4

The Recovery of Voice in Shakespeare’s PERICLES

And words can be wrung from us,—like a cry. Words can be hard to say: such, for example, as are used to effect a renunciation, or to confess a weakness. (Words are also deeds).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In this chapter I will not be so intimately concerned with the resources of penance and its transformations. Instead, I will be examining Shakespeare’s exploration of the wording of the world in Pericles. This chapter then explores the “post-tragic,” a term I have already used, but so far not defined. It also shows how Shakespeare develops in Pericles a new form of romance in which a community is re-created through the recovery of voice.

To understand Pericles, we must begin with King Lear.

Romance, “The Fair Unknown,” King Leir, and King Lear

Gloucester’s eyes are out. There is nowhere to be led except to the place from which he will not need leading. This is Dover cliff whose “head / Looks fearfully in the confined deep” (4.1.73–74), the place from which he wishes to fall to a death that releases him from a life quite beyond endurance. Here is where Edgar stages his morality play. Gloucester is Despair. But what is Edgar? The good priest who counsels him against despair and turns him back to life? The figure of mercy who redeems him to a life it would be merciful to leave? And what are the remedies against despair or the resources of theater in this endeavor?

From the point of view of the penitential tradition despair is the most corrosive aspect of accedia or spiritual sloth because it renders impossible its own cure. Despair is unbecoming; it is the privation of the only resource by which the hopeless person might be released from its deadly, annihilating force. In Spenser’s stunning treatment in The Faerie Queene the clinching argument that persuades the Red Crosse knight to want to kill himself is the knowledge of his own blemished life, the litany of his betrayals and failures and the bald fact that they deserve condemnation.1 What despair obliterates, of course, is the sensed availability of grace. The Red Crosse knight will have to be tutored in the House of Holiness by the theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Love, to feel that light again, and to be relieved of the bitter, excoriating logic of his own merits and deserts.

In the face of Gloucester’s despair, Edgar attempts to restore him to his own life. Gloucester’s blindness makes him easily deceivable. The word picture of the cliff’s edge that Edgar paints for him as they stand on flat ground shows Gloucester’s dreadful dependency on the kindness of strangers. Only the stranger is his estranged son. Gloucester jumps down the vertiginous cliff onto the flat stage and Edgar persuades him that he had been tempted to despair by a fiend now exorcised.2 Edgar through his morality play has staged a miracle play too: “Thy life’s a miracle” (4.6.55). It is a miracle performed dramaturgically, not supernaturally, and thus it is an ordinary miracle. Yet Edgar has thereby tricked him into living; in staging this sideshow, trifling with his despair to cure it, he has withheld himself and thereby theatricalized his relations to Gloucester.3 This prompts the question: to what sense of his life might Gloucester have been restored had his son shown himself and acknowledged his father as his?

In the final act of this morality and miracle play, Edgar is the vehicle of a third medieval genre. Entering as the “fair unknown,” he stages himself as the hero of romance. The fair unknown is the characteristic figure of medieval romance who assures us that virtue and force can be reconciled; the threat of violence in an honorific culture is thereby both challenged to embrace virtue and seen to uphold it. In the process the unnamed redeemer turns out to be noble, military valor retains its privilege, and gentility is preserved for gentles as a class as well as a moral attribute. In the last act of King Lear, Edgar seeks to “prove” that Edmund is a traitor. This is the archaic justice of the ordeal in which God’s agency can be enacted through the victor in combat.4 Edgar’s anonymity takes up the resounding theme of the last two acts—acknowledgment:

Dost thou know me?

(Gloucester to Lear, 4.6.135)

I know thee well enough.

(Lear to Gloucester, 4.6.177)

Sir, do you know me?

(Cordelia to Lear, 4.7.48)

“To be acknowledg’d, Madam, is o’erpaid.

(4.7.4)

So what does it mean in a tragedy about what Stanley Cavell has termed the avoidance of love, whose theme is the remorseless enaction of the capacities of each of the characters for acknowledgment, that Edgar enacts this romance part? When he claims his name from Edmund and reveals himself he tells his audience that it was a fault not to have revealed himself to his father sooner. He does so when he is armed and ready for battle, and the news is enough to kill Gloucester dying between “two extremes of passion, joy and grief” (5.3.199). There is thus no reconciliation of might and right. Edgar vanquishes Edmund but too late to preserve Cordelia. Romance recognition is given retrospectively in Edgar’s belated revelation of himself to his father. Nothing is born again from this revelation because it is the cause of his death by joy and grief. The form of romance that this play inherits and explores simply cannot contain the extremes of emotion engendered. That Edgar continues unknown to his father is a cause for deep regret rather than wonder, the cause of a death rather than a rebirth; it is an acknowledgment that in the world of King Lear every failure of acknowledgement will be remorselessly tracked down and exposed.5

