Thou … beget’st him that did thee beget.
Pericles, V.i.195
Another group of Shakespeare’s daughters not only survive dire circumstances but also take the role, traditionally relegated to the father, of succoring and guiding their loved ones. Marina, in Pericles, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and Cordelia, in King Lear, spend much of their respective plays exiled and, in the case of the first two, presumed dead. All have, in fact, found shelter with benevolent strangers and developed impressive reserves of daring and resilience. The daughters in the two romances are two-dimensional figures, paragons of virtue and optimism. Their simple natures are signaled by their label-names, which are linked to their situations: Marina, “of the sea,” is lost and found in that element. Perdita, “the lost one,” is “found again.” The symbolic name of Cordelia, a more fully rounded personage, focuses not on her situation but her character: she is all “heart,” a woman of prescience, compassion, and courage.
In the daughters’ absence, their fathers have fallen into the depths of melancholy and despair. The degree of each man’s blame for her initial loss proves to be directly proportional to the completeness of his recovery. In the simplest of these plays, the late romance Pericles, the title figure’s suffering is caused primarily by fate: he is bereaved for the wife whom he believes died in childbirth during a storm at sea and the grown daughter who reportedly died in the care of those he left her with as an infant. In the more complex romance, The Winter’s Tale, Leontes is anguished not only by grief but by bitter remorse. It was he who denounced Perdita, his newborn child, as illegitimate, and ordered her exposed to the elements and left to die. His tyranny caused his young son to die of grief, and his loss, in turn, was supposedly mortal to Leontes’s innocent wife. Having realized that his charge of adultery was a product of paranoia, Leontes falls into a black abyss of depression. In the tragedy, Lear exiles not a baby he hardly knows but a young woman who has long been his best-loved daughter. At the outset, he denies any blame for Cordelia’s suffering. Once his guilt penetrates his shell of vanity and self-righteousness, though, he is stricken to the point of madness. Not only his abuse at the hands of the corrupt daughters he has favored but his rash rejection of the loyal one create a howling “tempest in [his] mind.” Only Cordelia’s return and clemency can rescue him from its torments. In contrast to the healing in the romances, however, in the tragedy the daughter’s cure is poignantly transient.
The tone of each play is determined largely by the nature of the father and daughter’s reconciliation. In the romances, it is perfect and complete, leading not only to forgiveness but to the balm of restoration. Pericles and Leontes are blessed with the return not only of their daughters but their wives, and the family circle, long broken, is once again joined. The elegiac mood of each ending comes from the length of the family’s separation—the irretrievably lost years covering the daughter’s entire childhood. For the audience, it comes from the bittersweet recognition of the unlikelihood of such perfect reconciliation. The heartrending bleakness of King Lear rests on the brevity of the father and daughter’s reunion. Lear has no sooner regained his balance and realized the unique preciousness of Cordelia’s love than she is snatched from him and murdered at the hands of her cruel sisters. The old father’s valiant efforts at rescuing her from the evil forces that he himself set in motion fail, and Providence looks on indifferently at her execution. His only comfort, expressed in his dying words, is the illusion that she is still alive. No icon of failed fatherhood is more poignant than Lear’s pietà with the dead Cordelia in his arms.
Pericles, the last written of the three plays, most resembles a fairy tale in the simplicity of its characterization and the idyllic nature of its denouement. The medieval poet Gower, who serves as chorus to the romance, underlines in his opening speech the ritualistic nature of the play: he has risen “from ashes ancient” in order “To sing a song that old was sung … at festivals … and holy ales” (I.Chorus.1, 5–6) [All quotations are from the Arden edition of Pericles, edited by E. D. Hoeniger (Methuen & Co, 1963)]. Its purpose is to celebrate the triumph of the virtuous—not to provide a subtle exploration of character but to serve as a dramatized exemplum, with Pericles as the type of the devoted husband and father. That role is made clear at the outset by contrasting the title character with the wicked King Antiochus, tyrant and incest-perpetrator, violator of every sacred family bond. Although his daughter looks so lovely that she seems “as [if] heaven had lent her all his grace,” she is corrupt. Gower chastises both, but particularly the parent: “Bad child, worse father, to entice his own / To evil should be done by none” (I.Chorus.27–28).
To conceal the relationship, Antiochus has devised a spurious contest, supposedly to attract a husband for the princess, in which the suitor must either solve a riddle or lose his life. It is a malevolent form of the contest that Portia’s late father establishes for her suitors in The Merchant of Venice. This riddle, however, is ridiculously transparent—it describes the incestuous relationship—and young Pericles, Prince of Tyre, deciphers it easily. Horrified, he soliloquizes on his revulsion for the king’s “uncomely claspings with [his] child” and her “defiling of her parents’ bed” (I.i.129, 132). He tells the king in a riddle of his own that he sees his “vice”; then, realizing the danger in his candor, he rejects the king’s attempts at allaying his suspicions and flees for his life.
This picaresque tale of Pericles, brave and upright knight, favored of the gods, continues in the next episodes. The prince returns to his own land of Tyre, but fearing that the powerful Antiochus’s vengeance will light on his people, Pericles flees again. By heeding his instincts and sense of honor, he escapes the assassination plot of the evil king. Having heard of a famine in Tharsus, he loads his ship with “corn” (I.iv.95) and seeks new refuge in that land. When he again senses Antiochus in pursuit, Pericles sets off once more. This time, his ship is “wrack’d and split” and he lands at Pentapolis, “having all lost” (II.Chorus.32–33). “Fortune,” though, shines on him once again. The land is ruled by the virtuous Simonides, renowned for his “peaceable reign and good government.” The timing is also propitious. It happens to be the eve of the Princess Thaisa’s birthday, and Pericles learns from some fishermen that a contest is afoot, with “princes and knights come from all parts of the world to joust and tourney for her love” (II.i.107–09). Just as he is wishing for some means to compete, the fishermen draw up in their nets some flotsam from the shipwreck, “a rusty armour.” In keeping with the fable of the benevolent patriarch, this turns out to be Pericles’ own suit, bequeathed to him by his dead father with the fond wish that it may be “a shield / ’Twixt [him] and death” (ll. 125–26). Pericles immediately feels revived by this good fortune: “My shipwreck’s now no ill, / Since I have here my father gave in his will.” He adds the fond recollection: “He loved me dearly, / And for his sake I wish the having of it” (ll. 137–38). Pericles’ material fortunes may be at a low point, but his emotional and spiritual heritage is rich.
Thaisa is likewise blessed. Her father shows his love for her by holding “these triumphs” in “honour” of her birth and calling her by such affectionate names as “Beauty’s child.” She, in turn, shows herself worthy of his regard by embodying every virtue. Father and daughter agree on the worthiness of Pericles as a suitor. The king recognizes his “graceful courtesy” (II.ii.40) in spite of the rusty armor that he wears, and he chastises his courtiers’ mockery of this “outward habit” (l. 56). Not surprisingly, “the mean Knight” triumphs in the lists. At first, in order to test Thaisa’s love, Simonides denigrates these chivalric feats: “He’s but a country gentleman; / Has done no more than other knights have done; / Has broke a staff or two; so let it pass” (II.iii.33–35). Still, Pericles, observing the whispered exchange, is moved by the king’s resemblance to his own father. That sympathy is affirmed when Simonides privately declares: “by the gods, I pity his misfortune, / And will awake him from his melancholy.” His values of piety and empathy align him with all of Shakespeare’s positive characters. He bids the knights and ladies dance, gives Pericles Thaisa for his partner, pronounces him “the best” in this skill as well, and reserves the resolution of the contest for the morrow, to make the prize the sweeter.
To underline Simonides’s role as the good father, promoter of the match between his beloved daughter and a virtuous suitor, the scene shifts to Tyre, where news is brought of the sudden death of Antiochus and his daughter. While “seated in a chariot / Of inestimable value,” they have been struck by “a fire from heaven” that “shrivell’d up / Their bodies” (II.iv.7–10) and created so great a stench that their erstwhile followers have refused to bury them. The courtier who brings the news pronounces this fate “but justice,” the apt “reward” for so much “sin” (ll. 13, 15).
