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Pericles
Pericles tells of a prince who risks his life to win a princess, but discovers that she is in an incestuous relationship with her father and flees to safety. He marries another princess, but she dies giving birth to their daughter. The adventures continue from one disaster to another until the grown-up daughter pulls her father out of despair and the play moves toward a gloriously happy ending.
247 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1608
About the author
William Shakespeare
19.7k books44.4k followersWilliam Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 751 reviews
May 13, 2019
The first half (maybe three-fifths) of "Pericles" contains the worst writing found in any Shakespeare play. Fortunately for Shakespeare's reputation, he didn't write it: some hack--probably the ephemeral George Wilkins--is responsible instead. Much of the verse of the first three acts is difficult, but not in the way late Shakespeare is often difficult (an extraordinary concentration and richness of language), but because it is poorly constructed (or reported) and makes little or no sense, particularly when it is straining after a rhyme. Add to these shoddy verses an episodic plot barely held together by the wearying doggerel monologues by "the poet Gower" (even worse than the poetry of the real Gower, which takes some doing), and you are confronted with an extremely boring and occasionally infuriating play.
And then . . . Shakespeare takes over, somewhere slightly before the brothel scene I think, and he produces some passages of great charm, including two scenes of restoration and reconciliation that can stand with their counterparts in the tragi-comedies--which is high praise indeed. Any fan of "The Winter's Tale," "Cymbeline" and "The Tempest" will greatly enjoy these scenes. But as far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't hurt you to skip the rest.
May 21, 2020
This was fucking bananas and by no means Shakespeare’s most accomplished or most coherent work (which would make sense, given that he only coauthored it) and it felt like it was trying to be 12 different plays (of 12 different genres) crammed into one, but my god I enjoyed it SO MUCH? I think this is how most people feel about Shakespeare’s comedies (which I can’t warm up to)—it’s unapologetically ridiculous but thrilling and full of heart. Really pleasantly surprised by this.
April 29, 2017
To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man’s infirmities
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
By any measure available here on goodreads, this is one on Will’s worst plays. In terms of the average rating from my friends (3.0) it’s only beaten (on the downside) by the 2.75 of Cymbeline. Probably has something to do with the fact that it isn’t one of Will’s plays. Wasn’t included in the First Folio of 1623 (even though it had been printed during his life with his name on it); then was included (with six others) in the third Folio (1664). Of those seven, Pericles is the only one to survive in my edition of his works - the other six have been tossed away.
BUT … it’s known that he had no hand in writing most of the play. Nothing of the first two acts, then “some” of what follows. In particular, it’s known that he wrote the two brothel scenes in Act IV (IV.ii and IV.vi). Of course my Shakespeare is over sixty years old. In that time it’s certain that the vast bulk of Shakespeare research and scholarship has been concerned with nothing but trying to establish exactly which words of this play were written by Will! One current theory is that Shakespeare is responsible for only the indefinite articles in the play. The rather shocking evidence for this claim is a scrap of paper unearthed a few years ago, which seems to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting, reading, “I.ii A a an a”. Compare this to
Which Pericles?
Some readers may know of the great Athenian orator and statesman who went by this name
Not the guy. This play is based on a Roman tale from the fifth or sixth century about a different Pericles, this one a prince of Tyre.
As you can see, not so impressive a specimen.
Anyway, the Roman piece was retold in English by a cat named Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, back around 1400. It’s an exceedingly long, complicated tale, taking place in several different locales: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene, plus scenes on more than one ship. (The Elizabethan production won a Tony award for set design.)
Turns out the story as told by Gower is nearly identical to that in the play we’re talking about. Obviously the copywrite had expired, or Will and his collaborators would have been sued.
But it’s interesting that in the play, perhaps through agreement with some of Gower’s heirs, Mr. Gower is given a part to play – and it’s an important part. He comes on at the beginning of each act (and at play’s end) to tell us the many many bits of this abstruse story which couldn’t possibly be staged with the budget they had. “Gower” is actually listed as “CHORUS” in the play, obviously as a tip of the hat to Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists – though for what reason, the abundant Pericles scholarship has not yet unearthed.
The Play as I read it
When I had been randomly directed to read Pericles as the next stop on my travels through Shakespeare, I was flummoxed about whether I should even bother reading the play, given that it wasn’t written by the Bard. I first decided to read only the parts that the Master was responsible for. It took me about twenty minutes to carefully go through the text searching for all the indefinite articles, and reading each one. It was kind of boring, but gave me a definite feeling of accomplishment. Thumbs up!
The exercise also left me empty emotionally, however. Thumbs down.
Next I determined that I would read at least the parts of the play specifically mentioned in the Intro. These were I.iv, II.iv, II.v (of which it was said “puerile melodrama so badly written that they might almost be parodies of Elizabethan drama at its worst”) plus the two brothel scenes.
Armed with this list I then proceeded (drudge that I am) to work through the whole thing again. I read from the beginning, up through II.v; then sort of skimmed (to follow the story a bit) Act III, started reading more closely at Act IV, and sort of got drawn in, so read the last two acts with attention and even some pleasure.
(My judgement of the three “puerile” scenes: I.iv, “said to be puerile. I can take a hint.”; II.iv, “sort of empty”; II.v, “THIS WHOLE SCENE REALLY IS RIDICULOUS”.)
The brothel scenes. These really were written to make one feel back in Shakespeare. However, I must say that the first scene illustrated very well the disadvantage of reading, rather than seeing, a play. I made a note, “Maybe this is meant to be funny? Not very funny to me.” After all, a scene in which a fourteen year old girl is sold by pirates to a brothel, where she is to become one of the workers, can only achieve a reaction of amusement when it is played for laughs, as it no doubt was. This became more apparent near the end of the scene, and was very much so in the second brothel scene.
The play is sometimes described as a tragicomedy, a “type” which became increasingly popular in early seventeenth century London, thanks to the plays of this type written by Beamont and Fletcher in their brief and popular run as collaborative writers.
Rating
Well … Though I didn’t read the whole play, I did read (or “read”) a good bit of it. And don’t forget, I read all the indefinite articles.
The play was probably written in 1608. Shakespeare was 44; not too old, but in fact in the last decade of his life. He wrote only four more plays after this one, the best (from our point of view) being The Tempest. So I’m willing to give him a break here. Getting a commission to supply only the indefinite articles was, I think, a well-deserved coup. Whatever else he supplied of the latter part of the play seems quite well done. Yeah, it has a bit of the feel of a high-school play. Compared to most of his plays it’s pretty light, to say the most.
But I actually enjoyed the happy-ending denouement. The good guys and bad guys got sorted out and bestowed with their just deserts. I suspect it might be a fun play to watch, with the right over-the-top production. Then off to an after-play debauch, or something of the sort.
The rating I gave (4) is mainly to try to bring the average up a little – not too hard to do when so few ratings have been given. I’d probably feel more comfortable with 3 ½ or even 3 1/3.
If you're a Shakespeare completist you probably don't need encouragement. But if you do, you needn't shy away from this play, it’s worth a look.
