Pericles, Prince of Tyre
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Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a play written (at least in part) by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected plays despite some questions over its authorship. Most modern editors of the play believe that Shakespeare is responsible for the main portion of the play that follows the story of Pericles and Marina. These editors believe that the first two acts, detailing the many voyages of Pericles, were written by a relatively untalented reviser or collaborator, possibly George Wilkins.[1]
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[edit] Date, sources, and authorship
Due to the issue of dual authorship, the dating of Pericles is widely debated. Some scholars support a date of ca. 1607-8, which accords well with what is known about the play's likely co-author, George Wilkins (see below). Other researchers have named it one of Shakespeare's "early plays" that was revised in 1607-08 by Wilkins or another writer. The only published text of Pericles, the 1609 quarto (all subsequent quartos were reprints of the original), is manifestly corrupt; it is often clumsily-written and/or incomprehensible and has been interpreted as a pirated text reconstructed from memory by someone who witnessed the play (much like theories surrounding the 1603 "bad quarto" of Hamlet).[citation needed] The play was printed in quarto twice in 1609 by the stationer Henry Gosson. Subsequent quarto printings appeared in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635; it was one of Shakespeare's most popular plays in his own historical era. The play was not included in the First Folio in 1623; it was one of seven plays added to the original Folio thirty-six in the second impression of the Third Folio in 1664. [See: Folios and Quartos (Shakespeare).]
The play draws upon two sources. One is the Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, a poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer; this provides the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The second source is Lawrence Twine's prose version of Gower's tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, which dates from ca. 1576 and was reprinted in 1607. A third related work is The Painful Adventures of Pericles published in 1608. But this seems to be a "novelization" of the play, stitched together with bits of Twine; Wilkins mentions the play in the Argument to his version of the story[2] – so that Wilkins' novel derives from the play, not the play from the novel. Wilkins has been an obvious candidate for the author of the non-Shakespearean matter in the play's first two acts; Wilkins was a playwright, and no one has presented a better candidate.
The editors of the Oxford and Arden editions of Pericles support the contention that it is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins, citing stylistic links between the play and Wilkins's style that are found nowhere else in Shakespeare.[3] The Cambridge editors reject this contention, arguing that the play is entirely by Shakespeare, and that all the oddities can be defended as a deliberately old-fashioned style; however, they do not discuss the stylistic links with Wilkins's work.[4] If the play was co-written, or revised by Wilkins, this would support the 1607-8 date, as Wilkins' career as a writer spanned only the years 1603-8.[5]
The 1986 Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works, and the subsequent individual edition, include a "reconstructed text" of Pericles, which in places adapts passages from Wilkins' novel on the assumption that they are based on the play and record the dialogue more accurately than the quarto.
[edit] Performance
The earliest performance of Pericles known with certainty occurred in May 1619, at Court, "in the King's great chamber." The play was also performed at the Globe Theatre on June 10, 1631.[6]
However, the Venetian ambassador to England, Zorzi Giustinian, saw a play titled Pericles during his time in London, which ran from Jan. 5, 1606 to Nov. 23, 1608. As far as is known, there was no other play with the same title that was acted in this era; the logical assumption is that this must have been Shakespeare's play.[7]The title page of the play's first printed edition states that the play was often acted at the Globe Theatre, which was most likely true.
[edit] Synopsis
[edit] Act I
John Gower, a 14th century English poet and contemporary of Chaucer introduces each act with a prologue. The play opens in the court of Antiochus, king of Antioch, who has offered the hand of his beautiful daughter to any man who answers his riddle; but those who fail shall die.
Pericles, the young Prince (ruler) of Tyre in Phoenicia (Lebanon), hears the riddle, and instantly understands its meaning: Antiochus is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his daughter. If he reveals this truth, he will be killed, but if he answers incorrectly, he will also be killed. Pericles hints that he knows the answer, and asks for more time to think. Antiochus grants him forty days, and then sends an assassin after him. However, Pericles has fled the city.