In the romance trope of the “fair unknown,” the unknown (un-named, unidentified) presents a threat to the honorific code and its cult of gentility, but there is trust that the insignia of identity will once again make the protagonists knowable, recognizable. In Shakespeare’s version of the Lear story, taken from the Old Arcadia, Edgar’s desire to be unknown is first of all a conscious disguise that is necessary to protect him from the murderous ambition of his brother and the befuddled yet dangerous gullibility of his father. But he is now completely safe from this utterly broken man on the cliffs of Dover. His decision to maintain his disguise, to remain unknown to his father, is now not a disguise for the sake of safety: it is a conscious theatricalization of himself which deprives his father of the possibility of response. Edgar chooses to remain hidden so that he can reveal himself to his father not as a fellow broken man but as the hero of a romance, just as he has cast himself in a miracle and morality play. But the fortunes of Edgar and Gloucester, as of Lear and Cordelia, indicate that such forms will no longer answer to the paths of unknownness in King Lear. No revelation of the insignia of knighthood will answer to the forms of recognition that this play sounds and requires, paths which stem from the repudiation of language as a public form, an attempt to suborn it into the expression of naked flattery to a sovereign will. The revelation of a social identity cannot cure, resolve, or relieve the forms of unknownness the play has sounded. The revelation must undertake the risks and particularities of acknowledgment. Edgar must reveal himself not as a fair, chivalric knight but as Gloucester’s son, tricked and deceived by his murderous brother, disowned and hounded by his father, and hiding in the most displaced and outcast figure as the only place of safety. Edgar’s romance plot, like his morality and miracle play plots, is an avoidance, its narrative modes unanswerable to a world in which humanity preys upon itself like monsters of the deep. King Lear shows us a graceless world, a world which God or the gods seem to have abandoned, a world in which virtue is initially indiscernible to those in power.

In rehearsing these well-trodden themes I mean to show how the recovery of grace and the resources of romance are again at issue in Pericles. So too is the recovery of speech. Pericles is a rewriting of King Lear. Lear gives away his kingdom; Pericles is exiled from his. King Lear loses a beloved daughter and discovers that his other daughters are monstrous; Pericles imagines that his daughter has died and so loses her. Both plays inherit and test out the capacities of the romance form. Both plays feature recognition scenes which beg to be seen in the light of each other; the one with a king who is moving in and out of sanity; the other in which both father and daughter regain their voices together. Pericles is Shakespeare’s first post-tragic play: not only is it written after King Lear but it works through the tragic impasses of King Lear. If King Lear is a tragedy of acknowledgment, Pericles is a romance of acknowledgment. Both plays have a complexly evolving relation to the form of romance. I will argue that the romance forms in King Lear are motivated by a relation to speech and that this highlights the work of recovery in Pericles, a play which one critic has noted seems to have been written for its recognition scene alone.6 The more normal route taken in romance recognition scenes is the revelation of identity through tokens and signs. This is sometimes a mark on the body: Odysseus’ scar, the mole upon the cheek of Viola and Sebastian’s father. Or, in the form of the fair unknown, it is sometimes an unveiling where the incognito knight reveals who he is beneath his mail, hauberk, and armor.7 The recognition in Pericles, I want to argue, does not merely supply the identity of the protagonists and so restore them to each other and to themselves. The recognition in the exquisite scene in which Pericles and Marina are begotten again happens not through the displaying of tokens and signs of identity, but through the sharing of a story that belongs to them both. It is a recovery that emerges from painful silence. The telling of the story comes as a revealed truth that incarnates the accidents of their histories. Their stories could so easily have not been told, and it is the telling that makes the play a profound exploration of what it means to tell a story and to find yourself in one. The recognitions involved here are about the basic, usually unspoken bonds of trust in speech.