Meanwhile, back at Pentapolis, Thaisa informs her father by letter that “she’ll wed the stranger knight,” and he privately approves their concord of taste: “’Tis well, mistress; your choice agrees with mine; / I like that well” (II.v.18–19). He also notes her willfulness and, sounding like Prospero, is amused and gratified by it: “how absolute she’s in’t, / Not minding whether I dislike or no! / Well, I do commend her choice, / And will no longer have it delay’d” (ll. 19–22). Again, like the magician in The Tempest, he pretends to oppose the match, taunting Pericles with having “bewitch’d” his daughter and accusing him of lying when he swears that he has not courted her without permission. Stung, the prince protests, “My actions are as noble as my thoughts” (l. 58). Privately, Simonides “applaud[s] his courage” and professes himself “glad on’t with all [his] heart.” Aloud, he berates her: “Will you, not having my consent, / Bestow your love and your affections / Upon a stranger?” (ll. 75–77). This time he sounds like a feigning echo of Brabantio chastising Desdemona. Simonides works the charade to a high pitch with the threat, “Either be rul’d by me, or I’ll make you—” and concludes slyly “Man and wife.” Delighted, they consent in chorus, “If it please your majesty” (l. 90), confirming the good children that they are. Although critics commonly agree that Shakespeare had little hand in the first two acts of Pericles, these courtship scenes with the blocking senex contain several echoes not only of The Tempest and Othello but also of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. This play, however, presents two generations of loving fathers and resourceful daughters.
At first it seems as though Pericles’ fortunes have taken a permanent turn for the better. He and Thaisa quickly conceive “a babe,” and, the threat of Antiochus past, Pericles is called home to be restored to the throne of Tyre. The pregnant Thaisa, Gower tells us in the chorus to Act III, insists on accompanying him. Pericles’ family crest, we discovered when he donned his rusty armor, is “a withered branch, that’s only green at top,” the motto Latin for “In this hope I live” (II.ii.42; footnote 43). To this point, that green hope seemed to be represented by his bride. But Pericles will prove to be a king and knight who needs to be rescued twice, first by his wife-to-be and later by their daughter.
The second rescue becomes necessary in this saga of cataclysmic events and doleful consequences when a storm comes up at sea that proves the undoing of the young family. Panicked, the queen goes into labor and, despite her husband’s earnest prayers, apparently dies in childbirth. Her nurse, Lychorida, enters carrying the newborn and declares: “Here’s all that is left living of your queen, / A little daughter” (III.i.20–21). Pericles, distraught, nonetheless has room in his heart to pity the child, “poor inch of nature!” and to wish that the storm “be quiet” (ll. 35, 42) for her sake. Rather than proceed to Tyre, he decides to return to Tharsus, the kingdom that he aided earlier during the famine, “for the babe / Cannot hold out to Tyrus,” he says anxiously. With the storm still raging, the superstitious sailors insist on throwing Thaisa’s body overboard, claiming that the “sea” and “wind” “will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead” (ll. 47–49). Reluctantly, Pericles agrees. But first he mourns over her corpse, addressing his dead wife with heartbroken tenderness: “A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear” (l. 56). He laments having no time “to give thee hallowed to thy grave” and orders that the body be put to sea with all the ceremony and luxury he can muster: He calls for “spices,” “jewels,” and “ink and paper” (ll. 65–66) for him to write a description of her rank and story, and he orders the chest in which she lies to be “caulked and bitumed” (ll. 70–71) against the sea’s incursion. No husband could be more caring and compassionate.
Next occurs one of the miraculous coincidences peculiar to Shakespeare’s romances. The coffin, so carefully made watertight, washes up in Ephesus. There it is found by Cerimon, a pious nobleman, who, ordering it opened, finds not only the body “shrouded in clothes of state” and “entreasured with full bags of spices” but bearing a “passport” (III.iii.67–68). This is the scroll that Pericles wrote in the throes of the storm, declaring the victim a “queen, worth all our mundane cost,” and pleading with whoever finds the body to bury her and keep “this treasure for a fee” (ll. 74, 76). Moved by the enormous care that Pericles has taken and the “woe” of his tale, Cerimon stares pityingly at Thaisa and realizes suddenly that she is not dead but “entranc’d” (l. 96). With such simple remedies as “fire,” dry clothes, and “still and awful music,” he revives her. Her awakening, reminiscent of Lear’s and Juliet’s, is announced with her dazed questions, “Where am I? Where’s my lord?” Cerimon’s response affirms both Pericles’ love and her special qualities: “fair creature, / Rare as you seem to be” (ll. 105–06). With his triumphant announcement to his household, “Gentlemen, this queen will live,” everything seems set for the happy reunion of the little family. But, unaccountably, both wife and husband make decisions that prolong the separation and anticipate the pathos of the denouement.
When next we see Thaisa, she has recovered physically, but decides, with uncharacteristic passivity, to remain ignorant of Pericles’ final fate. Although she admits to having no memory of the voyage, she apparently assumes that he has perished at sea. Saying that she “ne’er shall see [him] again,” she vows to assume “a vestal livery” in a nearby shrine to Diana and “never more have joy” (III.iv.8–10). Does it never occur to her to seek news of the shipwreck? To return to her beloved father? Her reaction seems more melodramatic plot device than convincing motivation.
The like is true of Pericles’ decision to leave his “gentle babe Marina,” whom he has so named because “she was born at sea,” in Tharsus. After a year with the king, Cleon, and his queen Dionyza, Pericles has been called back to Tyre, locked in a “litigious peace” (III.iii.3) and desperate for leadership. The need for his return is clear, but his reasons for leaving his little daughter are not. Is it because his country is on the brink of war? Because Dionyza has a child Marina’s age and this is a family while he is a single father? In this two-dimensional characterization, his motives are never explained. Clearly, he is not moved by lack of love for his child. In an echo of his “priestly farewell” to the supposedly dead Thaisa, he makes the Biblical vow not to cut his hair “till she be married” (l. 27). He forbids her faithful nurse Lychorida, in whose care he leaves the infant, parting tears, and commands: “Look to your little mistress, on whose grace / You may depend hereafter” (ll. 39–40). This assertion will prove more prophetic for Pericles himself than for Lychorida.
As in The Winter’s Tale, the abandoned daughter manages not only to survive but also to emerge as a paragon of talent and grace. In this play, too, the chorus serves as “winged time” to fly over the years of Marina’s childhood and present her as a young woman, grown into “the heart and place / Of general wonder” (IV.Chorus.10–11). She is “absolute Marina,” who “gets all praises” (ll. 31, 33–34) with her lute playing, singing, and erudition. But before we even see this wonder, Gower relates the dire results of all her accomplishment: the queen, “cursed Dionyza” (l. 43), is consumed with “that monster envy” because her own daughter is in Marina’s shadow. As Act IV opens, she is already plotting her young charge’s murder. Pericles is about to return, and Dionyza is in haste to dispatch Marina before he arrives. She commands her servant Leonine to do the deed, cutting short his reluctance to harm the “goodly creature” with the cynical quip, “The fitter then the gods should have her” (IV.i.9–10).
The girl, meanwhile, has been left entirely defenseless. She enters, bearing flowers and “weeping” for the newly dead Lychorida, and bemoaning her ill luck in losing first her mother and then her nurse. “This world to me is as a lasting storm” (l. 19), she laments. Yet she greets the falsely pitying Dionyza with gratitude and reluctantly accepts the queen’s command that she walk along the seashore with Leonine, supposedly to improve her appetite. Modest, eloquent, and lovely—we have the jealous queen’s word for the girl’s “excellent complexion, which did steal / The eyes of young and old” (ll. 40–41)—Marina is the classic fair maiden. She soon shows, though, that she also has courage and spirit, which she attributes to her father’s heritage. She begins by recalling Lychorida’s account of her violent birth at sea and his stalwartness in the storm:
My father, my nurse says, did never fear,
But cried “Good seamen!” to the sailors, galling
His kingly hands, haling ropes [ll. 52–54].
