Oddities
in
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
“Enjoyable”
is usually too tame a word to describe a Shakespeare play but in some ways it
fits Pericles. It moves along
quickly with some surprising twists and turns and it has a happy ending.
I
wonder. How much did Shakespeare write and how much did someone else
write? I haven’t read the introduction
to the Norton edition yet. Maybe it will
say something there. I’ll get back to that.
But
my first spontaneous and uninfluenced reaction upon reading the play – this one
is different! And filled with small
oddities, even by Shakespearean standards. So let’s take a look at them.
The
first oddity is John Gower, the Presenter.
Why does he have a name? In the other plays this role is called the
Chorus. This presenter tells an awful lot of the action that could have been
shown on stage – storms and messages and murderous plots and righteous
punishment. Rather dramatic things that could have made the play very exciting.
Instead these are glossed over in rather simple rhyming couplets. But it
certainly moves the action along and that in itself provides a lot of
interesting surprises and makes it a quick read, if that’s what you want.
Another
oddity is the incestuous relationship that got the whole intrigue started. We have a king in an incestuous relationship
with his daughter. Why set the stage
with this? And why does Pericles come to woo her, along with a lot of other
princes? But he does and figures out from a rather obvious riddle that the king
and princess are incestuous so his life is threatened and he flees. King and princess are struck by the lightning
of the gods for their sins and that’s the end of that. It all plays a rather
small part in the story. Odd, don’t you think? As far as I can remember incest
wasn’t so obviously used in other Shakespeare plays and although incest
undoubtedly took place then as always, was it generally used as a toss-away
intrigue starter? I don’t think so.
Next
oddity. Shakespeare’s murderers often have pangs of conscience, not always, but
sometimes, but the would-be assassin Thaliart is just relieved when he hears
that Pericles has fled and he goes off with Pericles’s friends to party. A very
small detail, I agree, but an odd one.
Dionyza
is also a puzzle. In Scene 4 she is eloquent in responding to husband Cleon’s
suggestion that they relate “tales of others’ griefs” brought on by the famine
in the land to “see if ‘twill teach us to forget our own” (Scene 4). She says
That were to
blow at fire in hope to quench it,
For who digs hills because they do aspire
Throws down one mountain to cast up a higher.
O my distressèd lord, e’en such our griefs are;
Here they're but felt and seen with midge’s eyes,
But like to groves, being topped, they higher rise.
I really felt for her here but then some
fifteen years later she coolly plans on and seemingly succeeds in carrying out
the murder of the daughter of the man who saved her and Cleon’s lives and that
of their people. That’s treacherous, I’d say. I liked her and then I didn’t.
It’s not unusual for Shakespeare’s villains to be likeable but I still found
this odd. She really turns nasty in the end and there’s no sign of remorse or
any hint of why she’s so awful.
Also
a bit odd is the sincerity of the revolutionary speech of the fishermen.
Shakespeare often slips in some incendiary class conflict into the lines of
workers, peasants and craftsmen but usually the radical rhetoric is shouted by
uncouth louts as if Shakespeare is sneaking a hint of politics past his
aristocratic fans without arousing their irritation. Here the fishermen are
nice serious fellows, rough but hardworking and kind, but they “would purge the
land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey” and “Here’s them in our
country of Greece gets more with begging than we can do with working” (Scene 5.)
And Pericles, the wayward king, says, “God lads, I’ll join you.” (And then
forgets them...)
In
my notes made while reading the play I called Scene 9 “odd”. Here Thaisa has
informed her father King Simonides that she’ll marry Pericles or lock herself
up. Simonides wants her to marry
Pericles but has to pretend he doesn’t. Why?
Can’t he just say, “Oh good. Let’s have a wedding”? Apparently not. And here follows a convoluted scene in which
Simonides accuses Pericles of being a traitor for sneaking around wooing the
princess and Pericles throws himself at Simonides’s merciful feet crying, “Not
me! I wouldn’t do such a thing!” Why is
Pericles so humble? Anyway after a page or two of this Simonides says to the loving
couple:
It pleaseth me so well that I will see
you wed.
Then with what haste you can, get you to
bed. (Scene 9)
Subtle, old King Simonides.
So
they get married, Pericles is called back to Tyre to be king there, Thaisa has
a baby aboard ship during a storm and dies in childbirth (she doesn’t really)
and Pericles gives the baby to his old friends (they’re not really) Cleon and
Dionyza to raise and continues on his journey to Tyre wifeless and daughterless
and grieving. It was of course perfectly
natural for a widowed father to leave his infant in the care of others. Nobles always
left the rearing of their children to others. But it seemed odd to me that
Pericles doesn’t show any interest whatsoever in staying in contact with baby/
child Marina. He certainly should have, as things develop. Marina grows up beautiful and talented in
many skills, Dionyza is jealous for her own daughter’s sake, tries to have
Marina murdered but the girl is kidnapped by pirates and ends up in a brothel
where she’s so virtuous and eloquent that she talks everyone involved into
giving up debauchery and she and Pericles and Thaisa are happily reunited. It really does all happen nearly this quickly
in the play too.
Two
more oddities: Unlike in all of Shakespeare’s other plays where the major – and
often minor – characters are a complex mixture of good and evil and have unclear
but often painful motivations for somewhat less than noble deeds – the
characters of Pericles are quite simple. Good or evil. Sinful or
virtuous. And unlike nearly all of Shakespeare’s parents, Pericles and Thaisa –
other than giving up very easily – are really very kind and loving towards
Marina in the few minutes they’re together.
Hmmm.
What to do with all these oddities? It’s time to read the Norton intro and
other scholarly texts for help.
