SOURCE: Thorne, W. B. “Pericles and the ‘Incest-Fertility’ Opposition.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 1 (winter 1971): 43-56.

[In the following essay, Thorne offers an analysis of Pericles as representative of Shakespeare's “late plays of reconciliation,” arguing that the drama's central principle of fertility is structurally counterpointed by the incest motif.]

Though a comprehensive analysis of Pericles must be advanced only tentatively, because of the critical doubt about Shakespeare's share in its creation, its thematic structure seems not unlike that of the bulk of Shakespearian comedies. In fact, it presents a sophistication of the fertility and spring themes which supply the dramatic impulse in The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The basic difference between Pericles (indeed all the late plays of reconciliation) and the earlier comedies is that the dramatic moment of Pericles deals not only with individuals and the fertility theme, as applied to the struggle between the young and the old, but also to whole lifetimes, to generations, and to the effect of the principle of fertility upon the entire life of each man.

Unlike a representative tragedy, which is frequently the history of a single individual, the late plays of reconciliation treat, as Janet Spens points out, “of the story of a group of people, usually a family and always consisting of two generations.”¹ In Pericles, for instance, the action covers the space of about sixteen years, and in The Winter's Tale Leontes and Hermione undergo sixteen years of ritual penance. Though the basic device of the comedies had always been the conflict between the old and young generations, the factor which differentiates the approach of the late comedies from that of the early ones, for instance The Taming of the Shrew, is that the device of the personification of polar impulses is adapted to the life of a single individual, to both his youth and his age, and is extended to his posterity. Though we first see him in the springtime of his youth, Pericles, like Lear, suffers a bitter winter of separation, not only from his child, but also from his wife and all that is dear to him. As the play unfolds, we have the feeling that the human story is being enacted before us, with the scapegoat, his suffering, and all the paraphernalia traditionally effective in cleansing society of its evil. What is born in Marina, as M. D. H. Parker explains, like what is to be born in Perdita, Miranda, and Cymbeline's lost sons, is a new humanity, “from which redemption flows back to the old.”² This plot situation represents a sophistication of the basic comic device of the antipathy between the young and the old, and the device of the flippant young suitor who outwits the kill-joys and the representatives of “age” and “society”. It casts this alloy into a new mold, purifying it, to a large extent, of the grosser comic elements and consciously forming it into a new dramatic construct. The associations of the traditional suitor and his efforts to triumph over rivals and the maiden's father contribute accretions of meaning impossible without a knowledge of the play's dramatic predecessors among the folk. E. M. W. Tillyard says of these plays of reconciliation, in Shakespeare's Last Plays:

We find in each the same general scheme of prosperity, destruction, and recreation. The main character is a King. At the beginning he is in prosperity. He then does an evil or misguided deed. Great suffering follows, but during this suffering or at its height the seeds of something new to issue from it are germinating, usually in secret. In the end this new element assimilates and transforms the old evil. The King overcomes his evil instincts, joins himself to the new order by an act of forgiveness or repentance; and the play issues into a fairer prosperity than had first existed.³

The concept of the lost child, wife, or husband is, of course, not new to the Shakespearian canon, nor to Shakespearian comedy, for it had appeared as early as The Comedy of Errors, and is thematic in As You Like It. Consequently, Pericles seems constructed upon a familiar foundation, though disguised with apparently unfamiliar friezes and frescoes. Critical opinion is at last recognizing that the same ideas, preoccupations, situations, devices, and themes inform Shakespeare's comedies from the very earliest to the latest.⁴ This view is directly opposite to the traditional opinion that Shakespeare began with satirical comedies of a classical pattern, turned for pragmatic reasons to romantic comedies, then, as his outlook darkened, created the “dark” comedies, forerunners of the great tragedies, and, then, in the mellowed “sear, the yellow leaf” of old age, resolved his bitterness in the artistic patterns of reconciliation in the late comedies. The modern view now recognizes that Shakespeare manipulated a limited number of dramatic devices and themes, many of them borrowed directly from the native drama, though he consistently gave to them a fresh “local habitation and a name.” Even the use of Gower as prologue or presenter is a device, similar to that of the folk-drama, which acts like the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew to give the flavor of ritual or a morality play to Pericles. Gower's speeches punctuate the action, and his opening remarks emphasize the fertility imagery and the ritualistic nature of the play to follow, its educational or beneficial effect upon the audience. Pericles, moreover, is a “festival tale” presented for the good and welfare of the community, and Gower indicates in the first Chorus that:

It hath been sung at festivals
On ember eves and holy-ales,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.
The purchase is to make men glorious:. …

(I, Chorus, 5-9)

F. D. Hoeniger suggests, in the critical commentary appended to the Arden edition of Pericles, that “Gower is employed in a manner quite unlike that of the chorus of Greek or Senecan tragedy. The ultimate origins of this device are rather to be looked for in mediaeval religious drama.”⁵ He also argues that, like the Chorus of Henry V, Gower acts as both prologue and epilogue, appears on the stage before each act, influences the imaginative processes of the minds of the spectators, and, finally, is both presenter and, to some degree, interpreter. Hoeniger's conclusions concerning the nature of the play are of more than common interest to the present discussion, for he is convinced that Pericles is so significantly indebted to folk-drama that not only its story-material and its presenting chorus, but also its essential dramatic form, are medieval in nature and influence. The evidence is so clear, he feels (p. xviii), that Shakespeare may have known a folk-lore version of the tale which is now lost to us. Seeing Pericles primarily as a Shakespearian miracle play, he explains (p. lxxxviii) that:

The play is curiously, and I think significantly, like the vernacular religious drama in its later, more developed, and less rigid, forms, especially the Saint's play. One could argue that from plays of this kind, with which Shakespeare was surely acquainted, most of the broad structural features of Pericles are derived. They are at any rate paralleled; among them the device of the choric presenter in the person of a poet, the building up of the action out of a large number of loosely related episodes, the treatment of the play as a “pageant” rather than a work of highly concentrated action around a central conflict, the tragicomic development of the action, the large part taken in it by supernatural powers, and the construction of the whole so as to serve an explicit didactic end.

Richard Wincor, in his article “Shakespeare's Festival Plays”, suggests that “Shakespeare's last plays may best be understood by comparing them to the old festival plays that celebrate the return of spring after a barren winter.”⁶ He was not, of course, aware in 1950 that fertility themes had, all along, supplied the structural and thematic framework of the bulk of Shakespearian comedy. Independent of other analysis upon the festival themes of the early comedies, he postulates that the most important of the rites associated with the traditional folk-drama is the mock death and cure, frequently administered by a doctor or venerable medicine-man who through sympathetic magic encourages the operation of nature (p. 221). Echoing ideas advanced as early as 1916 by Janet Spens, he suggests that Shakespeare's late comedies seem to be indebted to this old pattern of the mock death and the renouveau, which have so many subtle affiliations with primitive fertility ritual. In Pericles, Thaisa, Marina, and Pericles himself undergo a form of mock death, a device which Shakespeare has already experimented with in Much Ado About Nothing. Marina's release from the brothel where pirates placed her is regenerating, like a renouveau, as is her effect upon the sorrowing King, who awakens to her celestial music and later is able to hear the music of the spheres.

Wincor also suggests that Pericles begins with an interesting example of nature veneration, a corollary to the fertility theme. By committing incest with his daughter, Antiochus offends the very foundation of nature herself, for his is an evil and barren union. So “unnatural” is this union that father and daughter are eventually destroyed by avenging gods. The relationship in the brothel which Marina escapes is equally an offense against the principles of nature, for in it the vital spirit of life is wasted without reciprocating spirituality. As an ironic counterpart to the temple of Diana, in which Thaisa is voluntarily immured, the brothel serves as a setting to magnify the rich jewel of Marina's purity and virtue. Her healing presence, however, affects not only Pericles, but also those who frequent the brothel, and the pander himself. Thus, focussed in this symbol and the brothel scenes in general is the familiar polar dramatic construction and the reversal of opposites which it can afford.

John Arthos, in his article “Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Romantic Narrative”, argues that other devices used in the play are also interestingly close to folk-lore.⁷ The device of a man who must solve a riddle in order to win a desirable young “virgin” has its parallel in folk-legend, and Shakespeare certainly uses the device again in The Tempest, when Ferdinand is forced to fulfil an irksome task to win Miranda. He has already used the device in The Merchant of Venice and the early comedies, but in them, of course, it is in another form. It occurs in the early comedies whenever a self-possessed, flippant young man must use a clever device or subterfuge to outwit a rival, a father, or a husband in order to win the maiden.