When Leonine reveals his nefarious purpose, she first asserts her innocence and then makes a heartfelt appeal to his “well-favored” look and, she hopes, corresponding “gentle heart” (ll. 85–86). Undeterred, he “seizes her”—at which moment, pirates enter, cry “A prize! A prize!” and snatch her from him; “Leonine runs away” (stage direction, l. 92). This is the standard fairy tale plot: stereotypical evil and virtuous characters, dire events stopped by chance on the verge of realization, the heroine spared by means of her own spirited resistance and the aid of fate. The play depicts a more sordid world, however, than is typical for a fairy tale. Leonine returns to speculate lasciviously that the pirates may simply “please themselves upon” (l. 100) Marina and then abandon her, at which point he would finish his own murderous work. The lack of pity for the innocent victim is reminiscent of Lavinia’s rape in Titus Andronicus.
In Pericles, however, lust anticipated is but lust delayed. The pirates do not rape Marina, but instead sell her to a brothel in the seaport of Mytilene. The house of ill repute is kept by three unscrupulous rascals, two called by the label names of Bawd and Pandar, and the third, his servant, by the bawdy pun Boult. Presumably the name alludes to one who “bolts” the door after customers enter or who bolts down any superfluous favors from the prostitutes. The latter definition is suggested when he reminds the Bawd that it was he who “bargained” with the pirates for the “joint” of Marina, and she responds: “Thou mayst cut a morsel off the spit” (IV.ii.130). These keepers are completely contemptuous of their “creatures,” complaining that they have but a “poor three” and those are already “rotten” with disease (ll. 7–9). They joke about the “poor bastards” they have “brought up” and then “brought down” again—forced into prostitution at the age of eleven. Their only concern is how much money they may have lost in the “mart” by “being too wenchless” (ll. 4–5). Naturally, such crass exploiters are interested in Marina only for the price she can command. The Bawd orders Boult to hawk her “complexion,” “age,” and the “warrant of her virginity” with the cry, “He that will give most shall have her first” (ll. 54–56).
This is utter degradation, particularly harsh for one so delicately raised, and Marina’s first reaction is to regret that neither Leonine nor the pirates murdered her. The Bawd is amused at such scruples. “Why lament you, pretty one?” she demands. She tries to sway the girl with titillating promises of “pleasure” with “gentlemen of all fashions” (IV.ii.72, 74–75). But when the pious Marina pleads, “The gods defend me!” and expresses her own high principles, the Bawd becomes irritated. “You’re a young sapling, and must be bow’d as I would have you,” she threatens. The means, she agrees with the lascivious Boult, is to “quench” her “blushes” with “some present practice” (ll. 123–24). The hapless girl vows suicide to keep her “virgin knot … untied” and prays to Diana for aid. “What have we to do with Diana?” (l. 148) the Bawd responds scornfully. But we know what she does not: the exiled Thaisa has become a votaress of the chaste goddess, and her daughter’s prayer will not go unheeded.
The immediate rescue for which Marina prays is coming just too late: the scene shifts to Tharsus, where Pericles is expected any moment to “fetch his daughter home” (IV.iv.20) at last. Dionyza, believing that the murder has been carried out, is unrepentant. Lady Macbeth–like, she blames Cleon for his “coward spirit” and congratulates herself on having poisoned Leonine, the only witness to her crime. She has prepared a fine show of sorrow to fool the bereaved father: a lavish monument, complete with “epitaphs / In glitt’ring golden characters” (IV.iii.43–44), a hypocritical analogue to the heartfelt gift of the gold statue of Juliet that Montague offers Capulet. Her ruse works, as we see in a dumb show and chorus. At the tomb, Pericles “makes lamentation, puts on sackcloth, and in a mighty passion departs” (stage direction, IV.iv.23). The chorus steps in to describe the “tempest” of the father’s grief: “in sorrow all devour’d,” he reembarks for Tyre, vowing “Never to wash his face, nor cut his hairs” (ll. 25, 27–28). Summarizing rather than staging this reaction increases the fairy tale simplicity of the plot. That quality is further emphasized by the stark contrast between the good and evil parent. Dionyza calls the murder an act of love, “an enterprise of kindness / Perform’d to [her] sole daughter (IV.iii.38–39). She is the epitome of malicious jealousy. Pericles, in contrast, is the well-meaning victim, helpless in the face of such duplicity. With the distancing devices of dumb show and chorus, it is easy to miss the blame that he bears for Marina’s fate. Like Macduff’s, his absence has left his child prey to those who would harm her. Because, in contrast to the tragedy, Pericles’ reaction is not staged, we do not see either the suspicion of the perpetrators or the remorse for his own neglect that deepens Macduff’s characterization. The chorus sums up his gullibility and passivity: “Let Pericles believe his daughter’s dead, / And bear his courses to be ordered / By Lady Fortune” (IV.iv.45–47). Marina, meanwhile, has again been left alone to cope with the “unholy service” (l. 50) into which she has been sold.
Back in Mytilene, scenes at the brothel prove the girl a marvel of daring and resourcefulness. She faces three tests of her will, each with an adversary more determined than the last to take her virginity. The first occurs off stage. Two gentlemen enter from the brothel, so struck by the “divinity” that she has “preached” that they swear off “bawdy-houses” forever and vow to devote themselves to “anything … that is virtuous” (IV.v.4–8). The brothel keepers are exasperated by her powers of conversion: “She’s able to freeze the god Priapus,” the Bawd complains, and Boult swears the ironic oath: “Faith, I must ravish her, or she’ll disfurnish us of all our customers” (IV.vi.3–4, 11–12).
The Bawd prepares Marina for the second, harder test. Lysimachus, “the governor of this country,” has come for his usual pleasures. If Marina will “treat him kindly,” the Bawd promises, “He will line her apron with gold” (IV.vi.57–58). Lysimachus is a jaded roué, intent on despoiling “a dozen of virginities” and concerned only that this one be truly fresh and therefore free of disease. He begins by treating Marina as a common prostitute, venturing that she began plying her “trade” at “five or at seven.” Her aloofness, he thinks, is due only to her knowledge of his rank and her hope for greater profit. The girl goes quickly from arch denial to indignation, calling the brothel “this sty,” “this unhallowed place” where “most ungentle fortune” has confined her. She wishes that “the gods / Would set [her] free,” even if that meant being transformed into “the meanest bird” (ll. 96–101). She swears that she is a “maid” and challenges Lysimachus: “If you were born to honor, show it now” (l. 91). These fairy tale allusions trigger a correspondingly fabulous transformation. Lysimachus is charmed by her fervor and eloquence: “I did not think / Thou couldst have spoke so well,” he marvels, and professes his “corrupted mind” “alter’d” by her speech. He gives her gold and more gold, pronounces her “a piece of virtue” (an echo of Prospero’s description of Miranda’s mother), and urges: “Persever in that clear way thou goest” (l. 105). Then he turns on Boult, just coming in to check on the assignation, and berates him in the lowest terms.
Again, the servant condemns Marina’s “peevish chastity” and turns to his mistress for support. His is furious that Marina has spoken “holy words to the Lord Lysimachus” and “sent him away as cold as a snowball; saying his prayers too” (IV.vi.139–40). “O abominable!” the Bawd clucks. The self-righteousness of the lewd gives the scene a dark comic edge reminiscent of Measure for Measure. Marina’s success against Lysimachus, though, sparks the third and most difficult test of her virtue. The Bawd reinforces Boult’s lust and thirst for vengeance with her crass command: “Use her at thy pleasure. Crack the glass of her virginity, and make the rest malleable” (ll. 141–43).
Left alone with this callous lecher, Marina uses her vaunted eloquence not in prayers but in insults as coarse as those that have been directed at her: “Thou art the damned doorkeeper to every / Coistrel that comes inquiring for his Tib” and “Thy food is such / As hath been belched on by infected lungs” (IV.vi.164–65, 167–68). But she is too clever to limit her weapons to those that offend. Sensing that Boult is more intent on making a profit than on satisfying his lust, she gives him a practical course of action. When he claims that he has no choice but to earn his living as a pander, she offers her services as an artist and teacher and urges him to hawk those rather than her sexual favors:
Proclaim that I can sing, weave, sew, and dance.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I doubt not but this populous city
Yield many scholars [ll. 182–86].
