THERE ARE still many unsolved problems in connection with Pericles but there is now fairly general agreement that the text of the 1609 quarto, bad as it manifestly is, was based on an earlier play and that Wilkins’s novel – The Painfull Adventures of Pericles – was based on the same play, rather than on Shakespeare’s rewriting of it.1 It would also seem, from the difference of style between the first two acts and the last three, and from the novel’s divergencies from the later acts, that Shakespeare made few changes in the early acts, but that he rewrote the remainder of the play, from the birth of Marina to the end.2 The authorship of the source-play is still a matter for debate, Heywood and Day being the present favourites; but Dryden’s statement3 that
Shakespeare’s own Muse her Pericles first bore;
The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moore
has been used to support the view that the Ur-Pericles, as it has been called, was written by Shakespeare himself. Dryden, however, wrote these lines some sixty years after the play was performed and he may have assumed it was an early work merely because of its episodic structure, or even because Jonson described it as ‘a mouldy tale’. It is true that Pericles has something in common with The Comedy of Errors. Ægeon is separated from his wife during a sea-voyage; Æmelia takes refuge in a nunnery; and Thaisa becomes a priestess in the temple of Diana, both at Ephesus. Presumably Shakespeare had read the story of Apollonius of Tyre, the ultimate source of Pericles, before he wrote The Comedy of Errors. As we have seen, that is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays which is based on a Latin comedy; but it has been pointed out4 that Palaestra, the heroine of the Rudens of Plautus, is, like Marina, stolen by pirates and sold by them to a pimp. The play also contains a shipwreck and the marriage of the heroine to a young man who had originally intended to buy her as his mistress.5
There are three reasons for rejecting the theory that Pericles was written at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career. The verse of the first two acts, though unlike that of Shakespeare’s maturity, has little resemblance to that of The Comedy of Errors;6 the Rudens, although we need not doubt that Shakespeare read it, is an analogue rather than a source since the kidnapping by pirates and the sale of the heroine to a brothel are features of the Apollonius story; and there is no real evidence of a play on the subject as early as 1590.
The story itself was indeed a mouldy tale existing in many versions from the ninth century onwards. The only versions which the author of Pericles must have read are those given by Gower in Confessio Amantis and by Lawrence Twine’s Pattern of Painful Adventures.7 The play owes most to Gower, as the choice of that poet as presenter makes clear. The naming of characters – Helicanus, Dionyza, and Lychorida – follows Gower rather than Twine; Leonine is master of the brothel in Gower’s poem, though Shakespeare uses the name for a different character; Philoten is mentioned by Gower, but not by Twine; and Gower’s Thaise, Appolinus’ daughter, becomes the name of Pericles’ wife. The archaic style of the choruses is an imitation of Gower’s; and there are two striking verbal echoes. When Appolinus’ wife is resuscitated, she asks:8
Wher am I?
Where is my lorde, what worlde is this?
Thaisa in the play uses the same words:
O dear Diana,
Where am I? Where’s my lord? What world is this?
There is nothing to correspond to this in Twine’s novel. In the reunion-scene, Thaise says to Appolinus:
My lorde, I am a mayde,
And if ye wyst, what I am,
And out of what linage I cam,
Ye wolde not be so salvage.
I am a maid,
My lord …
I said, my lord, if you did know my parentage
You would not do me violence.
It has been suggested9 that the name of the hero was derived from Pericles of Athens, who was noted for his patience. Whether Shakespeare’s hero should be credited with this virtue is a moot point: his despair on the report of Marina’s death tells against it. It is surely more likely that the name was derived from Sidney’s Pyrocles, who is shipwrecked like Pericles, and who nearly strikes the unrecognized Philoclea who rebukes him for his excessive grief at her supposed death, as Pericles strikes Marina.10
Shakespeare had certainly read The Orator of Alexander Silvayn; and Professor Bullough quotes11 Declamation 53 about a nun who preserves her chastity in a brothel; but Twine provides a much closer parallel to the brothel-scenes of the play.
It is possible, as I have suggested elsewhere,12 that Shakespeare took the name of Marina from the account of a Mexican girl who was baptised under that name. She had been sold by her own mother to some Indians and she afterwards became an interpreter to Cortez and forgave her cruel mother in a way which would have appealed to Shakespeare during his final period.
As we do not know the exact nature of the original Pericles, we cannot know precisely how much Shakespeare took from it, and how much from Gower and Twine; but if Wilkins’s novel was based on the old play – and not, as some believe, on Shakespeare’s revision of it – we can estimate the kind of changes he made. The bad text of the play, however, makes this a hazardous task. It may be suggested, for example, that some of Shakespeare’s intentions have been blurred by omissions. In Act II Scene v Simonides informs Thaisa’s suitors that she will not marry for at least a year:
One twelve moons more she’ll wear Diana’s livery.
This by the eye of Cynthia hath she vow’d,
And on her virgin honour will not break it.