For Pericles, however, the traditional folk opposition of the old father and the young suitor has been modified to accommodate the incestuous daughter-father relationship. Essentially, the same situation is present as that supplying the comic structure of The Taming of the Shrew or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Pericles is endeavoring to win from the father, Antiochus (who opposes the match), his young, desirable, supposedly-virgin daughter. The traditional situation is complicated by the fact that it is merged with the rivalry between the old and young suitors, also reflected in The Taming of the Shrew. Antiochus, the old father, is also an “old suitor”, and will risk all to prevent a desirable young man from carrying his daughter away. It might be argued, of course, that this motive is always in the psychological background of the father-suitor rivalry, and touches upon a basic emotional reaction, unavoidable in such human relationships. But this argument seems merely to reinforce the “folk nature” of the device.

The “incest” motif, as we see later, destroys for Pericles the value of that which he sought and hoped to win, and serves to blight his life until the rediscovery of his wife and daughter at the end of the play. The critical consequences that each adventure has for the young suitor's soul serve to ally the action with that of morality plays with a folk background and to bring to the forefront of our attention the question of Pericles' ability to survive the evils with which he is confronted. He is not in control of his fortunes; rather he endures them, and at the end of the play, when he is soothed by the beauty of Marina's song, he seems restored to life, much as is Hermione in The Winter's Tale, and he hears the music of the spheres.

The opening of the play seems deliberately deceptive. The audience's interest is captured by the romantic device of the suitor who endeavors to win an attractive young woman away from some representative of age, who seeks to keep her by placing almost insurmountable obstacles in the path of suitors. Almost immediately, Antiochus' daughter enters, appareled like a pageant personification of Spring, and appears a dazzling beauty, the epitome of virtue and honor:

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

(I. i. 13-15)

“All that glisters is not gold”, alas, and soon we learn that she who seemed to be a representative of fertility, like the other women in the comedies, is really a representative of age and winter, because, through her incestuous relationship with her father, she confounds the seasons and offends the very laws of nature. Pericles' suit for her hand seems to be a momentary plunge into the unnatural, a plunge into sin and death, and he seems to feel guilt when he realizes the meaning of his brush with death, for he had been willing to sacrifice life itself, only to win a tainted prize. Like Hamlet, he recognizes the danger in plumbing to the depths of the soul of a King, and he is uncertain how much of the “offence” is his own. Though the play does not on the surface discuss the extent of his involvement in the sin of Antiochus, the following action indicates that Pericles has been “tainted” by the incest with a stain which he must eradicate through his own behavior.⁸ His necessary penance seems to follow the principle of misrule, which assumes that a plunge into “disorder” will eventually produce a new and more precious “order”.

At any rate, Pericles becomes a “scapegoat” figure, the King who must sacrifice himself for the welfare of his people. To divert the hand of vengeance and prevent it from striking at the innocent lives of his subjects, he sets out on a sea-journey, almost as an Everyman on a mission of penance, and relieves the sufferings of other peoples. His first action after taking leave of Tyre is one of charity: he seems to journey deliberately to Tarsus so as to relieve its sufferings from famine. Morality themes and devices become quite recognizable, as Pericles labors to erase the stain upon him, the result of tampering with rotten fruit. In a similar vein, G. Wilson Knight suggests that at this point the action seems to be “a little morality drama on the theme of good works and indeed recalls the parable of the ungrateful man in the New Testament; for, after being let off by Providence functioning through Pericles' charity, Cleon and Dionyza are to prove criminally ungrateful.”⁹

Pericles' first adventure in the court of Antiochus gives him experience of disillusion and a realization of evil. His perilous life-journey is rather reminiscent of the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the ritual paraphernalia of the test, temptation, the journey, and penance. Both characters are faced by sexual evil, and both are to some extent tainted by it; furthermore, in both, the concept of spring and fertility plays an important role and provides to a degree the resolution. At least the play presents a cyclical representation of life and time, for it dramatizes a substantial summary of an individual's lifetime, a life cycle crowned by the abiding values of human generation, of forgiveness, charity, and spiritual renaissance. In it we find transmuted the values of fertility and springtime, in affirmation of the operation of the seasonal cycle in the spiritual life of mankind.

The great themes of the last plays are transmitted, it seems, in the familiar framework of the earlier comedies, through the manipulation of devices already well tried and tested on the boards. On the principle of the dramatic polarities of the early comedies, Pericles is organized in two contrasted parts, much in the fashion of the traditional opposition of winter and summer; it opens with the wintry bitterness of incest, tempest, shipwreck, loss and penance, after which it presents “spring festivity, youth and love, reunion and music”,¹⁰ a pattern to be repeated in The Winter's Tale. The seasonal concept is mirrored not only in the divisional structure of the action, but also in the life history of the main characters. Birth and regeneration round out the familiar concepts of repentance and penance, and pageant figures personify youth and age and the spiritual regeneration which assures that “death shall have no dominion”.

