[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1981, Meszaros explores the significance of music in Pericles.]

In The Shakespearian Tempest (1932) and The Crown of Life (1947), G. Wilson Knight organized his interpretations of Shakespeare's last plays around their recurring, dichotomous images of tempests and music—the former representing ultimate disorder and chaos, the latter universal harmony. Knight's reading of the romances as immortality myths in which restoration and reconciliation are symbolized by the final victory of music over tempest has informed nearly all subsequent criticism, and although John Hollander has rightly pointed out that Knight's “insistence on symbolic music ignores conventions of musical imagery and exegesis in Renaissance literature,”¹ it is nevertheless true that Knight's initial premise, that tempest and music are the two poles of a single force, is valid in terms of Elizabethan thought about music. In the work of Hollander and others, moreover, we now have studies of the music in Shakespeare's plays which go well beyond the symboliste suggestiveness of Knight's analyses to satisfy both the historian of the theater (not to mention the modern director) and the historian of ideas—studies of what the Elizabethans would have called musica practica, and of what they would have called musica speculativa.²

Among the discussions of the music called for in the last plays, however, and of what its being there means, there is none which to my mind satisfactorily resolves one of the problems about the nature and meaning of music in Pericles. I refer to the oddly anticlimactic sequence of recognition and reconciliation scenes in Act V, in which Pericles, after being reunited with his daughter Marina, seems to hear the music of the spheres, then has a vision of the goddess Diana (accompanied by music), and only then, after receiving the goddess' instructions, is reunited with his wife Thaisa, whom he had believed dead and buried at sea. The problem of the music of the spheres in Pericles has both speculative (i.e., critical) and practical (i.e, theatrical) dimensions. The first is a matter of placement and causality: if the music of the spheres expresses universal harmony, why does Pericles hear it after the lesser miracle but before the greater; that is, before the theophany and before his wife is restored to him? The second is a matter of staging, but one of interpretive significance: clearly Pericles is the only character on stage who hears the music of the spheres, but does the audience hear it with him, and if so, what does it sound like? Both dimensions of the problem must be considered together, and the problem itself must be considered with reference to other instances of music in the play, and within the context of the play as a whole.

This last is not easy to do, given doubts about the play's authorial integrity and the degree and nature of the corruption of the 1609 Quarto text. As the author of the most recent detailed textual study of Pericles concludes, the text we have is “made up of material of varying authority and diverse origins” into a “difficult manuscript” which was also “printed carelessly.”³ Yet we know that Pericles, probably presented at the Globe in a form bearing a close resemblance to the Quarto text, was among the most popular plays of its time (more popular, apparently, than was King Lear), and we also know that it has been revived occasionally in recent years with considerable success, as a triumph of stylized and self-reflexive theater. It seems reasonable, therefore, to set aside for the moment vexed questions of authorship and textual validity, and to adopt instead an audience-centered approach to the play, following the text we have.⁴ I should like us to imagine, then, a performance of Pericles in the Globe Theatre, following the text from the 1609 Quarto, as prepared by James G. McManaway for the Pelican Shakespeare.⁵ It is obvious that the words of the text must be supplemented by the spectacle and music that are integral to the play's effect, and yet it is not at all clear that the generalized pattern articulated by Knight, “from normality and order, through violent conflict to a spiritualized music and thence to the concluding ritual” comfortably fits the play.⁶ We shall see.

“To sing a song that old was sung”: the first words we hear are chanted, in sing-song tetrameter, by a figure dressed in a cloak and carrying bays.⁷ He is the long-dead poet Gower, returned “from ashes,” he tells us, “To glad your ear and please your eyes.”⁸ All his emphasis is on the antiquity of the story (he himself has read it in the work of other authors) and on the refined pleasure it will bring us (lords and ladies have read it “for restoratives”). Yet the tale Gower narrates in his archaic rhythm, with an occasional awkward shift for a line or two into iambic pentameter (as if the immediate seriousness of the material will break through), is a horrifying story of incest and murder, and the first spectacle he calls to our attention to “please” our eyes is the “grim looks” of the severed heads of unsuccessful suitors upon the walls of Antioch. We must trust the authority of the poet, of antiquity, and of tradition, but how is this tale, this spectacle, to edify and please us? Almost before we can formulate the question, Gower himself seems to abandon his professed cause. No longer chanting, he tells us in an iambic pentameter couplet that we must depend on what he calls “the judgment of your eye” (I.Cho.41) from this point onward.