She reinforces this assertion by giving him some of the gold that she has earned in her encounter with Lysimachus. When he hesitates, she switches again to his crass idiom: “Prove that I cannot, take me again, / And prostitute me to the basest groom / That doth frequent your house” (ll. 188–90). Incredibly, Boult accepts. He promises to place her “amongst honest women” and to persuade his “master and mistress” to approve the new contract. Marina has dared to wager her virginity and her honor, and in the gutter language of those who would exploit her. Her goodness is not weak or passive: in feistiness and resilience, she is a spiritual sister to Juliet and Rosalind.
Gower comes on to confirm that Marina has made good on her claims. She has proven such a “goddess-like” singer, dancer, and embroiderer that she has won over even “people of noble race” and paid off the “cursed bawd” (V.Chorus.9–10). Meanwhile, the fates are operating again to protect and reward her. Pericles, “driven before the winds,” happens to anchor off the coast of Mytilene, and Lysimachus hospitably sails out to welcome him. The king, however, is in a deep state of depression, “unkempt and clad in sackcloth,” eating almost nothing and, for three months past, totally mute with grief “from the loss / Of a beloved daughter and a wife” (V.i.29–30). His loyal courtier, old Helicanus, despairs of reaching him, but one of the local lords thinks of “the maid in Mytilene” to cheer him with “her sweet harmony” (ll. 42, 44).
Marina, soon summoned, demands to be left alone with the sufferer. She attempts to rouse him from his lethargy by singing and then addressing him, but he refuses to “mark [her] music” or even look at her, and, when she speaks, only pushes her away with an inarticulate exclamation: “Hum, ha!” Undeterred, the girl gives him a long description of one who has, she says, “endur’d a grief / Might equal yours, if both were justly weigh’d” (V.i.87–88). Hers, she persists, is that “time hath rooted out [her] parentage.” Although her irony is unwitting, she has sensed a connection with the melancholy figure and confesses aside that “something” urges her to remain with him “till he speak” (l. 96).
Pericles has been listening, and the word that rouses him to respond is “parentage.” Dazed, he demands if that has indeed been her choice of word, asks Marina to look at him, and blurts, “You’re something like that—” (V.i.102). The wavelength between father and daughter is reestablished, and he bursts into an eloquent recollection of his “dearest wife,” so “like this maid.” Marina’s pedigree is written in her beauty and talent: her “brows,” “wand-like” carriage, “jewel-like eyes,” and “silver” voice. For all her beauty, she looks “modest as Justice,” the essence of “Truth” (ll. 108–22). He is especially struck by her self-possession. In contrast to his collapse in the face of suffering, she has remained the picture of Patience, conquering Extremity with a stoic “smile[ ]” (ll. 138–39). Pericles himself has stressed this reversal of roles in an ironic simile. He compares her courage to that of “a man,” and accuses himself of “suff’ring like a girl” (ll. 136–37). Eagerly, he questions her heritage. She responds with the talisman: “My name is Marina.” He is indignant and incredulous, sure that the gods are mocking him. She must play the parent who restores him to composure by chastising him: “Patience, good sir, / Or here I’ll cease.”
Marina then resolves his doubts in a moving exchange, reminiscent of Lear’s reunion with Cordelia. She is “a king’s daughter,” “call’d Marina, / For I was born at sea” (V.i.155–56). It remains only to recount her miraculous escape from “cruel Cleon and his wicked wife” and to give the final proof of her identity: her mother’s name. Pericles, who has not seen his child since she was a baby and who has believed her dead, is overwhelmed. He questions her reality: “But are you flesh and blood? / Have you a working pulse, and are no fairy motion?” (ll. 152–54). Reassured, he calls this the “rarest dream” imaginable. He weeps unrestrainedly and is so overcome that he demands of Helicanus: “Give me a gash, put me to present pain,” lest he “drown” in the “sweetness” of “this great sea of joys” (ll. 191–94). The image is reminiscent of Gloucester’s reported end: the heart that “burst smilingly” at his discovery that his beloved son was alive and guiding him. This, however, is Shakespearean romance, rather than tragedy, and Pericles is experiencing not death but rebirth. In fact, he describes his daughter as the parent in that process: “Thou beget’st him that did thee beget.” Still using the tender second person, he reiterates her vital role: “Thou hast been … another life to Pericles thy father” (ll. 206–06).
Pericles goes “wild” with elation. He calls for “fresh garments,” cries “O heavens bless my girl!” addresses her fondly as “my Marina,” and claims to hear “the music of the spheres” (V.i.213–28). Suddenly exhausted, he slips into a “thick” and healing slumber. Again, the echoes of Lear’s cure by Cordelia are apparent—but this play is Lear made happy. To increase the joy, Pericles is visited in his sleep by a vision of the goddess Diana, the confirmation that the heavenly music he alone heard was not the result of delusion. He had intended to go first to Tharsus, to punish “inhospitable Cleon,” but he piously agrees instead to follow the goddess’s command. The act ends with Lysimachus reappearing and hinting at a “suit” he will present later. Pericles anticipates it and grants his wish: “to woo my daughter, for it seems / You have been noble towards her” (ll. 260–61). The former reprobate, impressed by the news of Marina’s noble parentage and reformed by her example, has been magically transformed into a worthy suitor. He requests Pericles’s “arm,” the father beckons the daughter to join them, again using the tender possessive “my Marina,” and the trio go off in a pageant of fatherly blessing.
Only one strand remains to make the fairy tale denouement complete: the “dead” mother must be reunited with her long-lost husband and daughter, so that, as the Chorus puts it, “Wishes fall out as they’re willed” (V.ii.16). The marks of identity, for mother as for daughter, are clear intellect, stainless principles, and boundless affection. Thaisa’s “own most clear remembrance” (V.iii.12) allows her to recognize instantly Pericles’ “voice and favor,” and her unchanged love causes her to faint with joy. Recovered, she needs reassurance that this is truly Pericles, so that she will not mar her “sanctity” by giving way to “licentious” (l. 30) longing. The daughter’s piety has a clear source.
At hearing her speak, Pericles cries, “The voice of dead Thaisa!” (V.iii.34). He is overwhelmed by a new joy so enormous that he can compare it only to death: He wishes that at their first kiss he “may / Melt and no more be seen,” and urges her, long “dead,” “O come be buried / A second time within these arms” (ll. 43–44). The morbid hyperbole strikes a chord in Marina, too. Not missing a beat, she completes her father’s blank verse line and echoes his figure of speech: “My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom” (ll. 44–45). She is wishing at one and the same time to be unborn and reborn. Instantly, Thaisa pronounces her “Blessed and mine own!” As in The Winter’s Tale, the family circle is made complete by the efforts and saving graces not of the father but of the daughter and mother. This play, though, bears no taint of the paternal remorse that darkens the earlier romance. Pericles is simply overcome with gratitude, pronouncing his “past miseries” mere “sports” in the face of the gods’ “present kindness” (ll. 40–41). His last act is to announce Marina’s betrothal, a decision in which he consults neither wife nor daughter. Presumably the blocking would show that Marina is in accord, and Thaisa poses no objection. She reveals that her father has died, and Pericles decrees that he and she will go to rule his kingdom of Pentapolis, while Marina and Lysimachus will reign in Tyre. He will further “grace [the] marriage day” by shaving the fourteen-year beard that he grew as “ornament” of his suffering (l. 73). Marina, it is thus revealed, is the same age as Miranda and, like her, the embodiment of her kingdom’s and her father’s future.
The play ends with an epilogue by Gower, who returns to resolve the final plot element and to underline the moral. When the conspiracy against Marina’s life is revealed to the people of Tharsus, “wicked Cleon and his wife” are attacked in their palace by the outraged citizenry and burned to death. Thus he, like the incestuous Antiochus, receives “his due and just” punishment, while Pericles and his family earn a happy fate: “Virtue preserved from fell destruction’s blast, / Led on by heaven and crowned with joy at last” (Epilogue, ll. 65–66). Pericles, although responsible for leaving his daughter with caretakers who prove unfit, is not guilty of either Lear’s or Leontes’s tyranny. Rather than sentencing his daughter to banishment or, worse, death, or accusing his wife of adultery, he loses them through cruel fate—a tempest at sea. He also puts their welfare first in the crisis, lavishing tender care on both his supposedly dead wife and his newborn child. Thus, he is restored to both of his lost ones, and, as in The Winter’s Tale, the family circle is not only rejoined but enlarged by the addition of a worthy son-in-law and the promise of future progeny. Only in the tragedy does the father’s cruelty result in the total destruction of the family.
