SOURCE: Hanna, Sara. “Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles.” Upstart Crow 11 (1991): 92-116.

[In the following excerpt, Hanna traces Pericles's spiritual evolution in terms of his increasing awareness of good and evil and his eventual understanding of what may be gained by patience and perseverance. She finds in the play a coherent system of emblems and spectacles developed from Christian and biblical sources that mark the hero's progress from darkness to light.]

Vision is an especially complex subject in Pericles, very closely bound up with the play's medieval dimension. To some extent the very heroism of Pericles can be defined through the progress of his vision. Pericles appears as a chivalric hero, a young knight on a quest. While he is much more than an allegorical figure, we may see him in the medieval and Spenserian tradition as a knight of patience who must learn the virtue in question through severe trials.¹ Scholars have associated him with the Everyman protagonist of the morality plays and with the trials, sufferings, and miraculous recoveries of saints in legends and miracle plays. Influence from the medieval religious plays also appears in the parabolic qualities of language and events throughout the play and in the overall Christian scheme of patient suffering leading to ultimate spiritual reconciliation.² Whether we see Pericles as knight, Everyman, or saint, his adventures present life as a spiritual journey; and at important stages of development the hero's mode of vision changes, growing more profound.

The most influential theory of knowledge in the Middle Ages comes from St. Augustine's commentary on Genesis, Book XII of De Genesi ad litteram, which defines three stages of vision as man progresses into fuller knowledge of God.³ Francis X. Newman summarized these stages in his discussion of Dante's use of the Augustinian scheme in The Divine Comedy:

The first of these is the visio corporalis, the literal sight of the eye or, more generally, knowledge by means of the external senses. The second is the visio spiritualis or imaginativa, knowledge by means of the imagination. In “spiritual” vision we do not see bodies themselves but images that have corporeal shape without corporeal substance. … The third and highest of the classes of vision is intellectualis, the direct cognition of realities such as God, the angels, caritas, etc., which have neither corporeal substance nor corporeal shape. Whatever man knows he knows in one of these three ways, but Augustine is particularly interested in how we know God. In this regard he asserts that man can know God by means of any of the three visions.⁴

As Newman demonstrates, Dante's progression from Hell through Purgatory to Paradise is not only from near darkness to brilliant light but also from heavy corporeality through progressive dematerialization as the pilgrim approaches a paradisiacal, unmediated vision of God. Even the lowest form, corporeal vision in Hell, can engender in the pilgrim knowledge of God through beholding Hell's parodic inversion of the cross and the Trinity embodied in the winged, three-headed Satan. Augustine chose St. John's visionary mode in the Apocalypse to illustrate the use of images in spiritual or imaginative vision and St. Paul's experience of being “caught up into paradise” (2 Cor. 12:4) to exemplify incorporeal, intellectual vision. Boethius' theory of knowledge in The Consolation of Philosophy uses a similar progression into higher forms of perception, although it posits a fourth type beyond human capability. In Chaucer's translation of this work, the four types are defined as wit (the senses), imagination (invented images), reason (incorporeal apprehension), and intelligence (divine knowledge).⁵ While it would be excessive to claim for Pericles the religious vision experienced by the apostles, there is, nonetheless, a clear progression in his vision from corporeal through imaginative to quasi-paradisiacal and from darkness through half-light to radiance.

It has long been recognized that Pericles creates powerful visual effects with a series of dynamic tableaux as we follow the adventures of the hero and his family throughout the Mediterranean world. Iconographic studies have explored some of the ways the play achieves its immense visual power. Mary Judith Dunbar examined the play's use of traditional motifs in stage properties, verbal images, and complex stage images, showing how the dramatic context alters these commonplace motifs by giving them new force and fuller significance. Bruce Smith demonstrated how pageants in Pericles and other late plays suggest a higher plane of reality, a metaphysical realm that is sometimes more arresting than the human action. Henry Green discovered the probable sources in emblem books of several devices of the knights at the court of Pentapolis, and William S. Heckscher and Gerald J. Schiffhorst have studied portrayals of Patience in the visual arts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that may have inspired Shakespeare's celebrated personifications of Patience in Twelfth Night and Pericles.⁶ These studies have effectively demonstrated how specific types of iconography (emblems, paintings, pageants, sculpture) contribute to the dynamic visual art of the play.

Yet there is another type of iconographic study to which Pericles lends itself, namely an examination of how certain of its visual features come together to create a coherent iconographical subtext. I think particularly of the studies of Chaucerian iconography by V. A. Kolve and Gail McMurray Gibson.⁷ Kolve uncovers a fascinating dimension of meaning in The Legends of Good Women through study of the medieval Christian iconography Chaucer associates with his pagan figures of Cleopatra and Alcestis, and Gibson demonstrates how Resurrection functions as a submerged ironic icon in the secular Shipman's Tale. Something similar to the Chaucerian iconographic techniques appears in Pericles, the most consciously and thoroughly medievalized play in the Shakespearean canon; in fact, the iconography is so coherent and so compelling that it reveals a fundamental unity in the play's vision. While Pericles ostensibly presents a pagan milieu, it draws upon Christian iconography and biblical conceptions of patience to define the progress of the hero's vision.