But in fact another of our senses is called upon. No sooner have the identities of Antiochus, the incestuous king, and Pericles, another in the succession of suitors, been introduced in a few lines of dialogue than we have an opportunity to listen to music, commanded by Antiochus (I.i.6) for his daughter's entrance.⁹ Since she is “clothed like a bride” (I.i.7)—that is, a virgin—and since Antiochus asserts that the planets themselves, from her conception to her birth, “did sit / To knit in her their best perfections” (I.i.11-12), the music arranged by her father to accompany her appearance must be not the earthly, sensual music of reed and wind instruments, but the heavenly, spiritual music of strings, probably a consort of viols.¹⁰ As we know (because we have heard Gower's introduction), but as Pericles does not, the music masks and falsifies the reality of father-daughter incest, providing a setting for the daughter's beauty that encourages the innocent suitor to find in her “every virtue [that] gives renown to men!” (I.i.15). But this ethereal music, invented by man in imitation of divine harmony, can also be used by man as he sometimes uses language and costume (and as Antiochus does here), to whiten the sepulchre—to lie. Thus, when Pericles reads aloud the riddle that blatantly reveals the ugly truth hitherto so artfully concealed, he recoils in disgust not only from the fact itself but also from the shock sustained by his aesthetic sensibilities. In a brief, meditative aside before he responds to Antiochus, Pericles dwells upon the way in which the riddle's revelation has violated the evidence of his eyes and ears. The daughter still appears to him to be a “fair glass of light” (I.i.77) and a “glorious casket,” but one “stored with ill” (I.i.78). The musical setting for the woman's appearance leads him to reflect in a more extended metaphor:

You are a fair viol, and your sense the strings;
Who, fingered to make man his lawful music,
Would draw heaven down, and all the gods, to hearken;
But being played upon before your time,
Hell only danceth to so harsh a chime.

(I.i.82-86)

As we witness Pericles' confusion and empathize with his shocked revulsion, we ourselves are more than ever confused by Gower's promise to delight our eyes and ears and by his injunction that we rely upon the “judgment” of our eyes. The scene we have just witnessed has demonstrated that delights for the eyes and ears mislead us; truth appears in a gnomic riddle that places the only character with whom we can identify in a classic “double bind”: not to “solve” the riddle is to incur execution as punishment, but to interpret it aloud will also mean certain death. Gower's introduction to his tale thus at this point seems quite inadequate—the story is neither pleasant nor edifying, and its “truth” is both figuratively and literally unspeakable. So far, Gower seems to be something of an “unreliable narrator.”

Since escape from Antioch is the only course of action available to Pericles, the audience is called upon now to follow a plot of flight and pursuit through a series of scenes (from the end of I.i. through I.iv.) in which new characters and situations are introduced abruptly and as quickly dropped, so that we have time to register our perceptions only in the simplest abstract terms—the loyalty of Helicanus; the treachery of Thaliard; the destitution of Tharsus (to be contrasted, perhaps, with the corrupt opulence of Antioch). Still unable to exercise the “judgment” Gower has recommended, we experience instead bewilderment and disorientation mirroring Pericles' own. It is with something akin to relief, therefore, that we hear Pericles' decision to accept Cleon's welcome, to “feast here awhile, / Until our stars that frown lend us a smile” (I.iv.106-07). Perhaps we will see more of Pericles now, listen to his thoughts about the harrowing experience he has just gone through, get to know him better.

The impatience we feel, however, when it is Gower and not Pericles who returns, seems to have been anticipated by the old poet, who tells us to “Be quiet then, as men should be” (II.Cho.5), just as Helicanus had earlier counseled patience in adversity to Pericles. In the same chanted tetrameter we heard earlier, Gower summarizes, hints at a moral—“I'll show you those in trouble's reign, / Losing a mite, a mountain gain” (II.Cho.8-8)—calls upon spectacle (this time a dumb show) to supplement his words, and finally, having described a storm and shipwreck to which Pericles has fallen victim, excuses himself.

