind, as it were, at work in this play and a coherence of structure that calls into question the claims of those who see Shakespeare's hand in such powerful moments as that of Pericles' resonant recognition of Marina but who would give the first two acts of the play, at the least, to Wilkins or another writer. It is Pericles' narrative and structural coherence, along with the dramaturgical audacity of its interweaving of stage media, that incline me to believe that Pericles is at least arguably Shakespeare's in conception and, in large part, in construction. I note that even MacDonald Jackson, a champion of Wilkins and among the most highly respected of those who would use statistical analysis to disintegrate the play into its several authorial parts, confesses that “Whatever the extent and nature of Wilkins's participation in the play, its overall design, though unusual, seems Shakespearian.”⁴¹

I feel comfortable, then, in finding a larger Shakespearean relevance in the Gower Chorus's citation of his “Authors.” One cannot ignore the irony, of course, that the only play or poem of Shakespeare's that openly calls upon its auctors to authenticate and authorize its story is one that is itself of problematic authorship and authority. (This irony is compounded by the fact that Pericles cites its auctors at the very moment that it most radically departs from them—namely, in the account of Antiochus's incestuous union.⁴²) Nor can one deny that, despite the Chorus's invocation of imitatio in his citation of his “Authors,” much of Pericles demonstrates a more mechanical use of that technique than we customarily find in Shakespeare. (Pericles I.iii, for instance, while interweaving Gower and Twine and reaching out to another source [perhaps Plutarch, perhaps Barnabe Riche's Souldiers Wishe to Briton's Welfare], does so in a wooden rather than an evocative manner.) Yet the Chorus's gesture toward the manuscript and print library on which the play draws, along with the play's occasional explosion beyond imitation into invention, are instructive in reminding us that Shakespeare throughout his work depends upon literary models, most often using them in the service of invention, as in the scenes we have examined above.

The awareness of the centrality of imitatio in Shakespeare's working habits is centuries old, with Pope noting in 1725 the presence of such auctors as Plutarch, Ovid, Plautus, Chaucer, and “modern Italian writers” in the plays.⁴³ This awareness, though, has not, for whatever reason, had any perceptible impact on the tradition that has given us a Shakespeare warbling his native woodnotes wild—just as, today, it seems to cast no shadow on the “artist in the garret” image presented in “Shakespeare in Love,” nor does it raise questions in the minds of those promoting Shakespeare-as-collaborator. It is because these alternative traditions and images are so powerful that it is instructive to have the Pericles Chorus's reminder of the early modern use of imitatio and of how it underlay Shakespeare's practice, both—as we shall see—in his poems and in his plays.

That Shakespeare would use the techniques of imitatio in constructing his poems should not surprise us, since Greene's Light in Troy has alerted us to the centrality of the imitation of models in the writing of early modern poetry. It is rather surprising, though, that the modeling technique in The Rape of Lucrece is so similar to what we have seen in Pericles. Like Pericles, Lucrece is modeled on a single story as told by two primary auctors—Ovid and Livy—and when the poem breaks away from these auctors—as it does, for example, in the 200-line passage where Lucrece fills the dreadful time awaiting her summoned husband by studying a painting of the Fall of Troy—material is pulled in from new auctors: from Books I and II of The Aeneid, from Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from North's Plutarch, and from Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido.⁴⁴ In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare uses imitatio in a slightly different way, interweaving two Ovidian stories—that of Venus and Adonis (Metamorphoses, Book 10) and that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Metamorphoses, Book 4)—drawing from both the Latin text and Golding's translation. In this poem, as in Pericles and Lucrece, Shakespeare transforms his models (here, by pursuing a “study of the physical and emotional attitudes of wooing and revulsion, lust and coyness … with a voluptuous delight … not found in Ovid or his English translator”)⁴⁵, and he also departs occasionally from his primary auctors, reaching out to Ovid's Ars Amatoria and the Fasti and, at one point at least, to Virgil's Georgics.⁴⁶