In contrast to the complexity that concludes King Lear, Pericles has the stylized flatness of an exemplum. With its two-dimensional characters, wooden professions of noble motives, and miraculous rescues, it is more fairy tale than exploration of character. Yet the main element of psychological realism animates the scenes that most commentators attribute to Shakespeare, those that depict the family reunited. In that fable of the resurrection of the beloved daughter and the forgiven father, Shakespeare once again taps the deepest sources of drama’s capacity for healing ritual.
At the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicilia, is a man who has everything: a peaceful, ordered kingdom, a loving and accomplished wife, a precocious, affectionate son and heir, a lifelong friend who is a kindred spirit, and the happy anticipation of a second child. Wantonly, recklessly, he destroys all these worldly blessings through rashness and arrogance. He accuses his faithful wife and loyal friend of adultery, orders her arrest and plots his murder, and declares his newborn child illegitimate and condemns her to death by exposure. Not even the defense of the innocents by the Oracle of Apollo can dissuade Leontes from this cruel course. The consequences are dire and immediate: his young son Mamillius pines away from grief for his mother; at the news of his death, Hermione collapses and is declared dead; the baby girl, the king’s only remaining relative, has been spirited away, and Leontes falls into an anguished state of remorse and despair. Since the play is a romance, not a tragedy, this situation is not irremediable. The king’s actions do, however, exact a terrible cost: the loss of Mamillius and sixteen years of bitter loneliness. Only the fulfillment of the Oracle’s prophecy, predicting the restoration of his lost daughter, can console the bereft man. The play is the story of Leontes’ long lesson on the supreme value of trust, love, and forgiveness.
Leontes conceives his jealousy from the slimmest of evidence: watching his wife pay the courtesies that he himself has commanded to their guest Polixenes, King of Bohemia and his lifelong friend. The fact that she is nine months pregnant and that Polixenes has been resident in the court of Sicilia during that time adds to Leontes’ irrational suspicion. Everyone from his most trusted advisor to his wife’s upright lady-in-waiting tries to persuade Leontes that his accusations are groundless—a “sickness” (I.ii.384) and a “folly” (l. 429) that will prove “most dangerous” (l. 298) to his own happiness. Leontes himself compares his paranoia to the “venom” felt by one who, previously oblivious, suddenly becomes aware of a poisonous spider that has fallen into his cup: “I have drunk and seen the spider.” But he concludes that his “mistrust” must be confirmation of what is “true” (II.i.45, 48).
Polixenes, warned by the benevolent courtier Camillo of Leontes’ plot against his life, sees the fatal intensity of the jealous triangle: the more “precious” and “rare” the wife, the greater the jealousy at the betrayal. The belief that the lover is not a stranger but “a man which / Ever professed” friendship must make his quest for vengeance “more bitter” (II.i.452–57). Leontes’ “mighty” power gives him the means to make such vengeance “violent.” The one hope for curbing Leontes’s tyranny, expressed by the lady-in-waiting Paulina, is that he will “soften at the sight o’ th’ child” (II.ii.38). The baby, whom Hermione has borne “something before her time” due to the shock of Leontes’ accusation and harsh treatment, is “a goodly babe, / Lusty and like to live” (ll. 24–25). Paulina hopes that her “pure innocence” will move the king.
Paulina tries to convince Leontes that the baby is a tiny “copy” of him. In answer to her plea for his blessing of “the Princess,” however, he hisses: “This brat is none of mine, / It is the issue of Polixenes” (II.iii.79, 93–94). He orders that both “the bastard” and “the dam” (the term for a maternal animal) be “commit[ted] to the fire!” (ll. 95–96). When Paulina protests, Leontes threatens next to “dash out” the “bastard brains” (l. 140) with his own hands, an echo of Lady Macbeth’s sadistic vow. He will not, he rants, “live to see this bastard / Kneel and call me father,” and adds, “Better burn it now / Than curse it then” (ll. 155–57). But something holds Leontes back from acting on his rage, and, at the plea of the kindly courtier Antigonus, he changes the sentence to exile and exposure. Antigonus is to take the baby to “some remote and desert place” and “without more mercy” abandon it. Helplessly, Antigonus agrees, though he protests that immediate death would be “more merciful” (ll. 176, 185).
Hermione, who has remained the essence of integrity and dignity throughout these trials, tries to warn her husband of his folly: “How this will grieve you / When you shall come to clearer knowledge” (II.i.96–97). She does not give way to scorn or fury at this most unjust of husbands, but she does say ominously: “I never wished to see you sorry, / Now I trust I shall” (ll. 123–24). Leontes had earlier predicted that his supposed cuckolding and its “issue” would “hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamor / Will be my knell” (I.ii.188–90). Hermione, firm in her faith in both her own “honor” and the “powers divine” (III.ii.110, 28), sees instead that children are the great hope for the future, that Leontes is cutting off his own posterity. In this conviction, she is supported by the Oracle of Apollo, which pronounces the somber judgment that Hermione is “chaste,” Polixenes “blameless,” and “the innocent babe truly begotten.” The corollary is “The king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found” (ll. 132–36). Leontes, incorrigibly obstinate, rejects even the divine testimony as “mere falsehood.” Instantly, the heavens exact retribution for his hubris. A messenger announces that the ailing Mamillius, who had begun to recover, has died of a heart “cleft” by anxiety and sympathy for his “gracious” mother (ll. 196, 198). The queen “swoons” and Paulina immediately says that this news has been “mortal” (ll. 47–48) to her.
Leontes instantly repents his “injustice” to his family and “great profaneness ’gainst [the] oracle” (III.ii.154). He prays that the queen will recover and begs that Paulina and her attendants “apply to her / Some remedies for life” (ll. 152–53). They carry off the unconscious Hermione. Moments later, Paulina returns and grimly pronounces that the heavens’ “vengeance” has been dire. She reviews in detail Leontes’ sins against family and friends and cruelly advises: “betake thee / To nothing but despair.” Leontes, stricken by “shame perpetual,” vows that he will visit “once a day” the graves of wife and son and spend his life in “shed[ding] tears” (ll. 238–39) of grief and remorse.
Were the play a tragedy, that would indeed be the sad end of Leontes’s story. But the romance form allows for the faint hope expressed by the oracle to bear fruit. The kindly Antigonus, pitying the “poor thing, condemned to loss” that he has been ordered to dispose of, prays: “Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens / To be thy nurse!” (II.iii.186–87). Immediately, his prayer is answered. Hermione appears to him in a vision and tells him to take the child to Bohemia and, because “the babe / Is counted lost forever” (III.ii.32–33), to name her Perdita. Antigonus obeys. He leaves the infant with a “scroll” and a “bundle” that offer proof of her identity and riches to raise her and provide a legacy. This action is reminiscent of Pericles’ care for Thaisa, but this time not to provide means to bury the loved one but to sustain her. With the affectionate wish, “Blossom, speed thee well!” (l. 46), he leaves the child to fate. Minutes later, he hears the “savage clamor” that marks his own fateful end, and runs off, “pursued by a bear.”
Immediately, Antigonus’s prayer for Perdita is answered. An old shepherd happens along, sees the “pretty barne,” and “take[s] it up for pity” (III.ii.70, 76). He thinks her a “changeling,” complete with “fairy gold.” His son, witness to the bear’s attack and to a storm at sea, comes in and reports the deaths of Antigonus and of the mariners who brought the baby to Bohemia. “Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born,” the old shepherd says, and proclaims: “’Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t” (ll. 113–14, 138–39). Providence has intervened to spare the hope for Leontes’ future—a child who, as Mamillius once did, can “make old hearts fresh” (I.i.39). In the last happy talk between mother and son, the boy had requested prophetically that she tell him “a sad tale,” as being “best for winter” (II.i.25). When we next see Perdita, sixteen years have passed, spring has come to Bohemia and the new season’s blessings are at hand.
