[In the following essay, Lewis probes the metaphorical link between incest and the cannibalistic devouring of kin in the thematic contexts of Pericles.]

The problems which have, historically, plagued critics of Pericles stem not so much from its doubtful origins—its exclusion from the First Folio and the attendant questions of authorship—as from the sense that the play is, finally, meaningless. For Ben Jonson Pericles was “a mouldy tale,”¹ all the more exasperating for its considerable popularity on the stage. But for more recent commentators the play is less an old familiar story than a mishmash, a repository filled with the stuff of romance but jumbled in a way that defies understanding. Though the play is occasionally read as a myth of death and re-birth, as a dream, as an allegory of patience in suffering, or for its affinities with King Lear and with Shakespeare's earlier comedies and later romances, the typical refrain has to do with Pericles' apparent incoherence. Perhaps collaboration simply did not work, the argument seems to run, and Pericles is no more than a series of familiar and often fascinating incidents adding up to an incomprehensible totality.²

What I would like to argue in the following essay, however, is that Pericles enacts one theme: the personal, familial, and governmental obligation to nourish self, relations, and citizens. Taking my cue from the curious definition of incest as cannibalism in Antiochus' riddle in Act I, and using the recent work of social scientists, I read the play's persistent analogy between sexuality and eating habits as a vivid and terrifying illustration of the ways in which human beings respond to the need to sustain themselves and to nurture others.

I

It is fitting that the action of so intractable a play as Pericles should begin with a riddle. Though the meaning of the puzzle with which the King of Antioch challenges suitors to his daughter is transparent, “significant interpretation of this key incident is lacking, and intriguing problems remain unexplored”:³

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

(I.i.65-72)⁴

What scholarship has done is locate sources and analogs for the play, and therefore for the riddle. P. Goolden, in particular, has traced its evolution from the Latin prose of Apollonius of Tyre, through the Eighth Book of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, to Pericles, noting significant changes including a shift in the riddle's speaker, from the father in Apollonius of Tyre to the daughter in Pericles.⁵ But what Goolden does not discuss—and what editions of the play routinely ignore—is the tacit definition of father/daughter incest which the riddle provides: “I feed on mother's flesh.” Like the “sexual cannibals”⁶ biologists describe in the world of insects, an incestuous daughter, the riddle tells us, is one who devours her mother.

Identifying incest in particular as a kind of devouring is, in fact, at least as old as the Pericles (Apollonius) story itself, and is used, in one form or another, in every extant version of the tale. In Apollonius of Tyre the riddle includes “maternam carnem unescor,”⁷ “I feed on my mother's flesh.” The King in Gower's Confessio Amantis, described as one who “devoureth / His owne flesh,” declares in the riddle, “I ete, and have it not forlore / My moders flesshe.” In Lawrence Twine's The Patterne of Painful Adventures which, with the Confessio Amantis, is generally recognized now as a source for Pericles, the King states in the riddle, “I eate my mothers fleshe.”⁸ George Wilkins' The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, an analog to Shakespeare's play, uses virtually the same phraseology as Pericles, “I am no viper, yet I feede / On mothers flesh, that did me breede. …”⁹

Shakespeare's play insists on identifying incest with eating, for when Pericles describes the incestuous couple later in the first scene he repeats this curious definition and echoes the language of the riddle:

Where now you're both a father and a son,
By your uncomely claspings with your child,—
Which pleasures fits a husband, not a father;
And she an eater of her mother's flesh,
By the defiling of her parent's bed;
And both like serpents are, who though they feed
On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed.

(I.i.128-34)

The reference to serpents in lines 133-34, which describe feeding in literal terms, echoes the definition in lines 131-32, which describe the Princess in metaphorical terms. Although the analogy between the incestuous couple and serpents is somewhat ambiguous, what is clear is the linking of sexuality to feeding habits, a linkage emphasized by the “feed/breed” rhyme. Although serpents eat healthful, even “sweet” foods, flowers, they produce “poison,” just as the incestuous king and his daughter use the sweetness of sexual love to “breed” the poison of incest. The allusion to serpents, however, amplifies the description of the incestuous couple in yet another way, for folk wisdom had it “that vipers at birth eat their way out of the mother's body,” a notion F. D. Hoeniger believes derives from Herodotus and other classical sources.¹⁰ Thus, serpents were simply thought to be thanklessness incarnate, a sense clear in Lear's rage at Goneril, “How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” (I.iv.288-89), as well as in Cleopatra's ironic reference to the asp that kills her as “my baby at my breast …” (V.ii.309). Thought to be cruel offspring, serpents became, by analogy, symbols of cruel parents as well; Geoffrey Whitney describes Medea and “all dames of cruell kinde” as tyrants to their own young, “serpentes seede” “that tender not theire frute.”¹¹ Referring to an incestuous couple as “serpents” thus reinforced a sense of the two as hideously ungrateful devourers of their own.¹²

To describe the Princess of Antioch's incest as devouring and, in particular, as cannibalism, was to use an image familiar to readers and audience in the seventeenth century as a time-honored indication of evil. After all, the Bible had presented original sin in the homiest of ways, the King James Version of Genesis simply stating that Eve “tooke of the fruit thereof, and did eate, and gaue vnto her husband with her, and hee did eate.”¹³ Medieval and Renaissance dramatic tradition had established hell's demons as fierce eaters of the sinful, and it is hardly necessary to rehearse here the history of so popular an image. As Emile Male notes, “almost all thirteenth-century representations of the Last Judgment show an enormous mouth vomiting flames”;¹⁴ and from The Castle of Perseverance, with its devils prancing into Hellmouth, to Doctor Faustus, a hero “glutted” with learning¹⁵ who must “taste the smart of all” (V.ii.127) even as he himself is devoured, to Jacobean tragedy, where vengeance can be described as “thou terror to fat folks,”¹⁶ eating and cannibalism are familiar metaphors for perverse human behavior, conveying a rich history of religious, economic, and social connotations.¹⁷

Shakespeare himself had, of course, much before Pericles, used similar images and references, and Ruth Morse is, I think, correct in seeing “consistent and coherent imagery of animals and eating … from the beginning to the end” of his career.¹⁸ The “blood-drinking pit” (II.iii.224) into which Quintus and Martius fall in Titus Andronicus has a “mouth” (II.iii.199) and is a “fell devouring receptacle” (II.iii.235). Romeo describes the vault of the Capulets as a devouring animal,

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I'll cram thee with more food.