The play begins with a striking contrast between the barrenness of death in the riddle scene and the spring imagery used to describe the daughter of Antiochus. The opening scene sets up immediately the pageant opposition between life and death, summer and winter, as Pericles stands amidst the death's heads of previous suitors, “deathlike dragons”, which warn him that

Before thee stands this fair Hesperides,
With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched;. …

(I. i. 27-28)

This situation has its ironic counterpart later in the play when the truly innocent and virtuous Marina is displayed amidst the setting of the brothel, with all its implications of infertility. Because the incestuous daughter is described as a personification of spring, a garden bearing luscious fruit, and nature's darling, “clothed like a bride”, we are quite likely to assume that she is to be the representation of fertility in the play. But we are mistaken, of course, and soon learn that the “glorious casket” is “stored with ill”. This clear opposition with which the play opens is but the first of a series of symbolic confrontations of the principle of death, age, and winter with the principle of life, youth, and spring. Pericles is daring death in a false cause, for which he is to pay a severe penalty, though at the outset he deems even “death no hazard in this enterprise.” The temptation to taste that for which he is not prepared is made quite clear in Antiochus' speech:

Her face, like Heaven, enticeth thee to view
Her countless glory, which desert must gain,
And which, without desert, because thine eye
Presumes to reach, all thy whole heap must die.

(I. i. 30-33)

Like Leontes, Pericles is to lose both wife and child and suffer a bitter winter of penance. In fact, as Knight suggests in The Crown of Life (p. 14),

The stories of Pericles and The Winter's Tale are remarkably alike. In both the hero loses his wife and daughter just after the birth of his child; in both the idea of a child's helplessness is synchronized with a sea-storm of the usual Shakespearian kind; both the wife and child are miraculously restored after a long passage of time; and the revival of Thaisa, and the restoration of Marina and Hermione are accompanied by music. These plays are throughout impregnated by an atmosphere of mysticism. Hermione is restored to Leontes in a “chapel” to the sound of music, Thaisa to Pericles in the temple of Diana, with the full circumstance of religious ceremonial.

In these plays, Shakespeare is also dealing with similar themes, one of which is a mystical recognition of a force of life that conquers death. Opposed to the principle of spring in life (love, marriage, birth) is the tempest force, focussed in the storm that parts Pericles from Thaisa, and dissipated in the passions of Antiochus, Cleon and Dionyza, the pirates, and the bawds.

Though he seems “innocent” in the opening lines of the play, Pericles' plea to the gods

That have inflamed desire in my breast
To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree
Or die in the adventure

(I. i. 20-22)

indicates that he has been tainted by an unhealthy desire, and that even his proximity to the incestuous evil has infected him. The associations with the tampering with forbidden fruit are strong in the context of this passage and cling tenaciously to the device of the “test”. They are, moreover, reinforced by the animal imagery, which likens Antiochus and his daughter to vipers and serpents and supports the connotations of the tempter and the breeding poison. Pericles is about to be tested by life, and because of his faults he is required to spend a winter of penance, like Berowne, to render himself worthy of his wife and child. Unlike the “martyrs, slain in Cupid's wars”, Pericles gains from his experience:

Antiochus, I thank thee, who hath taught
My frail mortality to know itself
And by those fearful objects to prepare
This body, like to them, to what I must;. …

(I. i. 41-44)

As a corollary to this theme of “initiation” or “experience”, the opening scene describes Pericles as a combatant, a novice preparing for the test:

Like a bold champion I assume the lists,
Nor ask advice of any other thought
But faithfulness and courage.

(I. i. 61-63)

He prepares himself with qualities of the heart and soul, only to discover “what our seemers be.” Knowing finally that there is sin within, he wisely will not touch the gate, and determines to flee the danger of Antiochus' sin and guilt.

Scene two presents an entirely different Pericles from the one who flouted danger in the cause of love. His life is blighted by self-torment, by the danger of Antiochus' fear, and by his threat to the safety and peace of the people of Tyre. His own speech, in which he likens himself, as King, to the “tops of trees Which fence the roots they grow by and defend them” (I. ii. 31-32), begins the association of Pericles with the concept of the scapegoat and the noble figure who takes upon himself the dangers and sins of his community. To stop the tempest-force of Antiochus' evil before it lays to wrack and ruin his kingdom, Pericles determines to flee and thereby divert the hand of vengeance. As Thaliard explains to his countrymen, Pericles puts “himself unto the shipman's toil, With whom each minute threatens life or death” (I. iii. 24-25). By this he means that Pericles, supposedly fearing that he had committed some error or offense, punishes himself to show his sorrow by submitting himself to the perils of a sea voyage. This explanation carries the play to the brink of the penance inflicted upon Berowne by Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost. The ritual penance imposed upon Berowne, however, occurs after the play is through; in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale we see a record of the penance itself and its miraculous result.