In keeping with the fairy tale shift of setting, Perdita has not been harmed by her banishment. Time, appearing as the play’s chorus, “slide[s] / O’er sixteen years” and presents a young woman “now grown in grace” (IV.i.5–6, 24). Despite her upbringing by a “most homely shepherd” (IV.ii.38), she looks and speaks like the princess that she is by birth. Even Polixenes, disgruntled at his son’s passion for the “low-born lass,” concedes her “rare” beauty and carriage: she “smacks of something greater than herself, / Too noble for this place” (IV.iv.156–59). His faithful courtier, Camillo, also marvels at her “prett[iness]” and “breeding,” so marked that although she “lacks instruction,” she could serve as a teacher “to most that teach” (ll. 582–83). We have only to compare Perdita to some of Shakespeare’s conventional country lasses, “greasy Joan” in Love’s Labour’s Lost or simple-minded Audrey in As You Like It, to note the impossibly idealized outcome of Perdita’s deprivations. Cut off from every source of refinement and education, she nevertheless emerges as graceful and well spoken, with a naturalness to her manners that makes them the more winning.
Of course, something more than ordinary time is operating here. Providence has intervened, not merely to rescue Perdita from sordidness but to put her in the way of the young prince who will change her estate. Florizel, aptly named for the spring flowers that represent his fresh and hopeful nature, “bless[es] the time” that he met Perdita, when his “good falcon” happened to fly across the old shepherd’s grounds (IV.iv.15). He is not merely handsome and gallant but utterly smitten with Perdita. She reminds him (in perfect blank verse) that she is but a “poor lowly maid” in contrast to his “high self,” and she “tremble[s]” (ll. 7–9, 18) at the chance that the king will discover his son’s love. But Florizel is determined to evade his father’s will, not to seduce and abandon her but to treat his “fair belov’d” with “honor” and “faith” (ll. 34–35) and to keep his “oath” to marry her (ll. 491–92). From this risky defiance of his father, Florizel assures her, he “apprehend[s] / Nothing but jollity” (ll. 24–25). In keeping with the ambience of Bohemia and the workings of benevolent fate, this will indeed prove the outcome of the lovers’ forbidden passion.
Perdita and Florizel serve as the means in this generation to reconcile their fathers’ breach and to provide hope for the future. Polixenes, who has gone in disguise to break up the romance, pronounces with ironic aptness the traditional hope behind a father’s marriage blessing: “All whose joy is nothing else / But fair posterity” (IV.iv.408–09). His sudden vengeful shift in tone is reminiscent of Leontes’, although at least this time there is justification for the wrath. Perdita, as “mistress of the feast,” has given Polixenes and the faithful Camillo “rosemary and rue,” flowers that maintain color and aroma “all the winter long” (l. 75). We know from Ophelia that rosemary stands for “remembrance” and rue for remorse. But Polixenes does not respond to the language of flowers, any more than to the heartfelt pleas of the lovers that he would separate. Threatening Florizel with disinheritance and Perdita with death should they continue their romance, he stalks off.
Fortunately, Camillo is present to rescue the couple. He counters Florizel’s desperate plan to run away to sea by advising them to “make for Sicilia” and ask for refuge from Leontes. He presents a vision of Leontes’ open-armed “welcome” of the prince, a plea for “forgiveness” and a means of vicarious restitution for his past “unkindness” (IV.iv.549, 552) to the young man’s father. Delighted, Florizel proclaims Camillo “preserver of my father, now of me, / The medicine of our house” (ll. 586–87). But the faithful old counselor has further restoratives in mind. Although the young people believe that they have escaped unnoticed, Camillo plans to tell Polixenes of their flight and to join him in pursuing them to Sicilia. His ultimate purpose is to bring the two former friends together and create “almost a miracle” (l. 534) of reconciliation. Again, Providential as well as human benevolence will aid him in that effort.
The agent of Providence is the sly Autolycus, itinerant pedlar, thief, and, as he is designated in the cast list, “rogue.” He overhears the old shepherd and his son discussing the “secret” of Perdita’s past and determines to use the information for his own gain: “Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes by chance” (IV.iv.712–13), he confides to us. He escorts them and their circumstantial evidence—the contents of the “scroll” and “bundle” left with the abandoned infant—to Sicilia, to reveal the true identity of “the changeling.” Even without this confirmation, Perdita’s royal heritage, like Marina’s, is evident in her appearance. Three Gentlemen at Leontes’ court discuss her arrival and reunion with her father, which has taken place off-stage. The young woman’s “nobleness,” which “shows above her breeding,” the “majesty” that is evident in her resemblance to her supposedly dead mother, “proclaim her, with all certainty, to be the King’s daughter” (V.ii.37–39).
Leontes is clearly overwhelmed by this turn of events. Just before the reported scene, we see him for the first time since he defied Apollo’s Oracle. His courtier Cleomines describes the king’s “penitence” and “saint-like sorrow” and urges him: “forgive yourself.” But Leontes is prey to bitter remorse for actions that have left his kingdom “heirless” and destroyed “the sweet’st companion that e’er man / Bred his hopes out of” (V.i.10–12). Paulina is there to rub salt in these old wounds: “she you killed,” she amends harshly. She reminds him of Mamillius’s death, which Leontes recalls with fresh anguish, and repeats the Oracle’s decree: “King Leontes shall not have an heir / Till his lost child be found” (ll. 39–40). She believes, however, that the “infant” has “perished.” The one hope that she holds out is for him to marry again, someone of her choosing, though she says in an ironic riddle that that will happen only “When your queen’s again in breath; / Never till then” (ll. 83–84). Into this impasse come the exiled lovers.
Leontes is touched by their youth, beauty, and obvious devotion. Calling them “a gracious couple,” he says benevolently: “Welcome hither, / As is the spring to th’earth” (V.i.134, 151–52). He wishes wistfully that he could have “a son and daughter” so “goodly” and confesses the “folly” that lost him such a pair, when “the heavens,” in “angry note” of his “sin,” “left [him] issueless” (ll. 172–74). In a tragedy, this would be the outcome of Leontes’ wrongs, his restitution and consolation only vicarious. But the renewal and fertility of the season are at hand. As Autolycus says at the sheep shearing fest, the spring is “the sweet o’ the year,” when “the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale,” and Perdita is “mistress of the feast” (IV.iii.2–4; 40). So lovely is she that the passion roused nearly takes a wrong turn, when Leontes is momentarily attracted to her. The austere Paulina reproaches him: “Your eye hath too much youth in it” (V.i.225). But it is the girl’s resemblance to Hermione that has moved Leontes, and, in any case, Florizel, “his father’s image,” is on hand to complete the couple. Leontes is no Antiochus—incest is not his bent. As the Gentlemen report, when Perdita’s identity is revealed, Leontes is recalled to his role as benevolent father and bereft husband:
Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss, cries, “O thy mother, thy mother!” [V.ii.49–52].
He embraces the couple and his long-lost friend and again asks forgiveness of Bohemia. At the account of her mother’s supposed death, Perdita “bleed[s] tears” of empathy and anguish. All go off to view the wondrously lifelike state of Hermione wrought, according to Paulina, by a “rare Italian master” (l. 97). These melodramatic scenes, which would be hard to credit if staged, Shakespeare wisely confines to report. As one of the Gentlemen notes: “The news … is so like an old tale that verity of it is in strong suspicion” (ll. 28–29). The playwright saves for direct presentation the more subtle and affecting scene of Hermione’s restoration.