(V.iii.45-48)

And when the wheel turns in Richard III, “prosperity begins to mellow / And drop into the rotten mouth of death” (IV.iv.1-2). Shakespeare found such imagery an especially effective way of delineating character and of clarifying issues in his more mature plays. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, where direct references to the eating of human flesh abound, attitudes toward food are used as a method of separating Shylock from the Christian community and of identifying him as one with special dietary restrictions. It is Shylock who refuses to eat with other Venetians, preferring, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, the “explicitly cannibalistic,” wishing to “feed” (III.i.54) his revenge on Antonio's pound of flesh. Shakespeare clearly implies through such images that usury is a kind of cannibalism, and perhaps alludes as well, as Fiedler suggests, to “anti-Semitic child-murder” stories such as that told by the prioress in The Canterbury Tales.¹⁹ Morse, who discusses the image in general, observes that in the early histories, Macbeth, and Timon of Athens, eating, cannibalism, and the body politic are related to one another.²⁰ In Coriolanus, too, as Janet Adelman has shown, Shakespeare uses images of food, eating, and cannibalism to define central issues and to describe the psychologically, indeed, pathologically, complex relationship between Volumnia and her son.²¹ Adelman argues that “the image of the mother who has not fed her children enough” (p. 130) is at the center of the play, and that “in this hungry world, everyone seems in danger of being eaten” (p. 136).²²

Cannibalism was a familiar plot element found not only in Medieval and Renaissance drama, but also in Shakespeare's classical and folk sources, as well as in traveller's tales. In the mid-sixteenth century Montaigne used recent reports of cannibalism among isolated tribes in the new world as a way of pointing to what he saw as degeneracies among his compatriots in “Of Cannibals,” an essay which goes so far as to praise that practice for its naturalness. Similar tales, no doubt, lie behind Othello's report of having seen the Anthropophagi, “the Cannibals that each [other] eat” (I.iii.143). Arthur Golding's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which popularized the stories from Greek and Roman mythology, uses eating as a metaphor for greed and lust throughout, and offers stunning instances of cannibalism, often linked with infanticide and incest. For example, Tereus' rape and mutilation of Procne, his wife Philomela's sister, is avenged by the women's killing and cooking his son, Itys. Tereus “fed / And swallowed downe the selfesame flesh that of his bowels bred,”²³ and later, having been told the precise nature of his fare, this descendant of Mars tried “To perbrake up his meate againe, and cast his bowels out” (VI.839). Much the same tone is taken in the last book of the Metamorphoses, when Pythagoras not only lectures on the inappropriateness of eating flesh, but also argues that metamorphosis implies that the human spirit—indeed, the souls of relatives—may reside in the bodies of animals. He begins by decrying carnivorousness in general, lamenting, “Oh, what a wickednesse / It is to cram the mawe with mawe, and frank up flesh with flesh” (XV.95-96), but quickly moves to the central point, “That whensoever you doo eate your Oxen, you devowre / Your husbandmen” (XV.156-57). Repeatedly we are counseled not to “nourish blood with blood” (XV.195), not to eat the “bodyes which perchaunce may have the spirits of our brothers, / Our sisters, or our parents” (XV.511-12), not, “Thyesteslyke,” to “furnish up our boordes / With bloodye bowells” (XV.515-16). In similar fashion, Seneca, to whom the English Renaissance dramatists turned both for stylistic examples and for exciting plot, re-wrote his Greek models so as to highlight the violent, and abounds, quite specifically, in instances of child abuse. In Thyestes Seneca combines infanticide with cannibalism in Atreus' killing of his brother's children and Thyestes' unwitting dining on them. This “Thyestean feast” is echoed in Titus Andronicus, in Tamora's eating meat pies made from her sons, a meal “Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (V.iii.61-62). Familial cannibalism is also suggested in symbolic ways in Shakespeare, for example in Queen Margaret's offering to York a handkerchief dipped in his young son's blood in 3 Henry VI. Wearing a paper crown, grieving Rutland's death, York can only protest,

O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide!
How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child,
To bid the father wipe his eyes withal,
And yet be seen to wear a woman's face?

(I.iv.137-40)

Given the enormous popularity of images relating to eating and cannibalism both in Shakespeare's works and in those of his sources and contemporaries, it might seem unnecessary to gloss lines in Pericles which define incest as familial cannibalism, a child's devouring a parent or a parent's devouring a child. After all, common sense supports the notion that incest destroys one relationship in favor of another, removing parent or child, consuming, in a sense, one family member and replacing him or her with another. And yet, it is only here in Pericles that Shakespeare equates cannibalism specifically with incest, as his sources had done before him for millennia. The tenacity with which the metaphor has remained in all versions of the Pericles story attests to something more than simply the regressive pull of literary tradition. In spite of common sense and the ubiquity of eating and cannibalism as metaphor for evil, Shakespeare's definition of incest in particular as a kind of devouring remains refractory. What logic, if any, lies behind the apparently traditional association of incest and eating, and how, if at all, does this startling definition illuminate central issues in this puzzling play?