In working the recognitions through the fundamental act of speaking rather than through the tokens or signs that ratify social identity, Shakespeare is making the form of romance into something new. In this play, with its extraordinary focus on the fact of utterance itself, Shakespeare finds the recovery of self and community all at once, and this becomes central to the grammar of forgiveness as it is explored in the subsequent three plays on which this book focuses: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

But if Pericles, as I am arguing, is a play that stages the recovery of voice, how is a voice lost? The abdication scene of King Lear might provide one response to that question. At the beginning of King Lear a daughter finds that she has nothing to say. Words of truth and of love are alike impossible at Lear’s court. The play will show relentlessly, remorselessly, what a culture comes to look like when the paths to truthful expression are lost. In the famous first scene of King Lear, Lear has devised a “love-test.” This is distinctively different from the test contrived in the old King Leir play where the point is to trick Cordella, his favorite child, into allowing her father to choose her husband. In King Leir, Cordella wishes to choose her own husband, but the King anticipates that her response to the love-test—that she loves him best—will force the emotional logic that he then must choose for her. Shakespeare’s version of this scene is entirely different. Most important, it is staged as a public ceremony. In Stanley Cavell’s influential reading of the abdication scene, Lear sets the public test not because he wants to choose her love for her, but precisely because he cannot bear the utterance of love; he is avoiding acknowledgment. To be loved, he must be known, and so to speak love is to reveal that knowledge, to acknowledge it. Flattery does not need to know its object; its aim is mutual aggrandizement, and so it obscures both truth and the particularities of an actual relationship. His public ritual of competitive flattery makes any true declaration of love impossible, unspeakable under those conditions. Cordelia cannot declare her love precisely because she does really love him. Goneril and Regan can declare their pseudo-love precisely because they don’t. They are willing to participate in the charade of flattery because that is their currency. Goneril, as Stanley Cavell has said, shows her contempt for “human speech as such” and not alone for her father.8 Lear has staged a public ritual in which it is impossible to speak words of love and he loses—has already lost—the capacity to distinguish between flattery and love. Lear reads her “nothing” as a rejection, but “nothing” true can be spoken here. Lear has enforced a kind of silence on Cordelia: “Love and be silent” (1.1.62). The love she bears him can have no voice here. And in theatricalizing love, stifling its expression, Lear loses his ability to learn differences. He cannot discern love from its imitation, and this, Shakespeare shows us, is tragic.

The abdication scene in King Lear is thus a primal scene of silencing, a scene that expropriates public ceremony to private fantasy and thus disables ritual from its work of participation. The interruption, suspension, or appropriation of ritual work is characteristic of Shakespeare’s explorations of the form of tragedy. At the court of King Claudius Prince Hamlet’s expressions of grief and love are also unspeakable. “That within” cannot find expression in the “maim’d rites” of the play. What people learn of each other is through surveillance, eavesdropping, subterfuge, or through Hamlet’s attempts at dramaturgy. As I shall suggest in a subsequent chapter, the truthful speech known as confession is also stifled and travestied in Othello’s devastating “confession” of Desdemona in the death-bed scene. When the paths to the natural expression of emotions are foregone, there are no ways of knowing oneself or others.9 The results are catastrophic, the stuff of tragedy. Cordelia cannot heave her heart into her mouth; Hamlet’s natural expressions of grief and love pass showing; the plays in which their natural voices are silenced are plays in which it is impossible to know anyone or be known because trust in words as the home of such knowledge has all but disappeared. Once public rituals are made to echo the private and mad fantasies of a man powerful enough to mold ceremonies around those fantasies, no one can be knowable within their forms. Shakespearean tragedy takes up the cues of the history plays in examining the subsumption of ritual languages under the fantastical imaginings of vain or tyrannical men. When public ceremonials are suborned to private fantasy we get the logic of Leontes: “I have said / She’s an adult’ress, I have said with whom” (2.1.87–88). What Shakespeare shows us in act 1, scene 1 of King Lear is the kind of stifling of speech consequent upon these suborned ceremonies which try to speak one and not many voices.

Critics have certainly noticed the preoccupations of the tragic plays with “maim’d rites.” 10 But one of the remarkable things about such readings, illuminating as they have sometimes been, is the way in which a kind of functionalist talk (never far away when ritual is at issue) comes to define Shakespeare’s relation to received traditions. Rites always assumed to be stable are said to be lost, and the lostness and the stability work in perfect counterpoint. The stability of ritual can even be understood as a back-projection of that lost-ness. The problem with this kind of generalizing language is that it loses the specificity of speakers and the occasions on which they speak, and even more the specificity of Shakespeare’s own occasion. To miss that specificity is to fail to ask why speakers say just these things in these situations and thus to miss what they say.