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man’s infirmities
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
By any measure available here on goodreads, this is one on Will’s worst plays. In terms of the average rating from my friends (3.0) it’s only beaten (on the downside) by the 2.75 of Cymbeline. Probably has something to do with the fact that it isn’t one of Will’s plays. Wasn’t included in the First Folio of 1623 (even though it had been printed during his life with his name on it); then was included (with six others) in the third Folio (1664). Of those seven, Pericles is the only one to survive in my edition of his works - the other six have been tossed away.
BUT … it’s known that he had no hand in writing most of the play. Nothing of the first two acts, then “some” of what follows. In particular, it’s known that he wrote the two brothel scenes in Act IV (IV.ii and IV.vi). Of course my Shakespeare is over sixty years old. In that time it’s certain that the vast bulk of Shakespeare research and scholarship has been concerned with nothing but trying to establish exactly which words of this play were written by Will! One current theory is that Shakespeare is responsible for only the indefinite articles in the play. The rather shocking evidence for this claim is a scrap of paper unearthed a few years ago, which seems to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting, reading, “I.ii A a an a”. Compare this to
SCENE II. Tyre. A room in the palace.So apparently, Shakespeare had supplied a complete list of the indefinite articles, and the order in which they were to be used in the play. (Something of the reverse of the great Italian Renaissance painters who would leave minor parts of paintings for underlings to do. Here the master did the small work.)
[Enter PERICLES]
PER. [To LORDS without] Let none disturb us. –
Why should this change of thoughts,
The sad companion, dull-eyed melancholy,
Be my so used a guest as not an hour …
[then, 37 lines later, the next indefinite article appears]
… but a spark …
Which Pericles?
Some readers may know of the great Athenian orator and statesman who went by this name
Not the guy. This play is based on a Roman tale from the fifth or sixth century about a different Pericles, this one a prince of Tyre.
As you can see, not so impressive a specimen.
Anyway, the Roman piece was retold in English by a cat named Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, back around 1400. It’s an exceedingly long, complicated tale, taking place in several different locales: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene, plus scenes on more than one ship. (The Elizabethan production won a Tony award for set design.)
Turns out the story as told by Gower is nearly identical to that in the play we’re talking about. Obviously the copywrite had expired, or Will and his collaborators would have been sued.
But it’s interesting that in the play, perhaps through agreement with some of Gower’s heirs, Mr. Gower is given a part to play – and it’s an important part. He comes on at the beginning of each act (and at play’s end) to tell us the many many bits of this abstruse story which couldn’t possibly be staged with the budget they had. “Gower” is actually listed as “CHORUS” in the play, obviously as a tip of the hat to Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists – though for what reason, the abundant Pericles scholarship has not yet unearthed.
The Play as I read it
When I had been randomly directed to read Pericles as the next stop on my travels through Shakespeare, I was flummoxed about whether I should even bother reading the play, given that it wasn’t written by the Bard. I first decided to read only the parts that the Master was responsible for. It took me about twenty minutes to carefully go through the text searching for all the indefinite articles, and reading each one. It was kind of boring, but gave me a definite feeling of accomplishment. Thumbs up!
The exercise also left me empty emotionally, however. Thumbs down.
Next I determined that I would read at least the parts of the play specifically mentioned in the Intro. These were I.iv, II.iv, II.v (of which it was said “puerile melodrama so badly written that they might almost be parodies of Elizabethan drama at its worst”) plus the two brothel scenes.
Armed with this list I then proceeded (drudge that I am) to work through the whole thing again. I read from the beginning, up through II.v; then sort of skimmed (to follow the story a bit) Act III, started reading more closely at Act IV, and sort of got drawn in, so read the last two acts with attention and even some pleasure.
(My judgement of the three “puerile” scenes: I.iv, “said to be puerile. I can take a hint.”; II.iv, “sort of empty”; II.v, “THIS WHOLE SCENE REALLY IS RIDICULOUS”.)
The brothel scenes. These really were written to make one feel back in Shakespeare. However, I must say that the first scene illustrated very well the disadvantage of reading, rather than seeing, a play. I made a note, “Maybe this is meant to be funny? Not very funny to me.” After all, a scene in which a fourteen year old girl is sold by pirates to a brothel, where she is to become one of the workers, can only achieve a reaction of amusement when it is played for laughs, as it no doubt was. This became more apparent near the end of the scene, and was very much so in the second brothel scene.
The play is sometimes described as a tragicomedy, a “type” which became increasingly popular in early seventeenth century London, thanks to the plays of this type written by Beamont and Fletcher in their brief and popular run as collaborative writers.
Rating
Well … Though I didn’t read the whole play, I did read (or “read”) a good bit of it. And don’t forget, I read all the indefinite articles.
The play was probably written in 1608. Shakespeare was 44; not too old, but in fact in the last decade of his life. He wrote only four more plays after this one, the best (from our point of view) being The Tempest. So I’m willing to give him a break here. Getting a commission to supply only the indefinite articles was, I think, a well-deserved coup. Whatever else he supplied of the latter part of the play seems quite well done. Yeah, it has a bit of the feel of a high-school play. Compared to most of his plays it’s pretty light, to say the most.
But I actually enjoyed the happy-ending denouement. The good guys and bad guys got sorted out and bestowed with their just deserts. I suspect it might be a fun play to watch, with the right over-the-top production. Then off to an after-play debauch, or something of the sort.
The rating I gave (4) is mainly to try to bring the average up a little – not too hard to do when so few ratings have been given. I’d probably feel more comfortable with 3 ½ or even 3 1/3.
If you're a Shakespeare completist you probably don't need encouragement. But if you do, you needn't shy away from this play, it’s worth a look.
February 25, 2013
Preface
Although superficially similar in form, most scholars do not consider that the Abridged Pericles belongs to the Madelinian Canon; the most plausible theory holds that it was partly or wholly composed by an imitator, possibly a Manfred Reiner (the spelling is uncertain), who lived in Geneva around 2013.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (abridged version)
ANTIOCHUS: Here's a riddle: if you can't guess, I'm going to kill you. What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening, and sleeps with his daughter?
PERICLES: Humbert Humbert?
ANTIOCHUS: Close enough. But I'm going to kill you anyway.
PERICLES: Hey, no fair!
[Dumb show. Pericles flees Antioch, is shipwrecked, falls in love with Thaisa, marries her, incorrectly believes she has died in childbirth, dumps her body in the sea, places his newborn daughter in the care of an idiot and his homicidal consort, etc. Distressed by this unfortunate series of events, he decides to stop visiting his hairdresser]
PERICLES: [much longer hair] Her voice was ever soft and low
An excellent thing in woman.
ATTENDANT: His wits are wandering, he thinks he's Lear.
PERICLES: And my poor fool is hanged.
ATTENDANT: He means his wife.
[Enter MARINA and THAISA]
MARINA: Hello Daddy!
PERICLES: Thou livest!
THAISA: There was a mixup. They hanged a different fool.
PERICLES: Yay! Group hug!
CHORUS: Don't you wish you could write like William Shakespeare and his unknown collaborator?