II

Psychologists and anthropologists have long noted a relationship involving social groupings, sexual mores in general, and those having to do with eating. Erich Neumann generalizes that “sexual symbolism is still colored by alimentary symbolism,”²⁴ while Robin Fox sums up the connection between food and sexuality simply by declaring, “whatever else humans do, one can be sure that they will classify and make rules about kin and the food supply, confuse the two, and be anxious about the whole process. …”²⁵ In “Taboos on Eating and Drinking” in The Golden Bough, Sir James G. Frazer mentions in passing tribal customs prohibiting women from eating with—or even observing—men who are eating or drinking, and prohibiting opposite-sex food preparation.²⁶ Similarly, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has shown that in fifteenth-century Italy social relations were often defined by eating arrangements, for “blood relatives customarily ate together under the same roof and made this sharing into a right,”²⁷ and that “a uno pane e uno vino” (sharing food and drink), was an expression “often used by the taxpayers and the scribes … to describe families” (p. 36). Her study shows as well how questions of familial bloodlines were related to those of eating in parents' reactions to a wet nurse's pregnancy. If the man who impregnated the nurse were unknown or of questionable social standing, her pregnancy was often considered a development fraught with dire consequences for the infant who might ingest debased milk (p. 159). The prevalence of “alimentary separation of the sexes” in primitive societies is noted by Laura and Raoul Makarius,²⁸ who explain that “the notion of sharing food establishes the primitive notion of kinship quite as much as does the idea of a common lineage” (p. 43). The authors point out that

there are many facts to prove that, although as a rule men fear the danger inherent in all women, they particularly dread the establishment of a food bond with those women who are—or will become—their sexual partners, illustrating the fundamental incompatibility that exists in the primitive mentality between sexual union and the sharing of food.

(p. 48)

Freud, who cited Frazer's studies as well as those of W. Robertson Smith in the final section of Totem and Taboo, thought “it probable that the totemic system … was a product of the conditions involved in the Oedipus complex.”²⁹ That is, for Freud the symbolic devouring of the father through the totem animal was intimately related to incest prohibitions and to laws governing exogamy. Julia Kristeva, building on Freud, sees a relationship between food and sexual intercourse which has to do with a social unit's perceptions of its ability to thrive. “In a number of primitive societies religious rites are purification rites whose function is to separate this or that social, sexual, or age group from one another, by means of prohibiting a filthy defiling element.”³⁰ Food, like sexual intercourse, may be debased and is thus “liable to defile,” to bring one into contact with “the other” that “penetrates the self's clean and proper body” (p. 75). Ingesting food that is considered unclean or impure can bring on disease and death; similarly, illicit sex can destroy an individual or a nation for it too crosses established boundaries. Oedipus, “through murder of the father and incest with the mother interrupted the reproductive chain” and was responsible for “the stopping of life” (p. 85), a defilement of the human social condition. Because defilement is “incest considered as transgression of the boundaries of what is clean and proper” (p. 85), both feeding and sexuality contain the potential for disrupting personal and social integrity with sterility, disease, and death.

The connection between sexual intercourse and eating habits was addressed more directly in a recent issue of the Journal of the Polynesian Society devoted to questions of incest in Polynesia and Micronesia. Anthony Hooper notes that “eating blood” is a literal gloss of the Tahitian phrase ‘amu toto,’ which denotes, among many other things, ‘incest’,”³¹ while J. L. Fischer, Roger Ward, and Martha Ward observe that one of the “two most common Ponapean terms given as translations for the English word ‘incest’” is “li-kengkeng-enih-mat, literally, ‘rotten corpse eater’.”³² In the same issue, David Labby finds a close link between eating and incest based less on psychological than on economic determinants.³³

In an attempt to discern the reasoning behind the Yapese identification of incest as cannibalism, Labby points out that the Yapese word for incest, “ku'w,” “also referred to a variety of large sea bass which was notorious for its voraciousness and huge mouth. It would engulf all fish, even its own offspring, perhaps even a man. People who committed incest, it was said, were similarly voracious, consuming their own kin in a sort of sexual cannibalism” (p. 171). Labby develops the analogy between incest and cannibalism by pointing to the similar ways in which the incestuous and cannibals consume themselves: “As the cannibals appear to survive by eating off themselves, by self-consumption, rather than by working the land and receiving food from it in exchange, so incest attempts to perpetuate the clan by sexual self-consumption rather than through the cultural exchange with other groups” (p. 174). For Labby it is clear that when food production and exogamous reproduction are perverted into cannibalism and incest, a culture's ability to survive is impaired if not destroyed. Thus, for the Yapese, “incest was ultimately ‘cannibalistic,’ a denial of culture, of exchange, or work, a kind of survival through self-consumption” (p. 179).

I offer the conclusions of anthropologists not as a way of suggesting that “all people” reason or experience the world alike, or that the folklore of Pacific islanders is somehow the same kind of material as English dramatic literature of the seventeenth century. My point is not that cultures are simply interchangeable and that all stories are analogous, but rather that the idea of sustenance, which links the sexual and the alimentary in Yapese oral history, helps us to see a similar binding of healthful sexuality and licit eating, and of cannibalism and incest, in Pericles. For the Yapese, eating and sexual intercourse, both necessary in order for the individual and the society as a whole to survive, are fundamentally alike in that food is sustenance and reproduction is sustaining. In Pericles Antiochus and the Princess seek to sustain themselves through self-consumption, perverting the socially acceptable means of propagating their family as fully as if they nourished themselves by eating human flesh.