The following scene with Pericles and the fishermen offers the most sustained dialogue of the play to this point, and full of the conventional wisdom of the common folk as it is (“I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as a whale”), puts us ashore on familiar dramatic territory. There is talk about happy kings and good government, and the well-known parallels are drawn between the commonwealth and the order of nature. Thematically oriented at last, we can reflect upon the wickedness of Antiochus and the goodness of Pericles. We can also move with ease and assurance into the next scene, in which another princess is presented by her father with music and pageantry. What a satisfying repetition! What a satisfying contrast to the scene in Antioch, for this princess is all that she appears to be on the surface—not only beautiful but also virtuous—and learned as well, to judge from her skill in heraldry and her ability to interpret the mottos in Latin and Spanish upon the knights' shields. The tournament, an honest contest unlike the travesty arranged by Antiochus, naturally and satisfyingly results in the triumph of Pericles, the knight in rusty armor.

Significantly, the tournament is followed by the first music we have heard since the introduction of Antiochus' daughter: Simonides' court is all art and elegant ceremony representative of the harmony of the well-ordered state under a benign ruler. This music (presenting another contrast with the treacherous world of appearances in Antioch) is exactly right for the audience and the occasion. First, all the knights who had participated in the tournament perform a soldiers' dance, or almain,¹¹ followed by a dance performed by the soldiers and ladies together, and joined by Pericles and the lady Thaisa at the urging of her father. The old king, with his rough humor and his “Unclasp, unclasp!” (II.iii.106), is completely in control of the action, so that the banquet hall represented by the stage becomes a microcosm of world order. The king calls for music and sets his guests to dancing, just as the Creator ordered the cosmos and set the planets in a dance.

In this scene of social grace and harmony we find such a satisfying sense of rest and closure that we are not distressed when we are called upon next to give our attention once again to Helicanus. His news, indeed, adds another important element of resolution: Antiochus and his daughter are dead, consumed by a fire from heaven. Pericles need no longer flee the assassin; he can return to Tyre, taking Thaisa with him as his bride.¹²

So, as Gower had promised, an early misfortune has been overshadowed by subsequent and unexpectedly great good fortune; the bride Pericles has won incomparably exceeds in merit the one he initially sought. As Gower had predicted, too, our eyes and ears have indeed been delighted by spectacle and music. He is not such an unreliable narrator after all. When he makes his third appearance, a familiar and more trustworthy figure now, his tetrameter couplets and archaic diction seem just right for the little epithalamion he recites.

But then we are thrown badly off-balance again, as the happy sing-song tetrameter turns by degrees into another tale of woe. The stability and calm produced by the music, the dancing, and the plot resolutions of the preceding scene have left us unprepared for what follows now. Nothing in the play so far, in fact, has prepared us for the drama, the poetry, of the scene in which Pericles, amidst a storm at sea, greets his newborn child and prepares to commit the body of his wife to the deep. It is as if we have been leafing through an album of snapshots, to come suddenly on an unsettling close-up, a portrait blazing with character and pain. The desire we felt earlier to know Pericles better, and which we have since forgotten, is now unexpectedly fulfilled. We hear the intimate voice of the private men:

A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire, Th' unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly. …

(III.i.56-57)

Almost immediately, however, our renewed interest in Pericles is diverted again, this time to the physician Cerimon and his wonderful skill, as the sounds of tempest give way to the sounds of music.

This is medicinal, restorative music, played by a viol (III.ii.89) because the vibrating string is most like the veins and nerves of the body, and because strings produce the most ethereal music accessible to mortals, thus calling the spirit back to the body and composing the senses. But that single viol, theories about music aside, also strikes an echo from the harmonies of the court of King Simonides, and that in itself may be a restorative for Thaisa. In any case, the music is efficacious: after calling, “The music there!” Cerimon says, “I pray you, give her air. / Gentlemen, this queen will live” (III.ii.93-94).