THE END
Although superficially similar in form, most scholars do not consider that the Abridged Pericles belongs to the Madelinian Canon; the most plausible theory holds that it was partly or wholly composed by an imitator, possibly a Manfred Reiner (the spelling is uncertain), who lived in Geneva around 2013.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (abridged version)
ANTIOCHUS: Here's a riddle: if you can't guess, I'm going to kill you. What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening, and sleeps with his daughter?
PERICLES: Humbert Humbert?
ANTIOCHUS: Close enough. But I'm going to kill you anyway.
PERICLES: Hey, no fair!
[Dumb show. Pericles flees Antioch, is shipwrecked, falls in love with Thaisa, marries her, incorrectly believes she has died in childbirth, dumps her body in the sea, places his newborn daughter in the care of an idiot and his homicidal consort, etc. Distressed by this unfortunate series of events, he decides to stop visiting his hairdresser]
PERICLES: [much longer hair] Her voice was ever soft and low
An excellent thing in woman.
ATTENDANT: His wits are wandering, he thinks he's Lear.
PERICLES: And my poor fool is hanged.
ATTENDANT: He means his wife.
[Enter MARINA and THAISA]
MARINA: Hello Daddy!
PERICLES: Thou livest!
THAISA: There was a mixup. They hanged a different fool.
PERICLES: Yay! Group hug!
CHORUS: Don't you wish you could write like William Shakespeare and his unknown collaborator?
THE END
November 23, 2017
“Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan the outward habit by the inward man.”
― William Shakespeare, Pericles
Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a foot in the cannon and a foot outside it. It wasn't part of the First Folio, but I decided to still read it this year so I could basically still say I read everything. The play threw me a bit off my 3 x 12 schedule, but meh. Sometimes, you gotta do what ye gotta do. Fair warning GR friends, most likely, the first two acts are NOT composed by the Bard, but the last three make up a lot of the ground. Also, I'm pretty sure Shakespeare spiced a few of George Wilkins' lines in the first two.
No doubt some mouldy tale,
Like Pericles; and stale
As the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish—
Scraps out of every dish
Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub
- Ben Jonson, Ode (to Himself)
Anyway, it begins with an incest riddle and ends with the unwinding and winding back of Pericles' family. There is, packed into this play, a few moments of brilliance AND the story is interesting (just not brilliant). Some of the characters were boring, undercooked, and flat, but I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot about how amazing the reunion (recognition) scene is between Pericles and his daughter.
Favorite quotes:
― “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.” Act 1, Scene 1
― “Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” - Act 1, Scene 2
― “Who makes the fairest show means the most deceit.” - Act 1, Scene 4
― William Shakespeare, Pericles
Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a foot in the cannon and a foot outside it. It wasn't part of the First Folio, but I decided to still read it this year so I could basically still say I read everything. The play threw me a bit off my 3 x 12 schedule, but meh. Sometimes, you gotta do what ye gotta do. Fair warning GR friends, most likely, the first two acts are NOT composed by the Bard, but the last three make up a lot of the ground. Also, I'm pretty sure Shakespeare spiced a few of George Wilkins' lines in the first two.
No doubt some mouldy tale,
Like Pericles; and stale
As the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish—
Scraps out of every dish
Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub
- Ben Jonson, Ode (to Himself)
Anyway, it begins with an incest riddle and ends with the unwinding and winding back of Pericles' family. There is, packed into this play, a few moments of brilliance AND the story is interesting (just not brilliant). Some of the characters were boring, undercooked, and flat, but I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot about how amazing the reunion (recognition) scene is between Pericles and his daughter.
Favorite quotes:
― “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.” Act 1, Scene 1
― “Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” - Act 1, Scene 2
― “Who makes the fairest show means the most deceit.” - Act 1, Scene 4
Read
April 21, 2020This is a triiiiip. It feels kind of beside the point to say that’s because the writing is 2/5 George Wilkins, 3/5 Shakespeare; clearly, the play was crafted 1/3 by man, 2/3 by drugs.
November 5, 2017
Man on the Run
4 November 2017
Well, I believe that I've got seven plays, and the poems, and I would have read all of Shakespeare's extant works. While I do have a copy of his complete works sitting in my lounge room, a part of me doesn't want to read it, first of all because it is a huge volume and would be quite unwieldy while sitting on a crowded morning train, and it would also add an unbearable amount of weight to my already fraying backpack. Since I do prefer the Signet editions (namely because of the essays contained therein) I'm going to have to trawl through some more second hand bookshops to see if I can get my hands on the missing volumes.
Time and time again I have been commenting on how it is much better to watch a play performed as opposed to reading them. I'm going to have to make a confession – I have also been trying to read them as fast as possible, which as it turns out, especially when we have language such as Shakespeare, and also a work written in dramatised form, doesn't quite work out. So, I tried something a little different – when I completed reading this particular work I decided to go back and read it again – this time somewhat slower. Guess what, I got a lot more out of it, and I was actually able to follow along much more easily. I guess that means that when I go back to Dante, it is going to take me a lot longer to get through that work than I originally anticipated.
Pericles is a little different from Shakespeare's other plays. First of all it is technically a lost work. The reason I say that is because the version that I read suggested that only acts three, four, and five were actually Shakespeare's and the first two acts were written by somebody else – apparently some guy named George Wilkins. The suggestion is that Shakespeare may have found this work and decided to rewrite it so that it was more his style – though others seem to suggest that it is actually a collaborative work (and Ted even went as far to suggest that the only Shakespearian elements were the indefinite articles). One thing that stands out, that doesn't really appear in any of his other works, is that we have a narrator that introduces us to each of the scenes, and also tells us what has been happening between the scenes. Interestingly the narrator is John Gower, the writer of one of the sources that Shakespeare used.
This is actually where Pericles stands out from his other plays – the scope is much broader. The action takes place in various locals including Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, Mytiline, and Greece. The action also takes place over a huge amount of time, and at one point there is even a fourteen year gap – which is unusual for Shakespeare. The other thing is that a lot happens between the acts which necessitates the addition of a narrator, and also includes a dumb play, which is where the actors perform actions but don't actually speak – and these dumb plays don't tell us what is going to happen in the scenes, but rather what is happening between the scenes.
So, the play begins in the city of Antioch where a number of suitors are trying to woo the king's daughter. However, there is a hidden secret and that is that the king and his daughter are amorously involved (you read that correctly). So, to deal with that the king proposes a riddle, and anybody who solves the riddle can marry his daughter, but anybody who guesses incorrectly will be killed. As it turns out …
Pericles correctly guesses the answer to the riddle only to discover that the answer reveals their dark secret, and since Pericles has guessed what is going on then he must die – it's a situation of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So, Pericles returns to Tyre only to have the king send an assassin after him. Pericles then puts one of his trusted lords in charge and heads off to Tarsus (while bringing some grain to releave a famine) only to have the assassin track him down there. So Pericles jumps onto another ship and heads off to Greece. Here he comes across another contest where a group of suitors are vying for the King's daughter, and this time Pericles wins and marries the king's daughter.