I.

In the opening chorus Gower takes care to establish perspectives—temporal, moral, and visual—on the events we are about to witness. Already “ancient” (I. Ch. 2)⁸ to a Renaissance audience, this quaint medieval poet insists on the much greater antiquity of his tale, giving the audience the impression of looking far back through time. F. D. Hoeniger has traced the device of using the poet as presenter to the medieval miracle plays, and Bruce Smith has noted its affinities with the presenter of contemporary Renaissance pageants.⁹ Both possibilities point toward the mystery of the visual show and reflect the need for some type of interpretation. We also see in Shakespeare's Gower that favorite pastime of medieval narrative poets, unearthing pagan tales and allegorizing or moralizing them to fit them into a Christian framework. The historical Gower, obviously fascinated with this old tale of incest, found a place for it in his Confessio Amantis to illustrate the seventh deadly sin, lust or lechery. The Shakespearean Gower sustains the role of medieval moralist when revealing the sin of Antiochus and his daughter. Toward the end of the opening chorus Gower emphasizes visuaI perspective, pointing toward “yon grim looks” of the dead suitors (I. Ch. 40). They pose the first paradox of vision in the play: dead eyes, looks that cannot see, watch over all.

The scene Gower introduces functions somewhat as an emblem with the poet providing its motto or key, Sin framed by Death. That, however, is only the first stage of interpretation, an allegorical direction, not a final solution to the mystery. The ancient poet is only a mediator. Interpretation of events devolves finally upon the more sophisticated audience of later times; as Gower expresses it at the end of his opening chorus:

What now ensues, to the judgment of your eye
I give my cause, who best can justify.

(I. Ch. 41-42)

The legalistic terminology suggests an audience of jurors trying a case. In the preceding line the “grim looks” of the suitors “testify” to the crimes of Antiochus. Thus, while their dead eyes frame the action on stage, our active eyes frame the stage, judging its characters and events. And the disparity between what we see (already influenced by Gower's perspective) and what Pericles sees creates the initial tension of the opening scene.

Pericles comes to the court of Antiochus determined to risk his life to win a beautiful wife. The choric Gower has already prepared the audience to expect a phenomenal beauty through his description of her as “So buxom, blithe, and full of face / As heaven had lent her all his grace” (I. Ch. 23-24); and Shakespeare continues to emphasize her ravishing face through the first two scenes. When Pericles first sees her, he finds “Her face the book of praises, where is read / Nothing but curious pleasures” (I. i. 16-17). Antiochus presents the temptation: “Her face like heaven, enticeth thee to view / Her countless glory” (I. i. 31-32). And Pericles explains to Helicanus later: “Her face was to mine eye beyond all wonder” (I. ii. 75). This unusually strong emphasis on “her face” may recall for us that other source of painful adventures in the Mediterranean world, “the face that launch'd a thousand ships.” Overwhelmed by the lady's beauty, Pericles falls victim to naïve error, first in his assumption that beauty necessarily entails virtue:

See, where she comes apparell'd like the spring,
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the king
Of every virtue gives renown to men!

(I. i. 13-15)

But the greater error involves succumbing to the tyranny of the senses, allowing corporeal vision to dictate action. In a bold visual metaphor Antiochus warns Pericles that “without desert because thine eye / Presumes to reach, all the whole heap must die” (I. i. 33-34). To paraphrase, if you presume to look on her without deserving to, you will die. My paraphrase, however, lacks the suggestiveness of the synecdoche, eye for man, which poses the real danger: the sensual eye can usurp rational powers and dominate a man. The rather grotesque image of a presumptuous, reaching eye captures the fatal temptation at Antioch.

Immediately after, Antiochus directs Pericles' attention to the dead suitors, “Yon sometimes famous princes,” and paints a detailed portrait of their ghastly faces with “speechless tongues,” “semblance pale,” and “dead cheeks” (I. i. 33-40). When recounting this incident to Helicanus in the next scene Pericles explains, “against the face of death / I sought the purchase of a glorious beauty” (I. ii. 71-72). The audience has been prepared through Gower's medieval vision to see an emblematic quality in the opening scene. The emblem takes on fuller significance through the drama itself—face of death and face of sinister beauty yoked together by a tyrant of immense power—a relationship that Milton represented later when pairing Sin and Death as the incestuous offspring of the devil. Milton's allegory of the genesis of Death stems in part ultimately from a biblical passage:

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

(James 1:14-15)

Shakespeare, too, may have had this passage in mind. The general outlines of the visual scene, an incestuous pair and the death's heads, are of course present in the sources for the tale. But Shakespeare has filled in the sketch, moving it toward emblem through strong emphasis on the faces of sin and death and on the immense power of the tyrant. In the audience, if not in the pagan hero, this parodic inversion of the Trinity or the Holy Family can in an Augustinian manner engender knowledge of God.

