SOURCE: Mullaney, Steven. “‘All That Monarchs Do’: The Obscured Stages of Authority in Pericles.” In The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, pp. 135-51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Mullaney argues that Pericles represents a dramatic experiment in which Shakespeare attempted to dissociate the dramatic art form from its popular context and instead re-imagines it as a “purely aesthetic phenomenon, free from history and from historical determination.”]

I

In 1605, the Queen's Revels Children performed Eastward Ho! at Blackfriars. The authors, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, were soon apprehended and imprisoned, and for a time it was rumored that Jonson would suffer the loss of his nose and ears for satire directed against the king and his Scottish knights. A year later John Day's The Isle of Gulls resulted in similar charges, and again “sundry were committed to Bridewell.”¹ When again at large, the company was reorganized as the Children of Blackfriars, but they ran into difficulty once more in 1608, this time managing to offend not only the king but the visiting French ambassador as well. A further round of imprisonments was one of the results; another was the dissolution of the company—one of the last of the boys' troupes—by order of James himself.

Another consequence, according to critical tradition, was the emergence of Shakespearean romance. When the Children of Blackfriars were forced to give up their lease, Richard Burbage, the owner of Blackfriars, redeemed the lease himself and retained it for his own company. For years, the private theaters of the city had been the exclusive province of boys' companies, but the age of strict division between private and public playhouse—the former located within the city walls and devoted largely to satirical comedy,² the latter situated on the outskirts of the city, where it pursued a more marginal and ideologically complex form of drama—was at an end. Popular drama had returned to the confines of the city. The future of the King's Men would include Blackfriars as its city residence, an intramural dramatic forum to supplement the stage they continued to occupy at the Globe. That future would also include, of course, the development of Shakespearean romance—a historical coincidence that can prove misleading, especially if taken as a sign that the romances were shaped to fit the tastes and expectations of a new, presumably more elite audience at Blackfriars.

In Alfred Harbage's view, such is the case: the romances bear the stamp of the coterie, as Harbage defined the playgoers who frequented theaters like Blackfriars and Paul's.³ Harbage's coterie has proved, however, to be more of a critical fiction than an Elizabethan or Jacobean reality, an exaggeration not only of the differences between audiences attending plays within and without the city but also of their power to shape or determine a dramatic repertory.⁴ Shakespeare's romances were, moreover, far from elite productions. They enjoyed a popularity as catholic as that of any of his earlier plays, and when they succeeded they did so in the Globe and at Court as well as at Blackfriars. Much to the bewilderment of modern critics, Pericles seems to have been one of the most popular romances, and it could hardly have been conditioned by either the audience or the stage facilities of the private theater. Written in 1607 or 1608, it may have preceded the acquisition of Blackfriars by as much as a year; even if the later date of composition is correct, the play could not have been staged before a “private” audience, elite or otherwise, at that time. When Burbage redeemed the lease on Blackfriars, the theater was in a state of disrepair, requiring extensive work before it could be reopened. The city was also in the throes of a new outbreak of plague, making it a propitious time for reconstruction: throughout 1608, performances at Blackfriars as at all theaters within the city were suppressed for the duration of the epidemic, which lasted well into the new year. Neither the King's Men nor any other company performed at Blackfriars during the initial years of Pericles' popularity, and the forum of the private theater cannot, as a consequence, explain the dramaturgical shift toward romance.

When popular drama moved out into the Liberties to appropriate their ambivalent terrain for its own purposes, it was able to do so only because the traditions that had shaped and maintained those Liberties were on the wane. A gap had opened in the social fabric, a temporary rift in the cultural landscape that provided the stage with a place on the ideological horizon, a marginal and anamorphic perspective on the cultural dynamics of its own times. Popular drama owed its birth, in other words, to an interim period in a larger historical transition, a period marked by the failure of the dominant culture to rearticulate itself in a fashion that would close off the gaps and seams opening on the margins of its domain. Such a historical interlude could not last long, however, and it was beginning to draw to a close in the first decade of the Jacobean period. One sign of the times came in the form of the Crown's increasing demands for the incorporation of the Liberties. London staunchly resisted the effort—however unhappy the city was over the incontinence of its margins, it was haunted by the specter of a rival urban body—and was successful in its opposition until 1637, when Charles brought the traditional liberty of the suburbs to a corporate conclusion.⁵

The king's harsh actions against the Children of Blackfriars also served as a warning that traditional forms of license would not necessarily prevail under the increasing absolutism of the Jacobean state. For marginal groups, former sources of power and ideological mobility were fast becoming insecure, sources of anxiety at best. One expression of that anxiety was Burbage's effort to broaden the financial and cultural base of his company, responding to a previously unfelt need by taking over Blackfriars himself. The advent of Shakespearean romance was another such expression. If the shift in theatrical setting and the shift in dramaturgy are at all related, they are apposite developments, independent yet homologous signs of a changing political and cultural climate. As a genre, Shakespearean romance reflects the shifting ground of popular drama in the city; it also reflects upon or articulates the broader tensions and contradictions of a culture poised on the verge of the modern world and the status of Shakespearean theater in such a world.

II

Upon deciphering Antiochus' riddle, Pericles first offers to conceal the arcanum imperii of the king's incest. “Who has a book of all that monarchs do, / He's more secure to keep it shut than shown” (I. i. 97-98). The offer to keep the king's secret safe only reveals, of course, that it is no longer either a secret or his own; the incestuous entanglements of legitimacy and authority have already been disclosed, and will continue to shape the main plot of the play. “We begin in incest,” as C. L. Barber most succinctly put it, “and end in a sublime transformation of the motive.”⁶ In other respects, however, Pericles is something less than an open book. Where the actions of Pericles and his daughter are concerned, the play reveals a sense of taboo that is both far from universal and quite foreign to the familiar Greek romance upon which the play is based:⁷ a sense of taboo that reveals significant cultural tensions and contradictions, and is produced by the intersection of genre, dramatic forum, and historical moment that we customarily call Shakespearean romance.

Consider, for example, Pericles' first act of any significance after fleeing Antioch. To the starving city of Tharsus, he presents a shipment of grain, expecting nothing in return but “love / And harbourage for ourself, our ships and men” (I. iv. 99-100). It is a gift without reserve, a demonstration of legitimate authority in action—of a patriarchal power that does not feed upon its subjects or dependents but rather nourishes and protects them. A true prince, as Pericles says, should be “no more but as the tops of trees / Which fence the roots they grow by” (I. ii. 31-32), and it is in recognition of such princely grace that the citizens erect a memorial to their benefactor, in the form of a “statue to make him glorious” (II. Chorus. 14). In and of itself, the scene is hardly problematic, the contrast with Antiochus quite clear. Unspecified in Shakespeare's play, however, is the setting for Pericles' princely performance; in Lawrence Twine's The Patterne of Painful Adventures,⁸ a relatively faithful Elizabethan version of the Apollonius romance that was also one of Shakespeare's sources, the gift of grain takes place in the marketplace of the city, where a safe harbor is not the only price attached to Apollonius' expression of princely bounty. The citizens of Tharsus must also pay the going rate for wheat, namely “eight peeces of brasse for every bushel” (262). When the bargain is completed, however, Apollonius has second thoughts. “Doubting lest by this deede, he should seem to put off the dignitie of a prince, and put on the countenance of a merchant rather than a giver, when he had received the price of the wheate, he restored it back again to the use and commoditie of the citie.” Taken in payment and then returned, the brass coin effaces the course of its circulation and restores Apollonius' princely countenance; it even redoubles his generosity, since it returns to the city in the form of a second gift—and so the citizens treat it, not as money to be spent but as a gift to be in some fashion reciprocated and returned to the giver. The citizens follow Apollonius' example quite profoundly, in fact, for they translate the brass coin returned to them into a monumental image of princely generosity. “They erected in the marked [sic] place a monument in the memoriall of him: his stature [sic] made of brasse standing in a charret, holding corne in his right hand, and spurning it with his left foot.” Beginning as a monetary sign for the value of the grain, the coin of the city—what Apollonius in fact spurned, although not with his foot—has been recast to represent the grain according to the dictates of an alternate symbolic economy; the money of the merchant has been translated into the image of the prince, not by bearing his likeness, as in the case of a coin of the realm, but by becoming that likeness in a manner more attuned to princely decorum.

