[In the following essay, Saenger argues for the dramatic integrity of Pericles, insisting that the “flaws” are not really flaws, but rather Shakespeare's ingenious manipulation of the burlesque genre.]

Pericles has always been a play which is equally enthralling and perplexing. Some perplexity certainly comes from its status as a poorly transmitted collaboration. However, in this reading I explore the thesis that the play makes dramaturgical sense, partly because of its original perplexity. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare had treated the Apollonius story with nuanced irony, and in all likelihood, he was presented with an incomplete play on the same subject in 1607. Once again, he gave the melodramatic story an ironic tone, experimenting freely on his source. Shakespeare shows as much free-ranging, collaborative playfulness as the Rose playwrights who wrote the Huntingdon plays, but he also shows some of the pathos of tragedy. This zestful complexity of tone is heavily dependent on its contemporary dramatic context, as well as the resources of a theater to complicate representation.¹ This may explain why modern readers find it hard to understand why Pericles was so popular in the seventeenth century.² The problem is that we are modern and that we are readers.

Until recently, Pericles was not thought to merit serious attention. The suspicion of multiple authorship, now confirmed by computer analyses, for some time allowed it to be dismissed.³ Recently, individual elements of the play—such as Gower—have acquired more interest and increasingly critics have conceded multiple authorship and yet shown thematic structure to hold the entire play together.⁴ Of course, Shakespeare was never the “sole author” of anything; he shaped, altered and reframed sources, often very mediocre ones. My working assumption is that he received some parts of a clumsy play on Apollonius and used poor writing for dramatic utility, adding to it mainly burlesque but then, first in the storm scene and then in Marina's recognition scene, moments of keen pathos. Like Titus Andronicus, Pericles is a rich experiment of mixed success. Shakespeare's first romance, like his first tragedy, is an exploration of tone that paves the way for his subsequent masterpieces of the genre. This reading is essentially the argument of F. David Hoeniger's important essay,⁵ But whereas Hoeniger finds an analogue in Chaucer,⁶ I find ironic metatheatrical romance much closer to Shakespeare's milieu.

“Believability” is a pivotal term. The point is not verisimilitude; Renaissance drama was far from considering that as an option. Rather, the issue is that the audience comes prepared to embrace certain conventions, among them the temporary assumption that the characters and their situations are real. Usually, the audience is thinking in the terms of the play rather than in the terms of the theater—they see Richard III rather than Richard Burbage, the forest rather than a stage, and so on. The play's ability to engender and protect this set of assumptions will be called “believability.” “Burlesque” is another key word. Here it is taken to refer to a mode rather than a genre. “Burlesque” functions by showing a recognizable set of conventions that constitute a genre and taking them, meticulously, too far.⁷ A humorous gap is created between the burlesque and its object (here, romance), and simultaneously, it is implied that a similar gap exists between the object genre and reality. Burlesque makes itself ridiculous, but not without rendering its target equally absurd.⁸ As Lee Bliss suggests,

The emphasis on artificiality … enables [the dramatist] to present a double critique—both of the genre he has placed before us and of his own play—and to offer a version that incorporates the conventions of its models while it also, in breaking them, becomes something new.⁹

Romance is exceptionally vulnerable to such parody; it is already fantastical, contrived and laden with antiquated conventions. The genre provides a wide target.

In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare uses Gower's story of Apollonius (renamed Aegeon) to frame a version of Plautus's farcical Menaechmi. Brian Gibbons has called Aegeon's narrative “a studious compendium of romance motifs, each of which is taken to an extreme” and a subtle, but unmistakable “straight-faced burlesque of romance.”¹⁰ Farce and romance have a great deal in common; both have shallow characters, episodic and extravagant plots, and both are manipulated by the conspicuous and arbitrary hand of the author. Indeed Shakespeare employs the burlesque technique of generic exaggeration by taking Plautus's device of a pair of twins and creating another pair. Even The Menaechmi can be taken further into absurdity, and this sophisticated layering of absurdity makes The Comedy of Errors more than a simple farce.¹¹ Shakespeare is as disinclined to write in a single genre as he is to write a simple sentence.