It is also noteworthy that the allegory of Lust, Sin, and Death occurs in that book of the New Testament which is most fully devoted to the subject of patience. The Epistle of James begins with an explanation of patience (1:2-15), culminates in an exhortation to patience (5:7-8), and recalls “the patience of Job” (5:11), who in the Old Testament was repeatedly described as “the perfect and upright man” (Job 1:1; 1:3; 2:3). James explains that “the trying of your faith [amid temptations] worketh patience,” and he exhorts, “let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (James 1:2-4). While the young Pericles is obviously a man in whom patience hath not yet had her perfect work, he implies in the course of the opening scene that perfection is his ideal goal. On discovering the incest of Antiochus and his daughter, Pericles sees the daughter as a castle of sin from which his “thoughts revolt” (I. i. 79), producing an apothegm on the ideal man:

For he's no man on whom perfections wait
That, knowing sin within, will touch the gate.

(1. i. 80-81)

This small metaphor coheres with the drama's larger scenic emblem, a Castle of Sin framed by Death.

For Pericles and the audience there is one more term in the visual paradoxes of the opening scene, which Antiochus does not see. Just after Antiochus warns Pericles by pointing to “yon sometimes famous princes” (I. i. 35), he observes that these heads have no covering but “yon field of stars” (I. i. 38), thereby initiating the important constellatory imagery of the play. For Antiochus the stars are only backdrop. However, when Pericles first grasps the meaning of the riddle, the stars take on new significance as the eyes of heaven:

                                                                                          … but, O you powers
That gives heaven countless eyes to view men's acts:
Why cloud they not their sights perpetually,
If this be true, which makes me pale to read it?

(I. i. 73-76)

Thus framing the scene ultimately is still another visual paradox, eyes that seem not to see, but do.

The opening scene also enacts a variation on the fall of man with its imagery of garden, celestial tree, forbidden fruit, and viper. But Shakespeare conceives the hero's change not as a fall into sin but as an advance into consciousness of good and evil, as a sudden shift from naïve sensual vision that sees no evil to a blinding of the sensual eye, producing insight into the depths of depravity, the darkness and “sin within” (I. i. 81). Understanding the riddle destroys the tyranny of the senses. Suddenly Pericles perceives the significance of the scene, but that perception takes the form of symbolic blindness in Pericles' famous identification of himself with the mole in the fallen garden:

                                                                                                    … The blind mole casts
Copp'd hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is throng'd
By man's oppression; and the poor worm doth die for't.

(I. i. 101-03)

Near the end of the scene Pericles defines his extreme peril in less cryptic terms:

                                                            … wisdom sees, those men
Blush not in actions blacker than night,
Will shew no course to keep them from the light.

(I. i. 135-37)

But the price of wisdom, of seeing into darkness, is the temporary loss of the visual splendor of the world.

II.

Darkness clings to the hero's vision through the next two acts. Back in Tyre Pericles finds no relief from fear. Increasing dread of what Antiochus may do to his kingdom in order to destroy him preys on his mind:

Why should this change of thoughts,
The sad companion, dull-ey'd melancholy,
Be my so us'd a guest, as not an hour
In the day's glorious walk or peaceful night,
The tomb where grief should sleep, can breed me quiet?
Here pleasures court my eyes, and my eyes shun them.

(I. ii. 2-7)

While dull melancholy arises from seeing future consequences, it also produces in the hero that greater vision of a provident ruler looking out for the welfare of his subjects. Thus Pericles flees from Tyre to save his people, carries grain to Tharsus to relieve the famine, flees from Tharsus to save himself, and wrecks off the coast of Pentapolis. Here at the nadir of his fortunes, when he is resigned to death, Pericles overhears a witty conversation among fishermen that suggests the need for perseverance in faith.¹⁰ One fisherman compares rich misers to whales “who never leave gaping till they swallow'd the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all” (lI. i. 33-34). Another insists that as belfry he would keep ringing his bells until the whale cast up the whole church. It is perhaps the fisherman's wit, combined with the providential gift from the sea of his father's armor, that awakens new faith in Pericles and leads him to present himself at Simonides' court as a knight of hope.

In a pioneering study of Shakespeare's use of the emblem tradition, Henry Green found close parallels between emblems in books popular in Shakespeare's day and the devices and mottos on the shields of the first five knights at the tournament in Pentapolis.¹¹ However, for Pericles' device of “a wither'd branch / that's only green at top” (II. ii. 43-44) with its motto “In hac spe vivo” (In this hope I live), Green found no close correspondence; and only one possible source for this emblem has been suggested to date. Alan R. Young discovered an impresa used for a tournament at Whitehall by Sidney in the attire of a desert knight, consisting of a tree half dead and half alive. The poem accompanying this device reveals that Sidney is expressing hope for favor from Queen Elizabeth after his absence from court; as Young puts it, the device “suggests that his fortunes lie in the balance.”¹² Simonides interprets Pericles' device in a similar fashion, assuming that it means Pericles hopes to improve his fortunes through Thaisa. Young also notes that borrowings in Pericles from the Arcadia suggest that Shakespeare had Sidney in mind and that Shakespeare might have seen Sidney's device at the Shield Gallery in Whitehall. Gerald Schiffhorst has discovered a similar analogue to Pericles' device, the emblem of Victrix Patienti Duri, which portrays a “bare tree with branches green only on top,” from Gabriel Rollenhagen's Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum (Utrecht, 1611-13).¹³ While these proposals of source and analogue for Pericles' device are certainly plausible, I think we can come closer to the branch with a green tip (rather than a tree) by pursuing Green's and Schiffhorst's lines of thought on the device a bit further.