Nor, as Baldwin long ago demonstrated, is Shakespeare's dependence on the techniques of imitatio in any way lessened when he constructs his plays. To glance at only a handful of them: In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare dramatizes Robert Greene's Pandosto, structuring the play in a Pericles-like manner, with Time as Chorus speaking in rhymed couplets as lame as old Gower's, leaping over sixteen years and, Gower-like, dispersing the play's characters geographically and chronologically. The play, while in large part following Pandosto scrupulously, departs from it at key moments in ways that cannot but remind us of Pericles' departures from Gower and Twine. It differs sharply from Pandosto, for example, in its treatment of the abandoning of the baby daughter (adding human agency in the taking of the baby to Bohemia, adding the reported dream vision and the bear); and it alters significantly the concluding recognitions and reunions, restoring Hermione by way of the supposed statue and replacing Greene's threatened father-daughter incest and the father's attendant suicide with paternal love and mutual happiness. At such moments of departure from his primary auctor, Shakespeare alters the tone and the direction of the story by reaching out to such diverse authorities as Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Amadis de Gaule, Pettie's Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasures, and the anonymous History of the Tryall of Chevalry.⁴⁷

Richard III, like Pericles, is modeled on two slightly different versions of a single authority—Holinshed and Hall's printings of Thomas More's biography of Richard—and, like Pericles, it departs at key moments from its primary auctors, and again does so through the incorporation of new authorities. For the scene of Clarence's dream, for instance, which is among Shakespeare's contributions to the Richard III story, Shakespeare drew on the Mirror for Magistrates, The Spanish Tragedy, Book IV of Golding's Ovid, several of Seneca's plays, and Book II of The Faerie Queene; and for the scene of the wooing of Anne, another of his contributions, he turned primarily to Seneca, “specifically to the wooing of Megara by Lycus in the Hercules Furens, adding the incident to the offered sword from the Hyppolytus; there are also recollections of the Hercules Oetaeus and the Medea.”⁴⁸

Sometimes Shakespeare builds a play not on a single story in one or more versions but on a set of stories each with its own auctor—as in Cymbeline, for example, where Holinshed, Boccaccio, and The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune seem to jostle for control of the play. And some plays, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, weave together story threads or isolated speeches from such a variety of earlier texts that the play's story has no apparent authorizing voice but Shakespeare's, though its text is richly imitative. Shakespeare, that is, employs imitatio in a variety of ways, creating a variety of effects. He sometimes, for instance, constructs characters from details found in rhetorically and ideologically oppositional auctors, thus endowing the characters with a complexity reminiscent of that which we perceive in living human beings; he creates plays by interweaving, say, an Ovidian myth with a Biblical story, so that a single character brings into the play from Ovid his function as a negative blocking figure while, from his Biblical role, he carries the affect of a deeply wounded, and therefore sympathetic, subjectivity.⁴⁹

As I noted at the outset, scholars today, when speaking of intertextuality, are more comfortable focusing on reception rather than composition; however, in dealing with the intertextuality of an early modern author, it is almost negligent to ignore the role of imitatio in the composition of a given work. As Thomas Greene makes clear, imitatio “determined for two or three centuries the character of most poetic intertextuality.”⁵⁰ I would argue that, even though Shakespeare rarely points directly to his auctors, and even though he so interweaves and transforms his auctors that what leaps into life is his creation and not theirs, it is, at core, imitatio that is the ground of his invention, imitatio that he manipulates and transcends.

Leonard Barkan, discussing the speech in which Holofernes attacks imitatio (“Imitari is nothing. So doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider”) and praises “the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention”, writes that “The irony is, of course, that Holofernes imagines himself to be on the side of invention over imitation when his poetry is agonizingly, almost regurgitatingly, derivative from the books that he inclucates and the pedantic languages that he speaks. The further irony is that true invention can emerge only from a properly understood practice of imitation.”⁵¹ It is to that practice and that “true invention” throughout Shakespeare's works that—ironic or not—the Chorus in Pericles leads us when he cites his “Authors.”