First
to the question of how much of Pericles was written by Shakespeare. It
seems to be agreed that the first two acts (Scenes 1-9 in the Norton edition)
were not written by Shakespeare but by George Wilkins. Professor Bloom goes so
far as to say that these two acts are “dreadfully expressed and cannot have
been Shakespeare’s” but were written by Wilkins, “a lowlife hack, possibly a
Shakespearean hanger-on” and “an unsavory fellow”. Shakespeare tossed the idea
of the first two acts to Wilkins then “compensated by making the remaining
three acts into his most radical theatrical experiment since the mature Hamlet”
(pages 603-605). Professor H.W. Fawkner,
on the other hand, suggests that the writer of these scenes is in fact
Shakespeare. “Is not Shakespeare’s real collaborator here Shakespeare himself?
Could he not have collaborated with a fellow writer and with
himself? And could he not have collapsed
those two collaborations into one another: not only technically, but
metaphysically?” (page 29). Shakespeare, Fawkner suggests, has “cancelled” his
own “[a]uthorial self-presence and self-centering...in the name of creative
shattering” (page 27). If you had to
read these sentences a few times and still have a hard time making sense of
them, well, that’s Fawkner for you. He
was one of my professors at the university and he rarely made much sense. I’m
surprised he didn’t ruin Shakespeare for me forever.
On
to Gower. That oddity is quickly
explained. The historical John Gower lived and wrote Confessio Amantis
in the 14th century. It was Shakespeare’s main source for Pericles. Shakespeare also retains the medieval form of
episodic narration of the play (Norton, page 2723-2724). Enough said.
More
interesting is the oddity of the incest.
Walter Cohen, who wrote the Norton intro, explores the idea, promoted by
some scholars, that the incest of Antiochus and his daughter mirrors “an
overtone of incest” (page 2729) in the relationship between Pericles and
Marina, a very pure relationship. Cohen puts this into a general view that the
play is, in the manner of the medieval mystery plays, filled with Christian
symbolism (pages 2729-30). Bloom disagrees. He dismisses the incest question as
unimportant: “Doubtless there is an implied contrast between incest and chaste
father-daughter love but it is too obvious for critical labor” (page 611).
On
the notion of Pericles as a Christian play Bloom writes, “Shakespeare
avoids the patterns of Christian miracle plays...the divinity that haunts
Shakespeare’s late romances is located by him outside the Christian tradition”
(page 608). For once I agree with Bloom
and not with Cohen. (That doesn’t happen often).
It
seems that I’m the only one to find Thaliart and Dionyza to be oddities.
They’re hardly mentioned in my books though Cohen wonders why “the play does
not explain why Pericles leaves his daughter at Tarsus or why Dionyza, eager to
be rid of Marina, does not consider sending her home instead of murdering her”
(page 2727). Several other of my
“oddities” are ignored or glossed over so let me move on to the question of the
simplicity of the characters.
As
we have seen, Cohen attributes this in part to what he sees as the play’s
similarity to the medieval mystery plays and writes that the play’s
theatricality encourages “the audience to view events from a certain distance,
to attend to the larger pattern that unfolds rather than becoming emotionally
engaged...” (page 2724). Not only events – he might have added characters.
Bloom
puts it more bluntly: “It would be absurd to ask, What sort of personality does
Pericles possess?...none whatsoever. Even Marina has every virtue but no
personality...their relationship is all that interests Shakespeare” (page
604). No personality, OK. One might ask,
however, what relationship? Shakespeare
sees to it that they don’t have one!
Bloom
again touches on the lack of character depth when pointing out that this play
is “very peculiar” (page 603) and emphasizes “how different Pericles is
from the more than thirty plays preceding it” (page 606). Bloom comes close to echoing Fawkner (in tone
and meaning and obscurity) when he writes of “the sense of Shakespeare’s
knowing abnegation of inwardness” (page 606). One cannot now “read Pericles
without the awareness that the creator of Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra is giving us a protagonist who is merely a
cipher, a name upon a page. Wonder is
always where one starts and ends with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare himself, as
poet-playwright, is the largest provocation to wonder in Pericles” (page
606).
Well,
that cleared things right up. Or didn’t. Fawkner puts it simply (for him): “Pericles
- a Shakespearan world free from Shakespeare fever” (page 60).
I
can’t say that my view of Pericles is all that much clearer now. A
couple of my questions have been answered but most of the oddities remain.
That’s
all right. Shakespeare doesn’t have to be explained or understood. Maybe
“enjoyed” isn’t such a bad word after all.
Now
it’s time to watch the BBC production. I intend to enjoy it, oddities and all.
Works cited:
- The Norton Shakespeare, based on the
Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
- Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare – the
Invention of the Human. 1998.
- Cohen, Walter. “Introduction” in The Norton Shakespeare,
based on the Oxford Edition.
- Fawkner, H.W. Shakespeare’s
Miracle Plays – Pericles, Cymberline and The Winter’s Tale. 1992.
Films seen:
- Pericles,
Prince of Tyre, BBC, 1984. Director: David Jones. Cast: Pericles – Mike Gwilym; Gower – Edward
Petherbridge; Thaisa – Juliet Stevenson; Marina –Amanda Redman; Simonides –
Patrick Allen; Lysimachus – Patrick Ryecart; Dionyza – Annette Crosbie; Boult –
Trevor Peacock. One of the best of the
box! Mike Gwilym, Juliet Stevenson and Amanda Redman are all excellent in their
roles, as in fact is the whole cast. This is one of the later productions in
the BBC project, maybe that’s why it’s so much better than many of the
others. I did indeed enjoy it.
Seen on stage:
