Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
“To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come”
“The sad companion, dull-eyed melancholy, Be my so used a guest as not an hour In the day’s glorious walk or peaceful night, The tomb where grief should sleep, can breed me quiet”
“So sharp are hunger’s teeth, that man and wife Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life”
“the great ones eat up the little ones”
“Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges”
“A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear; No light, no fire: th’unfriendly elements Forgot thee utterly”
“I hold it ever, Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches”
“Death may usurp on nature many hours, And yet the fire of life kindle again The o’erpress’d spirits”
“Untied I still my virgin knot will keep. Diana, aid my purpose”
“Diseases have been sold dearer than physic”
“Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling Extremity out of act”
“Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me O’erbear the shores of my mortality”
“Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget”
“The gods can have no mortal officer More like a god than you”
“In reverend Cerimon there well appears The worth that learned charity aye wears”
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.