Pericles and The Comedy of Errors use a family's separation to create a huge matrix for conflict and interaction of characters before a final, tidy resolution in the family's reunion. The earlier comedy has a frantically tight plot while the later play has a wildly episodic one. This must go hand in hand with threatening the credibility of the characters onstage. The audience's attention is not being held with emotional depth, so to maintain its energy, there is only one solution—more must happen. The Comedy of Errors and Pericles both use multiple shipwrecks or accidental crossings of characters, at least one of which sends a character to Ephesus, famous for its magic, sorcery, and strangeness.¹² In the performance of magic tricks, as in these plays, very strange things are brought to pass, and they are enjoyed, but never fully believed.

“Shallowness” in character is not merely the lack of meditative profundity, but the easy conformity to a simple character type. Both The Comedy of Errors and Pericles are filled with “type” characters, who are ironically comic. Adriana is the jealous wife, and Dionyza is the wicked queen. Luciana and Marina are pure virgins with rhetorically perfect set speeches, and Helicanus is identified in the play as “a figure of truth, of faith, of loyalty” (Epilogue, 8, emphasis mine).¹³ It is telling that Helicanus is referred to as a “figure” rather than as a “man,” which would fit the meter better. When Pericles threatens Helicanus, he responds,

HELICANUS:
I have ground the axe myself; [he bows]
Do you but strike the blow.
PERICLES:
                                                                                                              Rise, prithee, rise;
Sit down; thou art no flatterer.

(1.2.58-60)

In another play Helicanus's humility would be taken as irony by Pericles. Here, although absurd, he is sincere. As a true subject, he offers his head with the slightest provocation. The irony is irrepressible, but it lies in the scene as a whole, and is perceived only by the audience.

To identify the type to which Pericles belongs, a comparison with his analogue Aegeon is revealing. They perform similar roles in the plays: They are the necessary ballasts of comedy. The personalities of both are conformed to their suffering—compare Aegeon's “… death, / Which though myself would gladly have embraced” (1.1.69-70) with Pericles' “Here to have death in peace is all the grace [Pericles will] crave” (2.1.11). Both suffer loss upon loss, and all they can do is wander by sea, which, until the last act, only causes them more suffering. They are disaster-prone and as deferential as Helicanus; as Pericles says, “Wind, rain and thunder … I, as fits my nature, do obey you” (2.1.2-4).

An examination of 2.5 suggests such shallowness is both intentional and sophisticated. Pericles' character is again defined as comically reticent. He is so accustomed to misfortune that upon Simonides' proof of Thaisa's love, he begs mercy:

O, seek not to entrap me, gracious lord,
A stranger and distressed gentleman,
That never aim'd so high to love your daughter,
But bent all offices to honour her.

(2.5.45-48)

Simonides is bent on arranging their marriage, but neither his frankness nor his daughter's admission of love will convince Pericles that good fortune might be his. Simonides responds to this dilemma by maneuvering outside the basic scene. He plays the “blocking father” character, often reminding the audience of his real intentions. Prospero performs the same role in his manipulation of the young Miranda and Ferdinand, also hurling the absurd charge of “traitor” at the young man wooing his daughter (Tmp. 1.2.470, Per. 2.5.55). The dialogue has the same farcical momentum as The Comedy of Errors, or parts of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

PERICLES:
Then, as you are as virtuous as fair,
Resolve your angry father, if my tongue
Did e'er solicit, or my hand subscribe
To any syllable that made love to you.
THAISA:
Why, sir, say if you had, who takes offence
At that would make me glad?
SIMONIDES:
Yea, mistress, are you so peremptory?
Aside. I am glad on't with all my heart.—
… Will you, not having my consent.