It doesn't end there though because they discover that the king of Antioch and his daughter have died so they decide to return to Tyre. On the journey his wife appears to die in childbirth and a huge storm sweeps up. The sailors convince him to put his wife in a casket and throw the body overboard, since having a corpse on the ship is a bad omen. The storm doesn't abate, so to keep his child safe he pulls into Tarsus and gives the daughter to the king to look after her and to return when things are much better. However, Pericles gets held up in Tyre for fourteen years and the king's wife becomes insanely jealous of Marina (Pericles' daughter), but before she can kill her she is kidnapped by pirates and sold into a brothel. To cut an insanely long story short, Pericles finds his daughter, and his wife, alive and as Shakespeare once said – All's Well that Ends Well.
I find it interesting that Shakespeare can get away with stuff that many writers of today would be crucified if they even thought of doing something similar. For instance the famous stage direction 'exit, pursued by a bear'. The thing is that we see similar things in this play, such as pirates appearing from nowhere just as Marina is about to be murdered, and just due to blind luck Pericles coming across the daughter as he is wandering around the seas grief stricken. Oh, there is also the scene where the goddess Diana appears to him and tells him that his wife is also alive. Mind you, this isn't the only time such things happen in Shakespeare, as there are other plays where similar discoveries occur (and they are usually the comedies). Mind you, in spoof movies of today you can probably get away with it, but Shakespearian comedies are hardly spoof - they are more like romantic comedies. Imagine an 'exit pursued by a bear' occurring in Crazy Stupid Love. Yet for some reason because Shakespeare is Shakespeare he can get away with it. Oh, and we can't forget the suit of armour magically appearing in the fisherman's net when Pericles arrives in Greece.
The sea and storms play a huge role in Pericles. Actually, we have storms happening in other plays, and they seem to be this dramatic device to set the scene – the storm in the Tempest strands the main characters on the island, and a similar thing happens in Twelfth Night. In the case of The Tempest, this isn't just any old storm, this is a storm conjured by Prosphero to bring his enemies under his control. This isn't the case in Pericles, or Twelfth Night. However, the storms that Pericles faces are of a different type – they work to test him and mould him. The storms are metaphorical as well, since we have his life facing a tempest when he discovers the King of Antioch's dirty little secret.
Then there is the sea – much of the time we have Pericles travelling on the sea. Sure, he is the ruler of Tyre, but he has been forced to travel due to threats to his life. In a way the sea seems to be trying to put a distance between him and his enemies. It also works to bring about a different stage in his life. Everytime Pericles travels by sea he goes to a different land ruled by a different king. In this way it could be easily translated into a science-fiction setting. The lands are divided by the seas, and the seas are dangerous. When Pericles flees Tyre, the assassin, seeing that he has left by sea, believes that he is gone and that his duty has been fulfilled.
Yet the sea also has some life giving quality in that Pericles' wife not only survived crossing the seas in a chest, but while at first she appeared to be dead, he in fact turned out to be alive. Pericles is washed up on the shores of Pentapolis, and in doing so found a new life with a wife and a child, The people who found him were the fisherman, people who farm the seas for food, who also found him a suit of armour so that he could compete in the tournament. Sure, the armour was rusty, but it was still useful and enabled to him defeat all of the other suitors (who simply shrugged their shoulders and wandered off stage, though that suggests that they were the type of people would would wander around the country participating in tournaments for the hand of a woman in marriage). Finally, we also have the pirates, who appear out of nowhere to save Marina from certain death. Pirates are generally connected with the sea, and as such we seen another example of the sea's life giving properties.
The tournament is interesting, though I suspect this comes from the old medieval courtly romance. Twice we see kings put challenges before suitors for their daughter. Okay, one is a trap, but the other isn't. It gives us a good idea of the idea of marriage at the time, that it wasn't the girl's choice, but the father's. In one we have a challenge of strength, and another a challenge of wits. Mind you, this has come down to us today with the tradition of the girl bringing the boy home to meet her parents, and the boy needing to impress not just the father, but the mother as well. Numerous romantic comedies have been created around this tradition.
Personally, this is a wonderful play. It is in part an adventure, a romance, and a comedy (and there are some rather amusing comic elements in it). The final thing I wish to touch about is probably one of the most hilarious sections of the play – the brothel scene. Marina is a virgin, and there seems to be a huge emphasis on the purity of the woman. No doubt Antioch's daughter wasn't pure, but that was kept hidden. However, here were have the opposite, with Marina using all her skill to maintain her virginity. The whole scene has the brothel owners attempting to break Marina, but she is always about to outwit them. The sources had other reasons why she remained pure, but here we see Shakespeare's genius in that Marina simply outwits everybody who is brought before her, and then manages to outwit the owners as well, to the point that she ends up making a name for herself.
As I have indicated this is a fantastic play. I would say that it is a shame that it doesn't seem to be performed all that often, but then again since my only encounters with Shakespearian performances tend to be the big names such as The Globe and the RSC, I can't comment (the Globe last performed it in 2005 while I believe the RSC did it in 2012), and the various Australian companies. However, there are many, many other Shakespearian companies (and festivals) that I don't know about, and I'm sure this play makes an appearance among them every so often.
4 November 2017
Well, I believe that I've got seven plays, and the poems, and I would have read all of Shakespeare's extant works. While I do have a copy of his complete works sitting in my lounge room, a part of me doesn't want to read it, first of all because it is a huge volume and would be quite unwieldy while sitting on a crowded morning train, and it would also add an unbearable amount of weight to my already fraying backpack. Since I do prefer the Signet editions (namely because of the essays contained therein) I'm going to have to trawl through some more second hand bookshops to see if I can get my hands on the missing volumes.
Time and time again I have been commenting on how it is much better to watch a play performed as opposed to reading them. I'm going to have to make a confession – I have also been trying to read them as fast as possible, which as it turns out, especially when we have language such as Shakespeare, and also a work written in dramatised form, doesn't quite work out. So, I tried something a little different – when I completed reading this particular work I decided to go back and read it again – this time somewhat slower. Guess what, I got a lot more out of it, and I was actually able to follow along much more easily. I guess that means that when I go back to Dante, it is going to take me a lot longer to get through that work than I originally anticipated.
Pericles is a little different from Shakespeare's other plays. First of all it is technically a lost work. The reason I say that is because the version that I read suggested that only acts three, four, and five were actually Shakespeare's and the first two acts were written by somebody else – apparently some guy named George Wilkins. The suggestion is that Shakespeare may have found this work and decided to rewrite it so that it was more his style – though others seem to suggest that it is actually a collaborative work (and Ted even went as far to suggest that the only Shakespearian elements were the indefinite articles). One thing that stands out, that doesn't really appear in any of his other works, is that we have a narrator that introduces us to each of the scenes, and also tells us what has been happening between the scenes. Interestingly the narrator is John Gower, the writer of one of the sources that Shakespeare used.
This is actually where Pericles stands out from his other plays – the scope is much broader. The action takes place in various locals including Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, Mytiline, and Greece. The action also takes place over a huge amount of time, and at one point there is even a fourteen year gap – which is unusual for Shakespeare. The other thing is that a lot happens between the acts which necessitates the addition of a narrator, and also includes a dumb play, which is where the actors perform actions but don't actually speak – and these dumb plays don't tell us what is going to happen in the scenes, but rather what is happening between the scenes.