The scenes in Tarsus repeat the “appearance-reality” theme begun in the opening of the play and reinforce the idea of the effect of fortune upon human life. Just as Tarsus had experienced an unexpected fall from good fortune, so Pericles is further battered upon life's seas and cast ashore without retainers or “pelf”. The fishermen-clowns, whom he encounters soon after, prove his benefactors and supply him with knightly accoutrements to enable him to compete for the hand of yet another desirable young maiden and enter in the tourney for her love, clothed in garments from the sea. This combat, like its symbolic counterparts in the earlier comedies, is to eventuate in happiness and fertility, for it represents a foil to the evil of the Riddle Scene. The description given Thaisa by her father parallels that of the daughter of Antiochus, though it lacks, of course, the irony of the first. The triumph of the “mean” knight in the Tournament scene proves the moral given voice by the good Simonides: “Opinion's but a fool that makes us scan The outward habit by the inward man” (II. ii. 56-57).

The Banquet scene following upon Pericles' victory presents Thaisa as “queen o' the feast”, and Simonides as the image of Pericles' dead father, of whom he says, “None that beheld him but, like lesser lights, Did vail their crowns to his supremacy” (II. iii. 41-42). Thus both Simonides and Thaisa act as ideal foils to the pernicious evil of Antiochus and his daughter, whose act has offended great creating Nature herself. This system of parallels supports the divisional structure of the entire play, constructed loosely upon a system of winter-summer oppositions which readily lend themselves to a discussion of the fluctuation of fortune, and themes of repentance, reconciliation, and regeneration.

The device of the decision by Thaisa to refuse marriage for a twelve-month is reminiscent of the position taken by the Princess of France in Love's Labour's Lost:

One twelve moons more she'll wear Diana's livery.
This by the eye of Cynthia hath she vowed,
And on her virgin honor will not break it.

(II. v. 10-12)

Reported by Simonides, this unexpected development, a temporary frustration of the audience's hopes for a romance between Thaisa and Pericles, represents a deliberate distortion of the typical plot situation used by Shakespeare in the earlier comedies. It is true that, in this case, the woman is closed to all “resort”, but this time it is voluntary on her part, and the young man involved seems not to care. In Pericles, this familiar device is used as a subterfuge to dismiss the other suitors and to pave the way for a match between Pericles and Thaisa. For his own purposes, the King plays a temporary representative of winter, a kill-joy, who, like Brabantio in his hysterical denunciation of Othello's unnatural influence upon his daughter, cries, “Thou has bewitched my daughter, and thou art a villain.” For a time, he plays the irate father who wishes to conserve his “consent” and bestow his daughter upon another. Like Prospero, Simonides keeps up a pretence of aged harshness, accusing Pericles, as Prospero accuses Ferdinand, of treachery,¹¹ and put Pericles through the motions of the conventional romance love-trial.

Act Two culminates in the happiness of marriage, and the association of the marriage-feast, midnight, and the sleeping house (telescoped as the description is into the opening choric speech of Gower in Act Three) reminds one of the last scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Puck's invocation of the blessing of the fertility spirits. Act Three commences with the fertility theme of the conception of a child, Pericles is discovered to be a king in his own right, and he and his “Queen with child” set sail for Tyre. The first scene of this act bursts dramatically upon the audience with the menacing force of a tempest oppressing a woman laboring in childbirth, and eventually presents the husband and wife, overcome by their mutual loss, giving themselves over to a kind of ritual death and asceticism.¹²

The “sea-tossed Pericles” once more has cause to lament the cruelty of fortune which results in the apparent death of his wife in her travail. The “fresh new seafarer”, his daughter Marina, has, as Pericles exclaims, “as chiding a nativity As fire, air, water, earth and heaven can make” (III. i. 32-33). The device of carrying out death is reflected in the seamen's superstition, which requires that the corpse of Thaisa be despatched from the ship immediately upon her supposed death. When Cerimon, the magical medicine man, commands that Thaisa's coffin, fresh from the sea, be opened, he discerns life and uses his skill to awaken her, for “Death may usurp on nature many hours, And yet the fire of life kindle again The o'erpressed spirits” (III. ii. 82-84). To music, a familiar effect in Shakespeare, the “corse” stirs to life and “'gins to blow Into life's flower again” (III. ii. 95-96). As Knight explains in The Crown of Life (p. 51), music is used regularly in Shakespeare as the antagonist to tempests and to winter. It is used in the court of Simonides and again by Marina to give spiritual rebirth to her actual father.