(2.5.66-75, emphasis mine)

The “blocking father” device is here mocked within the scene, which serves to draw humor from Pericles' melodrama but also to show the audience how to value and enjoy that melodrama. The fact that the scene is shallow does not bother Simonides; it is just another dimension, in fact one that he relishes. Through his asides, Simonides stands simultaneously inside and outside of the scene, like Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (see below). The audience, which by definition stands outside the scene, can thus identify with Simonides. If it follows Simonides' example, it has a condescending perspective on the scene combined with an active interest in it. While the convention of belief in the characters as real people is threatened, the audience is nonetheless given a position from which to enjoy the proceedings.

The extreme example of this is 4.5. The pure virgin Marina inspires a scene that cannot be taken seriously. Offstage, two men go to the brothel asking for a prostitute and are given Marina instead. Rather than being corrupted by their lust, Marina purifies them. They leave, transformed:

GENTLEMAN 1:
Did you ever hear the like?
GENTLEMAN 2:
No, nor never shall do in such a place as this, she being once gone.
GENTLEMAN 1:
But to have divinity preach'd there! did you ever dream of such a thing?
GENTLEMAN 2:
No, no. Come I am for no more bawdy-houses. Shall's go hear the vestals sing?
GENTLEMAN 1:
I'll do anything now that is virtuous; but I am out of the road of rutting for ever.

This is one of the shortest scenes in Shakespeare. The point is a transformation, and to stretch it to the extent that a customer at a brothel says “Shall's go hear the vestals sing?” is an absurdly comic distension of the romance topos of the power of a pure virgin, as “vestals” reminds us. Burlesque (here parody, to be specific) thrives on such treatment of a recognizable, specific motif of romance.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle is pivotal. Beaumont's play was probably first performed in 1606 by the Children of Blackfriars, an ideal time to influence Pericles, which is usually dated 1607-1608.¹⁴ There is no need to quote an example of audience interaction with theatrical fiction in The Knight; there is little else. In The Knight, the progress of a knight errant is used as a precarious ballast for a wild theatrical journey, much like the wandering Pericles, who is the only constant in an episodic plot. The fragility of the fiction in The Knight is underlined by the fact that the protagonist comes out of the audience, as the Citizen and his Wife are continually reminding us. The shattering of belief that this causes is uncontainable; the citizen and his wife may pass for disruptive audience members for their first few lines, but it rapidly becomes clear that they are part of the cast (indeed the fact that boys were playing both man and wife may have given them away straight off). As M. T. Jones-Davies writes, “Ralph metamorphosed into an actor is for his spectators an equivocal figure pertaining to a double world, at once true and false.”¹⁵ He is transparently an actor-turned-audience-member-turned-actor, or put simply, a sustained hybrid of the two. As Stephen Booth has argued, “a prime fact of—and joy of—drama [is] perception of the degree of distance between the person performing and the person performed.”¹⁶ This interstice, normally in the background, takes center stage in The Knight; it is a gap that lies between burlesque and reality, and it underlines and reasserts the gaps between burlesque and romance and between romance and reality. Theater here, more than usual, is the structure of gaps.

Influence from The Knight to Pericles can be found in specific devices as well as tone. The entrance of the knights in 2.2 of Pericles provides a typical scene of a romance, ripe for satire. Indeed the point is that it is typical; it does not actually appear in the principle source, Confessio Amantis, but is probably borrowed from Sidney's New Arcadia. The second knight's motto is “In Spanish: ‘Pue Per doleera kee per forsa’” (Q 2.2.27). This has been radically emended in most editions and strained to conform to some known romance language. Is it not possible that it is meant to be a joke of mangled confusion, the Prince of Macedon's attempt at some language of southern Europe? In another burlesque romance which is introduced as the tale of an onstage presenter, Peele's The Old Wive's Tale (1595), two men compete for one woman with the following dialogue:

HUANEBANGO:
If the lady be so fair as she is said to be, she is mine, she is mine! Meus, mea, meum, in contemptum omnium grammaticorum.
COREBUS:
O falsum Latinum!
The fair maid is minum. …

(271-274)¹⁷

Like the Latin lesson in Merry Wives of Windsor or Katherine's English lesson in Henry V, a foreign tongue is the butt of a joke in Pericles as well. That is, Thaisa may be reading a questionable text with a raised eyebrow. Another of the suitors, who is there to prove his masculine prowess, goes by the motto “Qui me alit, me extinguit” [“That which lights me, extinguishes me”] (2.2.33), along with a torch burning upside down, which would stifle itself in its own wax. This is not only an absurdly unmanly motto and device, the precise opposite of the machistic heraldry typical of romance, but it is also a direct allusion to the title The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and the bathetic, bawdy humor therein contained.

It is also essential to such a project that the audience knows more than the characters onstage, allowing entire scenes to be ironic. The audience's position is removed, more subject to pity or laughter than empathy. The audience is shown Thaisa's revival in 3.2, long before she is reunited with Pericles. His catastrophic grief is thus inevitably faintly ridiculous. Gower must come forth and ask the audience to “Let Pericles believe his daughter's dead” (4.4.46). Similarly, in The Comedy of Errors, the audience becomes excessively aware of the fact that there are twins in Ephesus. When the Duke finally figures this out and shares his information with the other characters (5.1.357-362), it is more comical than redemptive; Aegeon's weighty salvation is felt, yet the ending marches on. In Pericles, the audience's preknowledge of Thaisa's resurrection undermines its ability to experience Pericles' and Thaisa's deep joy upon reuniting. This technique is reversed in The Winter's Tale. To crystallize the progression between Pericles and The Winter's Tale, in the latter play the audience finds out that Hermione is alive in the precise moments Leontes does, which brings the audience much closer to the redemption that Leontes feels.

There are enough similarities between The Winter's Tale and Pericles to make a contrast meaningful. The central kings, Leontes and Pericles, dominate the first three acts. Their wives are thought dead, as are their daughters, named Perdita and Marina for the conditions of their births. The plays then follow the daughters, whose inherent royal grace and purity saves them from becoming a peasant. In each play the king is redeemed by a reunion with his daughter, then with his wife, who has been saved by a character's access to the supernatural. Finally, the daughter's obstacles to marriage are gone in the resolution. Although these elements of plot are very similar, the staging of these plays differs enough to suggest a different dramaturgical goal:

Both plays contain belief-straining elements, but in The Winter's Tale, burlesque is systematically removed. Like Beaumont, Shakespeare moved toward a more serious treatment of romance.

The most obvious exaggeration in Pericles is the six episodic locales, a dizzying number even for a Renaissance romance play. The entire intrigue of Pericles' love for the daughter and the incest of the king is raised and then almost completely abandoned. In many Shakespearean plays, the first scene creates a false impression of the succeeding play, but this is a comic exaggeration of this technique. Pericles simply leaves, and aside from giving a reason for his travels, Antioch, and certainly Antiochus's daughter, are barely heard from again. The five succeeding settings compound the absurdity. In The Winter's Tale, the event of falling in love at first sight, a topos of romantic fiction, is hidden. That event has happened between Leontes and Hermione, and between Perdita and Florizel, but both events are referred to in the play's imagination of prior time, unassailable by doubt. On the other hand, Pericles catches Thaisa's eye while venturing to prove himself in romantic chivalry like Orlando in As You Like It, another play which deconstructs the conventions of romance.