So, the play begins in the city of Antioch where a number of suitors are trying to woo the king's daughter. However, there is a hidden secret and that is that the king and his daughter are amorously involved (you read that correctly). So, to deal with that the king proposes a riddle, and anybody who solves the riddle can marry his daughter, but anybody who guesses incorrectly will be killed. As it turns out …
Pericles correctly guesses the answer to the riddle only to discover that the answer reveals their dark secret, and since Pericles has guessed what is going on then he must die – it's a situation of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So, Pericles returns to Tyre only to have the king send an assassin after him. Pericles then puts one of his trusted lords in charge and heads off to Tarsus (while bringing some grain to releave a famine) only to have the assassin track him down there. So Pericles jumps onto another ship and heads off to Greece. Here he comes across another contest where a group of suitors are vying for the King's daughter, and this time Pericles wins and marries the king's daughter.
It doesn't end there though because they discover that the king of Antioch and his daughter have died so they decide to return to Tyre. On the journey his wife appears to die in childbirth and a huge storm sweeps up. The sailors convince him to put his wife in a casket and throw the body overboard, since having a corpse on the ship is a bad omen. The storm doesn't abate, so to keep his child safe he pulls into Tarsus and gives the daughter to the king to look after her and to return when things are much better. However, Pericles gets held up in Tyre for fourteen years and the king's wife becomes insanely jealous of Marina (Pericles' daughter), but before she can kill her she is kidnapped by pirates and sold into a brothel. To cut an insanely long story short, Pericles finds his daughter, and his wife, alive and as Shakespeare once said – All's Well that Ends Well.
I find it interesting that Shakespeare can get away with stuff that many writers of today would be crucified if they even thought of doing something similar. For instance the famous stage direction 'exit, pursued by a bear'. The thing is that we see similar things in this play, such as pirates appearing from nowhere just as Marina is about to be murdered, and just due to blind luck Pericles coming across the daughter as he is wandering around the seas grief stricken. Oh, there is also the scene where the goddess Diana appears to him and tells him that his wife is also alive. Mind you, this isn't the only time such things happen in Shakespeare, as there are other plays where similar discoveries occur (and they are usually the comedies). Mind you, in spoof movies of today you can probably get away with it, but Shakespearian comedies are hardly spoof - they are more like romantic comedies. Imagine an 'exit pursued by a bear' occurring in Crazy Stupid Love. Yet for some reason because Shakespeare is Shakespeare he can get away with it. Oh, and we can't forget the suit of armour magically appearing in the fisherman's net when Pericles arrives in Greece.
The sea and storms play a huge role in Pericles. Actually, we have storms happening in other plays, and they seem to be this dramatic device to set the scene – the storm in the Tempest strands the main characters on the island, and a similar thing happens in Twelfth Night. In the case of The Tempest, this isn't just any old storm, this is a storm conjured by Prosphero to bring his enemies under his control. This isn't the case in Pericles, or Twelfth Night. However, the storms that Pericles faces are of a different type – they work to test him and mould him. The storms are metaphorical as well, since we have his life facing a tempest when he discovers the King of Antioch's dirty little secret.
Then there is the sea – much of the time we have Pericles travelling on the sea. Sure, he is the ruler of Tyre, but he has been forced to travel due to threats to his life. In a way the sea seems to be trying to put a distance between him and his enemies. It also works to bring about a different stage in his life. Everytime Pericles travels by sea he goes to a different land ruled by a different king. In this way it could be easily translated into a science-fiction setting. The lands are divided by the seas, and the seas are dangerous. When Pericles flees Tyre, the assassin, seeing that he has left by sea, believes that he is gone and that his duty has been fulfilled.
Yet the sea also has some life giving quality in that Pericles' wife not only survived crossing the seas in a chest, but while at first she appeared to be dead, he in fact turned out to be alive. Pericles is washed up on the shores of Pentapolis, and in doing so found a new life with a wife and a child, The people who found him were the fisherman, people who farm the seas for food, who also found him a suit of armour so that he could compete in the tournament. Sure, the armour was rusty, but it was still useful and enabled to him defeat all of the other suitors (who simply shrugged their shoulders and wandered off stage, though that suggests that they were the type of people would would wander around the country participating in tournaments for the hand of a woman in marriage). Finally, we also have the pirates, who appear out of nowhere to save Marina from certain death. Pirates are generally connected with the sea, and as such we seen another example of the sea's life giving properties.
The tournament is interesting, though I suspect this comes from the old medieval courtly romance. Twice we see kings put challenges before suitors for their daughter. Okay, one is a trap, but the other isn't. It gives us a good idea of the idea of marriage at the time, that it wasn't the girl's choice, but the father's. In one we have a challenge of strength, and another a challenge of wits. Mind you, this has come down to us today with the tradition of the girl bringing the boy home to meet her parents, and the boy needing to impress not just the father, but the mother as well. Numerous romantic comedies have been created around this tradition.
Personally, this is a wonderful play. It is in part an adventure, a romance, and a comedy (and there are some rather amusing comic elements in it). The final thing I wish to touch about is probably one of the most hilarious sections of the play – the brothel scene. Marina is a virgin, and there seems to be a huge emphasis on the purity of the woman. No doubt Antioch's daughter wasn't pure, but that was kept hidden. However, here were have the opposite, with Marina using all her skill to maintain her virginity. The whole scene has the brothel owners attempting to break Marina, but she is always about to outwit them. The sources had other reasons why she remained pure, but here we see Shakespeare's genius in that Marina simply outwits everybody who is brought before her, and then manages to outwit the owners as well, to the point that she ends up making a name for herself.
As I have indicated this is a fantastic play. I would say that it is a shame that it doesn't seem to be performed all that often, but then again since my only encounters with Shakespearian performances tend to be the big names such as The Globe and the RSC, I can't comment (the Globe last performed it in 2005 while I believe the RSC did it in 2012), and the various Australian companies. However, there are many, many other Shakespearian companies (and festivals) that I don't know about, and I'm sure this play makes an appearance among them every so often.
October 13, 2022
“Tell thy story.” (3.5 stars)
PERICLES is an episodic play, very Dickens like in its large cast of characters, sprawling locales, and spanning many years. The first two acts of the play are generally considered to have been written by George Wilkins, and one can clearly see Shakespeare’s pen at work in the last three acts. And the play works. It is enjoyable to read (again, especially the last 3 acts) and fun to watch performed.
I gave PERICLES a 3.5 star rating compared to other Shakespeare, not to literature as a whole. The Bard is in a class of his own.
The text boasts many interesting supporting characters, but one of my favorites is Dionyza, the prototypical jealous evil queen/stepmother out of fairytales. Her silky fake sweetness is a delight to read. In a play full of intriguing supporting players, she stands out.
Like most of Shakespeare, PERICLES has some moments that seem especially relevant to our times. In Act 4:2 pimps in a brothel discuss their female acquisitions and the scene is one of the most disturbing in Shakespeare. Considering the modern sex trade, it is eerily present day. It is skin crawling, and Shakespeare spares no subtly while having the characters detail their view of females and the commodity of sex. His making one of the pimps a female ups the queasiness in the scene even more.