The idea of sustenance thus provides a nexus, and helps to explain Shakespeare's linking cannibalism and incest. That he understood the notion of sustenance as the common denominator between eating and sexual intercourse is clear from Pericles, as we shall see, as well as from other sources. For example, in Measure for Measure, when Isabella tells Claudio that Angelo will save his life if she agrees to sleep with him, her imprisoned brother begs, “Sweet sister, let me live” (III.i.132). Isabella calls him a “faithless coward” and a “dishonest wretch” (III.i.136), asking rhetorically,

                                                                                O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame?

(III.i.136-39)

Here again we find incest coupled with the idea of sustenance, for to “be made a man” and “to take life” are to sustain life. J. W. Lever, one of few editors to gloss these lines, interprets Claudio's desire to live as incestuous “since through Isabella's shameful intercourse her own brother would be ‘born’ again.”³⁴ For Lever, the accent is clearly on the relationship between Isabella and “her own brother,” and it is certainly the conjunction of siblings and sexuality here that prompts the notion of incest. Yet Claudio's behavior is “a kind of incest” not only because he encourages his sister's sexual intercourse, but also because he attempts “to take life,” that is, to live, to sustain himself, in a grossly inappropriate manner, in this instance, through his “sister's shame.” The distinction between the two ways of reading the line—either emphasizing the relationship between brother and sister, or emphasizing the inappropriateness of “taking life” in a shameful way—is more than simple hair-splitting. Pericles, which begins with incest (and abounds in images of devouring and cannibalism), is quite self-consciously about sustenance, about the ways in which people nourish themselves, propagate the species, and protect their families, friends, and nation. Like a morality play, Pericles presents side by side a variety of examples of good and bad nurturing, and uses images of eating as the medium through which we must interpret the action.

III

When Ben Jonson used Pericles as a prime example of a “mouldy tale,” “stale / As the shrieve's crust, and nasty as his fish,”³⁵ he was doing no more than hoisting the play with its own petar, for images of eating are pervasive in Pericles. “I feed / On mother's flesh,” the riddle's metaphor, is but one—and not the first—in a series of literal and figurative references to devouring. Although Caroline Spurgeon concluded that “Pericles alone of the romances has no sign of any running ‘motive’ or continuity of picture or thought in the imagery,”³⁶ the play in fact presents an almost obsessive chain of images and actions having to do with eating, food, vomiting, starving, and nourishment. From Pericles' description of his determination to win the Princess of Antioch as “an inflam'd desire in my breast / To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree” ([I.i.21-22], the first of many which imply cannibalism), to his description later of his daughter Marina as one “Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry / The more she gives them speech” (V.i.112-13), Pericles uses the gustatory for a variety of purposes, though most often as a way of indicating sexual desire. That is, as in the riddle, where a kind of eating (cannibalism) describes a kind of sexuality (incest), so in the play as a whole the alimentary is used to define the sexual. Indeed, in Pericles a scheme of moral values relating to sexuality and nurturance is indicated primarily by right and wrong sorts of appetite, food, and eating. The two activities—eating and propagating—form an apt metaphorical duo, for both, as we have seen, are natural and sustaining activities from which we “take life.”³⁷

Like most Shakespearean comedies, Pericles identifies love with plenty, and the play has its fair share of feasts and celebrations which use eating and drinking as signs of communal celebration. The happy recognitions of the fifth act, for example, begin with Gower's telling us that Pericles' ship arrived in Mytilene as that city “striv'd / God Neptune's annual feast to keep” (V.Cho.16-17). Earlier, when the fishermen discover Pericles ashore near Pentapolis after the shipwreck, they offer him food and clothing, promising that “we'll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-days, and moreo'er puddings and flap-jacks. …” (II.i.81-83). Their gracious sharing with him is echoed later, after Pericles defeats competitors at the tournament at Pentapolis, when Simonides, his host, entertains the contestants with a lavish banquet, enjoining them to be happy, “for mirth becomes a feast” (II.iii.7).

But eating and drinking in Pericles always suggest more than simple celebration, and the speed with which literal references to eating become figurative characterizes Shakespeare's use of language in this play. For example, the banqueting at Pentapolis takes on a less innocent coloration, and seems less the simple sign of community, when Thaisa offers Pericles wine in language which suggests transubstantiation, or a totemic sacrifice:³⁸

THAI.
The king my father, sir, has drunk to you.
PER.
I thank him.
THAI.
Wishing it so much blood unto your life.

(II.iii.75-77)

The threatening aspect of the father, which Pericles had witnessed to his horror in Antioch, seems to re-appear in Pentapolis. Here, however, the King's words are part of the language of courtesy, and though they suggest the carnivorous, and perhaps cannibalism, they merely indicate Simonides' hospitality. Many of the metaphors in the play, however, perhaps taking their cue from the riddle, do suggest cannibalism in fairly direct ways. Thaisa, “queen o'th' feast” (II.iii.17), is so taken with Pericles that she loses her appetite for the foods offered by her father to his guests:

By Juno, that is queen of marriage,
All viands that I eat do seem unsavoury
Wishing him my meat.

(II.iii.30-22)

Pericles had wanted to “taste” the Princess of Antioch, who was herself “an eater of her mother's flesh,” and now Thaisa wishes Pericles her “meat.” The identification of people with food, the reduction of human beings to comestibles, is this play's way of indicating human desire and the intensity and quality of relationships. What Pericles makes equally clear, however, is the difference between the kinds of eating and sexuality which are licit and sustaining, and those forms which are not. Thaisa and Simonides stand as corrective examples against which Pericles and the audience can measure the perversely sustaining habits of Antiochus and his daughter.