This mock death of Thaisa, like that of Hero and Hermione, provides the “activating circumstance”, as students of the novel would have it, of the penance necessary for regeneration and rebirth. In most of the examples of mock death and revival in Shakespeare, the emphasis is definitely not upon the character undergoing the death; rather it is usually on one of the other characters who is most affected by it. It is really no more than a means to an end, both structurally and thematically, in the drama as a whole. The mock death and revival of Hermione and Imogen is sufficient indication of this fact. The ritual penance later adopted by Pericles also compares to that in Love's Labour's Lost. Upon landing at Tarsus, Pericles swears an oath to let his beard grow in sorrow and penance until his new daughter, Marina, be of age and married. Thaisa, too, in Ephesus swears eternal chastity and takes on a “vestal livery” to live out her days in a temple of Diana, the goddess of chastity. This device is also to be seen in Much Ado About Nothing and in The Winter's Tale, in which Hermione accepts voluntary celibacy almost as a rite of purification until the Oracle is fulfilled. This ritual isolation has a folk flavor to it which reminds one of fairy tales and moralities. As T. W. Craik elucidates in The Tudor Interlude, “Repentance and regeneration, which is a principal theme of most early moral-interludes, is often accompanied by a change to a more sober costume.”¹³ Moreover, a white sheet was often worn by public penitents.

In Act Four the death of Lychorida, the old maid, wrings grief-stricken words from Marina, now grown, who exclaims tearfully:

The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave
While summer days do last. Aye me! Poor maid,
Born in a tempest when my mother died.
This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends.

(IV. i. 16-21)

The association of flowers with Marina is designed to oppose the tempest and winter imagery, which, as she acknowledges in the above speech, seems to be her motif and the guiding force of her life. The tempest imagery, however, increases in symbolic force in this scene, as Marina describes her grief and the hour of her birth to Leonine, the murderer.

In scene two, Marina reaches the nadir of her sufferings. The Brothel Scenes represent an ironic counterpart to the fertility imagery so usual in Shakespearian comedy. Like the incest theme, they represent sexuality perverted and barren, and in them Marina opposes anti-fertility, though, like her mother, she is still a daughter of Diana, and, therefore, committed to chastity. There is a curious ambivalence to the concept of chastity in Shakespeare. In the comedies it is treated for all the world as a latent fertility, pure and unsullied and waiting for fulfillment. As lovely as the daughter of Antiochus, Marina's beauty appears at first to be her downfall, and she regrets it. However, in these scenes, the power of sweet innocence and virtue is strongly asserted, and Marina becomes an instrument of the forces of fertility, with beneficial healing powers. Learning the report of Marina's death, Pericles again accepts a ritual death and imposes upon himself further penance of sackcloth. At this point, the concept of winter opposed to spring is mirrored in Dionyza's inscription on Marina's tomb:

The fairest, sweet'st and best, lies here,
Who withered in her spring of year.
She was of Tyrus the King's daughter,
On whom foul death hath made this slaughter.
Marina was she called; and at her birth,
Thetis, being proud, swallowed some part o' the earth.
Therefore the earth, fearing to be o'erflowed,
Hath Thetis' birth-child on the Heavens bestowed;. …

(IV. iv. 34-41)

Trapped in her “unholy service” in the brothel, Marina is a representative of spring and fertility who heals false sexuality and guides it in healthful directions. She, with her needle, imitates nature in all its fecundity, and dances “As goddesslike to her admired lays.”¹⁴ The holiness and mystic force of her goodness transcend the taint of her surroundings, and she emerges untouched by the rottenness, the evil which abounds there. Unlike Pericles, she is not involved in the “offence”, and the upward movement of her fortunes begins when she leaves the brothel to teach her arts to others. Pericles, lost and appearing quite by accident at the appropriate moment, arrives in Mytilene during the annual feast of King Neptune. The sable banners of his ship draw Lysimachus, the governor of Mytilene, only to learn that Pericles exists in a form of ritual death, speaking to no one, aware of no one, and miraculously existing on very little food. The ship itself is presented as funereal, and Pericles is displayed like a corpse, affected by an unnatural lethargy. At this sight, Lysimachus offers the arts and skills of Marina to effect a cure of the suffering King:

She, questionless, with her sweet harmony
And other chosen attractions, would allure,
And make a battery through his deafened parts,
Which are now midway stopped.

