Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Summary

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a romance of wandering, loss and recovery, told across fourteen years and half the eastern Mediterranean. The medieval poet John Gower, risen "From ashes," serves as its chorus, apologizing for the old tale and leaping over sea and time between acts. His presence signals the play's kind of truth: this is a story sung "for restoratives," not a realistic chronicle. Pericles begins by courting the daughter of Antiochus, King of Antioch. Suitors must solve a riddle or die, and the riddle discloses that the king lives in incest with his daughter. Pericles understands it, flees for his life, and leaves Tyre in the care of the loyal counsellor Helicanus. He brings grain to the famine-stricken city of Tarsus, ruled by Cleon and Dionyza, then is shipwrecked on the shore of Pentapolis. Fishermen haul up his father's armour in their net; he wins the tournament for the hand of Thaisa, daughter of the good King Simonides, and marries her. On the voyage home a storm breaks while Thaisa is in labour. She gives birth to a daughter and appears to die; the superstitious sailors demand that the body be thrown overboard, and Pericles commits her to the sea in a caulked chest. The chest washes up at Ephesus, where the physician Cerimon opens it, recognizes that she has not been dead long, and revives her with fire, cloths and music. Believing her husband lost, Thaisa becomes a votaress in Diana's temple. Pericles, believing her dead, leaves the infant Marina with Cleon and Dionyza. Marina grows into a gifted young woman whose graces eclipse Dionyza's own daughter. Dionyza orders her murder; pirates seize her from the assassin and sell her to a brothel in Mytilene, where her purity and speech convert the customers, including the governor Lysimachus, until the bawds give up and let her earn money by teaching. Told that Marina is dead, Pericles falls into a mute grief, refusing speech and food for three months. His ship drifts to Mytilene; Lysimachus sends for the maiden who can charm with song, and in the long recognition scene of Act V father and daughter find each other. Diana appears in a vision and sends Pericles to Ephesus, where he is reunited with Thaisa. Gower closes by naming the moral figures he has shown: monstrous lust punished, patient virtue rewarded, loyalty in Helicanus and learned charity in Cerimon. The library attaches the full public-domain text (Project Gutenberg #1537), so each episode here can be checked against the play.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: A riddle at Antioch and bread for Tarsus

  Gower introduces Antiochus, who keeps his daughter in incest and kills the suitors who fail his riddle. Pericles reads the riddle's meaning, flees the assassin Thaliard, and confides his fear to Helicanus, who advises travel. At Tarsus he relieves a famine so severe that Cleon reports mothers ready to eat their children, and is hailed as a deliverer.

• Act II: The rusty armour of Pentapolis

  Shipwrecked, Pericles is helped by fishermen who joke that great men devour the small like whales. They draw his father's armour from the sea, and in it he enters King Simonides' tournament for Thaisa's birthday. Simonides tests the couple with feigned anger, then blesses the match. In Tyre, news arrives that Antiochus and his daughter have been destroyed by fire from heaven.

• Act III: A birth in the storm and a waking at Ephesus

  At sea, Thaisa dies, as it seems, in childbirth. Pericles puts her body in a chest with spices, jewels and a written plea for burial, and leaves the newborn Marina with Cleon and Dionyza. At Ephesus the physician Cerimon revives Thaisa, who enters Diana's temple as a votaress.

• Act IV: Marina at Tarsus and Mytilene

  Fourteen years pass. Dionyza, jealous for her daughter, orders the servant Leonine to murder Marina by the shore, but pirates carry her off and sell her to a Pandar and Bawd in Mytilene. Marina defends her chastity, converts Lysimachus and the brothel's customers, and wins the right to support herself by singing, weaving and needlework. At Tarsus, Pericles is shown Marina's false monument and departs in sackcloth.

• Act V: Recognitions and Gower's epilogue

  Lysimachus boards the silent king's ship and brings Marina to him. Her story, told by degrees, draws Pericles out of his stupor until he knows her as his daughter and hears the music of the spheres. Diana bids him go to Ephesus, where Cerimon restores Thaisa to him. Marina is betrothed to Lysimachus, and Gower reports the burning of Cleon and Dionyza by their own citizens.

Characters

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre

  A young prince driven from home by a dangerous secret who becomes a man of sorrows, losing wife and daughter to the sea and to treachery. His speeches in the storm and at the recognition carry the play's finest verse.

• Marina, daughter of Pericles and Thaisa

  Born in the storm and named for the sea; preserves her chastity in a brothel through courage, eloquence and prayer to Diana, and heals her father by telling her story.

• Thaisa, daughter of Simonides, wife of Pericles

  Chooses Pericles over richer knights, dies seemingly in childbirth, is revived at Ephesus and lives as a priestess of Diana until the final recognition.