Apollonius' flurry of brass coins serves to remind us that a gift is never merely a gift. Gift-giving initiates a dialectical process of “prestation,” according to the now-classic study of symbolic exchange by Marcel Mauss: a gift establishes a cycle of exchange, an obligation to accept the gift offered and to accept what it implies as well, that is, the obligation to give presents in return.⁹ A gift marks the beginning of a coercive system of exchange, one that comes into play, as Pierre Bourdieu observes, in cultural situations where more overt systems of obligation or domination are unavailable:

The gift, generosity, conspicuous distribution—the extreme case of which is potlatch—are operations of social alchemy which may be observed whenever the direct application of overt physical or economic violence is negatively sanctioned, and which tend to bring about the transmutation of economic capital into symbolic capital … an interested relationship is transmuted into a disinterested, gratuitous relationship, overt domination into misrecognized, “socially recognized” domination, in other words, legitimate authority.¹⁰

All gifts are to some degree “misrecognized,” the obligations they embody cloaked in an aura of disinterested gratuity and gratitude. Through their acts of prestation, both Pericles and Apollonius achieve an indebted alliance with Tharsus that could easily bring the wrath of Antiochus down on the city. Pericles' alliance, however, is never quite represented as part of an exchange, except insofar as it is included in, or occluded by, the “love” he seeks. The mercantile traces of Apollonius' negotiations, the brass from which his statue is molded, are not allowed to mar the figure of Pericles raised by the city in Shakespeare's play; the “marked place” in Pericles, where the gift is given and the statue erected, is stripped of all distinguishing marks, including its designation as a marketplace. Nor is the initial scene at Tharsus the only instance in which the negotiations of authority are thus suppressed. When Pericles returns to Tharsus to deposit the infant Marina there, he sails off to resume his throne at Tyre—where he remains throughout the childhood and early adolescence of his daughter, despite the fact that she is “all his heart's delight.” Apollonius, by contrast, is too grief-stricken over the loss of his wife to return to either her father's court or his own; he leaves his daughter behind in order to embark on a voyage around the Mediterranean, “meaning … to exercise the trade of merchandize,” and until his return some fourteen years later is presumed lost at sea. Shakespeare's divergence here is an extreme one: what keeps father and daughter apart, and unknown to one another until their climactic recognition scene, is left unexplained, resulting in a lapse of logical plot development that even Gower, standing “i' th' gaps / To teach you the stages of our story” (IV. Chorus. 8-9), cannot resolve.

According to Fredric Jameson, such lacunae mark significant moments in the transmission and transformation of a genre, especially when that genre is romance. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson defines romance as a genre of historical crisis—one that surfaces most prominently at critical moments of transition in Western culture, and that seeks to provide imaginary solutions to real but unprecedented social and cultural contradictions:

As for romance, it would seem that its ultimate condition of figuration … is to be found in a transitional moment in which two different modes of production, or moments of socioeconomic development, coexist. Their antagonism is not yet articulated in terms of the struggle of social classes, so that its resolution can be projected in the form of a nostalgic (or less often, a Utopian) harmony. Our principal experience of such transitional moments is evidently that of an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by a nascent capitalism, yet still, for a long moment, coexisting with the latter. So Shakespearean romance … opposes the phantasmagoria of “imagination” to the bustling commercial activity at work all around it.¹¹

Adopting Jameson's perspective for the moment, we would note that the Apollonius romance was originally the product of the early Middle Ages, and was shaped by the relatively comfortable cultural contradictions of that world: it was the product, that is to say, of a state of society in which trade and merchants were officially denounced by the Church but were also, for the most part, either turned to its advantage or merely overlooked. “To fornicate is always forbidden to anyone,” as canon law aptly proclaimed, “but to trade is sometimes allowed, and sometimes not.”¹² With the development of a world economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, cultural concern over the place and “trade of merchandize” was significantly heightened; as Louis Dumont has shown, the expanding commercial activities of the period were not readily accommodated by existing ideologies but instead provoked an escalating disparagement of trade and money in general, resulting in a state of severe cultural contradiction that would only be resolved over the course of the next century and a half, as economic theory evolved to the point that exchange and even profit could be ideologically justified.¹³ The countenance of a merchant may be a source of anxiety for Apollonius, but that countenance is fully repressed in Shakespeare's version of the story; what Jameson regards as the signature of Shakespearean romance, its efforts to dissociate itself from the “bustling commercial activity at work all around it,” thus manifests itself in Pericles, and makes it a dramatic register and imaginary resolution of the cultural contradictions that were the early modern period.

Such a reading would conform to what Jameson regards as the ultimate horizon of literary interpretation, in which the occlusions and anxieties of a given genre are viewed as registers of the informing tensions and contradictions of distinct historical modes of production; the text is conditioned and determined by its place in Jameson's master narrative of History. Twine's Painful Adventures, however, occupies the same transitional moment in history, and in the three editions that were issued between 1576 and 1607 exhibits none of the mercantile anxieties produced when the same romance is brought on stage. Jameson would situate Shakespearean romance on the plane of historical modes of production, but in the case of Pericles such a strategy seems premature, producing a significant blindness to more immediate historical conditions of production. The popularity of Twine's version and the nature of Shakespeare's divergence from it suggest that not all the anxieties of the text are generic, that we are dealing with a critical moment in the life of a specific romance tradition—the Apollonius of Tyre story—at the point where that tradition intersects the more recent one of popular drama.