When Shakespeare rewrote The Chronicle History of King Leir, a play deriving from the late 1580s or early ’90s and newly printed again in 1605, he was rewriting a romance. Indeed Pericles was written during a revival of romance. Mucedorus had recently been restaged as had the old King Leir (in 1605).11 The Knight of the Burning Pestle, itself first produced in 1607, though not printed until 1613, had been apparently too scathingly sophisticated about the popular revivals of chivalric romance to be well received, but it is a testimony to the popularity of the form and the sophistication with which it is revisited.12 Versions of King Lear appear to be written on either side of Pericles (a dating which makes King Lear a late play too). The History of King Lear (Q) and The Tragedy of King Lear (F) appear to have been written in 1605–6 and 1610 respectively, with Pericles, as well as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra coming between.13 It is clear, then, that Shakespeare was profoundly interested in the form of romance as a post-tragic drama. Romance is present in King Lear not only in the Gloucester/Edgar subplot, added from the Old Arcadia and absent in King Leir, but in the fact that it is so pointedly and remorselessly a deliberate inversion of the romance form. King Leir is of course a romance: Cordella is reunited with her father, the kingdom is regained, and right triumphs. In fact the play is a morality play about the evils of flattery and unkindness. Above all in this play, the heavens answer the trust of those who call on them.

When Regan’s messenger is sent to murder Perillus (the Kent character in King Lear) and King Leir, he asks the messenger to prove that he is doing this on Goneril and Regan’s orders and there ensues a discussion about whether he should swear by heaven, earth, or hell. He should not swear by heaven because Perillus proclaims the guiltlessness of heaven in “such haynous acts”; he should not swear by earth because King Leir declares that “the mother of us all…abhors to bear such bastards,” and he should not swear by hell. There ensues a long scene in which Perillus and King Leir submit to the will of God and pray for forgiveness. Each attempts to save the other by standing in his stead. At this point thunder and lightning come in as the deus ex machina, and the messenger’s knife poised to kill them falls. At each point where the gods are called upon in this play they respond to the call of humans; the agency of heaven in restoring justice to the world is vindicated through the work of romance. In Shakespeare’s Lear, this romance is systematically inverted to indicate that the gods have left the stage. Romance is the form that systematically converts chance into providence, but there is no such conversion in King Lear. In the play, the gods never answer the prayers of those who call upon them.

In Pericles, Shakespeare explores the notion that with the return and renovation of romance can come a restored faith in the possibilities of grace. Yet the miracles are ordinary. Although it is clear that the overarching agency of heaven is supervising human action, it is the agency of the human voice that is the medium of redemption. In this way, both the form of romance and the form of tragedy are profoundly revised through the sounding of human acknowledgment as miracle.

Pericles is a ragbag of romance effects and techniques, and as such it explores the mutuality of narrative and community.14 If King Lear begins with a ceremony where truthful speech cannot be uttered—can say only “nothing”—then Pericles makes a different kind of silence central to its workings. Its romance resolution operates not through the traditional body marks and tokens but through the slow dawning of speech in which one person is encouraged to tell her story to another who longs to hear it.

In Pericles we are presented with a man who refuses to speak. The death of his daughter, following on the death of his wife has made him an exile not just from Tyre and the murderous fantasies of the incestuous Antiochus, but from all of human society. Pericles is a post-tragic play both because it sublimely stages the recovery of voice—Pericles’, Marina’s, and Gower’s too—and because it bets the possibility of any goodness in the social order on such recovery. Pericles is a profound exploration of the resources of acknowledgment, of recognition, and of the power of stories, shown and told.

In what follows I propose to examine anew the relation of Pericles to one of its source texts, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, an examination that will reveal how central the question of voice is to the play.15

Pericles and Gower’s Confessio Amantis

Two of the recent editors of Pericles ponder the notion that in George Wilkin’s draft of the play, Shakespeare found the paths to the late great plays, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Says Philip Edwards: “It would be curious indeed if Shakespeare had discovered, in a poor play that he started tinkering with, the kind of plot, the kind of art, the kind of themes, which he was to spend all the endeavour of his last years of his writing life trying to develop. It would be curious indeed, but it has to be admitted it would not be impossible.” 16 Roger Warren, the editor of the Oxford World Classics edition of Pericles, puts the point more positively: “Wilkins’s outline of his draft may have provided Shakespeare with a stimulus for all his late work.” 17 Shakespeare, however, enters the world of the late plays through Gower rather than through Wilkins. I will be arguing that Shakespeare found three related things in a renewed encounter with Gower’s Confessio Amantis and in particular with Gower’s version of the Appollonius of Tyre story in Book VIII of the Confessio. First, against the Calvinist consensus that we inhabit an utterly depraved nature that can only be redeemed by God’s grace, Shakespeare found in Gower’s rendering of the Appollonius story grace at work in and through nature as Appollonius finds the world restored to him in the lineaments of his lost daughter’s face. Second, he found an engrossing and thoughtful contemplation of the nature of stories and their authority in Gower’s frame narrative, a narrative that makes time and the possibilities of an internally motivated, not externally imposed recognition central to both the power and vulnerability of stories. Third, and above all, he found a shared fascination with the question of voice, and what it means to come to speech and to lose it. The third aspect is my focus here.