Clearly, the banquet scene at Pentapolis uses images of food and eating to indicate community values and the healthfulness of Simonides' court, though its language toys with the idea of cannibalism, using such gruesome images for positive effects, much as The Merchant of Venice, for example, uses pecuniary imagery to define Portia's worth. But if cannibalism is occasionally used playfully in Pericles, as a sign of one's ultimate deliciousness (as in popular songs and rhymes where little girls are “sugar and spice”), this play in general is full of less innocuous examples. In terms of the play's dominant, and perhaps sole, image pattern, it is significant that it is fishermen who discover a bedraggled Pericles on the shore after his shipwreck (II.i). When one marvels “how the fishes live in the sea” (II.i.26-27), another responds,

Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a' th' land, who never leave gaping till they swallow'd the whole parish, church steeple, bells, and all.

(II.i.28-34)

Once again, as in the riddle, an inappropriate modus vivendi is illustrated through the agency of a metaphor having to do with eating. In this case, the fishermen, who sustain themselves in a socially acceptable way—by catching and eating what they need—point to “our rich misers,” comparing them to whales and calling them whales “a' th' land.” The natural order in the ocean, where the big eat the small, is simply an unpleasant fact of life for the fishermen. But Shakespeare, who moralizes in Pericles as nowhere else,³⁹ uses nature as a way of commenting on the impropriety, the obscenity, of what a later era would call social Darwinism, where “the great ones eat up the little ones,” on a world where power is appetite, “And appetite, an universal wolf / … / Must make perforce a universal prey / And last eat up himself” (Tro., I.iii.121-24). Thus, Pericles, which begins with child devouring parent, that is, the little (like young snakes) eating the great, soon expands the metaphor to include the more familiar horror of the great devouring the little. This scenario recalls Labby's analysis of the Yapese identification of cannibalism with incest: the huge sea bass “would engulf all fish, even its own offspring, perhaps even a man. People who committed incest, it was said, were similarly voracious, consuming their own kin in a sort of sexual cannibalism.” The vehicle of the metaphor, devouring, is the same in Labby's example and in Pericles; and the tenor, incest in the former, human greed in the latter, are both unacceptable—because ultimately self-defeating—methods of sustenance.

Storms in the natural world are associated in this play with the excesses of overeating and drinking, and lead, as we might expect, to the riots associated with vomiting. “What a drunken knave was the sea to cast [i.e., vomit] thee in our way!” chide the fishermen when they find Pericles (II.i.57); the north “disgorges” (III.Cho.48) the tempest that splits Pericles' ship and brings on Thaisa's labor; the sea has its “belching whale” (III.i.62), and later “belches” Thaisa's coffin upon shore (III.ii.56) when its “stomach” is “o'ercharg'd” (III.ii.54). Shakespeare uses a similar set of images throughout the brothel scenes, and equates prostitution with gluttony and cannibalism, much as he does the immorality of miserliness in the fisherman's lament in II.i. The whores are “unwholesome” (IV.ii.19), “rotten” (IV.ii.9), and are killing off the customers, one of whom was made “roast-meat for worms” (IV.ii.22-23). The Bawd needs “fresh ones” (IV.ii.10) to replace the “sodden” [i.e., “stewed”] (IV.ii.18) women who remain in the business. Marina is instructed in her new duties by the Bawd, her “herb woman” (IV.vi.84), so that “she may not be raw in her entertainment” (IV.vi.51-52) in a house where the “doors and windows savour vilely” (IV.vi.110). When she proves intractable, causing the profession to “stink afore the face of the gods” (IV.vi.135-36), Boult tries to force her. Marina defends herself by telling the pander's servant that his

                                                                                                    food is such
As hath been belch'd on by infected lungs.

(IV.vi.167-68)

The connection between Boult's trade and the condition of his food is clear enough, I think, to most audiences. Marina's point, an elaboration of the terms of the riddle—where eating is used to describe sexuality—is that a debased profession and a shameful way of earning money, that is, of “taking life,” to borrow Measure for Measure's phrase again, is the same as sustaining oneself on diseased food. The physical is used to illustrate the moral, all the more telling an approach given the real danger in seventeenth-century Europe of ingesting bad food or of contracting a disease and infecting one's lungs.⁴⁰

Although Marina is told she will “taste gentlemen of all fashions” (IV.ii.74-75), and that “Men must feed” her (IV.ii.88), most descriptions in these scenes suggest that it is she who will be cannibalized and become food for the men. Such a substitution—Marina for rotten meat—underscores the horrific nature of her life in the brothel. The virgin, Western literature's pre-eminent sign of moral healthfulness,⁴¹ is to be used, indeed, consumed, by those corrupt natures who ordinarily eat diseased flesh. When Boult “cried her through the market” (IV.ii.90), “There was a Spaniard's mouth water'd” (IV.ii.97-98). Boult himself argues that he is entitled to sleep with her; after all,

                                                                                                                        if
                    I have bargain'd for the joint,—
BAWD.
Thou mayst cut a morsel off the spit.

(IV.ii.129-30)

The Bawd tells Marina her chastity “is not worth a breakfast in the cheapest country under the cope” (IV.vi.122-23), and then calls her “my dish of chastity with rosemary and bays!” (IV.vi.150-51). The reduction of people to “morsels” suggests the horrors of fairy tales, where caged children are fattened, sleeping children have their throats cut, and young girls are simply devoured by hungry animals. Marina's treatment, however, quite self-consciously conflates sexual abuse and physical abuse in a way fairy tales do not, implying that she will be cannibalized as a graphic way of indicating rape. Thus, like the riddle, the brothel scenes describe illicit sexuality and moral turpitude by calling attention through their imagery to appetite and rapacity. The assumption inherent in such an approach seems to be that the easiest way for an English audience of the seventeenth century to comprehend the ghastliness of sexual abuse is via the more familiar horrors of hunger, disease, and the sicknesses attendant on gluttony.

