The Shakespeare Book

298

S

hakespeare shaped his plays

to satisfy his audience’s

expectations. People

attending a tragedy would expect

to see a tableau of death by the

play’s close; those attending a

romance or comedy anticipated

marriages and reunions. Pericles,

Prince of Tyre is no exception. In

this romance, Shakespeare

separates his protagonist from his

wife and daughter in order to build

toward their reunion at the close.

Pericles is tossed upon the seas

of the Mediterranean from shore

to shore and must endure life’s

“ceaseless storm” (15.71) in order, at

the end of the story, to appreciate

fully the pleasures of reconciliation.

Believing his wife and daughter

to be dead, Pericles slips into a near

comatose state. Twenty scenes into

the drama Shakespeare asks his

audience to imagine that Pericles

“for this three months hath not

spoken” (21.18). The protagonist

is emotionally exhausted. Grief

has transformed the voyager; as

Helicanus suggests, when he draws

back a curtain to reveal Pericles

with an overgrown beard, “This

was a goodly person / Till the

disaster of one mortal night / Drove

him to this” (21.29–30). Separated

from his wife and daughter, Pericles

all but withdraws from society.

Emotional reunion

Shakespeare’s presentation of

Pericles’s reunion with his daughter

Marina is a moving moment. The

couple’s gradual realization that

they are father and daughter is

developed across the space of some

hundred lines. Marina begins

by telling Pericles that she has

“endured a grief” (21.76) that may

equal his own. By this point in the

play, audiences will be acutely

aware of the misfortunes that have

befallen both characters. They will

also be aware that Pericles believes

his daughter to be dead. Having

listened to Marina’s opening words,

Pericles shares his private thoughts

with the audience in an aside that

IN CONTEXT

THEMES

Life’s journey, love, fate,

family, endurance, reunion

SETTING

Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus,

Pentapolis, Ephesus,

Mytilene (Mediterranean)

SOURCES

1390s Shakespeare used John

Gower’s Apollonius (Pericles)

of Tyre included in Confessio

Amantis. Gower expanded

on the popular Greek story.

1576 Shakespeare also took

some details from Laurence

Twine’s novella The Pattern

of Painful Adventures.

LEGACY

1623 Pericles is not included

in the First Folio, leading to

persistent doubts surrounding

its authorship.

1659 The play is one of the

first staged after the reopening

of the theaters by Charles II.

1738 George Lillo puts on an

adaptation of the play called

Marina at Covent Garden.

1983 The BBC film the play

with Mike Gwilym as Pericles,

and Juliet Stevenson as Thaisa.

2003 Yukio Ninagawa’s

Japanese production creates a

fairy-tale world using human

puppet shows. It played at the

National Theatre, London.

2012 The National Theatre of

Greece produces the play as

part of the Shakespeare World

Festival running alongside the

Olympic Games.

PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE

John Gower, illustrated in this

14th-century manuscript, was a popular

poet and storyteller. Shakespeare drew

on his retelling of the Greek tale and

made Gower the narrator in the play.

Why, as men do a-land—the

great ones eat up the little ones.

Master fisherman

Scene 5