Shakespeare had used Gower’s Appollonius of Tyre story before as a source for The Comedy of Errors, where his placing of Egeon’s lost wife as abbess in the temple of Diana indicates Gower as his source.18 The play is an astonishing exploration of the poetics (and theatrics) of incarnation and, as in Pericles, the sea is the very solvent of human identity:

I to the world am like a drop of water,

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.

(1.2.35–38)

That Shakespeare returns to Gower’s Appollonius story again several years later and with such pointed and rare fidelity indicates that Gower is a pervasive and generative resource for him. Helen Cooper claims that this return is characterized by a “faithfulness to his source so unusual in his work as to turn the play into an act of homage to the traditions of romance transmitted through English.” 19

Blown by chance winds, Gower’s Appollonius harbors at Mytilene in an extremity of desolation. Reduced to a virtual catatonia by the loss of his wife and daughter, he refuses to talk with anyone and keeps inside the hold of his ship weeping all alone, wishing neither to see or to be seen:

For he lith in so derk a place,

That ther may no wiht sen his face.

(CA 8.1642–43)

He wants, it seems to be a hole in nature, to lose his sentience. It is at this point that Thaise is called upon to “glade with this sory man” (CA 8.1663), but although she sings like an angel and though she tells him many tales and strange riddles, he refuses to speak. At last there is some response: half-mad with wrath and grief, he asks her to leave:

But yit sche wolde noght do so,

And in the derke forth sche goth,

Til sche him toucheth, and he wroth,

And after hire with his hond

He smot.

(CA 8.1690–94)

Thaise is struck into a forceful reproach. Almost despite herself she begins to reveal her identity:

Avoi, mi lord, I am a maide:

And if ye wiste what I am,

And out of what lignage I cam,

Ye wolde noght be so salvage.

(CA 8.1696–99)

And thus it happens that the stories that had isolated each of them in their worlds turn out to be one and the same story. They are doubly shared—because it is told at all and because it is the same story. What Genius (the priest of Venus, Amans’s confessor, and the tutelary genius of procreation from Gower’s major intertext, the Roman de la Rose), wants Amans to see in this story is:

What is to be so sibb of blod.

Non wiste of other hou it stod,

And yit the fader ate laste

His herte upon this maide caste,

That he hire loveth kindely,

And yit he wiste nevere why.

(CA 8.1703–9)

In a poem that has explored the range and reach of loving according to one’s kind, where loving kindly had threatened to be overwhelmed by incestuous longings, compulsively static fantasies, and an inability to see beyond the mirror of self-reflection, this mode of kindly loving is given redemptive force and wonder and allowed its full extended play. I think the word “kindely” carries its Middle English sense of “thoroughly, completely, effectively, well.” 20 Above all, it animates the meaning of the word not simply as appetite and feeling but of course as “family” and “offspring” as well as with benevolence and revealed created nature.21 Thaise now freely offers what “sche hath longe in herte holde” (CA 8.1726) and what ensures is a “newe grace” (CA 8.1739) so that Appollonius can emerge from the “derke place” (CA 8.1740) that is both literal and metaphorical. The shadows of Antioch are dispersed and whereas the contagion of that riddle solved but not spoken had been to breed flight, exile, and a contaminating “privete,” this encounter will be towards openness, community, and in this story, sound government too: “And out he cam al openly” (CA 8.1748).

Gower’s rendering is pellucid and simple. Its power to move and its complexity derive from its setting as the last of a whole sequence of stories told by Genius to Amans. Amans is hardly an ideal interlocutor for these stories. Although he is scrupulously honest to the mandates of the confessional in giving his response to these stories, minutely examining himself for sloth, envy, and greed, for example, and though he is occasionally prompted into some curiosity that momentarily takes him out of the obsessive and sterile circularity of his thoughts toward his lady, he mostly, and sometimes hilariously, misses the point. (Amans’s obtuseness and relentless referring of all stories toward himself, his inability to recognize the otherness in them and in himself is not just a local problem but structured into the models of exemplarity at work in the confessional.) Terence Cave has read Shakespeare’s Pericles as the exemplary listener to Marina’s role as story-teller: he encourages—hangs on—her every word, trusts her beyond probability, beyond what is strictly reasonable, trusts her relation of the story before he has any intimation of their actual relation and, weeping with joy, he sees that her story is his.22 Shakespeare’s version of this scene reveals what is implicit in Gower’s scene of story-telling too. As William Robbins has recently said: “Thaise’s story moves Appollonius not out of intelligence or pity or persuasion, but out of kinship: not because it offers an analogy to his own predicament, but because it is part of his story” (my italics).23 Amans’s response to Genius’s culminating tale is bathetic:

Mi fader, hou so that it stonde,

Youre tale is herd and understonde,

As thing which worthi is to hiere,

Of gret ensaumple and gret matiere,

Wherof, my fader, God you quyte.

Bot if this point myself acquite

I mai riht wel, that nevere yit

I was assoted in my wit,

Bot only in that worthi place

Wher alle lust and alle grace

Is set, if that Danger ne were.

(CA 8.2029–39)

How a story will touch you is a function of its place in your history and a function of the extent to which this can be recognized. This is as much a question of acknowledgment as that growth from ignorance to knowledge celebrated in Aristotelian anagnorisis. And in Gower’s recognition scene, the kindly knowledge that Appollonius has of Thaise, the fact that he loves her kindly without knowing why, crucially precedes the revelation, the unfolding of her actual identity: “Bot al was knowe er that thei wente” (CA 8.1709). It is then the full resources of kind that Genius can finally draw on when he counsels Amans “what is to love in good manere, / And what to love in other wise” (CA 8.2010–11) and when he can invoke “loves kinde” (CA 8.2228). It is important in the last of a series of exemplary tales that we’re given a primal scene of recognition that might be understood as itself exemplary of the conditions of self-recognition in a story. It is a scene which transposes such self and other recognitions as vulnerable to the chance of an offshore wind, and to the terrifying risks of self-exposure—in this case prompted by a violent rejection, which is nevertheless the stuff of gift and wonder.

The Voicing of Recognition

Shakespeare takes these cures and the short lines of the recognition scene (less than a hundred) in Gower, and expands Gower’s spare, limpidly economical lines into a drama of two and a half times as many lines in which the recognition is drawn out to suggest the difficulty and centrality of what it means to come to speech. Each of the protagonists of this scene has been silent in different ways. Marina is supremely articulate; indeed she seems to be a goddess of the expressive arts. She can sing like one immortal and dance and compose artful canvases with her needle. She can confound deep clerks like the articulate female saints of the hagiographic tradition. In the brothel it is her ability to speak that has preserved her. Indeed it is important that when we first meet Marina she tells us in the most natural way of her parentage and her loss made new because of the loss of her nurse Lychorida:

Ay me! poor maid,

Born in a tempest when my mother died,

This world to me is as a lasting storm,

Whirring me from my friends.

(4.1.16–20)

Her very first words bespeak a loss just passed and one about to happen: like Proserpina, she will rob Tellus of her weeds to strew Lychorida’s grave with flowers.24 She goes on to rehearse the story her nurse has told her of her birth at sea, and she mimes out the storm, lending her voice to her father, to the storm, and to the sailors who man the boat. It is a mini-story of his endurance and her survival. But in Mytilene there is no one to trust with her words. There are no declarations at all that might reveal who she is.

This contrasts with one of the sources of the play, Lawrence Twine’s The Patterne of Painful Adventures, in which Tharsia (Marina) declares her heritage to Athanagoras (Lysimachus) and tells him the story of her abduction.25 If she cannot tell her story in Mytilene, a place which does not encourage stories, where words are for advertisement and sale and in which all flesh is commodified, she is the lightning rod which converts others. (“Thou hast the harvest out of thine own report” (4.2.141). Again, Shakespeare takes a motif from hagiography—the saint in the brothel, St. Agnes—and turns it into a property of speech. Her indefatigable yet unlabored honesty helps others to name and thereby come to see what they are doing. Her exchange with Lysimachus is a case in point. She is told Lysimachus is an honorable man; and she holds him to the standards of that honor. Honor is thus an ethical category, not a class code, as in the old hag’s speech of The Wife of Bath’s Tale. She takes the words of others and holds them to their meaning so that all equivocation, hypocrisy, all the euphemisms that cover over sin are shown to be pitiful evasions of the fundamental evils they purport to describe. Hence Lysimachus imagines he is making idle conversation in which she is paid to indulge him when he asks her how long she has been at “this trade.” He will cause offense if he names it, but she encourages him to do so and in this way he will start to see himself in the act of naming his actions. (4.1.75–125). Now she forces him to live out the honorable title he claims: “If you were born to honor, show it now” (4.6.92). In this and other ways Marina survives the brothel, but in so doing she brings others to name the deeds they do and so to understand and take responsibility for their own actions. Though she cannot help but be a touchstone of honesty, she has never revealed herself in her words in Mytilene. She is, one might say, powerless to make herself known.