Nor is it adequate to refer, as Jameson does in his general comments on Shakespearean romance, to plays written for and quite successful upon the popular stage as being set apart from “the bustling commercial activity at work all around [them].” Drama was a thriving if unseemly business enterprise in early modern England, theaters sites of exchange, players regarded with the same ambivalence as merchants for their protean capacities to cross or violate the class boundaries and cultural hierarchies. Merchants and players were homologous figures in the moral imagination of the period, each representing a degree of social mobility that threatened to produce a state of social alchemy. According to William Harrison, merchants should be counted among the citizens or burghers of the commonwealth but were in fact increasingly difficult to fix within a strict social hierarchy, since “they often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of one into the other.”¹⁴ And if merchants were confusing social categories and hierarchies, so were their fellow alchemists of the stage, according to the standard antitheatrical invectives:

In Stage playes for a boy to put on the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take upon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outward signes to shewe themselves otherwise than they are, and so within the compasse of a lye. … We are commanded by God to abide in the same calling wherein we were called, which is our ordinary vocation in a commonweale. … If privat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentlemen like in sattine & velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, unitie dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole must be dismembred and the prince or the heade cannot chuse but sicken.¹⁵

A player, according to a Jacobean character-book, was a jack-of-all-trades, “a shifting companion” from the perspective of social hierarchy:

If his profession were single, hee would think himselfe a simple fellow, as hee doth all professions besides his owne: His owne therefore is compounded of all Natures, all humours, all professions.¹⁶

If merchants changed place with gentlemen, the player's range was more extensive, subjecting all social classes and categories, from peasant to monarch, to a theatrical system of exchange and thereby inculcating in the audience a potent sense of social mobility and of the protean capacities of the self. Moreover, the player's profession not only was compounded of all but also confounded cultural distinctions crucial to the reigning hierarchy of early modern London. The player's work, his protean profession, was playing, and the guilds of London viewed such a blurring of cultural realms as a threat that was hardly limited to the narrow confines of the stage.

Merchants and players were twin figures for the period, ambivalent and discomfiting doubles; the popular stage itself was not only a significant participant in the bustling commercial activity of early modern London but was also located in the midst of various licit and illicit trades, ranging from actual marketplaces to stalls of foreign or unlicensed craftsmen to taverns and brothels, all of which had enjoyed both liberty and license outside the city walls. Such a situation was crucial to the emergence of popular drama, but it is a situation that Pericles consistently seeks to distance itself from, with a single exception. In the bawdyhouse at Mytilene, Pericles does allow the marketplace and the trade of merchandise to be brought on stage, and the exception is a significant one. In Shakespeare's reworking of Marina's time in the brothel, we find ourselves on familiar but strange ground: familiar in terms of the popular stage and its marginal situation and affiliations, strange in all the ways that the brothel of Pericles sets itself apart from the taverns of Eastcheap or the licentious suburbs of Measure for Measure. In the brothel, the countenance of a merchant comes into clearer focus as a source of anxiety, threatening to impinge not on the authority of a prince but on the authority and status of Shakespeare's dramatic enterprise itself.

III

Unlike her father, Marina enters a quite explicitly defined marketplace, not as an agent of exchange but as the thing itself: a commodity to be bought and sold, then sold again by a pander who hopes to shore up the “wenchless” fortunes of his brothel with her continually renewed use-value. She is, of course, a “piece of virtue,” and so she remains. She preaches divinity in the whorehouse and converts its customers; she wins Lord Lysimachus not by anything she says but by the nobility and breeding evident in any word that passes her lips. In Twine, Apollonius' daughter Tharsia is no less determined to preserve her chastity than is her Shakespearean counterpart, but the two part company in the means they employ to convert their customers and, ultimately, their masters' trade. Where Marina preaches, Tharsia shows a shrewder sense both of business and of theater.

The lord of the city, Athanagoras—the counterpart to Lysimachus—is her first customer; in the face of his desire she weeps, then offers to him neither her body nor a sermon nor even her speechless nobility, but rather the tale of her woeful adventures. She relates her part in the romance we have been reading, converting the desire of a man for a woman into the desire of an audience for a story, and with profitable results. In payment for the tale she tells, Athanagoras gives her twenty pieces of gold—twice the market value of her virginity. In leaving he encounters her next customer; when asked how he found her, he wryly replies, “Never of any better,” and then hides behind the door to watch and listen to the ensuing scene. Tharsia tells her new client of Athanagoras' generosity, and the man, Aportatus, offers her an even more inflated sum; she weeps, tells her story, and he too is satisfied. Upon leaving and discovering Athanagoras, Aportatus joins him outside the door—thus fulfilling the function for which he was named—to watch the scene played over, again and again. Tharsia and her story continue to appreciate in value, and the audience outside the room continues to grow.