Notes

1. The Late and much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre (London, 1609), published in facsimile, ed. W. W. Greg (London, 1940), I Ch. 20. Quotations from Pericles will be from this edition, with line numbers included parenthetically in the text. While quarto Pericles is universally attacked for its corruption and unusability, it was used as an acting text in 1610. See Barbara A. Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” in: A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York, 1997), pp. 213-30, esp. pp. 216-18.

2. “The prologue of the translatoure,” Kynge Appolyn of Thyre, printed in facsimile as The Romance of “Kynge Apollyn of Thyre” [sic] from the unique original, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, 1510, ed. Edmund Wm. Ashbee (London, 1870), p. 2.

3. Spenser, for example, used “myn auctor” to refer to Chaucer as, in Judith Anderson's words, “the enabling source of his own poetry” (Judith H. Anderson. “‘Myn auctour’: Spenser's Enabling Fiction and Eumnestes' ‘immortall scrine’” in: Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey [Ithaca and London, 1989], pp.16-31, esp. p. 16); and Ben Jonson, in commenting on the folly of an imitator limiting himself to a single literary model, wrote: “never no Imitator, ever grew up to his Author.” Timber, or Discoveries, in: Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52), vol. 8, p. 590.

4. A. J. Minnis, “The Terms Auctor and Auctoritas,” in his Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), pp. 10-12, esp. p. 10.

5. The connotation of “mine authors” suggests a distinction between versions read by “Lords and Ladyes” for “restoratiues” (ll. 7-8) and the scholarly, authoritative texts that would serve as the play's “enabling source”.

6. John Gower was, of course, himself a famous author and authority whose connection with the written word is signaled by his tomb in the church of St. Mary Overie (now known as Southwark Cathedral or St. Saviour's, Southwark), on which lies a stone image of the poet with its head pillowed on a stone replica of a pile of books—Gower's three important folio works. (See John H. Fisher, John Gower [New York, 1964], pp. 37-38.) The fact that William Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund was buried in a rather elaborate funeral service at St. Saviour's, Southwark, in December of 1607 may be to the point. See S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York, 1975), p. 26, and note 21, below.

7. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982), p. 16.

8. Thomas M. Greene, Light in Troy, p. 1. Greene's seminal study of Renaissance imitative theory and practice focuses “mainly on lyric poetry”, though he suggests that other studies with different foci “clearly could be written” (p. 2).

9. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, 1967), p. 118. For Greene's discussion of Ascham and the teaching of imitation, see Light in Troy, pp. 268-70.

10. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Syracuse, 1953), pp. 86-7. This passage is discussed in Greene, p. 275.

11. As Marion Trousdale writes, “To investigate compositional practices is to shift the focus of literary study from reception to invention”. See her “Introduction: Texts and Pretexts in the English Renaissance”, Style, 23 (1989), 333-34.

12. For an important exploration of early modern dramatic collaboration, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1997), esp. pp. 1-11. I am also indebted to Masten's “Shakespeare without Authorship”, presented at the 2002 conference of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (Weimar), in which he introduced the idea of “the scene of Shakespeare writing” in relation to the film “Shakespeare in Love” and its image of Shakespeare as a “self-generating Romantic genius”.

13. F. D. Hoeniger writes in 1963: “The majority of present-day scholars … believe that Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with Acts I and II” of Pericles. Hoeniger's own position is that the first two acts were probably written by John Day and George Wilkins, and that Shakespeare assumed “responsibility for the last three acts.” See Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1963), pp. lii-lxiii, esp. pp. liii and lxiii. See also Pericles, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Pelican Shakespeare (New York, 2001), pp. xxxiii-xxxvii.

14. Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, Including the Text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English Translation (Cambridge, 1991), p. 49, n. 5. I am greatly indebted to Archibald's work and to private communication in which she generously shared her knowledge of the Apollonius tradition. The quotation from Carol Gesner is from her Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington, 1970), p. 146.