Pericles' flight from Antioch is also a device common to light comedy. As in A Midsummer Night's Dream, an imminently fatal dilemma is set out first. Then a central character flees to “that place the sharp Athenian law / Cannot pursue us” (MND 1.1.162-163), or from Antiochus, “whose arm seems far too short to hit me here” (Per. 1.2.9). In The Winter's Tale, a profound element of darkness—Leontes' jealousy—is also introduced early and causes others to flee. But the play remains with the darkness, not rejoining the people who left until Act 4. In The Winter's Tale, it is the hero who is the source of the darkness. The same notion of remove from the reach of an evil arm is inverted. Leontes says, “[T]he harlot king / Is quite beyond mine arm … But she / I can hook to me” (2.3.4-7). The audience is counselled mainly by the dangerous king. Pericles' innocence in the face of suffering is much like that of Aegeon or Antipholus of Ephesus. Leontes' guilt is more typical of the morally tainted central characters of most Shakespearean tragedies, and so is the atmosphere he creates. And the fact that the evil is jealousy is important; all of Shakespeare's jealous men (Ford, Claudio, Othello, Posthumus, and Leontes) are incorrect, and thus lend themselves to a more subtle play of doubt and belief through the language of suspicion than the guilty Antiochus standing on the stage. The handkerchief that drives Othello mad is as thin as the precarious web of verbal structure and rusty swords upon which Shakespeare builds his ephemeral dramaturgy; that is the point of its thinness. If Leontes' suspicion is nothing, then “the world and all that's in't is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing” (1.2.293). Shakespearean jealousy is not so much sexual as it is metatheatrical, and in The Winter's Tale, the effect of this metatheatrical gesture is to close off the same portals of disbelief that are so deliberately opened in Pericles.

Many of the common plot elements of Pericles and The Winter's Tale are staged very differently. In every case, the events in Pericles are associated with a higher degree of specificity, and they are more likely to take place on stage. The rescues of Thaisa and Hermione from death are critical events in these two plays. Beyond the previously noted difference in the timing of the event, there are critical differences in the staging of the resurrection. The restoration of Hermione is ceremonial, culminating in Paulina's injunction of awe, “It is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.102-103); we are told to believe in the drama with faith, a word borrowed from a different sort of ceremonial congregation. In sharp contrast, Thaisa is revived onstage, without ritual. Cerimon, upon receiving the dead Thaisa, says,

                                                                                                                        They were too rough
That threw her in the sea. Make a fire within:
Fetch hither all my boxes in my closet.
Death may usurp on nature many hours,
And yet the fire of life kindle again
The o'erpressed spirits. I heard of an Egyptian
That had nine hours lien dead,
Who was by good appliance recovered.

(3.2.81-88)

It is not a very serious case of death. The very specificity of “boxes in the closet,” “an Egyptian,” and “nine hours” is antithetical to the thaumaturgy of Paulina's ceremony; Cerimon is a medical professional. With a similar contrast, Perdita is a poor but dignified shepherdess whereas Marina's indignities are sharp and realistic, putting the romance figure of the pure virgin in a disease-ridden whorehouse, thus showing the gaps that constitute burlesque.¹⁹