In the book Shakespeare probably consulted for the devices of three of the first five knights, Claudius Paradin's Heroicall Devises (1591), Green found two emblems somewhat similar in conception to Pericles', both presenting green shoots rising from something dead, in one instance bones, in another a sepulchre. … The mottos for these two emblems, “Spes altera vitae” (Another hope of life) and “Sola vivit in illo” (She only lived in him), according to the explanations that accompany the emblems, express the hope of resurrection.¹⁴ Green naturally did not seek a source for the device in emblem books later than the composition of Pericles (1607-08). There is, however, one emblem from a later book, George Wither's Collection of Emblemes (1635), that corresponds exactly to Pericles' device, presenting a green shoot rising from a withered one with the motto: “When Hopes, quite frustrate were become, / The Wither'd branch did freshly bloome”. … In this book the author has added his own mottos and verses to emblems previously published by Rollenhagen (1611-1613); and several of these emblems derive from earlier times. Wither gives the biblical pedigree for this one, Aaron's rod that budded, which serves as a type for the cross of Christ:

For, I, who by Faith's eyes have seene,
Old Aarons wither'd Rod grow fresh and greene;
And also viewed (by the selfe-same Eyes)
Him, whom that Rod, most rightly typifies,
Fall by a shamefull Death, and rise, in spight
Of Death, and Shame, unto the glorious height.
          Ev'n I, beleeve my Hope shall bee possest,
          And, therefore, (ev'n in Death) in Hope I'l rest.(15)

Even without Wither's verses, the small scenes behind the branch associate the emblem with resurrection, the scene to the left (the cross with its side branches rising from the sepulchre) revealing the significance of the front branch. While I have not found this kind of branch used as a symbol of resurrection in emblem books prior to the composition of Pericles, its typological precursor, Aaron's rod, appears in Paradin's Heroicall Devises. … In the pagan context of the play Pericles' device and motto can suggest simply a hope for renewal; yet they do present the hero through the very special biblical emblem of new life rising from a dead branch, which for a Christian audience may contain association with resurrection.¹⁶

Pericles' vision of Simonides' court suggests that Shakespeare is continuing to explore the Christian implications of the emblem. At the banquet following the tournament we find Pericles still sunk in “melancholy” (lI. iii. 54, 91) and Simonides determined to cheer him up. One moment during this scene stands out in defining a new stage of vision on the hero's part. We have seen Pericles looking at and behind the visual show at Antiochus' court. Now we see him looking at and beyond the spectacle of Simonides' court in a type of visionary imagination arising from dark melancholy:

Yon king's to me like to my father's picture,
Which tells me in that glory once he was;
Had princes sit like stars about his throne,
And he the sun, for them to reverence;
None that beheld him but, like lesser lights,
Did vail their crowns to his supremacy; …

(lI. iii. 37-42)

The opening “yon” echoes those gestures at Antiochus' court that directed our gaze beyond its immediate scope towards the death's heads on the battlements: “yon grim looks” and “yon sometimes famous princes,” set against the background of “yon field of stars.” The ugly images of death that framed the action of Antiochus' court acted as memento mori, reminding the hero of human frailty and mortality. In Pericles' vision of Simonides' court Shakespeare creates the opposite effect, a picture of human nobility that even death cannot destroy: “yon king” reminds Pericles of his dead father, yet the courts of both noble kings present an image of eternal splendor.

Pericles' initial vision of this court of king and princes in the configuration of the sun surrounded by stars (ll. 39-40) may owe its inspiration to Christian iconography. While at first glance the emblem seems merely an image of harmony in the heavens, it is from a naturalistic point of view quite the opposite, a phenomenon rarely to be observed in the natural world. In Paradin's Heroicall Devises Shakespeare may have seen an emblem that the author calls “a starre garland, or crowne round about the sunne,” which appeared in the reign of Augustus Caesar. … Paradin takes this natural wonder as a portent of the birth of Christ, “the true light, and true sonne of righteousness,” and gives it the motto: “This age knoweth God aright.”¹⁷ Pericles' image of stars around the sun may thus suggest the second stage in the Augustinian scheme, spiritual or imaginative vision; and the last two lines in the description of Simonides' court, in which the “lesser lights” take off their crowns (ll. 41-42), support this possibility through association with St. John's visionary mode.