15. See Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, pp. 3, 7-9, 45-48, 183-90.

16. One could argue that the differences among the versions are not large, since, according to A. H. Smyth, one of the notable things about the Apollonius story is how faithfully it was reproduced over the centuries. See Albert H. Smyth, Shakespeare's Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre (Philadelphia, 1898), p. 5. Archibald writes that the variations among the extant Latin manuscripts of Historia Apollonii are too small to be of much significance, but her analysis of the many versions from the 11th century forward shows that, as the Historia Apollonii “went forth and multiplied,” new episodes and details were often introduced, some making the story more chivalric, some more moralistic, and some simply filling in gaps. See Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, pp. 46-48.

17. See P. Goolden, “Antiochus's Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare”, Review of English Studies, NS 6 (1955), 245-51, esp. p. 247, n. 2.

18. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, 2000), vol. 1, Book 8, ll. 271-2005, esp. 1152. Unless otherwise noted, quotations will be from this edition, with line numbers included parenthetically in the text.

19. Berthelette's “To the Reder” explains that his edition follows “the prynt copie,” but that he includes the 70-line passage that some “wrytten copies” preserve, “cleane altered” from those printed in Caxton's 1483 edition. Berthelette seems also to have corrected the printed version against the manuscripts, since he writes that the printed copy contained so many errors and omissions that “this mooste pleasunt and easy auctor coude not wel be perceyued.” (Jo. Gower de confessione Amantis, Imprinted at London … by Thomas Berthelette … 1532, sig. aaiii-aa.iii^v) See also Berthelette's 1554 edition (Jo. Gower de confessione Amantis, Imprinted at London … by Thomas Berthelette … 1554, sigs. ii^v and iii).

20. See Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, p. 50. Archibald gives the publication date of Twine's novel as 1576. Since Lawrence Twine died in 1576, and since the novel was entered in the Stationers Register in that year, it was certainly written by that date and may even have been printed; however, the first extant copy of the work dates from c. 1594.

21. Hoeniger notes that “the edition of 1607 may have been the immediate cause for the play, or the play may have been the immediate cause for it.” (Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, p. xvi, n. 2.) The year 1607 looms large in any study of Pericles, this being also the date of two other major author-as-presenter plays (The Devil's Charter and The Travels of the Three English Brothers), as well as the year of the funeral of Edmund Shakespeare in the church that houses John Gower's tomb. (See n. 6, above.)

22. I find myself here in disagreement with Jeffrey Masten, who argues that “Gower re-presents [the story] on stage as his own.” See his Textual Intercourse, p. 75. Masten's study of Pericles in the context of “Representing Authority” is in general very perceptive (see pp. 73-93).

23. The Patterne of painefull Aduentures … Gathered into English by Lavrence Twine (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1903), p. 9.

24. See Bruce Harbert, “Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower”, in: Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 83-97, esp. pp. 87-88.

25. See Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1998), p. 7, and Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, p. xvi. Hoeniger notes, however: “As Twine's novel is an indirect translation of the story in the Gesta Romanorum, some passages in the play that appear to be derived from Twine may in fact come from a different source” (p. xvi, n. 2). DelVecchio and Hammond write that “the play … draws material from one or other [i.e., Gower or Twine] in a fashion that suggests Shakespeare the scholar consulting the open pages of those books during composition” (p. 3). I have been able to find no traces of Copland's version of the story in Pericles.

26. Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, pp. lxxxix-xc. For a text of the Digby Mary Magdalene, see The Digby Plays, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1930 [re-issued from plates from 1882]), pp. 53-136, esp. pp. 109-30.

27. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 374-83, esp. pp. 377-80. For the work's popularity, see note 28, below.

28. [Jacobus de Voragine], [Legenda aurea] (Wynkyn de Worde, 1493), fol. clxxxvi. For the legend of Mary Magdalene, see fols. clxxxiii-clxxxviii^v. The Short-Title Catalogue, 2nd edition, lists 11 editions of this work between 1483 and 1521. Philippa Tristram, in “Strange Images of Death,” Leeds Studies in English, 14 (1983), 196-211, argues that Shakespeare used Caxton's translation of The Golden Legend in writing Pericles.