Perhaps the most obvious and ingenious burlesque element in Pericles is the character of the chorus, the source author Gower.²⁰ He consistently and cunningly subverts the believability of the play. He does so partly because there was a real John Gower, who was in fact the translator of the principal source text Confessio Amantis (well known to Shakespeare's audience). A prologue and epilogue are conventional, but for an “author” to enter and exit eight times is not to round off a tale but to perforate it. For a precedent, we must not look to the Chorus of Henry V, but rather to the character of Skelton from the highly popular The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (1598).²¹ Like Gower, Skelton is an archaic, interpolating author who mediates with humorous ironic color between the audience and a romance that they (in the words of Orlando) “sometimes do believe and sometimes do not” (AYL 5.4.3). Skelton is an onstage character who claims to be the author of a play about Robin Hood, which he is “rehearsing” to perform before Henry VIII. When his actors “rehearse,” of course, it is the performance of the main play itself. So instead of simply going to a theater to see the past, we see a rehearsal (in the past) of a dramatic fiction located in previous time. Like Gower, Skelton steps in to explain and to lead dumb shows. After one narrated dumb show in The Downfall, Skelton says that “all shall see” the story. One “actor,” Sir John Eltham (apparently unsure if he is “in character” within the Robin Hood play or not), looks out at the gallery of the Rose, sees nothing, and asks, “Which all, good Skelton?” Skelton points again and says, “Why, all these lookers on: / Whom if wee please, the king will sure be pleas'd.”²² Presumably Eltham suddenly sees us, and we are not subjects of Elizabeth but rather of Henry VIII. This sort of metatheatrical burlesque of romance, then, was already a proven success. In his landmark edition of Pericles, F. D. Hoeniger finds two plays with chorus figures from 1607, Barnabe Barnes's The Divil's Charter and The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, but they are earnest traditional dramatic assistants, not mischievous meta-dramatists like Skelton.²³ It may be that when Wilkins wrote Ur-Pericles he intended an ordinary chorus figure like that of The Travailes. While energizing this play with burlesque, Shakespeare makes Gower both satirized and satirizing.

The subject of Gower's quaint, pseudo-Middle English archaisms is now a familiar element of Pericles criticism.²⁴ Like the dimeter couplets of the stage Skelton, these devices emphasize the musty origin of the text being staged. And the archaisms do not help us believe that this is the real poet; they rather mock the awkwardness of making a dead author appear. King Lear makes no allusions to the English of his time, so we temporarily take him to be alive. Under the pretense of clumsiness, Gower goes on to undermine the most basic conventions of the theater—that the time of a journey is elided, giving the audience only scenes before leaving and upon arrival; he says, “That he can hither come so soon, / Is by your fancy's thankful doom” (5.2.19-20). He points out the convention that all characters in the ancient eastern Mediterranean speak English—“We commit no crime / To use one language in each several clime / Where our scenes seems to live” (4.4.5-7, emphasis mine). These conventions of representation are so fundamental as to pass unnoticed by any audience. Shakespeare apologizes to Sidney for not observing the unities, but also apologizes for not staging his drama in Greek, Akkadian, and Phoenician. This burlesque is sophisticated indeed.

Gower complicates his position vis à vis the play. On the one hand, he interjects “I tell you what mine authors say” (1.Chorus.20), and on the other hand says “I nill relate, action may / Conveniently the rest convey” (3.Chorus.55-56). During one Chorus, Pericles enters, causing Gower to cut himself off in deference to a dramatization of “the text”: “What shall be next, / Pardon old Gower—this ‘longs the text” (2.Chorus.39-40).²⁵ Gower alludes to older authors and then underwrites and undermines the actors' performance of the text. Source ancestry is staged; as Richard Hillman writes, Gower is “not merely an unusually sophisticated choric function, but the most sustained literary allusion to be found in Shakespeare.”²⁶ After the third dumb show, when Pericles “discovers” his daughter's death, Gower comments, “See how belief may suffer by foul show! / This borrowed passion stands for true-ow'd woe” (4.4.23-24). On one level, Gower refers to Cleon and Dionyza's hypocrisy, but the comment also insults the credibility of the archaic dumb show. In the stage directions just before Gower's remark, it is Pericles who “in a mighty passion departs.” In a stylized, silent scream, the actor performing, or in Shakespearean idiom, standing for, Pericles has just feigned a mighty passion. No reference to acting in Shakespeare is without a metatheatrical resonance.