In the first movement of the play, we can see in retrospect, evil and treachery forced Pericles to take ship, but a storm at sea brought him to good. Now, it seems, we are witnessing an opposing sequence: a happy series of events having brought Pericles to sea again, disaster and then more treachery follow, this time in Tharsus, with the abortive plot of Dionyza to have Marina murdered. The audience can watch these new events with some equanimity, however, because we have come to accept the play's pattern of discontinuous scenes broken by the dumb shows and Gower's appearances, because we have come to trust Gower, and most of all because we share with Gower a knowledge superior to that of Pericles—neither Thaisa nor Marina is dead. The latter, indeed, clearly bears a charmed life. So much attention is given by Gower to her graces and accomplishments that she seems a paragon, and although she is captured by pirates and sold into a brothel, the comic tone of these scenes tells the audience that she is never really in danger.

Like her father, Marina is a talented musician: “by Cleon trained / In music's letters” (IV.Cho.7-8); according to Gower, “She sings like one immortal, and she dances / As goddess-like to her admired lays” (V.Cho.3-4). It seems not only right but inevitable, then, that Pericles in his wanderings should eventually arrive at Mytilene, and that Marina should be brought before him to sing, in an attempt to arouse him from the deep melancholy and silence into which he has fallen upon being told by the false Cleon and Dionyza that his daughter is dead.¹³

Pericles seems to those watching on stage not to hear Marina's song, but in fact the audience sees that he is rapt, concentrating totally on his attempt to recall an almost-forgotten melody and the larger harmony it evokes. Marina next resorts to speech, and her powers of persuasion (as we know from the brothel scenes) are as impressive as her musicianship. Still, it is what she says that restores Pericles to health; here music is only an ancillary restorative. Marina's song has aroused in Pericles the memory of harmony, but her story renews his faith in harmony. Convinced at last that she is his own child, he calls her “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (V.i.195), stating a paradox that is the antithesis of the paradox of Antiochus' riddle. Indeed, the therapeutic harmonies of Marina's musical performance have finally countered the dissembling harmonies of the music which had been used to introduce Antiochus' daughter, and the silence with which Pericles was forced to respond in untying the riddle of her relationship to her father is countered in the speech by means of which he and his own daughter untie the riddle of their relationship. We remember that Pericles has been speechless since hearing of his daughter's supposed death, and we realize that in this play silence (i.e., the absence of music and language) as well as tempest can be a manifestation of the forces of chaos. But in Marina's song and her marvelous story, Pericles has found good and harmony and order enough to balance the evil and chaos he has known in the world.

As for the audience, it has once again had its faith in Gower confirmed, and has been delighted and edified by spectacle and poetry, and especially by music. Moral and physical evil have occurred repeatedly without rational motivation or apparent cause in the world of the play, but human speech rises above the noise of the storm and untangles the knots of unhappiness wrought by human malice, and recurring music as outward manifestation of internal social harmony and as restorative of physical and mental health prevails again and again over chaos.

Pericles himself, however, now attains a degree of awareness of universal harmony transcending that of the audience, for it is granted to him to hear the music of the spheres. Originating with Pythagoras, adopted by Plato, and kept alive in Christian neoplatonic tradition, the concept of the music of the spheres was the central image of the doctrine of universal harmony prevalent in Shakespeare's time. In the Pythagorean sense, music is mathematical proportion bearing no resemblance to earthly music except as that music also is based upon proportion and degree; the music of the spheres comes from the vibrations of the planets moving at varying distances from each other, proportional to musical ratios. Symbols of this divine harmony, strictly speaking, are to be found only in such phenomena as “the … variety of Seasons, the concorde of the Elements … the politike Lawes … the love of the King” (Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579); the divine harmony itself is not directly accessible to fallen humanity. In the words of Shakespeare's Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice,

Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(V.i.63-65)

That a living man should hear the music of the spheres is thus exceedingly unlikely. Such an experience could probably come only to a good and noble man with an understanding of all the manifestations of earthly harmony, and then only at a moment when that man's spirit was peculiarly sensitive to the existence of a sublime and perfect harmony transcending that of this world. To hear the music of the spheres is to have a mystical experience. Obviously, Pericles alone of all characters on stage is capable of such sensitivity to harmony, and the text is clear on the point that he alone hears it:

PERICLES
Give me my robes. I am wild in my beholding.
O heavens bless my girl! But hark, what music?
Tell Helicanus, my Marina, tell him
O'er, point by point, for yet he seems to doubt,
How sure you are my daughter. But what music?
HELICANUS
My lord, I hear none.
PERICLES
None?
The music of the spheres! List, my Marina.
LYSIMACHUS
It is not good to cross him. Give him way.
PERICLES
Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear?
LYSIMACHUS
Music, my lord? I hear.
PERICLES
                                                                                Most heavenly music!
It nips me unto list'ning, and thick slumber
Hangs upon mine eyes. Let me rest.