What she converts the bawdyhouse into is a playhouse. Athanagoras fully understands what such a figure represents: he adopts Tharsia and removes her from the brothel to the “market place of the citie” where, with a broader audience and an expanded repertory, she will be able to “get store of money daily” (300). He becomes her sponsor, the equivalent of a patron or the owner of a theatrical company—or as Marx defined such a role, an entrepreneur who realizes the value of the songbird he has in his hands:

A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money, she is to that extent a wage-laborer or merchant. But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she becomes a productive worker, since she produces capital.¹⁷

It is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare, any less than Athanagoras, failed to realize what Tharsia represents. Not merely a figure born for the popular stage, she is a figure of the popular stage: she ruins her masters' trade not by driving them out of business but by converting a licensed yet illicit sexual transaction into the stage setting for a more theatrical form of exchange, creating a more profitable and inherently theatrical enterprise on the site of an incontinent but pervasive pastime.

Popular drama had been founded on an analogous translation of marginal pastimes into a new form and forum for theater. Popular playhouses like Shakespeare's had survived for years in the Liberties of London as profitable businesses, an enterprising form of theatricality dependent upon its close conjunction with other residual and emergent forms of cultural license. The particular conjunction that Tharsia achieves, that of a stage in the midst of a bawdyhouse, would in itself hardly have surprised Shakespeare's audience. According to contemporary accounts of spectators' activities in the popular theaters, performances took place in the midst of the theatrical equivalent to a bawdyhouse. The size of crowds in suburban theaters provided an anonymity which translated playgoing into an unrivaled opportunity for the less-than-aesthetic pursuits of sexual flirtation, seduction, assignation, and common prostitution. As Ann Jennalie Cook has recently argued, descriptions of “actes and bargaines of incontinencie” in the theaters are too pervasive to be entirely discounted.¹⁸ Even if they could be discredited, claims that playhouses were “the very markets of bawdry” were made so frequently as to guarantee that brothel and playhouse would be indissolubly linked in the cultural imagination, making the two virtually synonymous. The promise of sexual assignation was also heightened by such accounts; whether fulfilled or not, such a prospect swelled the ranks of the paying playgoers considerably, underwriting the financial stability of popular drama and making bawds silent partners of any company of players. Like Tharsia's customers, Shakespeare's audience was lured into the playhouse at least in part by the promise of illicit liaisons—an anticipation that, as Stephen Greenblatt has recently argued, the popular playhouse at once encouraged and transformed, displaced and incorporated into the erotic power and energy of the theater itself.¹⁹

Viewed in this light, the brothel scenes of Pericles bring the general anxiety over mercantile concerns into more specific focus; the play's unwillingness to represent the highly theatrical transaction between an actor and an audience, whether a prince before a populace or his daughter before prospective customers, marks an evasion of the economic and cultural roots of the popular stage itself. Elsewhere in Pericles, dramatic enactment is often preempted or supplanted by moral commentary posing as narrative; in the brothel scenes, the theatrical impetus that Tharsia turns to the profit of herself and her audience is suppressed in Marina's chaste performance. Theatricality itself—the capacity to submit oneself to another's desired fiction or compel another to submit to one's own, in a highly charged dissolution of the boundaries of identity—is displaced, divorced from the role Marina performs and relegated to the one she would have enacted, had she become the “creature of sale” that the bawd has in mind:

Pray you, come hither awhile. You have fortunes coming upon you. Mark me: you must seem to do that forcefully which you commit willingly; despise profit where you have most gain. To weep that you live as you do makes pity in your lovers: seldom but that pity begets you a good opinion, and that opinion a mere profit.

(IV. ii. 117ff.)

This is a speech to a fledgling player, replete with echoes from Shakespeare's corpus: Hamlet addressing the players, Polonius counselling Laertes, even a touch of Bottom worked in for good measure. Here, however, theatricality is reduced to mere role-playing in pursuit of profit. Playing and the bawdy “trade of merchandize,” closely associated in early modern culture and in Shakespearean representation of the past, have attained an equivalence that is no longer a source of theatrical energy but rather of an anxiety that marks a fundamental contradiction between Shakespearean romance, at least in this manifestation of it, and the cultural grounds of possibility for popular drama.