• Gower, chorus

  The fourteenth-century English poet whose Confessio Amantis supplied the story; speaks in archaic tetrameter, fills the gaps of time and place, and draws the moral at the end.

• Cerimon, lord and physician of Ephesus

  A nobleman who values learning and charity above rank, spends his fortune healing the poor, and brings Thaisa back from apparent death.

• Helicanus, counsellor of Tyre

  Pericles' loyal deputy, who tells his prince hard truths, refuses the crown offered to him in Pericles' absence, and stands beside him in his grief.

• Antiochus and his daughter, King of Antioch and his daughter

  Rulers whose hidden incest is the play's first image of corruption; they are struck by fire from heaven.

• Simonides, King of Pentapolis

  A gracious king who honours virtue above wealth in his daughter's suitor and tests Pericles with mock anger.

• Cleon and Dionyza, governor of Tarsus and his wife

  Saved from famine by Pericles and entrusted with his daughter; Dionyza plots Marina's murder out of envy and the weak Cleon consents to hide it.

• Lysimachus, governor of Mytilene

  Comes to the brothel in disguise and leaves reformed by Marina's words; brings her to the grieving king and is betrothed to her.

• Pandar, Bawd and Boult, brothel-keepers of Mytilene

  Comic and coarse figures of commerce in bodies who are defeated by Marina's integrity.

• Lychorida, nurse

  Thaisa's nurse who brings Pericles the newborn in the storm and later raises Marina at Tarsus.

Lessons

• Patience under a long providence

  Pericles does nothing to deserve his losses. He flees a wicked king, feeds a starving city and marries honourably, yet the sea takes his wife and treachery seems to take his daughter. The play's answer is not an explanation but endurance and an ending in which, as Pericles says, present kindness makes past miseries sport. Marina is likened to "Patience gazing on kings' graves," the virtue the whole play praises.

  • Which of Pericles' sufferings come from human wickedness and which from storm and chance? Does the play distinguish them?
  • Compare Pericles with Job: what does each lose, how does each respond, and how is each restored?
  • Is Pericles' three-month silence in Act V a failure of patience or its exhausted limit?

• Integrity in the brothel

  Marina is sold into a house where everything is priced, and she answers with prayer to Diana and with speech so honest that it changes the men sent to corrupt her. Lysimachus confesses that her words would have altered a corrupted mind. The scenes are coarse in their comedy but clear in their judgment: chastity is shown as strength and freedom, not weakness.

  • How does Marina use words to defend herself? What does she say to Lysimachus that changes him?
  • Why does the Bawd say Marina would make a puritan of the devil? What does that comic complaint reveal?
  • How do Joseph in Genesis 39 and Marina show resistance to sexual corruption in different ways?

• Cerimon and the vocation of healing

  Cerimon argues that "Virtue and cunning" outrank nobility and riches, and that he has studied "physic" and the infusions in plants, metals and stones. He spends his own money on the poor of Ephesus. When Thaisa's chest comes ashore he observes closely, acts promptly with fire, cloths and music, and refuses to assume death too quickly. Gower names him as the image of learned charity.

  • What reasons does Cerimon give for preferring learning to rank and wealth?
  • What details of his treatment of Thaisa show careful observation rather than magic?
  • Pericles calls Cerimon a "mortal officer" of the gods. How does the play combine human skill and divine providence in Thaisa's recovery?

• A daughter who restores her father

  The recognition in Act V proceeds slowly, with Marina's story drawn out question by question until Pericles calls her "Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget." The child once given life now gives it back. The scene shows grief answered by patient presence, truthful speech and music rather than argument.

  • Why does Shakespeare make the recognition so gradual? Track the stages by which Pericles comes to believe.
  • What does the paradox of the daughter begetting her father mean in this scene?
  • Why does Pericles hear the music of the spheres when no one else does?

Context

Pericles retells the late-antique romance of Apollonius of Tyre, a story of shipwrecks, separations and reunions that was popular throughout the Middle Ages. Shakespeare and his collaborator drew on Book VIII of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (c. 1390), which explains Gower's role as chorus, and on Laurence Twine's prose version, The Pattern of Painful Adventures (registered 1576, reprinted 1607). The play stands at the head of Shakespeare's late romances, with Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Composition

Usually dated 1607-1608. Most scholars hold that the first two acts are largely the work of George Wilkins and the last three largely Shakespeare's, a division supported by differences of style and verse. Wilkins published a prose narrative, The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in 1608, based partly on the play as acted. The only early text is the 1609 quarto, which is badly printed and was reprinted several times.

Reception

The play was popular on the Jacobean stage, but it was left out of the 1623 First Folio, probably because of its shared authorship, and entered the collected works only with the second issue of the Third Folio (1664). Ben Jonson sneered at it as a "mouldy tale," and later editors long doubted it; twentieth-century productions recovered the power of the reunion scenes. It is included among Shakespeare's plays in the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World (1990).