(V.i.224-36)

The responses of the bluntly honest Helicanus (229) and the more politic Lysimachus, who thinks it best to humor Pericles with a “white lie” (232, 234) are evidence that they hear nothing. The short lines (229, 230) are silences to be filled by intent listening, spaces into which both the characters on stage and the audience pour their collective concentration, trying to experience what Pericles experiences.

Having come this far with Pericles, having empathized with his sufferings and rejoiced at his reunion with Marina, bearing the knowledge that more happiness is to come (for Pericles still does not know what the audience knows, that his wife, too, is alive), the audience is nevertheless cut off from sharing with Pericles this transcendent experience. We shuffle our feet restlessly: what are we to make of this moment? Our rapport with the character is momentarily broken; the play has left us once more, unexpectedly, without bearings.¹⁴

But then Pericles, exhausted by emotion, falls asleep. One by one the other characters leave the stage, and almost inaudibly at first, then gradually louder, the sound of broken chords on lutes and harps is heard, introducing the goddess Diana, who instructs Pericles to repair to her temple at Ephesus to sacrifice and to tell his story.¹⁵ These sounds, however celestial, cannot be more than a pale shadowing forth of the total divine harmony of the spheres, for they accompany the earthly appearance of only one of the goddesses in the pantheon. Nor is it possible for Pericles to remain permanently attuned to the celestial harmony. Man cannot remain long in a state of spiritual ecstasy, but the memory of such a state can sustain and uplift him long after the experience is past. Pericles' sublime experience has reassured him that the world is ordered harmoniously. Thus, though he no longer hears the music of the spheres, he is receptive to divine guidance from the goddess.

If the audience cannot share Pericles' mystical experience, we can nevertheless share his dream-vision, and we have, moreover, regained our bearings, for we know why the goddess directs Pericles toward Ephesus. Our recent momentary confusion put aside, we reveal in pleasurable anticipation of the reunion of Pericles and Marina with Thaisa. The sense of power which our knowledge of the outcome seems to confer on us is reinforced by Gower, who addresses us this time to flatter us by reminding us of the control we exercise through our imaginations. It is we who

                                                                                aptly will suppose
What pageantry, what feats, what shows,
What minstrelsy and pretty din
The regent made in Mytilin
To greet the King.

(V.ii.5-9)

It is also our imaginations that will encompass the time and space necessary to bring Pericles and his company to the temple of Diana at Ephesus:

That he can hither come so soon
Is by your fancies' thankful doom.

(V.ii.19-20)

It is significant, perhaps, that Gower began his addresses to the audience by promising us edification and pleasure, as if we had to be coaxed into paying attention, and by asking us to listen and watch patiently and passively, but that he ends by praising our imaginations and by inviting us to participate more actively in bringing the story to its conclusion.

For the audience, Pericles has been an experience by turns bewildering and satisfying. We have been asked to attend to a succession of shifting scenes and characters, often following one upon another without apparent reason, but we have also found moments of delightful repose in musical harmony and of intense emotion expressed in moving language. We have been led to expect a moral, but none has been pointed, and no obvious one has emerged. We have followed the fortunes of the hero at varying distances—watching him objectively at the beginning as he learns the horrible truth we ourselves have only just learned, feeling with him intensely as he buries his wife at sea and again as he finds his lost daughter, observing him from a superior distance as he is brought innocently toward the reconciliation we ourselves have long anticipated. Occasionally, as an audience, we feel secure in our imaginative understanding of the unfolding story. Most strangely, however, we have not been able to share with Pericles the experience that might have been the climax of the play: we have not heard the music of the spheres.