Contrasting this is Act 5, which is one of the most tender in all the Bard’s output. I would say it is almost perfect. His last plays had a resounding sentimentality much greater than his earlier work. Personally, I like those moments very much. They are full of grace. I love that.
Quotes:
• “I thank thee, who hath taught my frail mortality to know itself.”
• “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.”
• “One sorrow never comes but brings an heir, that may succeed as his inheritor.”
• “One sin, I know, another doth provoke: murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.”
• “We do not look for reverence but for love…”
• “Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man is but a substance that must yield to you.”
• “How well this honest mirth becomes their labor.”
• “Opinion’s but a fool that makes us scan the outward habit for the inward man.”
• “Virtue and cunning were endowments greater than nobleness and riches.”
• “Pray, but be not tedious, for the gods are quick of ear.”
• “No visor doth become black villainy so well as soft and tender flattery.”
• “Thou art a piece of virtue.”
PERICLES is an epic adventure, spread out over 14 years, ending with grace, reunification and redemption which makes for a very satisfying conclusion. It is a very pleasing read.
The RSC Modern Library editions of the plays of Shakespeare are a quality trade paperback edition of the works of the Bard. This edition contains an Introduction that is mainly a recap of various critical traditions as they relate to this play. It is not too long, and mostly interesting.
The Modern Library edition also includes a scene-by-scene analysis, which can help point out an image or symbol you might have missed. The edition also includes a nice “Further Readings” list specifically for this play.
Frankly, all of the extra essays allow you to dive into the world of the play, and it is all included in one text.
PERICLES is an episodic play, very Dickens like in its large cast of characters, sprawling locales, and spanning many years. The first two acts of the play are generally considered to have been written by George Wilkins, and one can clearly see Shakespeare’s pen at work in the last three acts. And the play works. It is enjoyable to read (again, especially the last 3 acts) and fun to watch performed.
I gave PERICLES a 3.5 star rating compared to other Shakespeare, not to literature as a whole. The Bard is in a class of his own.
The text boasts many interesting supporting characters, but one of my favorites is Dionyza, the prototypical jealous evil queen/stepmother out of fairytales. Her silky fake sweetness is a delight to read. In a play full of intriguing supporting players, she stands out.
Like most of Shakespeare, PERICLES has some moments that seem especially relevant to our times. In Act 4:2 pimps in a brothel discuss their female acquisitions and the scene is one of the most disturbing in Shakespeare. Considering the modern sex trade, it is eerily present day. It is skin crawling, and Shakespeare spares no subtly while having the characters detail their view of females and the commodity of sex. His making one of the pimps a female ups the queasiness in the scene even more.
Contrasting this is Act 5, which is one of the most tender in all the Bard’s output. I would say it is almost perfect. His last plays had a resounding sentimentality much greater than his earlier work. Personally, I like those moments very much. They are full of grace. I love that.
Quotes:
• “I thank thee, who hath taught my frail mortality to know itself.”
• “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.”
• “One sorrow never comes but brings an heir, that may succeed as his inheritor.”
• “One sin, I know, another doth provoke: murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.”
• “We do not look for reverence but for love…”
• “Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man is but a substance that must yield to you.”
• “How well this honest mirth becomes their labor.”
• “Opinion’s but a fool that makes us scan the outward habit for the inward man.”
• “Virtue and cunning were endowments greater than nobleness and riches.”
• “Pray, but be not tedious, for the gods are quick of ear.”
• “No visor doth become black villainy so well as soft and tender flattery.”
• “Thou art a piece of virtue.”
PERICLES is an epic adventure, spread out over 14 years, ending with grace, reunification and redemption which makes for a very satisfying conclusion. It is a very pleasing read.
The RSC Modern Library editions of the plays of Shakespeare are a quality trade paperback edition of the works of the Bard. This edition contains an Introduction that is mainly a recap of various critical traditions as they relate to this play. It is not too long, and mostly interesting.
The Modern Library edition also includes a scene-by-scene analysis, which can help point out an image or symbol you might have missed. The edition also includes a nice “Further Readings” list specifically for this play.
Frankly, all of the extra essays allow you to dive into the world of the play, and it is all included in one text.
September 4, 2023
Escapa aos géneros a que Shakespeare nos habituou mas eu gostei bastante. Com uma perninha na mitologia quase que parece um ensaio para a Odisseia; Péricles, Príncipe de Tiro vê-se em apuros sempre que se faz ao mar acossado por tempestades violentas. O princípio e meio são um ror de desgraças mas o final é feliz. Não temos as habituais guerras de sexos, nem homens que se disfarçam de mulheres e vice-versa, mas temos um romance abençoado por Atena que se lê de forma muito agradável.
May 22, 2019
Πρώτη επαφή με Shakespeare στην ενήλικη ζωή.
Δεν χρειάζεται να πω κάτι... ΤΕΡΆΣΤΙΟΣ
Δεν χρειάζεται να πω κάτι... ΤΕΡΆΣΤΙΟΣ
September 4, 2022
Brodolomna, osvetoljubiva i senzacionalistička pozorišna avantura, puna intriga, spletki, mimoilaženja i gonjenja, rastanaka i sastanaka. Od incesta koji se otkriva rešavanjem zagonetke, turnira kao borbe za žensku ruku, preko živopisnih pirata* koji odvode Periklovu ćerku u roblje ili Džona Gavera, engleskog pesnika iz 14. veka, kao „dramskog hora”, pa i same činjenice da je ovo, po svemu sudeći, koautorski poduhvat Šekspira i izvesnog Džorža Vilkinsa, kojeg je vreme progutalo – svi detalji čine „Perikla” netipičnom i divno sumanutom dramom koja pleni upravo obrtima, preteranošću i neusklađenošću.
*Inače, postoji pretpostavka, relativno skoro načinjena na osnovu istraživanja specifične leksike, da je Šekspir tokom tzv. „izgubljenih godina” radio kao mornar. Jednako uverljivo mi deluje da je poznavao prave ljude i skupljao kroz priču šta mu treba.
*Inače, postoji pretpostavka, relativno skoro načinjena na osnovu istraživanja specifične leksike, da je Šekspir tokom tzv. „izgubljenih godina” radio kao mornar. Jednako uverljivo mi deluje da je poznavao prave ljude i skupljao kroz priču šta mu treba.
October 21, 2020
Pericles is a tale of loss and reconciliation between father and daughter, based upon the classical legend of Pericles of Tyre. Despite the considerable age of this folk story,Ben Jonson once called it a "mouldy tale"
scholars have identified the primary sources that Shakespeare probably used to compose his drama as John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Lawrence Twine's "The Paíteme of Paynfull Adventures".
The majority opinion seems to favor the theory that Shakespeare collaborated with another author, who is said to have written the somewhat inferior first two acts of Pericles, while Shakespeare himself is generally credited with having composed the last three acts of the play.