Comparisons

• The Tempest

  Both plays turn on a father, a daughter raised far from home, and a sea that destroys and restores. Prospero controls the storm and the ending by his art; Pericles is helpless before his storm and receives his restoration as a gift.

• The Winter's Tale

  Hermione, like Thaisa, is believed dead and is restored years later to a husband who has grieved for her, and Perdita, like Marina, is a lost daughter who returns. Leontes' losses come from his own jealousy, while Pericles' come from storm and the malice of others.

• Cymbeline

  Written in the same years, Cymbeline also ends with a chain of recognitions, a reunited family and a wronged woman vindicated. Imogen, like Marina, survives a plot against her life, though Cymbeline's plot is far more tangled and its wonders depend on disguise rather than a god's vision.

• The Comedy of Errors

  Shakespeare's early farce borrowed the same Apollonius story: a family scattered by shipwreck, and a lost wife found as an abbess at Ephesus. Pericles returns to that ending two decades later and treats it as solemn wonder instead of comic confusion.

• The Odyssey

  Like Odysseus, Pericles is a king driven across the sea for years, shipwrecked, received by a hospitable court, and finally restored to wife and kingdom. Odysseus wins his return by cunning and force; Pericles regains his family only by waiting.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Pericles contains one of the most admired physician figures in English drama. Cerimon of Ephesus studies "physic" from authorities and practice, speaks of remedies drawn from plants, metals and stones, treats the poor at his own cost, and revives a woman taken for dead by warmth, cloths, air and music; the scene reflects Renaissance interest in apparent death and the danger of hasty burial, and invokes Aesculapius. The play also stages a fatal-seeming childbirth at sea, a famine described in terms of starvation and family breakdown, the prostitute's trade in disease, and, in Act V, a king who has neither spoken nor eaten for three months after news of his daughter's death. Modern readers often describe that state as a depressive stupor; the play itself calls it grief and "distemperature," and it is relieved not by drugs but by music, patient conversation and a recovered relationship. Retrospective diagnosis here is a reading, not a fact.

• Act I, Scene 2

  Pericles describes melancholy as a constant guest that denies him rest by day or night; when Helicanus counsels patience, Pericles answers that he speaks "like a physician" prescribing a potion he would not take himself.

  Melancholia Depression Sleep Insomnia
• Act I, Scene 4

  Cleon and Dionyza describe the famine at Tarsus, where the once-feasting rich beg for bread and mothers are said to be ready to eat their children.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Act III, Scene 1

  Thaisa labours and apparently dies in childbirth during the storm; Pericles invokes Lucina as midwife and the nurse Lychorida brings him the infant.

  Childbirth Maternal Death Dying
• Act III, Scene 2

  Cerimon declares his study of physic and the remedies of nature, sends a prescription to the apothecary for a dying man, and opens Thaisa's chest; citing an Egyptian revived after nine hours, he restores her with fire, cloths, air and music and warns that a relapse would be mortal.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine Death Dying
• Act IV, Scenes 2 and 6

  The brothel-keepers joke about their worn-out women and the pox; Marina tells Lysimachus that in that house disease has been sold dearer than physic.

  Syphilis Venereal
• Act V, Scene 1

  Helicanus tells Lysimachus that the king has neither spoken nor taken food for three months except to prolong his grief; Marina is brought to reach him with song and speech.

  Grief Melancholia Depression Starvation Nutrition Mind Body
• Act V, Scene 1

  After the recognition Pericles hears heavenly music that no one else hears and falls into a healing sleep, in which Diana appears to him.

  Sleep Insomnia Mind Body
• Act V, Scene 3 and Epilogue

  Cerimon explains Thaisa's recovery to Pericles, who calls him the gods' mortal officer; Gower names him the pattern of learned charity.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Cerimon's casebook entry for the morning Thaisa's chest came ashore: what he observed, what he did, and why he did not give up on her.

• Poetry

  Write a speech for Gower in rhymed tetrameter couplets that bridges a gap in a story you know, as he bridges the fourteen years before Act IV.

• Classroom

  Stage the recognition scene of Act V, Scene 1 in pairs, marking each line where Pericles moves closer to belief. Discuss why the scene works only if it is slow.

Further Reading

• Confessio Amantis, Book VIII, John Gower

  Gower's Middle English version of Apollonius of Tyre, the play's main source.

• The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, George Wilkins

  Wilkins's 1608 prose narrative, closely related to the play and useful where the quarto text is corrupt.

• The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare

  The romance that most closely develops Pericles' pattern of loss, long grief and restoration.

• Shakespeare, Co-Author, Brian Vickers

  A 2002 study of Shakespeare's collaborations, with a chapter setting out the evidence for Wilkins's share in Pericles.