If the anxieties of the play over exchange and transactions of the marketplace and the theater are in any way relevant to the larger social and economic contradictions of the period, it is in the context of this narrowing-down of the theatrical. Theatricality was, of course, the mark of the player's profession, his business or enterprise; traditionally, it had also been what distinguished a player from his fellow social alchemist, the merchant. “By a mutual conversion of one into the other,” as Harrison complained, merchants and gentlemen actually changed places in the social hierarchy; players, by contrast, performed a deceptive imitation of such mobility, an apparent permutation of social categories that was at once ideologically powerful and a theatrical illusion. The theatricality that had formerly distinguished the player, however, was shifting ground in the period, undergoing what amounted to a cultural transvaluation.

In the broadened and “placeless market” of an expanding world economy, “impersonality and impersonation … suddenly thrust themselves forward as vexing issues.”²⁰ At the time when theatricality was being banished from the stage of Pericles, it was in the process of being appropriated by the marketplace. “Man in business,” as John Hall wrote, “is but a Theatricall person, and in a manner but personates himselfe … in his retired and hid actions, he pulls off his disguise and acts openly.”²¹ Displaced by history from the province of the stage to that of the marketplace, theatricality here suffers a radical reduction, becoming a mere impersonation that serves at once to enable and to mystify the pursuit of profit. Although the moral connotations of disguising oneself or one's motives have since continued to fluctuate, the theatrical has yet to escape from the narrow stage it came to occupy in the course of the seventeenth century—a narrow stage that has already become the confines of the theatrical in Pericles.

Hall's distinction between what a man does in business and what he does when retired or hid from public view also carries the seeds of a full and in many ways unprecedented dichotomy between the public and the private—a dichotomy around which the Enlightenment would articulate itself, within which Shakespeare's heterogeneous world could only occupy the no-man's-land of an excluded middle. As the theatrical and the mercantile were mutually displaced to fit the configurations of such a dichotomy, a new concept of the self or the person would arise. Hobbes' famous definition of the self as a persona stems from a discussion of social and other contracts, of man in the marketplace, and is elucidated by the necessary identification with the actor. “So that a person, is the same as an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another.”²² Behind Hobbes' effort to delineate the confused social and personal boundaries of a new age lies a rigid distinction between natural and artificial persons or personations, representations of oneself and another, which again could only exclude the middle ground formerly occupied by phenomena like the popular stage—by a theatricality that was at once less easily contained, more mobile, and more vertiginous.

It had been a certain capacity for a different form of the theatrical, for an intense submission to and exploration of alternative values and desires, that had made the popular stage remarkably receptive to the residual and emergent cultural phenomena which shared its place on the ideological horizon of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. To the extent that such a capacity is reduced or repressed in Pericles, the play represents not so much a turning point in Shakespeare's career as a concerted turning away from the cultural contexts and associations that had shaped his dramaturgy in the past. Speaking from the perspective of literary tradition, Howard Felperin suggests that Pericles “reveals Shakespeare reassessing the premises on which his art had always been based”;²³ from the standpoint of the present study Felperin's phrase is a felicitous one, especially if taken more literally than its author intended. The premises or grounds being reassessed include the place of the stage itself; in what it obscures or suppresses, Pericles reveals Shakespeare's systematic effort to dissociate his art from the marginal contexts and affiliations that had formerly served as the grounds of its possibility. As such, it is less a transitional work than an experiment never repeated, unsatisfying in its gaps and seams yet illuminating because of them, serving to demonstrate—for Shakespeare as for us—the crucial role played by the marginality of the popular stage and the critical resources it found available to it on the ideological threshold of its age.

IV

An experiment never repeated: unlike The Winter's Tale or The Tempest, Pericles represents a radical effort to dissociate the popular stage from its cultural contexts and theatrical grounds of possibility—an effort to imagine, in fact, that popular drama could be a purely aesthetic phenomenon, free from history and from historical determination. In later Shakespearean romance, the utopian impulse of the genre turns to the problematics and imaginary resolution of social and class divisions or to searching explorations of colonial ideology and the limits of patriarchal power and authority; here, utopian desire attempts to imagine a purely aesthetic realm governed by a purely aesthetic and not yet available figure, that of the author.