Few devotional images would have greater iconic power for a Renaissance audience than the type of heavenly court Pericles envisages, since it presents a variation on a central Christian icon that most people would have seen or read about: St. John's vision of the divine court in the Apocalypse. This subject inspired some of the greatest art from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance, appearing in paintings, bas reliefs, mosaics, tapestries, and illuminations, and throughout churches and cathedrals on altars, walls, portals, and stained-glass windows. The composition of the icon generally contains the same elements in the same configuration: the central figure of God enthroned in the sky with light radiating from his face (a sun aureole), surrounded by four beasts, seven candles, and twenty-four elders, either wearing “crowns of gold” (Rev. 4:4) or “cast[ing] their crowns before the throne” in a gesture of reverence (Rev. 4:10). Of the hundreds of magnificent representations of this subject from medieval and Renaissance art, Dürer's woodcut … is especially effective in capturing the moment Pericles emphasizes, when the lesser kings “vail their crowns” (lI. iii. 42) to the supremacy of the greater, and in expressing the visionary mode so clearly in the relationship between the earthly castle, the divine court, and the visionary in the foreground of the circular court. While Pericles deprecates his own position at Simonides' court, comparing himself to “a glow-worm in the night” (lI. ii. 43), we can nonetheless see in this simile an advance over his position as blind mole at Antiochus' court.

At the allegorical level in the play the scenic emblem of the diabolical court (Sin framed by Death) thus gives way to that of the divine court (Virtue Crowned), and in the ensuing drama Shakespeare presents variations on the image of crowned virtue at key moments. In the scene following Pericles' vision of Simonides' court, Helicanus urges the knights of Tyre to spend another year seeking out Pericles and tells them that success in this venture will mean: “You shall like diamonds sit about his crown” (lI. iv. 53). When Pericles first finds Marina, he sees her as “a palace / For the crown'd Truth to dwell in” (V. i. 121-122). After the final reconciliation at the temple of Diana in Ephesus, Gower sees the whole family as an example of “Virtue … crown'd with joy at last” (Epilogue, 5-6).

III.

The changes in the vision of Pericles in the first two acts were all in some sense bound up with death—the dead suitors at Antioch, the prospect of the slaughter of his subjects at Tyre, and the memory of his dead father at Pentapolis. Yet the darkening of sensual vision that accompanied these threats and thoughts of death also precipitated more profound forms of vision—insight at Antioch, foresight in Tyre, and visionary imagination in Pentapolis. The last three acts sustain and amplify this conjunction of vision and death through presenting several striking variations on a single scenic configuration: characters looking on the grave of another. The opening scenes of the last three acts all contain such a spectacle. Act III moves from Pericles committing the coffin of Thaisa to the sea to Cerimon standing over the coffin at Ephesus; Act IV, from Marina at the graveside of her nurse to Pericles at the funerary monument of Marina; Act V, from Marina entering the tomb Pericles has made for himself to Pericles' perception of Marina as “Patience gazing on kings' graves” (V. i. 138).

While tempests dominate the scenes of death, the scenes of recovery from near death stress the opposite, namely an ordering of time and action through music and ceremony and the advent of light. The scene of Thaisa's awakening takes place in the early morning hours, and the most striking image, the moment when Thaisa opens her eyes, draws a part of its power from contrast with the imaginative pre-dawn obscurity. Cerimon, bending over the coffin of Thaisa, gives us a minute, even precieux description of this moment:

Behold her eyelids, cases to those
Heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost,
Begin to part their fringes of bright gold.
The diamonds of a most praised water
Doth appear to make the world twice rich.

(llI. ii. 100-04)

This description is also significant to the whole pattern of visual imagery in the play. Act I emphasized dead eyes and distant stars watching over all; Act II moved from dull, clouded eyes to glimpses of heavenly harmony, crowns of diamonds and stars; the tempest opening Act III blotted out any perception of constellatory harmony, but this moment of awakening recovers elements of it in the “heavenly jewels” and “diamonds” of Thaisa's eyes.

The scene of Pericles' recovery brings out the full significance of that virtue the hero must achieve on his spiritual journey, patience. This powerful scene traces in slow motion the full range of aural and visual perception in the hero, from silence to the music of the spheres and from blindness to revelation. We begin in darkness and negation with Pericles' refusal to hear, speak, or see. Marina's song, like the music at Thaisa's wakening, prepares the way for recovery, although it seems to have no effect on Pericles. Marina then introduces herself with a dynamic visual image:

                                                                                                    … I am a maid,
My lord, that ne'er before invited eyes
But have been gaz'd on like a comet; …

(V. i. 84-86)

Neither this challenge to see nor the ensuing recitation seems to win Pericles' attention, and we can imagine Marina glancing down, contemplating whether to proceed (V. i. 94-96). But her words “fortunes” and “parentage” have struck a sympathetic chord in him, leading to the moment when he first looks up and invites her to look upon him: “Pray you, turn your eyes upon me” (V. i. 101). In a first influx of vision Pericles perceives Marina's physical qualities, those royal and divine traits that remind him of Thaisa, “As silver-voic'd; her eyes as jewel-like / And cas'd as richly” (V. i. 110-11). For the audience this description provides the fourth variation on a significant emblem. When Pericles understood the incest of Antiochus and his daughter in the opening scene, he described the daughter as “a casket stor'd with ill” (I. i. 78). In Act III we watched Cerimon opening the casket of jewels that Pericles had put in Thaisa's coffin and the coffin itself to reveal the “heavenly jewels” of Thaisa's eyes. Now we see the “jewel-like” eyes of Marina bringing life into the tomb of Pericles.