To understand the connection between eating and propagating in Pericles is to appreciate the equal importance of both elements which comprise the central metaphor. Thus, although Pericles begins with a glaring instance of perverse sexuality, and emphasizes its perversity by offering both the salutary example of Simonides' and Thaisa's healthy father/daughter relationship, as well as the vivid portrayal of Marina's sexual abuse in the brothel, the play pays quite as much attention, in the final analysis, to food, eating, starvation, and appetitive excesses. Indeed, I.iv, which describes Pericles' relieving the starving masses in Tharsus, does so in terms which lead us back to Antiochus' riddle as directly as do the brothel scenes. If the Princess of Antioch is a child who feeds “on mother's flesh,” and Marina a child who is threatened with being eaten, at least figuratively, it is only Pericles' fortuitous arrival which prevents the children of Tharsus from being devoured in fact. Pericles brings Cleon and Dionyza “corn to bake your needy bread, / And give them life whom hunger starv'd half dead” (I.iv.95-96), forestalling desperate attempts by mothers to cannibalize their young. The citizens of Tharsus, Knight tells us, are “brought low by savage hunger; brought, that is, to realize its ultimate dependence; brought up against basic fact; such fact as is the natural air breathed by the admirable fishermen of Pentapolis.”⁴² Cleon comments on the dreadful family situations in Tharsus,

Those palates who, not yet two summers younger,
Must have inventions to delight the taste,
Would now be glad of bread, and beg for it;
Those mothers who, to nuzzle up their babes
Thought nought too curious, are ready now
To eat those little darlings who they lov'd.

(I.iv.39-44)

This description of the state of mind of the mothers in Tharsus is an ironic reversal of the terms of the riddle. Though it mirrors the horror with which the play opens, it is but the most direct—and one of the earliest—in a long series of allusions to eating in general, and to cannibalism in particular. Pericles begins by defining incest as a kind cannibalism, and then proceeds to describe societies divided into the starving and the over-fed, in which the great eat the little, “the poor fry” are devoured by the whale and “the whole parish” by the gluttons on land. From its grotesque initial metaphor Pericles moves quickly and inexorably to a world where cannibalism is a real possibility. The vehicle of the riddle's metaphor achieves a life of its own, and an outrageous comparison suddenly describes the precise social conditions in which some characters actually live. The grotesqueries of fairy tale are thus validated early on in the world of Pericles, where it is entirely likely that a daughter will be “an eater of her mother's flesh,” but also that parents will devour “those little darlings whom they lov'd.” All may become foodstuffs.

How one “takes life” is thus quite clearly the focus of this play. Are we, Pericles seems to ask, to sustain ourselves by using our children? Are children to thrive by consuming their parents? Ought one prostitute others, or gobble up the small fry, or devour the parish as a way of carving one's place in “this breathing world” (Richard III, I.i.21)? If Robert Wiemann is correct in concluding that the vitality of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater derives primarily from its ability to reflect the “heterogeneous ideas and attitudes”⁴³ born in an age of “economic expansion and national awakening” (p. 161), an age in which “[o]lder conceptions of honor were confronted by the new pride of possession, hatred of usury by the fervor for gold, the idea of service by the idea of profit, deeply rooted community consciousness by passionate individualism” (p. 169), then it is not at all surprising that Pericles emphasizes a human obligation to imitate nature in nurturing our own. The universe in which the characters in Pericles move describes both ends of its “Great Chain of Being,” not so much in terms of their hierarchical relation to one another, as in terms of nurturance and familial and governmental responsibility. What Morse says of images of ingestion in Shakespeare in general clearly applies to his use of such images in Pericles:

A complex series of moral observations is conveyed by describing characters as eating like animals, eating food which is only appropriate to animals, or even eating what animals themselves might refuse. At the extreme, the worst eating is cannibalism, the worst cannibalism is that which occurs within the family. By virtue of the double metaphor of the state as both like a human body and like a parent, the worst kind of family-cannibalism is treason.⁴⁴

In Pericles Shakespeare repeatedly stresses the importance of a natural and proper relation between parent and child, citizen and country, man and God. Though images of eating and food form the heart of his approach to the subject of nourishment and sustenance, in this play there are as well a series of fairly direct references to nurturance and generation. Pericles assumes that “All love the womb that their first being bred” (I.i.108), for, as Helicanus tells us, even the “plants look up to heaven, from whence / They have their nourishment” (I.ii.56-57). We learn that it is the earth “From whence we had our being and our birth” (I.ii.113-14), and that “Time's the king of men; / He's both their parent, and he is their grave …” (II.iii.45-46). Appropriately, Thaisa sits by her father “like Beauty's child, whom Nature gat” (II.ii.6), for “princes are / A model which heaven makes like to itself” (II.ii.10-11).

Antiochus is not the only character to exploit the common understanding that “All love the womb that their first being bred,” that strong will protect weak as parents their children and children their parents. When Marina's nurse, Lychorida, dies, Dionyza counsels Pericles' child, “Do not consume your blood with sorrowing: / Have you a nurse of me!” (IV.i.23-24). Pericles, who had assumed years earlier that he left Marina “At careful nursing” (III.i.80) with Dionyza, could hardly anticipate that queen's perverse understanding of “nursing”:

CLE.
What canst thou say
When noble Pericles shall demand his child?
DIO.
That she is dead. Nurses are not the fates,
To foster it, not ever to preserve.