Perdita’s role in this episode is minor but crucial. She it is who first moves to kiss the statue, addressing it as “dear Queen, that ended when I but began” (V.iii.45). Paulina, who has long planned to engineer Hermione and Leontes’ reunion, knows that it is he who must first touch his wife, and she stops the girl with the excuse that the paint on the statue is still wet. Leontes’ first reaction has been some dismay that, for all its resemblance to the dead queen, the statue is “much wrinkled” and “aged”—effects of the “wide gap of time” (ll. 28, 154) that has separated the couple. At last, at Paulina’s direction, the statue “comes down,” and Leontes “presents [his] hand.” His wife forgives him with an embrace and “hangs about his neck” (ll. 107, 112). The lady-in-waiting then calls attention to the boon that neither she nor her mistress had dared to hope for: “Turn, good lady, / Our Perdita is found” (ll. 120–21). Hermione reveals that it was this hope, conveyed by the Oracle, that her daughter remained alive that gave her the will to go on: “preserve[ ] / Myself to see the issue” (ll. 127–28). Fittingly, the last word is a pun, meaning both “outcome” and “child.” Religious faith and familial loyalty have combined to save the wronged queen. As in Pericles, the family circle has been restored, mother and daughter safely returned, and father rendered beside himself with joy. Generosity and sympathy reign. Polixenes wishes that he could have taken some of the family’s long grief on himself. Leontes not only does not blame Paulina for her duplicity and his sixteen years of penitence but makes a match between her and Camillo. Paulina urges everyone: “Go together, / You precious winners all” (ll. 130–31).
Perdita does not speak again during all these events. Her role, as she herself says, is to “stand by,” a “looker-on” (ll. 84–85) at her parents’ reunion, and a representative of future peace and fertility. She has the heavens’ blessing on her own plighted troth. Of course, Florizel can never replace Mamillius, nor can Leontes regain the years of his daughter’s youth and his once idyllic marriage that his tyranny obliterated. This is, after all, a “winter’s tale,” but one that ends with the blessings of spring perhaps all the more cherished for their rarity.
King Lear’s initial rejection of Cordelia, recounted in Chapter 4, is crueler than Leontes’ of Perdita. Lear exiles not a baby whom he suspects of being illegitimate but a young woman who has proven not merely blameless but admirable. By his own admission, she had hitherto been his favorite daughter. Furthermore, the presence of her treacherous sisters should have been warning enough of how irrational he is acting. Nothing, however, deters Lear from his rash and vain decree, and he orders Cordelia into exile, charging her never to cross his path again. She would be fully justified in taking his command literally and cutting herself off forever from the father who has misjudged and rejected her. Instead, when next we hear about Cordelia, it is clear that her filial love has remained steadfast.
Although exiled to France, the kingdom of the husband who has provided her succor, Cordelia has continued to follow Lear’s fortunes through the agency of the loyal Earl of Kent. The league between the old king’s supporters is revealed when Kent, disguised as a servant, is arrested by the treacherous Regan and Cornwall. Thrust humiliatingly into the stocks, he comforts himself with a clandestine letter from Cordelia. Later, searching for the mad king in the storm, Kent confides to a “Gentleman” who has also remained loyal Cordelia’s support for her father’s cause. Through a network of spies disguised as servants, she has watched the “hard rein” of her sisters “against the old kind king” (III.i.27–28). Now she is leading “a power” from France, an invading force come “on secret feet” to aid him. Kent asks the Gentleman to give her the token of his signet ring to show his continuing support and to verify his message that Lear is in desperate straits, suffering “unnatural and bemadding sorrow.”
The scene shifts to the heath, and we see the sad proof of Kent’s description. Lear has gone completely mad, refusing to take shelter from the terrible storm and instead challenging the elements, the “winds,” “cataracts and hurricanoes,” that rage around him. He is obsessed with the theme of “filial ingratitude” (IV.iv.14). In his rage, he tries to shift all blame for his state on Goneril and Regan, picturing them as “two pernicious daughters” and himself as “the kind old father, whose frank heart gave all” (III.ii.22, 20). He says that he has been reduced to their “slave,” “a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man” (III.ii.19–20). He works himself up to the self-pitying defense: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning” (ll. 59–60).
One of Lear’s responses to this treatment, in keeping with his mindset at the start of the play, is to long for raw, violent revenge. Rather than “weep,” which he denigrates as effeminate, he vows to “punish home” (III.iv.16). He conducts an illusory trial in which he arraigns the “she-foxes” and imagines an attacking army, wielding “a thousand red burning spits,” attacking Goneril and Regan. He even takes his fantasies of vengeance so far as to will, with Macbeth-like nihilism, the destruction of all humankind: “Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once, / That makes ingrateful man” (III.ii.8–9).
Were this hardened bitterness Lear’s only reaction, there would be little for Cordelia to redeem, and her continued loyalty to her father would seem Pollyanna naiveté, even masochism. But in the midst of his suffering, Lear is discovering hard truths about empathy, the feeling for others’ suffering from which his former power and pride insulated him. As the mocking jingle of the Fool suggests, Lear has brought this pain upon himself:
The man that makes his toe
What he his heart should make
Shall of a corn cry woe
And turn his sleep to wake [III.ii.31–34].
Lear must reconnect with his own heart, and the daughter who represents it, if he is to move beyond this state of arid bitterness. He begins that change through his treatment of the other “child” he has always loved, the Fool, whom he habitually addresses as “boy.” Drenched and forlorn, the king thinks not of himself for once but of his jester: “How dost, my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself” (ll. 68–69). This is the process of achieving empathy through one’s own suffering, reduced to its simplest terms. The childish vocabulary and the familiar second person make it a moment of startling intimacy. Lear goes further than this single encounter, coming to sympathize with all the “poor naked wretches” that “bide the pelting of [the] pitiless storm” (III.iv.28–29). He sees his own responsibility for his needy subjects, and laments, “O, I have ta’en too little care of this!” He rejects “pomp” in favor of experiencing such misery, so that one may feel directly the plight of the poor and act to aid them. Again, he practices this new principle on the Fool. Coming to a hovel, the erstwhile Me-Firster urges the jester, “In, boy; go first” (l. 26).
Inside the hovel, Lear’s meeting with the supposed Bedlam beggar, Edgar disguised as “Poor Tom,” provokes further realizations. Deprived of rich attire, he exclaims, man is merely “such a poor, bare, forked animal” as the wretched beggar. Later, with the blinded Gloucester, Lear takes such insights still further. “Robes and furred gowns” can hide the “vices” so evident through “tattered clothes,” and even “a dog,” given power, will be unquestioningly “obeyed” (IV.vi.161–62, 155–56). His older daughters, in fact, treated him just that way, he says, “flattered me like a dog,” said “ay and no to everything that I said,” and “told me I was everything.” Now that he has been “wet” by the rain and made to “chatter” by the wind, he realizes that they lied and he is “not ague-proof” (ll. 96–104). He is revolted by Goneril and Regan’s “stench” and “corruption,” but he acknowledges that his own hand “smells of mortality” (l. 132). Suffering, physical and emotional, has taught Lear his own limitations as well as the restricted worth of wealth and power. He “see[s] how this world goes”—like the blind Gloucester, “see[s] it feelingly” (l. 147). Yet Lear’s clarity is incomplete, and he has achieved it at the price of his sanity. He is still spouting “reason in madness” (l. 172), still confused and tormented, and still intent on bloody vengeance. He reverts to the wish to lead a surprise attack on his treacherous daughters and sons-in-law and “Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill” (ll. 183–84). It will take Cordelia’s intervention to soothe his corrosive rage and give him a basis for gratitude and hope.
Earlier, Kent has puzzled that one couple, such as Lear and his late wife, “could … beget / Such different issues.” Only the “stars” (IV.iii.32–35) could be responsible, he maintains. Yet we have the bastard Edmund’s scorn of astrological influences to counter such a theory. Moreover, the nature of the bond between father and child is shown to be clearly a product of the parent’s treatment. When he visits Lear in the hovel, Gloucester laments, “Our flesh and blood is grown so vile / That it does hate what gets it” (III.iv.136–37). He thinks that he is describing the betrayal of his heretofore loyal son Edgar. But Edgar, wronged by his bastard brother, is looking on in his Poor Tom guise to provide a silent ironic commentary on this charge. It is Edmund, long scorned and rejected by Gloucester, who has gloated over the benefits for him of the conflict between the generations: “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (III.iii.23). Edgar and Cordelia, the children their fathers have long and deeply loved, put all their efforts into comforting and restoring them even after those fathers have wronged them. Being loved has taught them to reciprocate, and they set about repairing the “holy cords” of the parent-child bond that the unloved children have tried to sever.
