Incest, shipwrecks, and a whorehouse add up to zaniness in this (most would say justifiably) neglected work by Shakespeare.
Although there were quarto editions starting in 1609, this play did not appear in the First Folio, possibly because only shoddy texts of it were available. It was included in the Third Folio (1664) and gradually was adopted into the canon. The current state of this play may indicate that it was an incomplete draft left unfinished at the playwright’s death and patched together by another hand (to whom orthodoxy credits the first two acts); or, more likely, since Ben Jonson called it a “stale” and “mouldy tale” (Farina 98), it was another very early work of Oxford’s that the playwright was revising near the end.
The first two acts particularly either do not seem Shakespearean (Goddard, II 241; Wells 330) or at best resemble his earliest style. [Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen are thought to be other such “collaborations” — there may be others that were left in various stages of (in)completion.] The name George Wilkins has been put forth as the possible “collaborator” here, though Bloom notes that Wilkins was a “low-life hack” and “whoremonger” (Bloom 603). The apparent change in style takes place at Act III, where revision seems to be suddenly thoroughgoing regarding the story of father and daughter at this point. “Eric Sams has noted that in six quartos and in F3, the attribution of the play was to Shakespeare alone; three of the quartos had been published in Wilkins’s lifetime…. Sams ascribes the difference in style to Shakespeare’s revision of his own earlier play” (Gilvary 437). “How anyone can believe Pericles to have been as a whole a work of the dramatist’s maturity, one of his last plays, is beyond our comprehension” (Ogburn and Ogburn 128). (They think the play began as a masque in 1577, after Oxford’s travels.)
The Pericles of this play has nothing to do with the Pericles of Golden Age Athens; instead, Shakespeare is using the story of Apollonius of Tyre, originally a Latin prose romance based on a lost Greek version (Asimov 186), although “no one hearing the name could fail to recall the Athenian aristocrat turned democrat, who did so much to develop the cultural splendor of the Greek capital” (Beauclerk 118).
There is a “Pyrocles” in Philip Sidney’s work, but the real key sources are the Confessio Amantis by John Gower (Chaucer’s contemporary) and Laurence Twine’s The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures from 1576. Twine and his brother “contributed to the 1573 translation of The Breviary of Britain, a book dedicated to de Vere and praising his interest in history, geography, and all learning in general” (Farina 99). E.T. Clark thinks the play is very early, based on Oxford’s maritime adventures in the mid-1570s, and the elder Ogburns agree, adding that it was later retouched (Ogburn and Ogburn 962). Indeed, Dryden decided it was Shakespeare’s very first play (Ogburn and Ogburn 963). An entertainment presented at Richmond in 1577 titled A Pastorell or Historie of a Greeke Maide may have been an early version of Pericles (Ogburn and Ogburn 127). In this play, perhaps, Oxford “expressed the passionate gloom which had darkened his mind after his return from his travels” (Ogburn and Ogburn 128). The incest discovered in Act I has prompted a dark theory within Oxfordianism regarding Anne Cecil’s problematic 1575-76 pregnancy.
Farina puts forth the possibility that William Stanley, seeing himself as Marina’s husband Lysimachus, drafted a version of the play, with Oxford as Pericles and Elizabeth Vere, Stanley’s wife, as Marina; after which, Oxford dabbled with some revision (101). The scenario would resemble a strong possibility that The Tempest captured the same triad of father/daughter/husband.
Although romance tales can be expected to have “highly improbable, often event miraculous, happenings, asking us to suspend disbelief and to watch and listen with the wide-eyed wonder of children at pantomime” (Wells 329), Pericles is still rather a disappointment because it’s so sprawling and lacks those universal themes that make other plays so rich. Jonson’s gripe about it being “mouldy” “likely meant that it was both archaic and improbable” (Garber 754). It’s at best “an exciting series of adventures that violate the unities of time and place in most undramatic fashion. It is held together by narrative suspense and a certain interest in the three main characters, not by any dominating theme” (Goddard, II 242). Clearly, though, Shakespeare in his later years liked working with the father/daughter relationship.
Pericles, Act by Act
Pericles Introduction
Further Resources
Filmography
Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Starring Paul Scofield, Judi Dench. 1964. [Audio.]
Pericles. Starring Mike Gwilym and Amanda Redman. BBC, 1984.
Pericles Prince of Tyre. Southwest Shakespeare Company, 2020. A Zoom Production.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 1438-1474.
Gossett, Suzanne. Pericles. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. Bloomsbury, 2004. An unbearably long introduction perpetuating nonsense about Wilkins as collaborator.
Warren, Roger. Pericles. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2008. The intro is full of Wilkins rubbish and insistence on it being a late play, but Appendix A is the 1609 Quarto.
Other Valuable Oxfordian Perspectives
Beauclerk, Charles. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom. NY: Grove Press, 2010. 117-119.
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 60-78.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 98-104.
Gilvary, Kevin. Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 434-444.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. 127-135.
Showerman, Earl, M.D. Shakespeare’s Greater Greek. Kindle Direct, 2025. Chapter Pericles: 206-227.
And Other General Resources
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 241-243.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Later Comedies. London: The Macmillian Press, Ltd., 1993. 107-123. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement of scenes.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Foundation. Dir. Alan W. Green. The sponsor of Shakespeare Illuminated. You say you want a revolution. Well….
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member. Tell them I sent you.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.