The reasons for Pericles’ silence are different. Pericles refuses to speak at all. He cannot see the point in speaking. This means, I suppose, that he has nothing to say, nothing he has found worth saying, no one to whom he wants to speak, and no position from which to speak, because he believes that there are no listeners who might understand. His grief at the terrible loss of his wife and daughter has made him feel so alone that he cannot believe that anyone else might have experienced anything similar. (It is this that Marina gently contests when she suggests there might be one whose grief “might equal yours, if both were justly weigh’d” [5.1.88].) The point here is not the magnitude of the suffering but the unassuageable isolation to which it gives rise. The first production I ever saw of Pericles was put on in a huge old warehouse in Old Street, London, by the RSC and Cardboard Citizens, a homeless people’s theater troupe. The play had been developed in workshops with asylum seekers throughout England during the previous year and began with a set of stories about exile and wandering. One story concerned a man who had lost his wife and daughter in an accident who left home and simply walked and walked in a silent world without speaking.26 The production brought out in remarkable ways both the loneliness of grief and the terrible commonalty of the experience among the dispossessed.

So both Marina and Pericles fear to give voice; there is no one to hear and therefore nothing to say. It is worth slowing down at this point to stay with these silences. They are silences that negate or deny the grounds of human sociability and hence of the capacity for self-knowledge that is intrinsic to language use and to the ability of any community to go on. If talking is the wording of the world, if what can comprehensively be said is what is found to be worth saying, then no world is worded, no word worlded for Pericles.27 This is what makes their eventual mutual act of speaking so world-giving and so regenerative. Pericles’ isolation is identifiable in the traditions of despair, exile, and the wild man. He dons sackcloth and ashes and vows never to cut his hair. But Shakespeare’s version makes his speechlessness the most important thing about his exile, and mounts his integration back into forms of human sociability as the recovery of his voice simultaneous with the recovery of Marina’s. The mutuality is key; to tell someone something one must have something to tell, something the other must be in a position to be struck by.28 Shakespeare parses out the very conditions of telling and shows two people finding themselves and each other in that act. The relief is of a mutual intelligibility that restores a sense that their lives are common, shared, and no longer uniquely isolating. Let us now return to the scene of recognition.

It is structured like an interrupted story. The governor of Mytilene entreats Pericles’ chief adviser to recount the “cause / of your king’s sorrow” (5.1.63), but he is interrupted by the arrival of Marina herself, summoned by Lysimachus, the governor, to revive Pericles’ spirits. As in Gower’s version, Pericles’ downright violence in pushing Marina away elicits her spirited response. Though she has come to revive him, she is also prompted into a rare disclosure and a rare desire to be seen, a response that has been utterly submerged in the conditions under which she has hitherto been “gazed at.” Tentatively and with dignity she begins to outline the lineaments of her story, one that she has kept hidden in the world of Mytilene. Initially she can only tell her story in the third person. Perhaps the challenge of those words to Pericles’ sense of his own suffering as literally unmatched by any other’s can only be approached without the claims of the first person:

She speaks

My lord, that may be hath endured a grief

Might equal yours, if both were justly weigh’d.

(5.1.86–88)

She has seen something in his own grief to match hers and now tells him that hers might equal his. She then begins in the first person to tell him about her derivation and her fortunes. His voice now begins to echo her: “My fortunes—parentage—good parentage…” (5.1.97). And he asks her to speak again. When she does so, he asks her to turn her eyes upon him (the choreography of glances and sightlines is intricate, painful, and central to the scene). And he starts to see the likeness of Thaisa: “you’re like something that…” (5.1.102). He now begins to interrogate her breathlessly, prompted by this likeness. From his terrible withdrawal he now yearns for her language like a starving man who has found nourishment. Her words now become something to feed on, and by the end of his next speech it is no longer clear whether he is talking about his wife or his daughter:

My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one

My daughter might have been: My queen’s square brows,

Her stature to an inch, as wand-like straight,

As silver voice’d, her eyes as jewel-like

And (cas’d) as richly, in pace another Juno;

Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry

The more she gives them speech.