Presumably Simonides invented the vow to rid himself of the suitors, so as to leave the field free for the favoured Pericles. It is worth noting that Diana is mentioned several times in the Shakespearian parts of the play and once, as Lucina, in the first scene for which he was probably not responsible. Pericles prays to Lucina during his wife’s labour –
Divinest patroness, and midwife gentle
To those that cry by night –
and his prayer is unavailing. When Thaisa is restored to life, her first words are addressed to the same goddess – ‘O dear Diana!’ – and, assuming irrationally that she will never see Pericles again, she decides to put on a vestal livery, in accordance with her alleged pre-marital vow, and serve as priestess in the temple of Diana. Pericles vows, again by Diana, not to cut his hair. Marina prays to Diana to protect her chastity in the brothel. The goddess appears to Pericles in a vision, telling him to visit her temple, and there he is reunited to Thaisa. He promises to ‘offer night-oblations’ to the goddess. He might well cry, in scriptural phrase, ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians!’ I suggested13 some years ago that it looks as though Thaisa’s time in the temple was intended to be a means of expiating the sin of taking in vain the name of Diana. Professor Hoeniger has rightly pointed out that ‘such an interpretation is irreconcilable with any known form of the story’.14 To which we may reply that sources are not a branch of predestination and that the continual references to Diana, added by Shakespeare, presumably had some thematic function. We may well agree that Pericles is more like Job than Leontes; that his trials, and those of his wife and daughter, are ‘a means of testing them’; and their final reunion is in accordance with Jupiter’s pronouncement in Cymbeline:15
Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift,
The more delay’d, delighted.
Shakespeare was trying, it not altogether successfully, to convert the wheel of fortune into the wheel of providence.
If has often been pointed out that in the brothel-scene Wilkins gives more eloquent speeches to Marina than she is allowed in the play:16
If as you say (my Lorde) you are the Gouernour, let not your authoritie, which should teach you to rule others, be the meanes to make you misgouerne your selfe: If the eminence of your place came vnto you by discent, and the royalty of your blood, let not your life prooue your birth a bastard: If it were throwne vpon you by opinion, make good, that opinion was the cause to make you great. What reason is there in your Iustice, who hath power ouer all, to vndoe any? If you take from mee mine honour, you are like him, that makes a gappe into forbidden ground, after whome too many enter, and you are guiltie of all their euilles: my life is yet vnspotted, my chastitie vnstained in thought. Then if your violence deface this building, the workemanship of heauen, made up for good, and not to be the exercise of sinnes intemperaunce, you do kill your owne honour, abuse your owne iustice, and impouerish me.
After a short speech by Lysimachus, Marina continues:
It is not good … when you that are the Gouernour, who should liue well, the better to be bolde to punish euill, doe knowe that there is such a roofe, and yet come vnder it. Is there a necessitie (my yet good Lord) if there be fire before me, that I must strait then thither flie and burne my selfe? Or if suppose this house (which too too many feele such houses are) should be the Doctors patrimony, and Surgeons feeding; folowes it therefore, that I must needs infect my self to giue them maintenance?
This extract is sufficient for the purpose of comparison with the corresponding scene in Shakespeare’s play. Professor Philip Edwards rightly calls attention to the brevity of Marina’s two crucial speeches and shows how absurd it is for Lysimachus to praise her wisdom and eloquence on the strength of what she is given to say.17
Several explanations have been offered.
(1) Marina’s speeches as given by Wilkins drop into blank verse only occasionally and accidentally. They do not closely reproduce what was heard on the stage before or after Shakespeare’s revision but rather represent Wilkins’s variations on what he heard. This I find incredible. As several critics have noted,18 Wilkins’s speeches are thinly concealed blank verse, revealed in such tell-tale repetitions as
which too too many feele such houses are.
(2) Wilkins reproduces a more accurate version of the scene than the corrupt quarto19 and therefore his version should be printed in a modern text of the play. This I believe to be impossible, because the verse preserved by Wilkins is quite unlike the kind written by Shakespeare in the seventeenth century.
(3) Wilkins reproduces substantially the scene as performed before its revision by Shakespeare, whereas the quarto reproduces the scene after revision. G. A. Barker, whose view this is,20 thinks that Shakespeare, unlike the earlier dramatist, was not concerned with the qualities of a good ruler and is
intent on making Lysimachus into a more desirable suitor for Marina by removing as much of the blemish from him as possible without doing violence to the plot of the old play. We have, therefore, the rather improbable situation of Lysimachus’s denying that he came to the brothel with any ill intentions. Consequently, Shakespeare has to strike out most of Marina’s argument, since Lysimachus does not need conversion. Yet he can still show his admiration for Marina’s speech in words that clearly show Shakespeare’s revision:
Had I brought hither a corrupted mind,
Thy speech had altered it.
We may agree that Shakespeare wished to provide Marina with a more satisfactory husband than he is in the source-play; but Professor Edwards’s objection still stands,21 that Marina does not earn the right to be complimented on her eloquence. Nor can it be maintained that Lysimachus does not need conversion. It is obvious from the way he is greeted by the Bawd and Boult that he is an old customer; there is nothing in his early exchanges with Marina to suggest that he is, like Gladstone, attempting to rescue fallen women; and the words quoted by Barker read like a shame-faced excuse. In other words Lysimachus did need to be converted, and he was converted.
(4) This leaves the most probable explanation; that whatever changes were made by Shakespeare in the scene it is very unlikely that the quarto gives a faithful reproduction of it. We may suppose that Marina was given more eloquent speeches, if not so extended as the ones provided by Wilkins. It seems likely that Shakespeare made the brothel-scenes more sordid and realistic than they had been in his source.
One other alteration may be mentioned. In the recognition-scene, Appolinus smites his daughter (according to Gower); and, according to Twine, he ‘stroke the maiden on the face with his foote, so that shee fell to the ground, and the bloud gushed plentifully’; and, in Wilkins, who probably reflects the source-play, he struck her on the face so that she swooned. In Shakespeare’s gentler version Pericles pushes Marina roughly back.
As we cannot be certain how much Shakespeare derived from the source-play, there seems to be little point in discussing the numerous minor sources which have been listed by Professor Hoeniger22 and others; but it is fairly certain that the author of n. i, whether John Day or another, was echoing Day’s Law Tricks.23