Perhaps it is somewhat comforting, given our inability to make of Pericles a coherent play and our lack of understanding of one of its crucial episodes, to have a fall-back position in which we remind ourselves that Shakespeare probably took over the authorship of a botched play at about III.i., and that even in writing the remainder he paid scant attention to the sections that did not readily excite his interest; this way we can reject everything except those parts that remind us most of what we think a Shakespearean play should be. This argument, too, gives us authority for imagining the play as something other than it is. If only the music of the spheres occurred at the end of the play, for instance, we could view the play as an allegory of man's progress from earthly passion to divine love and harmony. Or if interludes of peace and harmony did not so prominently figure at the center of the play, we could find satisfying Knight's formula of normality—violent conflict—ritualized, spiritualized order. And if the formula still did not fit Pericles very well, we could say that the author was only practicing to write The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

But these attitudes (which I have presented only a little unfairly, and which do inform much criticism of Pericles) seem to me to be false to our theatrical experience of the play. That experience, always interesting and occasionally quite moving, is difficult to describe because it cannot be summarized or organized as a unity. Again and again we have seen that events in this play are not linked causally, that Pericles does not suffer because of a tragic flaw or even because of any wrong action. His suffering carries no moral overtones; indeed, it is so painful to see partly because it is (to borrow the phrase A. C. Bradley applied to Desdemona) mere suffering. Lacking causality and motivation, the play's sequence of events denies the coherence of beginning, middle, and end. The culminating spiritual event of Pericles' life is from an aesthetic point of view anti-climactic, and his reconciliation with his wife, though prompted by a goddess, is carried out without the appearance of supernatural harmony. A better or more attentive playwright, we might conclude, would have arranged things more logically. But a perceptive comment by Clifford Leech rings more true to our experience of the play. The ending, he says, “is not truly a point of finality.” Pericles has won no immunity to fortune. “We have the sense of a life-cycle,” Leech goes on, “which can be repeated both in other lives and, in its essentials, in the same life if our vision is extended.”¹⁶

What Gower has presented, then, has been a “pattern” (in the sense of a universal or archetypal model) of “painful adventures,” a parable of a life apparently as formless as the sea on which so much of it is lived, alternately wracked by storms and calmed by music, not subject to the false coherence of narrative or dramatic form, but presented, nevertheless, through the powerful magic of a poet musician.¹⁷ In this setting, man's best virtue both as actor and as spectator is patience, fortified by faith in the real and eternal harmony underlying and ultimately transcending temporary chaos. The deliberate confrontation of evil and chaos with the formal beauty of art—ceremony, poetry, dance, music—is an act of faith in the victory of harmony over chaos. Gower lets the audience discover that fact, and then sets it free to perform its own act of faith through the exercise of its creative imagination.

Some readers of King Lear—a play whose relationship to Pericles has not yet been adequately examined—find it intolerable to believe that Lear, when his “untun'd and jarring senses” have been restored to order through reunion with his daughter and through the therapeutic use of music, only to be finally destroyed by the most heartless evil of all, does not attain a single glimpse in this world of a transcendent justice and harmony. But audiences who watch and listen hear no music, and see only Lear dead, with the body of Cordelia in his arms. Pericles offers a degree of reassurance. Though man's life is as a lasting storm, there is evidence that harmony is real and unconquerable. Yet in this play, so much of which is concerned with art, particularly music, as an act of faith in harmony in the face of chaos, the audience itself is called upon to participate in an act of faith and imagination, for it must be willing to believe that Pericles has heard the music of the spheres, and yet it is not assured that the painful adventures of the Prince of Tyre have come to an end. We might paraphrase Jesus: “Blessed are they that have not heard, and have believed.” For Pericles requires of us the virtues of its hero—faith in an ultimate harmony, courage and imagination to imitate it as best we can on earth, and patience to wait for its full revelation until the revels are ended.

Notes

1. The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 147.

2. See, for example, John H. Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music: The Final Comedies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961); Gretchen L. Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580-1650 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); Shakespeare in Music, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll (London: Macmillan, 1964).

3. S. Musgrove, “The First Quarto of Pericles Reconsidered,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (Summer 1978), 406.

4. I am indebted for method to the brilliant essay by Stephen Booth on another textually (and otherwise) problematic play: “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 137-76.

5. Pericles, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1977).

6. The Crown of Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 336.

7. Gower appears this way on the title-page of George Wilkins' The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608). The conventional elements in the presentation of Gower are discussed by Walter F. Eggers, Jr., “Shakespeare's Gower and the Role of the Authorial Presenter,” Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 434-43.