When Marina hesitates to tell her tale for fear it will sound like lies, Pericles begins to see her as a spiritual presence:

                                                                                                    … for thou look'st
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace
For the crown'd Truth to dwell in.

(V. i. 120-22)

In addition to reinforcing the images of crowned virtue associated with the courts of Pericles' father, of Simonides, and of Pericles in Act II, the emblem of truth, reversing the image of Antiochus' daughter as a castle, shows virtue within rather than sin. It may also draw iconic power from association with the medieval allegorical motif of the beleaguered castle, as in The Castle of Perseverance. Another medieval iconographical tradition that may have contributed to Shakespeare's conception of the allegory in this scene is the Parliament of Heaven, which features the four daughters of God (Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace) arguing over the soul of man in the court of heaven.¹⁸ While Pericles first sees in Marina the two sterner daughters, Justice and Truth, the functions of the two gentler daughters, Mercy and Peace, merge in his next lovely allegorical emblem of her:

                                                                                                    … yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act.

(V. i. 137-39)

Pericles' whole spiritual journey culminates in this vision of his daughter. G. Wilson Knight's commentary on this emblem suggests a significant parallel with Pauline thought:

We remember Viola's ‘Patience on a monument smiling at grief’ (Twelfth Night, lI. iv. 116); but these lines hold a deeper penetration. The whole world of great tragedy (‘kings' graves’) is subdued to an over-watching figure, like Cordelia's love by the bedside of Lear's sleep. ‘Extremity,’ that is disaster in all its finality (with perhaps a further suggestion of endless time), is therefore negated, put out of action, by a serene assurance corresponding to St. Paul's certainty in ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ Patience is here an all-enduring calm seeing through death to everliving eternity.¹⁹

I could only wish that Knight had cited the sequel to Paul's comment on death, namely “O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Cor. 15:55), since graves are such a dominant feature in the play.

It is, in fact, Paul who gives us the most farsighted conception of patience in the New Testament through connecting the endurance of persecutions and tribulations with the hope of eternal life. The following passages, selected from many of Paul's observations on this subject, demonstrate the essential connection between patience, hope, and vision:

To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life.

(Rom. 2:7)

… but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience hope.

(Rom. 5:3-4)

For we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

(Rom. 8:24-25)

How Christian philosophy and iconography inform the medieval pagan world of the play we see especially in the Pauline quality of the two principal emblems associated with Pericles, the device representing Hope on his shield at Pentapolis and the image of Marina as Patience, both of which contain intimations of eternal life.

While no exact parallels for Shakespeare's emblem of Patience have been found in the visual arts, William S. Heckscher has studied similarities in conception from medieval and Renaissance art, especially in funerary sculpture and in emblems that show Patience or Fortitude seated on cubes or stones.²⁰ Both types capture the monumental quality of Shakespeare's emblem. Closest to Shakespeare's conception is the figure of Patience in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1603), although the lady is not exactly smiling. … Other conventional emblems of Patience show a woman manacled, chained, yoked, or stocked. This tradition finds expression in the second edition of Ripa's Iconologia (1611), which features a lady bearing a yoke and manacles, her slight smile qualified by the tragic cast of her eyes. … Still other emblems of ladies near sepulchres suggest tragic loss, even Grief on a monument in Geoffrey Whitney's representation of a woman mourning for Ajax. …²¹ Shakespeare's figure of Patience thus gains power not so much from similarities with current emblems as from transformation of the conventional concepts of patience as a form of bondage and death as an occasion for sorrow.

The emblem of Patience draws together the whole complex of paradoxes associated with vision in the play, all of which involve confrontations with death, ways of looking upon death. Perspective on this emblem is particularly significant. In the dark hold of Pericles' ship, we watch Pericles looking at Marina and imagining her in the act of “gazing on kings' graves.” The complex perspective gives the impression of looking deeply into darkness, of seeing through to spiritual truth; and that truth itself is a type of vision: patience is not just the passive submission of conventional emblems but an active power, a way of seeing that can transform, “smiling extremity out of act.” Here we have perhaps the prime example in Shakespeare's works of what E. H. Gombrich has defined as a symbolic icon, namely an allegorical image that raises the mind from vision to a revelation of higher reality.²²

The religious quality of the recognition scene between Pericles and Marina has often been noted. Andrew Welsh likened the influence of Marina to the operation of grace on the deadliest sin, despair or the medieval wanhope.²³ The allegorizing of Marina's virtues in this scene may also recall Spenser's House of Holiness, where the hospital of Patience and the instructions of Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa heal the despair of the Red Crosse Knight. Hoeniger noted the archetypal quality of Pericles' religious experience, a pattern found in several figures from the Bible, in the Red Crosse Knight, and in St. John of the Cross, for whom a period of utter darkness and negation is an integral phase of man's journey to spiritual light.²⁴ In Pericles this pattern has been repeated with increasing intensity throughout his spiritual journey, each new phase of vision arising from some form of darkness—the symbolic blinding of Act I, the dull melancholy of Act II, and the dark despair of Act V. The whole process takes the form of incremental vision leading to revelation, with Patience an emblem of the most profound vision man can achieve without divine intervention. As Pericles hears the music of the spheres and sinks into sleep in a final darkening of the senses, Diana appears in a dream vision to direct him to Ephesus. This theophany epitomizes the paradoxes associated with vision throughout the play: the most exalted visions arise not just from darkness but from states of being close to death.