Shakespeare based the narrator of (Pericles, Prince of Tyre) on "John Gower". One of Gower’s principal works is called Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover), This work contains several Greek and Roman romances translated into English rhyming couplets. One of these tales is called Apollonius of Tyre, on which Shakespeare based Pericles. In Shakespeare's play, Gower primarily serves to narrate the passing of time with rhyming couplets and dumb shows. The use of Gower as narrator allows this epic story to combine more than 14 years of action into a few hours and gives characters the ability to leap across vast geographic areas through Gower’s description.
scholars have identified the primary sources that Shakespeare probably used to compose his drama as John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Lawrence Twine's "The Paíteme of Paynfull Adventures".
The majority opinion seems to favor the theory that Shakespeare collaborated with another author, who is said to have written the somewhat inferior first two acts of Pericles, while Shakespeare himself is generally credited with having composed the last three acts of the play.
Shakespeare based the narrator of (Pericles, Prince of Tyre) on "John Gower". One of Gower’s principal works is called Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover), This work contains several Greek and Roman romances translated into English rhyming couplets. One of these tales is called Apollonius of Tyre, on which Shakespeare based Pericles. In Shakespeare's play, Gower primarily serves to narrate the passing of time with rhyming couplets and dumb shows. The use of Gower as narrator allows this epic story to combine more than 14 years of action into a few hours and gives characters the ability to leap across vast geographic areas through Gower’s description.
November 29, 2017
Okay. For starters, thanks to Marjorie Garber and her interesting piece on the play in her "Shakespeare After All," I enjoyed this more than I otherwise would have. She talks about how the play, a “dramatic romance,” needs to be seen not as a failed effort at the sort of play where the protagonist develops and shows psychological depth through monologues and all, but as a play where the character development and other “deep” aspects are illustrated through mythic and fairy tale motifs. …...
This really did help. When events in the play got particularly... goofy or illogical, I had something to think about other than, “Well, this is pretty dumb.” (Instead, I could think, “Well, this is dumb in a mythically symbolic” sort of way.”).
Anyway. So, her essay was great, and starting with her appreciation and a nice overview, I was prepared to be pleased by what the play has to offer. And I did find stuff to like. Some lovely lines and scenes, especially towards the end, and the situation with the brothel, where Marina converts all the guys who come in to virtue and the brothel owners are increasingly outraged, was funny. Until Lysimachus. The local governor comes in to the brothel looking for a virgin to deflower. So, ick. But... he sees the error of his ways, and I imagined I'd seen the last of that scumbucket. But NO. Rather than retreating to his palace or wherever he lives, he continues along with Marina, and is welcomed by Pericles as a wonderful future son-in-law. So, the fall out from being identified as a particularly loathsome sort of sexual predator is that he is welcomed into a royal family??? Not that this made me think of today's news or anything, but this Completely made me think of current events, with Roy Moore running in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, with a solidly documented record of having, in his 30's, dated young teenaged girls, and with the defense of supportive Evangelical pastors being that “only by dating young teenagers could he find girls who were really pure” (a paraphrase of the argument of Pastor Flip Benham). It's a truly twisted logic that argues that grown men chasing after young girls is a sign of high moral values. Gah. This illustration of the play's timelessness did Not increase my enjoyment.
Still, this isn't one I expect to ever return to, but I'm glad to have read it once. I listened to the ensemble recording from Librivox while reading, and, despite some truly jarring mispronunciations and silly accents, their recording features some excellent performances and did help me enjoy the play. Three stars.
”Some modern audiences – like some early modern ones – have found these plays deficient in realism, but, as we will see, what they actually do is shift the “real” to a different plane, one more aligned to dream, fantasy, and psychology, while retaining, at the same time, a topical relationship to historical event in Shakespeare's day.”
This really did help. When events in the play got particularly... goofy or illogical, I had something to think about other than, “Well, this is pretty dumb.” (Instead, I could think, “Well, this is dumb in a mythically symbolic” sort of way.”).
Anyway. So, her essay was great, and starting with her appreciation and a nice overview, I was prepared to be pleased by what the play has to offer. And I did find stuff to like. Some lovely lines and scenes, especially towards the end, and the situation with the brothel, where Marina converts all the guys who come in to virtue and the brothel owners are increasingly outraged, was funny. Until Lysimachus. The local governor comes in to the brothel looking for a virgin to deflower. So, ick. But... he sees the error of his ways, and I imagined I'd seen the last of that scumbucket. But NO. Rather than retreating to his palace or wherever he lives, he continues along with Marina, and is welcomed by Pericles as a wonderful future son-in-law. So, the fall out from being identified as a particularly loathsome sort of sexual predator is that he is welcomed into a royal family??? Not that this made me think of today's news or anything, but this Completely made me think of current events, with Roy Moore running in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, with a solidly documented record of having, in his 30's, dated young teenaged girls, and with the defense of supportive Evangelical pastors being that “only by dating young teenagers could he find girls who were really pure” (a paraphrase of the argument of Pastor Flip Benham). It's a truly twisted logic that argues that grown men chasing after young girls is a sign of high moral values. Gah. This illustration of the play's timelessness did Not increase my enjoyment.
Still, this isn't one I expect to ever return to, but I'm glad to have read it once. I listened to the ensemble recording from Librivox while reading, and, despite some truly jarring mispronunciations and silly accents, their recording features some excellent performances and did help me enjoy the play. Three stars.
February 11, 2020
What a fun play! Reading Pericles is one of the last plays on my Shakespeare TBR (now there are only four left and then I will have read Willy's entire canon!), so it's good to see that I have no longer any comprehension issues with Shakespeare whatsoever. When I started reading him in August 2015, I was so overwhelmed and confused, and had a hard time navigating through the story ... now, almost five years later, I'm so comfortable with reading his plays. It's crazy.
Pericles is one of the most engaging and gripping plays in Shakespeare's canon. Due to the fact that the narration is almost episodic and we are treated to a huge time span and many different locations, the play itself feels like an epic heroes' journey. In many ways Pericles is a kind of classical hero figure—always ready to enter a contest or competition to prove himself.
Pericles starts out in Antioch, where he desires to marry Antiochus's daughter. After he discovers their secret (aka that the both of them are in an incestuous relationship...), he flees to Tyre. First off, I thought that Antiochus was one of the dumbest characters in this play. If he didn't want other people to find out about the incest, why did he make the riddle (that all the suitors of his daughter have to solve) so easy??? like??? He explicitly mentions the incest in there? I am confusion. Secondly, I don't appreciate how the topic of incest was handled in general, since Antiochus' daughter is condemned as a "sinful dame" and Pericles loses all interest in and respect for her ... even though we learn that her father forced her to this "sinful act".
Pericles lands in Tarsus and hands over his child, Marina, to Cleon and Dionyza, since he thinks it won't survive the journey to Tyre. Then times passes; Pericles is king of Tyre, Thaisa becomes a priestess for Diana, and Marina grows up. But Dionyza plots to have Leonine murder Marina, because she takes all the attention away from her own daughter.
Meanwhile, Pericles goes on a trip to Tarsus to reunite with his daughter, but Cleon and Dionyza tell him that she has died, and show him the monument they have ordered built in order to erase their complicity in the matter. Pericles is distraught, and sets to the seas again. However, in a fantastic turn of events the whole family gets reunited at the end. I really liked the spiritual nature of Thaisa's "resurrection" and her posing as the priestess Diana.