Gower introduces Pericles as a tale of universal significance, ancient but unaging, forever timely and uncontaminated by historical or cultural contexts:

From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man's infirmities,
To glad your ear, and please your eyes.
It hath been sung at festivals,
On ember-eves and holy-ales;
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives:
The purchase is to make men glorious,
Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius.
If you, born in these latter times,
When wit's more ripe, accept my rimes,
And that to hear 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. Chorus. 2-16)

Although choral prologues and interludes are not alien to Shakespearean dramaturgy, Gower is a unique figure. His is not the voice of history such as we encounter in Henry V but of history's occlusion or antithesis; not the voice of time, as in The Winter's Tale, but of a timeless authority. Gower also represents, of course, one of Shakespeare's sources: reincarnated on stage, he occupies the place of both author and authority and seeks to legitimize the play in the way a father or a monarch legitimizes a genealogy, by authorizing it in a rather full sense of the term.

Shakespeare had never before felt compelled to bring his authors or authorities on stage; that he does so here, in a romance structured around the genealogical entanglements and contaminations of authority, should at least give us pause. Although Gower claims to stand at the limits of theatrical representation—to stand “i' th' gaps to teach you / The stages of our story”—his role is far from an illuminating one. “The effect,” as Muriel Bradbrook writes, “is to offer a point of view which is not authoritative … but is to be scanned from a Jacobean perspective.”²⁴ Scanned from such a perspective, Gower in fact conceals as much as he reveals, especially where the genealogical entanglements of Shakespeare's sources are concerned. His presence as an authorial figure obscures the discomfiting significance of Twine's Painfull Adventures; presenting himself as an authoritative supplement to theatrical representation, he serves in fact as an antitheatrical agent, an embodiment of the play's effort to divorce itself from the cultural grounds of theatricality in Jacobean London. As such he is a proleptic figure, an anticipation not of later configurations of Shakespearean romance but of an emerging figure of the author that would eventually eclipse the popular stage and Shakespearean dramaturgy.

It would have seemed fatal, as Stephen Greenblatt has reflected, to be imitated by Shakespeare: “He possessed a limitless talent for entering into the consciousness of another, perceiving its deepest structures as a manipulable fiction, reinscribing it into his own narrative form.”²⁵ This is not to mystify Shakespeare as an author but rather to recognize that his corpus is grounded not in a univocal perspective but in a multiplicity and heterogeneity of voices, an incorporation and appropriation of a wide range of alternative and marginal perspectives. Shakespeare stands at the threshold or horizon of professional authorship and the modern construction of the author, but that horizon was already coming into view. Although Ben Jonson was one of Shakespeare's contemporaries not taken in by Gower's claims to an ageless authority, finding Pericles as “stale / as the shrieve's crusts,” Jonson is nonetheless one of Gower's descendants, at least in his efforts to carve out a literary and properly aesthetic realm for his plays. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have recently noted, the figure of the author promulgated in Jonson's publication of his plays is a figure who seeks, like Gower in Pericles, to displace drama from its marginal and theatrical conditions of production:

The “authorship” of [Jonson's] plays, indeed, was an act performed on and against the theatrical script, so as to efface its real conditions of production. The Workes which Jonson published in 1616 were the result of a labour whereby his plays appeared as literary texts, miraculously freed from the contagion of the marketplace.²⁶

It was an effort that would succeed fully only in retrospect, when the figure of the Jonsonian author would be appropriated by the Restoration stage to authorize and legitimize a more proper, and properly aesthetic, form of theater.

It is to Jonson, however, that we owe a final glimpse of the marginal situation of the popular stage, the “licentious liberties” it occupied and appropriated to its own heterogeneous ends. Some things come into clearest view as they are about to disappear from the stage of history, and it is such a view of the popular stage that Jonson provides in Bartholomew Fair. Performed on the popular stage, the action of the play is also set on the grounds of that stage, in the Liberties outside the city walls and the marketplace and fairgrounds of Smithfield. The place of the stage is brought on stage, in what is presented as an ironic reification of a passing phase of history. The Stage-Keeper of the Induction is an anachronism, a figure of the theatrical past who has performed his duties since the days of Tarlton but is soon supplanted by a Scrivener who announces a new social contract for theater, and a new theatrical era. What we are about to see will not be a mere successor to the theatrical past, however; it will also be a demystification of that past, particularly of the marginal contexts of Shakespearean romance. The author of Bartholomew Fair, according to the Scrivener, can only present things as they are:

If there be never a servant-monster i' the Fair, who can help it? he says; nor a nest of antics? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his head with other men's heels.