(5.1.106–13)

In both Gower’s and Shakespeare’s versions of this story then, the preternaturally perceived fact of likeness is underwritten by a further act of telling. Before he recognizes her as his daughter he recognizes her as truthful and outlines the conditions of what Terence Cave calls the perfect audience for a story:

Falseness cannot come from thee, for thou lookest

Modest as Justice, and thou seemest a (palace)

For the crown’d Truth to dwell in. I will believe thee,

And make (my) senses credit thy relation

To points that seem impossible; for thou lookest

Like one I lov’d indeed.

(5.1.120–25)

The move here is from what looks like something (“thou lookest”), the mode of simile and analogy, to an extension of his mind to an utter trust in her language. And now he moves on to concrete, specific questions as he approaches not what she is like, but who she is. When she utters the simplest of words, to which his questions have finally brought her, her plain and literal declaration: “My name is Marina” (5.1.142) can have a long-delayed impact.29 And now echoing back her language to her, he prompts more from her: “Tell thy story” (5.1.134).

The celestial music that Pericles now hears as he drifts into sleep is the answering echo, the divine attunement to the harmonies established through the human voice. There is no competition here between divine and human agency. For if, as I earlier proposed, romance is the form in which chance is converted into providence, this has happened here through the touching of human voices. In violently rejecting Marina in his act of pushing her away, he prompted her to cry out, to declare who she was. The sound of her voice, the look of her; this is how grace breaks his refusal of the world and opens him up to another. It is a grace that works through nature in a felt wonder, a pattern of slow recognition that is utterly marvelous, yet utterly natural. The fact of Thaise’s / Marina’s life can now be felt as the miracle it is, and grace found and felt in the mysteries of generation. Such a wondrous yet ordinary miracle comes about by a soliciting attentiveness, a palpable hunger, and a felt desire for disclosure.

Amans’s response to what I have called a primal scene of recognition in the Confessio is, under the circumstances, hopelessly bathetic. In response to this lovely story, by far the longest in the structure of 88 odd narratives that make up the Confessio, he seems to say: “Lovely, well done, father, you’ve told a lovely story. But you don’t have to worry about me in this regard. Incest is not one of my problems. No, I’m far too in love with the one and only to bother with that kind of thing. Look, you’re supposed to be a clerk of love, can’t you help me?” 30 His own scene of recognition comes later when Venus gets him to look at himself in the mirror in a reverse Narcissus scene. She has tried to tell him kindly, though some things are hard to hear and some knowledges hard to remember:

So sitte it wel that thou beknowe

Thi fieble astat, er thou beginne

. . . . . . . . . . .

This toucheth thee; forget it noght:

The thing is torned into was.

(CA 8.2428–35)

With the mirror comes a memory of his passed and past days, and he is released from the timeless allure of his fantasies into a sense of his position in the cycle of nature and labor as he imagines himself in the seasonal calendar. As a lover Amans has been all too immune to the stories told him, but when he recognizes himself, he is revealed as the very teller of the stories we are hearing: the poet John Gower who is an old man.31

And it is as an old man, incarnate again, “assuming man’s infirmities” (1.1.3) that he returns to Shakespeare’s stage, the guardian and keeper of stories for the tribe for whom he wastes his life like a taper light (1.1.16). To tell a story Gower must be mortal, he must assume a human body with all its vulnerabilities and pleasures.32 Stories are “restoratives” (1.1.8), but they may be refused by the wit ripe enough to be on the brink of rottenness, as Gower says in his choric prologue. They can restore us to ourselves, but only if found, not if imposed from without.

To make the recovery of voice so central to the rehabilitation of Marina and Pericles, Shakespeare posits a new community founded on mutual attunement. Its fragility and depth both rest on the possibility of just this immensely delicate rendering. It is this kind of community that is at stake in each of the so-called romances that follow. Shakespearean romance offers the slow discovery of the ordinary chancy and occasional miracles of human communication. Their joy is fragile, open-ended. In finding this ordinary miracle of human story-telling and sharing, of human speech, he is not only decisively repudiating the eradication of the human in the reformed discourse of forgiveness which obliterates all human agency in that act; he is also decisively breaking with a model of language as private property enclosing a sovereign will. He is parsing out a grammar of recognition and acknowledgment, one which will allow him to perform acknowledgment itself as forgiveness in the late great plays to come.33