If Pericles is not wholly ironic, it is because romance, despite all temptations for burlesque, always retains the seeds of emotional impact. In The Comedy of Errors, the bewildering locale of Ephesus is the only setting; in Pericles, it is one of many, albeit an important one. Whereas in The Comedy of Errors, Aegeon is simply happy to be saved and reunited with his family, the reunion scene of Pericles and Marina suddenly becomes poignant. Pericles first says, “O, I am mocked, / And thou by some incensed god sent hither / To make the world to laugh at me” (5.1.142-144). Pericles and Marina are isolated onstage; the only “world” to which he could refer is the audience (the Globe). Indeed he has been mocked and laughed at. But this irony is poignant in part because he is finally protesting such treatment, and in part because, here, he is wrong—it is Marina. Until now, credulous characters embraced absurd fictions. Pathos is suddenly created as that is inverted; the audience sees the battered hero doubt “the truth.” The irony had left the audience wanting to exclaim “This is false!”; now irony makes them want to exclaim the contrary. Pericles launches into passionate poetry:

O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir!
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither.

(5.1.190-194)

The established character is intact. The long-suffering Pericles puts the pleasure of reunion in the image of drowning in a raging sea and asks for relief in the way of sharper pain. But there is depth of character here, best seen in the direct simplicity of “O, come hither.” He has been so humble and deferential as not to dare ask for anything good, often taking good things to be bad. When he finally asks for something, it is no more than to embrace his daughter. Thus an emotion is raised that is foreign to the levity of burlesque—redemption. Indeed, in the tournament scene which so mocks romance, Pericles' himself is allowed some dignity. His motto is “In hac spe vivo” [“In this hope I live”] (2.2.44).²⁷

Shakespeare often uses surprising changes of tone, as when Bottom qua Pyramus suddenly achieves pathos in his “death scene” amidst a very obvious burlesque of love tragedy. In its manipulation of tone and metatheatricality, Pericles is both more sophisticated and more coherent than critics have previously assumed. Many of its “flaws” work in the theater because they are not flaws at all but rather part of a careful use of the burlesque mode. In The Winter's Tale, we can see Shakespeare making use of Pericles, taking a similar story and giving it a treatment that is more consistently believable. But The Winter's Tale retains traces of burlesque (like the hyper-stylized narration of the Gentlemen in 5.2) and it ends hinging on the belief in an antiquated, indeed Ovidian, image—the awakening of a statue. However much Ovid inspires Shakespeare's imagery, Ovid's transformations would seem entirely unstageable, even more so than the conventions of romance; they are the sort of thing one can only refer to. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare claims the same territory on the margins of believability as he does in Pericles, with a different generic balance. Romance is fantastical, but the theater is founded on the seductive belief in obvious fictions. If a romance could be played on the thoroughly self-conscious Jacobean stage and even momentarily be believed, that would be a miracle surpassing the feats of any pure virgin; it would be a moment of the theater absolute.

Notes

1. This reading first sprung from a production of Pericles that I saw at Shakespeare at Winedale, led by Professor James Ayres of the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 1992. This was the only production I have seen that neither pushed the play toward farce nor toward stilted seriousness, and the result was a subtle burlesque.

2. See The Arden Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (Cambridge, MA: Methuen, 1963), lxv-lxvii.

3. Most research has concluded George Wilkins to be the principle author of the first two acts, and Shakespeare of the latter three. M. W. A. Smith provides a good summary of these efforts in “A Note on the Authorship of Pericles,” Computers and the Humanities 24 (1990), 195-300.

4. See, for example, Elene Glazov-Corrigan, “The New Function of Language in Shakespeare's Pericles: Oath versus ‘Holy word’,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991), 131-140.

5. F. D. Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), 461-479. Hoeniger writes that in parts of Pericles, “the effect may well be intentionally burlesque … though of course not so much that [the audience] would miss the tale's real enchantment and moving moments” (474).

6. He makes a very suggestive comparison with Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee. For the idea of the Chaucer comparison Hoeniger credits Professor Judith Kennedy (476). Assuming that Beaumont read Chaucer, Sir Thopas may even have provided a prototype for a tale beginning, being interrupted, and changed into another amidst a burlesque mode.