Pericles returns to Tyre, where his trusted friend and councilor Helicanus advises him to leave the city, for Antiochus surely will hunt him down. Pericles leaves Helicanus as regent and sails to Tarsus, a city beset by famine. The generous Pericles gives the governor of the city, Cleon, and his wife Dionyza, grain from his ship to save their people. The famine ends, and after being thanked profusely by Cleon and Dionyza, Pericles continues on.
[edit] Act II
A storm wrecks Pericles' ship and washes him up on the shores of Pentapolis. He is rescued by a group of poor fishermen who inform him that Simonedes, King of Pentapolis, is holding a tournament the next day and that the winner will receive the hand of his daughter Thaisa in marriage. Fortunately, one of the fishermen drags Pericles' suit of armor on shore that very moment, and the prince decides to enter the tournament. Although his equipment is rusty, Pericles wins the tournament and the hand of Thaisa (who is deeply attracted to him) in marriage. Simonedes initially expresses doubt about the union, but soon comes to like Pericles and allows them to wed.
Meanwhile, in Tyre, the noblemen learn that Antiochus and his daughter are dead, shrivelled up by a "fire from heaven" while riding in a chariot. Anxious at the long departure of their king, the nobles offer the crown to Helicanus, but Helicanus is a loyal friend to Pericles and refuses. However, he eventually agrees that if the noblemen search for Pericles in vain, Helicanus will consent to become king.
[edit] Act III
A letter sent by the noblemen reaches Pericles in Pentapolis, who decides to return to Tyre with the pregnant Thaisa. Again, a storm arises while at sea, and Thaisa dies giving birth to her child, Marina. The sailors on board insist that Thaisa's body is set out to sea in order to calm the storm. Pericles grudgingly agrees, and decides to stop at Tarsus because he fears that Marina may not survive the storm.
Luckily, Thaisa's casket washes up to shore near the residence of Lord Cerimon, a magician who brings her back to life. Thinking that Pericles died in the storm, Thaisa becomes a priestess in the temple of Diana.
Pericles departs to rule Tyre, leaving Marina in the care of Cleon and Dionyza.
[edit] Act IV
Marina grows up more beautiful than the daughter of Cleon and Dionyza, so Dionyza plans Marina's murder. The plan is thwarted when pirates kidnap Marina and then sell her to a brothel in Mytilene. There, Marina manages to keep her virginity by convincing the men that they should seek virtue. Worried that she is ruining their market, the brothel rents her out as a tutor to respectable young ladies. She becomes famous for music and other decorous entertainments.
Meanwhile, Pericles returns to Tarsus for his daughter. The governor and his wife claim she has died; in grief, he sets to the seas.
[edit] Act V
Pericles' wanderings bring him to Mytilene where the governor, seeking to cheer him up, brings in Marina. They compare their sad stories and joyfully realize they are father and daughter. Next, the goddess Diana appears in a dream to Pericles, and tells him to come to the temple where he finds Thaisa. The wicked Cleon and Dionyza are killed when their people revolt against their crime. Lysimachus will marry Marina.
[edit] Reputation
Despite all its problems, the play works well on the stage, as Harold Bloom has pointed out,[8] and as numerous stage productions have attested. Most recently, in 2005, The New Globe in London and The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC presented two very different but, nonetheless, crtically acclaimed productions of the play. In 1660, at the start of the Restoration when the theatres had just re-opened, Thomas Betterton played the title role in a new production of Pericles at the Cockpit Theatre, the first production of any of Shakespeare's works in the new era.
Critical response to the play has not been warm, to say the least. In 1629, Ben Jonson lamented the audiences' enthusiastic responses to the play:
No doubt some mouldy tale, Like Pericles ; and stale As the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish— Scraps out of every dish Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub (Ben Jonson, Ode (to Himself))
By "mouldy," Jonson did not impugn the age of the play (20 years), but rather, impugned the episodic form of the play, which scrapped genre and narrative "out of every dish." This form combines with its content, the medieval Apollonius legend, to present a play that reeks of the utter medievalism that Jonson's neoclassicism eschewed.