(“The Induction on the Stage,” 128-32)²⁷

Dryden praised Jonson for making “an excellent lazar of the fair”;²⁸ as a figure for the popular stage, Jonson's fair also has a larger historical resonance. Reducing the ideological range and license of popular drama to its sheerly material marginality, Jonson recalls something of the history of that marginality; he collapses popular drama into its prehistory, making a lazar not only of the fair but of the popular stage as well.

Jonson does not seem to have agreed with Dryden concerning his success: he did not include Bartholomew Fair in his Workes of 1616, nor was it published with Jonson's corpus until after his death. Even as an ironic and parodic review of the place of the popular stage, the play gives sufficient range and license to the enormities of the Liberties that the imprimatur of the author could not fully purge the taint of the stage. The vitality of Bartholomew Fair makes it a less radical effort to divorce popular drama from its cultural grounds than Shakespeare's effort in Pericles, but taken together the two serve to register the shift that was taking place in the cultural landscape of the period, and to clarify the role that the rise of the author would play in the impending eclipse of Jacobean popular drama. And if Pericles was an experiment never repeated by Shakespeare, it was also an experiment written for and performed on the popular stage, and its literary fortunes consequently testify to the limits of any work that seeks to obscure or escape its historical conditions of possibility. Gower's claims to universal significance were belied not only by Jonson but also by subsequent literary history; his perspective nonetheless anticipates predominant views in this century of the motives and nature of Shakespearean romance. Pericles stands as an unwitting but necessary qualification to such idealizing tendencies, a reminder that a work of art achieves such an aura of ahistorical significance not because it has successfully transcended or risen above the cultural conditions of its production and reception, but rather because it has remained inextricably bound to them and has engaged them fully: contained and to an extent determined by its specific cultural context, and only to that extent able to clarify, question, or transform the bonds and boundaries of the culture that produced it.

Notes

1. Cited by Marchette Chute, Shakespeare of London (New York: Dutton, 1949), p. 289.

2. Of the plays presented in theaters within the city through 1613, 85 percent were comedies and 15 percent tragedies; in the public playhouses, 49 percent were comedies, 30 percent tragedies, and 21 percent histories. Of the comedies that survive from the boys' companies, the overwhelming majority are satiric. For the figures and further discussion, see Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 85ff.

3. Ibid., esp. pp. 3-119.

4. The extreme distinction between a popular and an elite audience has frequently and persuasively been challenged, most recently by Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

   The use of “private” to describe theaters like Blackfriars is in itself misleading insofar as it suggests a socially uniform audience with preestablished tastes and expectations. Stephen Orgel argues that the only theater “private” in this sense was the one found at Court. “The public playhouse [within or without the city] is built by producers and theatrical entrepreneurs, the directors of theatrical companies, and its audience is their creation. The public theater will be successful only to the extent that individual citizens, potential spectators, are willing to compose themselves into that audience the producers have imagined. But private theaters [such as at Court] are the creation of their audiences, and are often designed not only for a particular group but for a particular production or occasion” (The Illusion of Power, p. 6).

5. Harold Priestley, London: The Years of Change (London: Frederick Muller, 1966), pp. 48ff.

6. C. L. Barber, “‘Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 64.

7. Presumed to originate in a lost Greek version written no later than the third century a.d., the Apollonius of Tyre story belongs to a subgenre sometimes characterized as Greek or Mediterranean romance. For a discussion, see Samuel L. Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), and Arthur Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); on Shakespeare's romances and their critical fortunes, see F. David Hoeniger, “Shakespeare's Romances Since 1958: A Retrospect,” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976): 1-10.

8. The edition of Twine used, and all page references, are from W. C. Hazlitt, Shakespeare's Library (London, 1875).

9. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. I. Cunningham (New York: Norton, 1967).

10. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 192.

11. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 148.

12. Cited by Raymond de Roover, “The Scholastic Attitude toward Trade and Entrepreneurship,” in Capitalism and the Reformation, ed. M. J. Kitch (London: Longman, 1969), p. 95.

13. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

14. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. G. Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 115.

15. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), G7v.

16. Cited by Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing,” p. 51.

17. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:1044.

18. Ann Jennalie Cook, “‘Bargaines of Incontinencie’: Bawdy Behavior in the Playhouses,” Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 271-90.

19. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 30-52.

20. Agnew, “The Theshold of Exchange,” p. 112.

21. John Hall, The Advancement of Learning, ed. A. K. Croston (Liverpool: University Press, 1953), p. 37.

22. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 217.

23. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 173.

24. Bradbrook, The Common Monument, p. 186.

25. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 252.

26. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, p. 75.

27. Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. A. Horsman (London: Methuen, 1960).

28. Cited by Stallybrass and White, Transgression, p. 72.