The reasons why Shakespeare chose Ephesus for the final setting have not yet been fully examined. J. Wilcock has pointed out that Shakespeare drew local color for the Ephesian setting of The Comedy of Errors from the Bible, the motif of sorcery from the Acts of the Apostles, and the theme of wifely obedience from the Epistles to the Ephesians.²⁵ More recently James Sanderson has noted that Ephesus is “a particularly appropriate setting for a play elaborating the theme of patience,” since the letters of St. Paul describe it as “a place of social discord and unrest.”²⁶ Yet a portrait of Ephesus even more relevant to the theme of patience emerges in St. John's Revelation, where we are presented with a series of portraits of cities, the seven cities of Asia addressed at the beginning and the vision of the New Jerusalem evoked at the end. The first city Christ addresses is Ephesus, and the virtue for which he commends the Ephesians most strongly is patience (Rev. 2:2-3). The importance of patience may be seen by the fact that it is also the last virtue for which Christ praises any of the cities (Rev. 3:10). Directly after that final commendation we hear the first mention of the New Jerusalem. In this sequence we can see the patience of Ephesus as a sort of first step toward a vision of the heavenly city.

The final scene of Pericles thus allows us to understand the whole play as a type of antique sacred drama, a spiritual pilgrimage culminating in religious vision. While the recognition scene at sea between Pericles and Marina emphasized natural, emotional restoration, the scene at Ephesus suggests a foreshadowing of ultimate spiritual reconciliation. This scene with its setting in a sacred temple, its atmosphere of miracle, and its imagery of silver, rich jewels, and stars, offers an earthly proximation to the heavenly cities envisaged by St. John, Dante, and the Red Crosse Knight. Here the hero's mode of vision undergoes a final change. He is no longer the outsider, trying to solve the riddle of Antiochus' court, or the sideline visionary, seeing in Simonides' court an image of divine harmony, but a participant in miraculous events. While it would be stretching matters to identify Pericles' experience with Augustine's highest mode of vision, direct cognition of divine reality, it is, nonetheless, similar in type to St. Paul's experience of being caught up into paradise. The audience's mode of vision has also changed, from that of jurors to that of witnesses to a religious event.

Bruce Smith has suggested that the references to Diana's altar combined with Pericles' direct address to the goddess may imply some visual representation of the goddess on stage, some emblem that would draw together the play's main themes. Smith has proposed a statue of the goddess based on a Cavalieri print, a robed figure with the usual symbols of a crescent moon on her head and an arrow in her hand.²⁷ Emphasis in the play's imagery falls on the silvery, ethereal qualities of the goddess, on “Celestial Dian, goddess argentine” with her “silver bow” (V. i. 246-48) and the “silver livery” (V. iii. 7) worn by her devotees. In fact, the final scene suggests an image of pure radiance—a silver icon of the goddess surrounded by Thaisa, Marina, and a group of virgins, all in silver garb.

If we imagine for a moment only the slightest alterations in this scenic emblem, changing the dominant color from silver to gold and the crescent moon on Diana's head to a halo, we would have an icon such as Christians portray on altars and elsewhere in Morations, Assumptions, and Coronations of the Virgin. Christian paintings may provide an interesting suggestion for staging the final scene. The Morations always feature the sepulchre, containing the Virgin's body with suggestions of her spirit rising; the Assumptions keep the sepulchre but show the body rising, usually surrounded by haloed angels. … One way to catch this metaphysical drift in the staging of the final scene would be to give the altar the shape of a sepulchre with the silver statue of the goddess rising behind it.²⁸ The center of Shakespeare's final scenic emblem, the united family with Marina kneeling before Thaisa and Pericles, may recall the sacred event portrayed in Coronations of the Virgin. While many Coronations omit the Father, Dürer, who typically gets everything in, suggests the whole process from sepulchre to crown in his Coronation, and, like Shakespeare, emphasizes the union of the whole family. …

Pericles thus shows something of a divine comedy's progress through earthly versions of inferno and purgatory to paradise. Through the hero's spiritual journey the audience sees striking variations on the hieratic configuration of the divine court, from the diabolical castle of sin framed by death's heads, which suggests a crown of death, through the secular courts in Pentapolis and Tyre, which reflect divine harmony in their jewelled and constellatory crowns, to the religious temple at Ephesus, which in its silvery radiance presents a more ethereal variation on the divine court.

Gower in his epilogue treats the whole play as an emblem and gives us his final allegorical interpretation of the family: “Virtue preserved from fell destruction's blast, / Led on by heaven and crown'd with joy at last” (Epilogue, 5-6). As always in the play the allegorical emblem is open-ended and provocative, suggestive of higher spiritual truth. While the crown of joy may remind us of the crowned Holy Family in Coronations of the Virgin, it might also recall the “crown of life,” which James presents as the reward of patient virtue:

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to them that love him.