8. I.Cho.4. All quotations and line numbers are from the McManaway edition cited above.

9. Some editors interpret the first word of Q's “Musicke bring in our daughter” as a stage direction rather than as a command. The effect of either, from the audience's point of view, is the same: the music does begin at this point, and Antiochus is clearly acting as stage manager.

10. The Jacobean audience would probably have been quite familiar with this distinction, which, according to Sternfeld's Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, was commonly made in the Renaissance and earlier (p. 227).

11. See Long, pp. 40-41.

12. In the scene in which Simonides gives Thaisa to Pericles in marriage, he also refers to the musical entertainment Pericles had provided on the previous evening, saying, “Sir, you are music's master” (II.v.30). Although this passage may be a vestigial remnant of an episode from the real Gower's “Apollonius of Tyre” in which Apollonius gives the princess a music lesson, it is possible that Pericles as acted contained an interlude between II.iii. and II.iv. in which Pericles, represented as being alone in his chamber, plays the lute and sings, to the delight of Simonides, who overhears him. Wilkins' prose version, which was very likely based on the play as performed, contains such a scene. There is certainly charm in the idea that Pericles is himself a musician, and appropriateness in the setting: a gentleman would not perform in public before strangers. If such an interlude is added, the sense of a restoration of peace and harmony through music will be even more pronounced than that I have noted.

13. The text gives no indication about the song Marina is to sing; it may be that she sings a contemporary popular song instead of one written for the play. In this case my own favorite candidate is “Come, heavy Sleep,” from Dowland's First Book of Ayres (1597). It would be especially appropriate if this song had been sung earlier by Pericles in an interlude following the banquet in II.iii., as I have proposed.

14. My interpretation of this scene places me in a distinct minority, for most editors interpolate at V.i.225 a stage direction for music. In the New Arden Edition of Pericles, for example (London: Methuen, 1963), F. D. Hoeniger says that the music of the spheres “must be shared by the audience from the beginning, to avoid the absurd impression of Pericles being deluded” (p. 153). In generalizing about instances of celestial music in the Renaissance theater, on the other hand, F. W. Sternfeld concludes that it was played by theater musicians only when it was heard by all characters on stage (p. 246). I argue that everything in the play up to this point directs us toward an interpretation of the music of the spheres as inaudible to everyone but Pericles, in a deliberate temporary alienation of the audience—a daring coup de théâtre, perhaps, but one that is not inconsistent with other strange touches in this odd, possibly experimental play. Some indirect support, moreover, may be found in Inga-Stina Ewbank's convincing argument pointing out that Marina's therapeutic use of language here has provided a “unique demonstration of the power of words,” since Pericles “begins as an apathetic deaf mute and ends up hearing the music of the spheres.” Professor Ewbank concludes that this is “a scene about the readiness to accept the impossible, a scene hinting at knowledge which passes understanding.” (See “‘My name is Marina’: The Language of Recognition,” in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G. K. Hunter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 115, p. 129.) My staging of the scene, I believe, would best convey to the audience that sense of a “knowledge which passes understanding.”

15. The music to accompany a theophany, unlike music of the spheres, has justification in Shakespearean stage convention. John H. Long observes that the appearance of the supernatural in Shakespeare's plays is usually preceded and accompanied by stage directions for music (p. 47).

16. “The Structure of the Last Plays,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), 22.

17. Others have also recently noted the degree to which Gower's presence organizes and unifies our experience of the play. Eggers, for instance, remarks on his “almost continuous control” (p. 438) and on the fact that his eight appearances give him a more dominant role than any other authorial presenter in an Elizabethan play. In a tantalizing brief summary of a paper given at the 1975 MLA meeting, F. D. Hoeniger is reported to have departed sharply from the Introduction to his own New Arden Edition to argue that “a dramatic decorum for the differences in [the play's] style can be experienced, on the stage at least, once one becomes fully aware of Gower's dominating role from beginning to end.” The summary of the talk, “Gower's Dramaturgy fitfully improved by Shakespeare,” is by David Bevington, in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 19 (1976), 1-2. A promised longer essay by Hoeniger on the subject has to my knowledge not yet appeared.