29. Another detail that may have affected this scene in Pericles is the legend's account of the reason for wanting to put the ruler's wife's body ashore instead of into the water: namely, “to saue it from deuouryng of the fisshes of the see” (fol. clxxxvi), a concern that may inform the powerful lines that Pericles addresses to the body of his dead wife before abandoning it to the sea—lines that are strikingly different from anything said by the hero in the Apollonius tradition: “nor haue I time / To giue thee hallowed to thy graue, but straight, / Must cast thee scarcly Coffind, in oare [usually emended to “i' th' ooze”], / Where for a monument vpon thy bones, / … the belching Whale, / And humming Water must orewelme thy corpes, / Lying with simple shels” (III.i.59-65).

30. Elizabeth Archibald writes that Pericles' line is “strikingly close to the traditional phrases” used to characterize Mary as “you who gave birth to your holy father.” See her Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2001), p. 244.

31. Pericles, ed. Philip Edwards, New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 188 (note to V.1.196) and p. 27.

32. Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, pp. 238-41. Alan de Lille's Anticlaudianus de Antirufino (c. 1182) quotes the refrain “She, the daughter, has conceived the Father, has borne Him as her Son” in his explanation of how the Incarnation silences Nature and conquers Logic. Alan is quoted in Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York and Evanston, 1953), p. 42.

33. T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 1947), p. 665.

34. Masten cites figures that show that at least half of all the professionally written plays of the period and “two-thirds of the plays mentioned in Henslowe's papers” had multiple authors. See his Textual Intercourse, p. 14.

35. George Wilkins, The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool, 1953), pp. 60, 106-7.

36. ibid, pp. [xvii] and p. 7 [title page and A3 in the 1608 printing].

37. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. DelVecchio and Hammond, p.10.

38. See, e.g., [Gary Taylor and MacD. P. Jackson], “Pericles”, in: William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford, 1987), pp. 556-60; Pericles, ed. Stephen Orgel, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii; and MacD. P. Jackson, “Pericles, Acts I and II: New Evidence for George Wilkins”, Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 192-96. Jackson's “Rhyming in Pericles: More Evidence of Dual Authorship”, Studies in Bibliography, 46 (1993), 239-49 includes in note 7 (p. 240) a list of “recent contributions” that make the case for Wilkins.

39. Quoted and translated by Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius, p. 185.

40. Pericles, ed. Philip Edwards, p. 27.

41. MacD. P. Jackson, “Rhyming in Pericles”, p. 248, n. 15.

42. A similar irony attaches to the 5th-act Chorus of Henry V, where the audience is reminded that the play dramatizes written texts at the very moment that the Chorus's account departs from these texts. “Vouchsafe to those that have not read the story / That I may prompt them”, says the Chorus, who goes on to foreground Henry's triumphant return to London after Agincourt, ignoring in his account the five years of battles, sieges, and negotiations that intervene between that return and the marriage to Katherine.

43. The Works of Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols (London, 1725), vol. 1, p. A6.

44. See The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1960), notes to ll. 1366-1567.

45. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1957-75), vol. 1, p. 164.

46. See Bullough, vol. 1, pp. 161-65, and T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, c. 1950), pp. 1-48.

47. See, e.g., Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8, pp. 115-55, esp. pp. 123-36.

48. See King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York, 1981), pp. 80-81.

49. See Barbara A. Mowat, “‘A local habitation and a name’: Shakespeare's Text as Construct”, Style, 23 (1989), 335-51; “Lavinia's Message: Shakespeare and Myth”, Renaissance Papers 1981 (Raleigh, N.C., 1982), 55-69; “Reading The Tempest Intertextually”, in: ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London, 2000), pp. 27-36; and “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale 4.3”, Shakespeare Studies, 22 (1994), 58-76.

50. Light in Troy, p. 2.

51. Leonard Barkan, “What did Shakespeare read?”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 31-47, esp. p. 39.