(IV.iii.12-15)

Just as the example of Simonides and Thaisa serves to balance the perverse example of Antiochus and his daughter, so the ultimate cohesiveness and loyalty among Pericles and his wife and daughter balance the selfishness of Cleon and Dionyza.

Perhaps “Pericles might be called a Shakesperian morality play,” as Knight suggests,⁴⁵ primarily because “correspondences emerge”⁴⁶ as the action advances. Surely, two of the clearest parallels have to do with Marina, not so much as a reincarnated Thaisa, as most critics would have it, but rather as a benign, healthy, and natural version of the Princess of Antioch. More fully than Thaisa, Marina stands as an exemplar of a right relation between a daughter and her parents, in part because the circumstances of her birth seem to echo rather than contradict Antiochus' relationship with his daughter. That is, just as the Princess of Antioch “takes life” by devouring her mother, so Marina “takes life” at the expense of her mother, who (seemingly) dies as she is born. Pericles is told that his daughter is a “piece” (III.i.17) of his queen, “all that is left living” (III.i.20) of his wife. Though Marina is innocent of wrongdoing and the Princess a “Bad child” (I.Cho.27), Pericles describes a world where, by accident or design, children place parents in the gravest danger. We have seen as well, however, that the reverse is equally true, that children are likely to be abused by parents, by all adults, for the children of Tharsus are finally thought of as food, and Marina herself is dreadfully abused in the brothel at Mytilene.

It is in the play's last act that the apparent potential for destruction in both parents and children is finally defused. Here, father and daughter rescue one another, and then go on to reclaim a wife and mother who had long been thought dead. Pericles redeems from the brothel the daughter whom he had left with the most unmaternal Dionyza in Tharsus, and Marina revives the father whom she had rendered bereft by the fact of her birth. The ways in which father and daughter are mutually dependent, connected not only by the undeniable facts of biology but by family history as well, are captured in Pericles' call to Marina,

                                                                                                    O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget. …

(V.i.194-95)

Pericles acknowledges that as parent and child and he and Marina take life from one another, he as her biological father, and she as the agent of his spiritual rebirth. Child and parent, each to the other, Pericles and Marina in the fifth act exemplify that healthful relationship which is so cruelly debased in the play's opening act. Gorfain argues that “Pericles's paradox [ll. 194-95] inverts the roles of father and daughter without consuming maternity and creativity”⁴⁷; indeed, his paradox points to “the thing that is most emphasized in the feminine figures—their power to create and cherish life, their potential or achieved maternity.”⁴⁸ As the play ends we are drawn back to that other paradox, the riddle which points to sterility and death; as Peterson suggests, “We have seen that the dialectical terms of process—a love that sustains, restores, and renews and a love that corrupts and destroys—are represented throughout the play by characters who are simple exemplars.”⁴⁹ The Princess of Antioch, “an eater of her mother's flesh,” destroys the parent who begat her and, in fact, sustains herself by “feed[ing] / On mother's flesh which did me breed.” Marina, sustained by her parents, indeed, taking life as her mother dies, reciprocates, begetting a father whose revival implies and impels the resurrection of her mother. Thaisa is told that Marina is “flesh of thy flesh” (V.iii.46), and hears her daughter declare, “My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom” (V.iii.44-45). The disparate units of Pericles' family are reintegrated, “flesh” joins rather than feeds on flesh, and the family becomes a self-sustaining entity comprised of parents and child who nourish and nurture one another.

Notes

1. George Parfitt, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), p. 283.

2. Hazlitt objected to “the far-fetched and complicated absurdity of the story” (“Characters of Shakespear's Plays,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe [London: J. M. Dent, 1930], p. 357), and quoted Schlegel, who felt that “Shakespear here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its proper sphere” (p. 355). For Larry S. Champion (The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970]) the play's startling events “entertain for their own sake, not because they arouse interest in what happens to a certain character or how he is affected” (p. 97). Similarly, James G. McManaway (ed. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare [Baltimore: Penguin, 1969]) writes Pericles off as a play with “striking incidents selected from a long romance with small regard for causality” (p. 1260), and Hallett Smith (ed. Pericles, in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston: Houghton, 1974]) claims that “From any realistic point of view, the spectacular scenes of Pericles are of course utter nonsense” (p. 1481).

3. Phyllis Gorfain, “Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in ‘Pericles’,” Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 11.

4. References to Pericles are from the New Arden, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963); those to other plays by Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare.

5. “Antiochus's Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare, Review of English Studies, N.S., 6 (1955), 245-51.

6. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 55.

7. Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, ed. A. Riese (1893; rpt. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973), p. 6.

8. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VI (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 377, 379, 428.

9. Bullough, p. 498. The earliest extant version of the Apollonius story, Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (see note 7), a late Latin prose romance, is thought to have been based on earlier Greek models. Thomas Hagg (The Novel in Antiquity [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983]) discusses the enormous popularity of Apollonius of Tyre (pp. 147-53), which exists as well in Latin verse fragments, and appears in Old English, Old French, Byzantine Greek, and Middle High German, as well as in numerous Renaissance versions. For a discussion of its genesis, provenance, and affinities with earlier Greek literature, see Philip H. Goepp, 2nd, “The Narrative Material of Apollonius of Tyre,” ELH, 5 (1938), 150-72. For its affinities with modern Greek oral narrative, see R. M. Dawkins, “Modern Greek Oral Versions of Apollonios of Tyre,” Modern Language Review, 37 (1942), 169-84.

10. Hoeniger, p. 12. Allusions to serpents as devourers of their mothers abounded in the Renaissance. See, for example, Jonson's Poetaster: “Out viper, thou that eat'st thy parents, hence” (The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G. A. Wilkes, II [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981], V.iii.291).

11. Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), p. 191.