After Jonson and until the mid-twentieth century, critics found little to like or praise in the play. In the eighteenth century scholars began to take issue with the text of Pericles, as England began to shape Shakespeare into a celebrated, national icon. Due to the increasingly central and elite status, the idea of Shakespeare began to displace both fact and popular folklore. The neoclassicism of the Augustan age shaped “Shakespeare” into something much larger than a human being; “Shakespeare” became a monolithic figure of English pride and heritage. While early modern peoples enjoyed and accepted both the pageantry of the episodic Pericles and the Renaissance psychological realism of Hamlet, the eighteenth century could not reconcile the former with the latter, because Shakespeare, the author of Hamlet, was something far superior to that botched quarto of 1609. In the eighteenth century Alexander Pope not only rewrote and liberally edited the complete works of William Shakespeare, but completely dropped Pericles from the canon (Edmund Malone later restored the play to the Complete Works).
The great nineteenth-century scholar Edward Dowden wrestled with the text and found that the play “as a whole is singularly undramatic” and “entirely lacks unity of action."[9] Whig literary critics like Dowden judged the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s works based on his understanding of Aristotle’s Poetics, which entailed the application of Aristotle’s advice for ancient tragic playwrights to Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedies, histories, romances, and comedies. While Dowden placed important emphasis on the dramatic criteria of unities, plot, and character, his ultimate treatment of Shakespeare’s plays has less to do with Aristotle than with Plato. Pericles does, indeed, present a problem for Dowden because of its episodic composition, which, according to Aristotle, is a habit of “inferior poets”.[10] But the episodic nature of the play combined with the Act Four’s lewdness trouble Dowden because these traits problemetized his idea of Shakespeare. Along the same reasoning—that the supposed product of Shakespeare did not match up with his idea of Shakespeare—he banished Titus Andronicus from the canon because it belonged to “the pre-Shakespearean school of bloody dramas”.[11]
The idea of Shakespeare, based on the myth of the Elizabethan Golden Age, was soon replaced by ideas of Shakespeare based on the critical and, often, scientific inquiries, made by the New Bibliographers of the early twentieth century. The efforts of pioneers Alfred W. Pollard, Walter Wilson Greg, and R. B. McKerrow began with an increased attention to the examination of quarto editions of Shakespearean plays published before the First Folio (1623). In terms of New Bibliography, the garbled text of Pericles was among the most notorious "bad quartos." In the second half of the twentieth century critics began to warm to the play. After John Arthos' 1953 article "Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Romantic Narrative"[12] scholars began to find merits and interesting facets within the play's dramaturgy, narrative, and use of the marvelous. And while the play's textual critics have sharply disagreed about editorial methodology in the last half-century, almost all of them, beginning with F. D. Hoeniger with his 1963 Arden 2 edition, have been enthusiastic about Pericles and sung its praises to the music of the spheres (Other, more recent, critics have been Stephen Orgel (Pelican Shakespeare), Suzanne Gossett (Arden 3), Roger Warren (Reconstructed Oxford), and Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond (Cambridge)).
[edit] Antiochus's riddle
- 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.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (OUP 2004), pp. 291-332
- ^ Halliday, p. 528.
- ^ Roger Warren, ed. Pericles (OUP, 2003), 60-71.
- ^ Doreen DelVecchio and Anthony Hammond, eds. Pericles (CUP, 1998)
- ^ Roger Prior, "The Life of George Wilkins," Shakespeare Survey 55 (1972).
- ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 363.
- ^ Halliday, p. 188.
- ^ Harold Bloom "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" (Riverhead Books, 1998) p. 604.
- ^ Edward Dowden. Shakespeare, His Mind and His Art. Dublin: 1875, pp. 145
- ^ Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Richard Janko. IN Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York and London. W. W. Norton & Co., 2001, pp.98
- ^ Dowden, 54
- ^ Shakespeare Quarterly 4 257-270
[edit] External links
- Pericles Prince of Tyre - HTML version of this title.
- Pericles Prince of Tyre - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