The first time that we hear of Cordelia again is in an unscene reported by the Gentleman to Kent. Her reaction to hearing of Lear’s desperate state is to shed “ample tear[s]” of “patience” and “sorrow” (IV.iii.12, 16). Rather than be, as Kent fears, “moved … to a rage” (ll. 15–16) against her father, Cordelia shows only pity and compassion. Her outrage is directed against her malevolent sisters, “shame of ladies,” who have subjected him to humiliation and peril. “‘What, i’ th’ storm, i’ th’ night?’” the Gentleman reports that she cried, “‘Let pity not be believed!’” (ll. 28–29). The person who is feeling shame at this point is not one of the “dog-hearted daughters,” however, but the father, who is mortified by “his own unkindness” at having “stripped” Cordelia of “his benediction” and cast her off. The Gentleman concludes: “These things sting / His mind so venomously that burning shame / Detains him from Cordelia” (ll. 45–47). The king has been stricken by the serpent’s tooth of his own thanklessness and has sentenced himself to separation from the beloved child he has wronged.
Cordelia will not be deterred from aiding him by such niceties of conscience. The first time that she reappears (she has been absent from the play since the opening scene), she is ordering her knights to “search every acre in the high-grown field” for the afflicted Lear. She is quick to assert that, as head of the French forces, traditional enemy of the British, she is not motivated by political “ambition” but by “love, dear love, and [her] aged father’s right” (IV.iv.27–28). Her indulgent husband, “great France,” has “pitied” her “importuned tears” (ll. 25–26) and therefore provided means for the invasion. He has been called back on urgent business, and Cordelia is left alone to lead her adopted country’s army against the “British pow’rs” (l. 22) led by her sisters. She implies again that her main goal is personal, not military, as she signals when she offers “all [her] outward wealth” to anyone who can help restore Lear’s “bereaved sense” (ll. 9–10). The word is a pun, meaning both “riven” and “beset by grief,” a sign that only Cordelia herself can heal this broken mind. She wishes that benign herbs could “spring with [her] tears” (l. 17) to cure his madness, but it is the tears themselves that will prove the crucial balm.
Lear is found, new clothed, and made to sleep long. At the attending Doctor’s urging, Cordelia rouses him, praying that she can “repair [the] violent harms” that her sisters have done him with the “medicine” of her “kiss” (IV.vii.2). On one level, this is a fairy tale cure. But in symbolic terms, such forgiveness and sympathy are the surest means to soothe and heal this “child-changed father” (l. 17). At first, the king is too distraught to understand or credit her kindness. He believes that he has died and been forced from his grave but that he remains in hell, “bound upon a wheel of fire,” and in such an agony of despair “that [his] own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (ll. 46–48). He thinks Cordelia a fellow “spirit,” but a visitant from heaven, “a soul in bliss.” When he tries to “kneel” to her, she asks instead for his “benediction.” The effect of these first shows of love is to snap Lear back to reality, and to a humble admission of his reduced status. He pleads:
Pray do not mock me.
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind [ll. 59–63].
The man once obsessed with image and power has become movingly open and vulnerable.
Still too abashed to address Cordelia directly, he asks again that the onlookers “not laugh at” his wild speculation: “For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (ll. 68–70). He has described their bond in its most basic terms, and Cordelia responds with a touchingly childlike affirmation: “And so I am! I am!” Addressing her for the first time, the old father asks in amazement, “Be your tears wet?” (l. 71). The proof of her sympathy is in the actuality of her tears—not feigned but “wet” on her cheeks. He still believes, however, that she wants revenge. “I know you do not love me,” he says. He reasons that her sisters, despite his generosity to them, “have (as I do remember) done me wrong,” whereas, he tells Cordelia, “You have some cause” (ll. 73–75). She counters with another magnificently simple expression of forgiveness: “No cause, no cause.” In these lines, Lear is not only clear-headed but unusually mild-mannered. As the Doctor notes, “The great rage is killed in him.” His wishes have become strikingly simple and concentrated on Cordelia: “You must bear with me. / Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish” (ll. 83–84). He has lost all his former pretense and vindictiveness. Like Edgar, the other loyal child in the play, Cordelia has “known the miseries of [her] father” by “nursing them,” “bec[o]me his guide, / Led him, … saved him from despair” (V.iii.181–82, 191–92). Could Lear’s story end there, it would not be the stark tragedy it becomes.
Cordelia is no soldier, and all too soon Edgar reports to Gloucester the defeat of her forces: “King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en” (V.ii.6). Brought in with Lear as a prisoner, Cordelia tries to remain philosophical about their defeat, assuring him: “We are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurred the worst” (V.iii.3–4). But she feels “cast down” for his sake and proposes seeing—and facing down—“these daughters and these sisters” who have betrayed them. But the once vengeful Lear is adamant about avoiding their sight. “No, no, no, no!” he insists, and claims to welcome imprisonment so that it be with her. “We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage,” he says. He imagines a process of mutual benediction and forgiveness, but with the reversal of the usual father/daughter roles: “When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness” (ll. 9–11).
Clearly, Lear has come to feel that Cordelia’s benison and pardon would be ample compensation for all his misery. He presents an idealized vision of their future life: “we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales.” It is an idyll of devotion to the tenets of religion, art, and family love. In turn, he would eschew his former values of wealth, power, and ambition. He and Cordelia would “laugh / At gilded butterflies,” the “packs and sects of great ones” that so quickly “ebb and flow.” Political grappling, “Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out” would be matters of utter indifference to them. They would be intent on higher goals: to “take upon’s the mystery of things / As if we were God’s spies” (ll. 12–17). Clearly, Cordelia sees the danger of their situation as well as the nobility of these attempts to cheer her, and she weeps afresh. “Wipe thine eyes,” he urges, and vows that his enemies will never make them weep—his old claim to Goneril and Regan but made now in the name of honor, not vanity. That Lear is aware, however, of the dire nature of their predicament is evident from his ominous metaphor, meant to comfort Cordelia: “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The gods themselves throw incense” (ll. 20–21). When next we see him, he is feeling the full effects of that grim designation.
It is the vindictive Goneril and Edmund who conceive the insidious plot to “hang Cordelia in the prison” and to “lay the blame upon her own despair” (V.iii.254–55). Mortally wounded and repentant at last, Edmund confesses the scheme to Albany, who dispatches an officer to the prison with the prayer, “The gods defend her” (l. 257). In this stark tragedy, however, the gods do not intervene: cruelty wins the day and the human misery is absolute. Before Albany’s messenger can return, Lear enters “with Cordelia in his arms.” “Howl, howl, howl,” he cries, reduced to a state of animal agony. The onlookers, Kent, Albany, and Edgar, three men who have fought selflessly for good, are appalled. Kent says, “All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly” (l. 291), and Edgar calls this sight the “image of [the] horror” of doomsday (l. 265).
Lear is in such a state of shock and anguish that he barely knows what he is saying. One of his last sensible remarks is on the supreme preciousness of this beloved daughter. If she were to revive, he says, that fact would “redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (ll. 267–68). He tells the dead woman proudly that, old as he is, he managed to “kill the slave that was a-hanging thee” (l. 275). His whole focus is on her—he barely recognizes the faithful Kent, and he cannot take in that Goneril and Regan “desperately are dead” (l. 293). He goes back and forth between the bitter realization that Cordelia is gone forever and the vain hope that she is still alive. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no life at all? Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never” (ll. 307–08). The relentless repetition recalls his former vow of vengeance—“kill”—now converted to despairing incredulity. Pathetically, his last words express the delusion that she has revived: “Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips, / Look there, look there—” (ll. 311–12).
Stretched “upon the rack of this tough world,” Lear must lose everything in order to realize the emptiness of what he once valued—ceremony, pomp, and rank—and the supreme worth of what he rashly scorned—candor, loyalty, and love. Like Marina and Perdita, Cordelia does forgive and heal the father who wronged her. But in the bleak world of King Lear, the benefits of her kindness are devastatingly brief.