(V. i. 45-48)

Marina's song and speech shatter the death-like sleep of Pericles, and the scene presents her as a spiritual Cerimon, as she, with “sacred physic”, the skills and arts of Nature herself, attempts to bring about Pericles' recovery. In her symbolic relationship to her father, she stands very much like Perdita, who similarly gives “physic” to the nation. She presents something of a riddle to Pericles, a riddle which he must answer to receive his spiritual renaissance. In reply to his question whether she is of the shores of Mytilene, Marina replies in terms of a riddle:

                                                            No, nor of any shores,
Yet I was mortally brought forth, and am
No other than I appear.

(V. i. 104-106)

Pericles conceives her tale to be in the nature of a dream and cannot believe his senses. When she discovers to him the truth of her parentage, Pericles exclaims

O Helicanus, strike me, honored sir,
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.—Oh, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;. …

(V. i. 192-97—my italics)

This exclamation begins the very real evidences in the play that Shakespeare intended his audience to regard Pericles' behavior as that of one who has been truly reborn. He springs up, crying, “Give me fresh garments”, and throws off the garments and pose of a penitent.¹⁵ His joy and exuberance seem reminiscent of the traditional behavior of the mummers (even of Bottom) who leap up reinvigorated after a mock death.

Thus with this scene, the ritual of renewal replaces the ritual of death, and ritual asceticism gives way to the marriage festival. The last scene records the reuniting of those who had been parted. In the temple of Diana at Ephesus, Pericles, obeying his vision of the goddess herself, tells the tale of “a tempest, A birth, and death” (V. iii. 33-34). After recognizing his wife, he exclaims,

This, this. No more, you gods! Your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports.

(V. iii. 40-41)

The play ends with Pericles removing all symbols of his past penance and grief and ordering the marriage festivities of Marina and Lysimachus. As in Love's Labour's Lost, after the death of old Simonides, Pericles and Thaisa take his place and determine to spend their “following” days in that kingdom, while Marina and Lysimachus rule in Tyre.

The action has now come full circle. The tempest which carried Pericles first to Pentapolis later parts him from his wife. The child who is born at sea is later returned to her father again at sea. The first misfortune of Pericles, his shipwreck on the shores of Pentapolis, was dispelled by music and marriage festivities, and his second misfortune, the loss of wife and child, is similarly dispelled, and his winter of grief and suffering begins and ends with a riddle. The penance has wrought its effects, and the main characters are in a sense reborn, having experienced a sort of spiritual renaissance which overcomes and transcends all past evil.

The use of a happy ending to a serious purpose in Pericles is not new: the earlier comedies, more serious works than is sometimes recognized, present, as Knight points out, stories of “error dispelled, mistaken identity set right, reunion after separation”,¹⁶ and they frequently show strong morality endings, as in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Examination of both the early and the late comedies indicates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the basis of the folk concepts found in Shakespearian comedy is completely serious. The late comedies especially participate in a view of life that assumes the principle of fertility and sexuality to be the controlling power of the universe, and the battle which it wages yearly with the antagonistic principle to be crucial to the continued operation of Nature herself. Certainly, the religious nature of the reunion in the temple of Diana serves to focus the ambivalence of the Diana-chastity-fertility imagery and completes a system of winter-summer, penance-regeneration concepts which animates Pericles. Though the operation of these folk concepts is very general in Pericles, they are present and do afford a good introduction to their clearer operation in Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

In Pericles and the other late plays of reconciliation, there is a curious shift of emphasis from the young to the old, though the traditional structural polarity of the folk oppositions and the rebellion of the young against their elders and the dictates of society are retained. The late plays represent, therefore, a sophisticated extension of the themes and devices of the early plays, not a venture into the unknown, as has so often been argued, and they place their emphasis, not upon the joyous and successful rebellion of young lovers but upon the ritual significance of the King, the central character, whose figure symbolizes the health and well-being of his whole kingdom. The corollary in the late comedies to the early comedies' view of the necessary regenerative qualities of love and springtime in youth is the concept of the King as scapegoat, as King of the Waste Land, who must bear a sterile period in his life which will be ultimately beneficial to his kingdom. Pericles, Leontes, and Cymbeline suffer a bitter winter of separation from all that is humanly dear to them; they experience a penance which has considerable effect upon their communities, Pericles especially acting as the kingly scapegoat for his subjects. The focus of these late plays is, therefore, not only upon the effect of love upon young lovers but also upon the effect of the young and their love upon the entire continuum of life, so that the whole community benefits from the action dramatized.