7. The best recent account of the parody of romance by Wim Tigges, “Romance and Parody,” Companion to Middle English Romance, ed. H. Aetsen and A. A. MacDonald (Amsterdam: Vu U.P., 1990), 129-151. Tigges begins with a very useful discussion of the various terms of parody, burlesque and pastiche, words that have proven extraordinarily difficult to define. Tigges shows that the roots of parody go back into Middle English romance. Gradually the realities of daily life drifted away from the world of romance (if they were ever close), providing increasing room for parody to operate. Tigges's study logically culminates with The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Also useful is N. F. Blake, The English Language in Mediaeval Literature (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), 116 ff.

8. This definition is adapted from that of M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 17-18.

9. Lee Bliss, “Pastiche, Burlesque, Tragicomedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1990), 242. Bliss is speaking of Marston's use of parody at the approximate time of Pericles.

10. Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 205. Gibbons goes on to point out that William Rossky has made this argument on what is usually regarded as Shakespeare's most embarrassing trial run in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Burlesque,” English Literary Renaissance (1982), 210-219.

11. Patricia Parker has recently illuminated the layering of biblical echoes in the play, which further enrich the combination of the serious and the ridiculous (Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 56-82).

12. This connotation, initially biblical, is reinforced by Shakespeare. See The Arden Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (New York: Routledge, 1988), xlvi-xlvii.

13. All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), unless otherwise noted.

14. This dating is generally, if tentatively, given by editors. For example, Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 11.

15. M. T. Jones-Davies, “‘The Players … Will Tell All,’ or the Actor's Role in Renaissance Drama,” Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, ed. K. Muir et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 79.

16. Stephen Booth, “The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 482.

17. Quoted from The New Mermaids Old Wife's Tale, ed. Charles Whitworth (New York: Norton, 1996).

18. Simonides's death is reported, but the reaction onstage only accentuates the difference from The Winter's Tale. The “grief” is captured in one trite line: “The heavens make a star of him” (5.3.79).

19. Shakespeare is playing a delicate dramaturgical game here. The whorehouse is as realistic as one might find near the Globe, and thus the intended contrast with the fairy-tale atmosphere of romance is created. At the same time, Bawd and Boult are comically portrayed, thus removing the edge of danger of Marina.

20. In addition to Hoeniger, see Richard Paul Knowles, “‘Wishes Fall Out as They're Will'd’: Artist, Audience, and Pericles's Gower,” English Studies in Canada 9 (1983), 14-24.

21. The most interesting treatment of the Skelton character has been by Paul Dean, “Forms of Time: Some Elizabethan Two-Part History Plays,” Renaissance Studies 4 (1990), 410-430. Dean addresses the hybridity of romance and chronicle modes of “history.” This is especially apposite to Shakespeare, since Cymbeline, like the Huntingdon plays, is a romance/chronicle of English myth/history. The fact that The Downfall made an impression on Shakespeare is evidenced by As You Like It, written shortly after Chettle and Munday's play, which shows many signs of following their example of a jovial outlaw “court” in exile.

22. The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, ed. John Meagher, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), ll. 109-111.

23. Arden Pericles, xxi-xxiii. The choruses are Guicciardine in The Divil's Charter, who importantly is a source author, and Fame in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, both printed in 1607.

24. For instance, Hoeniger, 468.

25. For this punctuation, I rely upon Hoeniger's edition, which glosses “long's,” as “belongs to.” The Riverside editor, Hallett Smith, preserves the Quarto's punctuation, “longs” and explains that Gower means “the text of my speech is this long and no longer.” Either way, the reference is metatextual, but “text” seems far more likely to refer to the play proper, which Gower wrote, and so would naturally see as a text.

26. Richard Hillman, “Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 428.

27. Alan Young, in “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 454, points out that Shakespeare seems to follow the example of Pyrocles from Sidney's revised Arcadia in Pericles' entrance, except for his motto, which emphasizes that the motto was deliberately chosen.