12. If serpents helped Shakespeare to describe in pictorial terms the cannibalism implicit in the riddle, they also suggested incest in more direct terms, for one of the examples which the OED uses to define “incestuous,” Sylvester's Du Bartas (1591), seems to assume in its description of usury a relationship between incest and serpents: “You City-Vipers, that (incestious) joyn / Use upon use, begetting Coyn of Coyn!” The reptilian, incest, and devouring are, of course, linked in Milton's Paradise Lost when Satan attempts to make his way through the gates of hell. The fallen angel is stopped by his daughter, Sin, the “Snaky Sorceress” (II.724), half woman, half serpent, and by Death, her son (and brother) begotten by her father. Milton makes clear the irony in the impending battle between Satan and Death in Sin's plea, “O Father, what intends thy hand … / Against thy only Son?” (II.727-28). Interestingly, Merritt Y. Hughes (ed. Paradise Lost [New York: Odyssey, 1962]) points out that John Gower had personified “Sin as the incestuous mother of Death in the Mirrour de l'Omme” (p. 51).

13. William Aldis Wright, ed. The Authorised Version of the English Bible, I (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1909), Gen.III.6.

14. Emile Male, The Gothic Image, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 379.

15. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), Ch.24.

16. Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), I.i.45.

17. The traditional association of evil and the torments of hell with cannibalism is most clearly seen in the visual arts. For example, Fra Angelico's “Last Judgment” (Florence), painted ca. 1430, divides the netherworld into eight chambers. In the various rooms sinners eat at a table, are cooked in a large pot, are stewed in an even larger pot—in the center of which the devil tears them to bits with his teeth—and devour themselves in what appears to be an orgy of cannibalism and self-mutilation. Occasionally, as in the literature of the period, artists commented on social injustice through depictions of universal gluttony or starvation. See, for example, Peter Brueghel's drawings “Big Fish Eat Little Fish,” “The Poor Kitchen,” and “The Rich Kitchen.”

18. Ruth Morse, “Unfit for Human Consumption: Shakespeare's Unnatural Food,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (1983), 148.

19. Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 111, 119.

20. Morse, p. 126, et passim.

21. Janet Adelman, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 129-49.

22. See Gail Kern Paster, “To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 123-44, on “the thematic link between animal imagery and the images of food and eating which recur throughout the play” (p. 136). It is likely that the enormous popularity of images having to do with eating, starving, and related subjects, whether familiar and reassuring or gruesome, may in fact partly be accounted for in the social history of the period. At the beginning of her essay Adelman suggests that popular protests and riots against food shortages may have provided real impetus to Shakespeare, who “shapes his material from the start [in Coriolanus] to exacerbate those fears in his audience” (p. 129). Robert Darnton, who has written extensively on pre-Revolutionary French cultural history (The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History [New York: Random House, 1984]), feels strongly the shaping influence of economic constraints on popular literature, and argues that the cannibalism, infanticide, and incest of 18th-century French fairy tales find their origin in the living conditions of the masses: “to eat or not to eat, that was the question peasants confronted in their folklore as well as in their daily lives” (pp. 31-32). Indeed, at least one critic thinks the “famine relief” (Graham Anderson, Ancient Fiction [London: Croom Helm, 1984], p. 105) in Apollonius of Tyre (echoed in Pericles, I.iv) speaks directly to a crucial social issue. Anderson believes that “romantic motifs are related to the kind of realities of ancient life that are at least familiar in a sophisticated Western culture” (p. 100).

23. John Frederick Nims, ed. Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation (New York: Macmillan, 1965), VI.824-25.

24. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 172.

25. Robin Fox, The Red Lamp of Incest (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), p. 182.

26. Sir James G. Frazer, “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul,” The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 116-19.

27. Christine Kapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 92.

28. Laura and Raoul Makarius, “The Incest Prohibition and Food Taboos,” Diogenes, 30 (1960), 46.

29. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), p. 132.

30. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horrors, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), p. 65.

31. Anthony Hooper, “‘Eating Blood’: Tahitian Concepts of Incest,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 85 (1976), 227.

32. J. L. Fischer, Roger Ward, and Martha Ward, “Ponapean Conceptions of Incest,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 85 (1976), 200.

33. David Labby, “Incest as Cannibalism: The Yapese Analysis,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 85 (1976), 171-79.

34. Measure for Measure, ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 75.

35. George Parfitt, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), p. 283.

36. Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), p. 291.

37. W. B. Thorne, “Pericles and the Incest-Fertility Opposition,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 43-56, reviews scholarship which sees Pericles as a play about the opposition between young and old, fertility and sterility, themes related to nurturance.

38. See Freud, pp. 140-46.

39. On Shakespeare's overt moralizing in Pericles see G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 32-75, and Maurice Hunt (“A Looking Glass for Pericles,” Essays in Literature, 13 [1986], 3-11), who discusses the play's “strong roots in Miracle drama” (p. 3). Goepp discusses the “didacticism” (p. 170) of Apollonius of Tyre.

40. See William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976), Ch. 5.

41. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), discusses the meaning of virginity in romance literature in Ch. 3.

42. Knight, pp. 48-49.

43. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 169.

44. Morse, p. 126.

45. Knight, p. 70.

46. Douglas L. Peterson, Time Tide and Tempest (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1973), p. 83.

47. Gorfain, p. 15.

48. C. L. Barber, “‘Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter's Tale,’” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 61. Marianne Novy writes, “Here, as when Pericles applies imagery of pregnancy and childbirth to himself earlier in the scene, the interchange of sexes suggests that the distinction between male and female experience has become less important than a sense of general human vulnerability and of the interdependence between generations” (Love's Argument [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984], p. 175).

49. Peterson, p. 88.