This change in the late plays, so frequently assumed to be the result of a tired and bored dramatist toying with the themes which had engrossed him in his youth, seems rather to be a deliberate artistic shift in emphasis, an extension of the searching beam of the dramatist's world vision, and not a metamorphosis or a development of a radically new method or style. Previously, in the early comedies, the focal point of interest had been in the young and the social reconciliation which they make with their society, after they have had their brief fling of romantic misrule. In the later plays, even as early as As You Like It, Shakespeare extends the field of interest to embrace the older generation, which had formerly occupied a more or less flat role, stereotyped and virtually unchanging. In doing so, he retains the familiar situations of the early comedies, so that the comparisons between them and the late plays may be virtually endless.

Whereas the early plays had illustrated the vital forces of life acting upon the young and invigorating them with all that is admirable in human life, the late plays repudiate the romantic notion that this phenomenon is limited only to the young, and display its operation in both generations, bringing both towards a central reconciliation, a personal, as well as a social one. To achieve this end, Pericles and The Winter's Tale dramatize not only the youth but also the maturity of the central character, the King who must play a symbolic role in the archetypal struggle between the forces of winter and summer in the life of his kingdom. Cymbeline and The Tempest, on the other hand, compress the time span and present the youth of Cymbeline and Prospero only by simple exposition, a device which serves to shift the pendulum slightly back, towards the focus upon the young in the early comedies. Whereas the early plays celebrate the natural and the healthy, the late plays punish the unnatural, and the father himself usually acts for a time as the kill-joy, who had been a stereotyped comic figure in the early comedies. These plays of reconciliation still include, however, the struggle between the young and age, winter, asceticism, or society, and the setting up of an artificial world apart from the normal. Like the early plays, their resolution is always the same; the unity and health of the community are assured for yet another year.

Pericles and the other late comedies are, therefore, remarkable not for their differences from the early comedies, but rather for their basic similarities to them, for their mature reassessment and enlargement of basic themes from folk and classical drama. These late plays deepen and intensify a comic vision evolved directly from the early comedies. They take as their province, however, an examination of a larger portion of the continuum of life, and provide a larger perspective from which the audience may evaluate the action, for they suggest that the various seasons and stages of life are necessary for continued life, that a temporary withdrawal or change has vitalizing and regeneratory results. They acknowledge from the outset the central tenet—which the early comedies had been dedicated to illustrate—that youth must have its day, that spring must inevitably follow upon winter, and that love's regenerative qualities cannot safely be denied; but, like the songs of winter and summer in Love's Labour's Lost, they remind us that there is a place for all the seasons, that each has its validity and significance, and that the seasonal metaphor may be seen operating throughout all of man's life. In their dénouements, and frequently earlier, they illustrate a spring-like renouveau of the spirit, paralleling the tremendous vitality of youth during the season of love, and they suggest that this experience is equally valuable and equally decisive in the totality of human affairs. The late plays therefore include the love-experience of the young, but they do not wait until the dénouement to set this vital element in perspective to the continuum of life. The young are apparently regarded as the old reborn, and the continuity of life becomes one of the central interests in the late plays. In these plays, the two generations are balanced equally in the dramatist's scale and found equally desirable and equally necessary in the wheel of life, and they recognize a process of “continuing accommodation” which is symbolized in the concluding scenes by marriage and feasting.

Notes

1. An Essay on Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition (Oxford, 1916), p. 101.

2. M. D. H. Parker, The Slave of Life: A Study of Shakespeare and the Idea of Justice (London, 1955), p. 181.

3. Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1951), p. 26.

4. See Sitansu Maitra, Shakespeare's Comic Idea (Calcutta, 1960), p. 50. See also Northrop Frye, “Characterization in Shakespearian Comedy”, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], IV (1953).

5. F. D. Hoeniger, ed., Pericles (London, 1963), p. xix.

6. SQ, I (1950), 219.

7. SQ, IV (1953), 258.

8. See I. i. 15-24. Here Pericles alludes to the ungovernable passion awakened in him for Antiochus' daughter.

9. The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (London, 1948), p. 37.

10. G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest: With a Chart of Shakespeare's Dramatic Universe (London, 1953), p. 222.

11. Knight, Crown of Life, p. 51.

12. Arthos, p. 260.

13. The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume, and Acting (Leicester, 1958), p. 78.

14. See Act V, Chorus.

15. See ll. 192-265, especially ll. 223-231.

16. Crown, p. 70.