(James 1:12)

St. John's Revelation also mentions “the crown of life” (Rev. 2:10) in conjunction with patience:

Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. Behold, I come quickly: hold fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown.

(Rev. 3:10-11)

Gower's final lines then expand the central concept of patience to include the whole audience: “So on your patience evermore attending, / New joy wait on you! Here our play has ending” (Epilogue 17-18).

Notes

1. On the theme of patience in Pericles see John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), pp. 95-106; F. D. Hoeniger, introd., Pericles, Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. lxxix-lxxxviii; Donald Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 266-78; and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, “Some Prolegomena for the Study of Patience, 1480-1680,” The Triumph of Patience, ed. Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 1-31. This last book also contains important essays on medieval and Renaissance conceptions of patience in literary works and visual arts by Ralph Hanna III, Elizabeth D. Kirk, Priscilla L. Tate, and Albert C. Labriola.

2. For influences of medieval religious plays on Pericles, see G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; rpt. London: Methuen, 1948), pp. 32-75; F. D. Hoeniger, introd., Pericles, pp. lxxxviii-cvi; and Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 13-29, 143-176.

3. Saint Augustine, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, ed. Josephus Zycha, 28 (1), 379-435.

4. Francis X. Newmann, “St. Augustine's Three Visions and the Structure of the Commedia,” Modern Language Notes, 82 (1967), p. 59. Newman also documents the influence of the Augustinian scheme in the Middle Ages, pp. 60-61.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 379.

6. Mary Judith Dunbar, “‘To the Judgment of Your Eye’: Iconography and the Theatrical Art of Pericles,” Shakespeare, Man of the Theatre, ed. Kenneth Muir et al. (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), pp. 86-97; Bruce R. Smith, “Pageants into Play: Shakespeare's Three Perspectives on Idea and Image,” Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre, ed. David M. Bergeron (Athens, Georgia: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 220-246; Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trübner, 1970), pp. 156-86; William S. Heckscher, “Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study of Paradox,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, pp. 13-14 (1970-71), 5-71; and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, The Triumph of Patience, pp. 13-24. Although Priscilla Tate's essay in The Triumph of Patience, “Patientia Triumphus: The Iconography of a Set of Engravings,” pp. 106-37, does not deal with Pericles, its analysis of a set of engravings from 1555-59 is certainly relevant to the study of the play's iconography.

7. V. A. Kolve, “From Cleopatra to Alceste: An Iconographic Study of The Legend of Good Women” and Gail McMurray Gibson, “Resurrection as Dramatic Icon in the Shipman's Tale,” both in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry, eds. John P. Hermann and John J. Burke (University, Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1981), pp. 130-178, 102-112.

8. Quotations from Pericles are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963).

9. Hoeniger, introd., Pericles, p. lxxxvi; Smith, “Pageants into Plays,” p. 238.

10. For a fuller analysis of the fishermen's scene and the redemptive pattern it initiates in the play, see Maurice Hunt, ‘“Opening the Book of Monarch's Faults: Pericles and Redemptive Speech,” Essays in Literature, 12 (1985), 155-70.

11. Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers, pp. 156-86.

12. Alan R. Young, “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), pp. 453-456.

13. Schiffhorst, Triumph of Patience, p. 14.

14. Claudius Paradin, The HeroicalI Devises of M. Claudius Paradin, trans. P. S. (1591; rpt. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1984), pp. 59-60, 320-21.

15. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes 1635 (Menston: Scholar Press, 1968), p. 217.

16. This interpretation of Pericles' device follows Rosemund Tuve's concept of “double chivalry,” by which an allegorical image has reference both to the moral life of man in this world and to his spiritual destiny, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 3-55.

17. Paradin, Heroicall Devises, pp. 199-200.

18. For a full study of the Parliament of Heaven, see Samuel Chew, The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1947).

19. Knight, Crown of Life, p. 65.

20. Heckscher, “Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts,” pp. 35-56.

21. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes 1586, ed. John Horden (Menston: Scholar Press, 1969), p. 30. See also his emblem of Thetis by Achilles' coffin, p.193.

22. E. H. Gombrich. “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-PIatonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948), 163-92.

23. Andrew Welsh, “Heritage in Pericles,” Shakespeare's Last Plays, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbred (Athens, Ohio Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 106-07.

24. Hoeniger, introd., Pericles, p. lxxxv.

25. J. Willcock, “Shakespeare and Ephesus,” Notes and Queries, 12 (1916), p. 345.

26. James L. Sanderson, “Patience in The Comedy of Errors,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16.4 (1975), p. 610.

27. Bruce R. Smith, “Sermons in Stone: Shakespeare and Renaissance Sculpture,” Shakespeare Studies, 17 (1985), pp. 16-17.

28. Such a configuration showing a lady standing on a block of stone also ties in with the typical representations of Patience, usually seated on a cube or stone. Schiffhorst has discovered an emblem from Rollenhagen and Wither relevant to the standing image, which shows a crowned Constancia standing on a rectangular block with the motto in Wither, “They, after suffring, shall be crown'd, / In whom, a Constant-faith, is found,” Triumph of Patience, p. 19.