Gower returns to offer a conclusion, noting that we have seen evil punished (Antiochus and his daughter have died, and when the people of Tarsus discovered Cleon's evil, they revolted and killed him and his wife in a palace fire), but that we have met a variety of good people along the way, such as loyal Helicanus and charitable Cerimon. Pericles and his family have endured the vagaries of fortune, and through it all remained virtuous, so in the end they were rewarded with the joy of being reunited.
Overall, Pericles is a well-executed and complex play that I enjoyed following along. There are great musings about power and the abuse of power. I liked the strong morale at the end, and even though some parts of the story didn't make much sense, it is a round tale that's highly engaging.
Pericles is one of the most engaging and gripping plays in Shakespeare's canon. Due to the fact that the narration is almost episodic and we are treated to a huge time span and many different locations, the play itself feels like an epic heroes' journey. In many ways Pericles is a kind of classical hero figure—always ready to enter a contest or competition to prove himself.
Pericles starts out in Antioch, where he desires to marry Antiochus's daughter. After he discovers their secret (aka that the both of them are in an incestuous relationship...), he flees to Tyre. First off, I thought that Antiochus was one of the dumbest characters in this play. If he didn't want other people to find out about the incest, why did he make the riddle (that all the suitors of his daughter have to solve) so easy??? like??? He explicitly mentions the incest in there? I am confusion. Secondly, I don't appreciate how the topic of incest was handled in general, since Antiochus' daughter is condemned as a "sinful dame" and Pericles loses all interest in and respect for her ... even though we learn that her father forced her to this "sinful act".
As heaven had lent her all his grace;Prone to melancholy, Pericles worries about Antiochus trying to have him killed, and sets off on more adventures that lead him to Tarsus, where king Cleon and his wife Dionyza bemoan the famine that has beset their nation. But when he is called back to Tyre, Pericles is shipwrecked in a storm in Pentapolis.
With whom the father liking took,
And her to incest did provoke:
Bad child; worse father! to entice his own
To evil should be done by none:
By Juno, that is queen of marriage,Some fishermen tell him about king Simonides's daughter, a lovely girl who will be married to whoever wins a jousting contest the following day. Pericles determines to enter the contest. He ends up winning the tournament and the heart of Thaisa (home girl is really out here lusting for Pericles' body, see quote above). After their marriage and the death of Antiochus, they set off for Tyre ... but, who would have thought, they get shipwrecked again. Thaisa "dies" during the storm giving birth to her daughter, whom Pericles then names Marina. The shipmaster insists that Thaisa's body must be thrown overboard, or the storm won't stop, and Pericles complies. (Later, it turns out that Thaisa wasn't even dead ... so, welp.)
All viands that I eat do seem unsavoury.
Wishing him my meat. Sure, he's a gallant gentleman.
Pericles lands in Tarsus and hands over his child, Marina, to Cleon and Dionyza, since he thinks it won't survive the journey to Tyre. Then times passes; Pericles is king of Tyre, Thaisa becomes a priestess for Diana, and Marina grows up. But Dionyza plots to have Leonine murder Marina, because she takes all the attention away from her own daughter.
LEONINEHer plan fails but pirates seize Marina and sell her to a brother in Myteline. There Marina refuses to give up her honor, despite the many men who come wanting to buy her virginity. Personally, I found that plot point was handled in a weird way, because Shakespeare, on the one hand, showed the horrors of prostitution ("Boult, take her away; use her at thy pleasure: / crack the glass of her virginity, and make the rest malleable.", "I must have your maidenhead taken off, or the common / hangman shall execute it."), but then, on the other hand, didn't really go there ... because Marina is able to convince the men who come to the brothel that her honor is sacred, and so the men leave seeking virtue in their own lives. AS IF! That's the most unrealistic bullshit ever. Marina even manages to convince her "pimp" that she'll work as a tutor instead, education girls in respectable households.
I will do't; but yet she is a goodly creature.
DIONYZA
The fitter, then, the gods should have her. Here
she comes weeping for her only mistress' death.
Thou art resolved?
Meanwhile, Pericles goes on a trip to Tarsus to reunite with his daughter, but Cleon and Dionyza tell him that she has died, and show him the monument they have ordered built in order to erase their complicity in the matter. Pericles is distraught, and sets to the seas again. However, in a fantastic turn of events the whole family gets reunited at the end. I really liked the spiritual nature of Thaisa's "resurrection" and her posing as the priestess Diana.
Gower returns to offer a conclusion, noting that we have seen evil punished (Antiochus and his daughter have died, and when the people of Tarsus discovered Cleon's evil, they revolted and killed him and his wife in a palace fire), but that we have met a variety of good people along the way, such as loyal Helicanus and charitable Cerimon. Pericles and his family have endured the vagaries of fortune, and through it all remained virtuous, so in the end they were rewarded with the joy of being reunited.
And what ensues in this fell stormI really enjoyed Gower in his function as the chorus. Gower plays a narrator for this play, coming on before and between scenes to retell the action of previous scenes, and to instigate "dumb shows," where some action of the play is pantomimed to advance the action of the play. He also gives the epilogue at the end of the play, pulling together the threads. (John Gower is also the name of a fourteenth-century English poet, whose story of Apollonius of Tyre in the eighth book of his Confessio Amantis served as an important source for this play.)
Shall for itself itself perform.
I nill relate, action may
Conveniently the rest convey;
Which might not what by me is told.
In your imagination hold
This stage the ship, upon whose deck
The sea-tost Pericles appears to speak.
Overall, Pericles is a well-executed and complex play that I enjoyed following along. There are great musings about power and the abuse of power. I liked the strong morale at the end, and even though some parts of the story didn't make much sense, it is a round tale that's highly engaging.
July 29, 2016
Pericles achieves a sense of scene-hopping adventure unequaled in Shakespeare’s repertoire, and as a perhaps inevitable corollary, it is also the play that most strains credulity, The Winter’s Tale notwithstanding. The dei ex machina arrive in the form of dream instructions, magical healings, and a pirate kidnapping. And yet, like Pericles with his Neptune-defying navigations, we can weather the plot. What is less easy to settle into is the variation in writing quality. While Shakespeare probably outlined the entire play, it seems as if one George Wilkins—“a lowlife hack, possibly a Shakespearean hanger-on…a whoremonger” in the unminceable words of Harold Bloom—wrote out the first two acts, which may explain the adventuresome shallowness that begins the story. In spite of Wilkins’ supposed qualities, I find the beginning not so off-putting, and even Bloom concedes that these two acts are “quite playable”, coming off much better in performance than on the page.
Although the writing inconsistency is undeniable, it feels more acute within the Shakespeare material than between that of Wilkins and the Bard. After writing some of the most internally-active and personality-driven characters of all time (Hamlet, Iago, Rosalind, et al.), Shakespeare somewhat bizarrely chooses to leave the major players in Pericles as impenetrable blanks, knowable only by their type. For our title character, that means being courageous, honorable, and in all things mannishly commendable, only just human and unfortunate enough to earn our sympathy. For Marina, it is the same story except with a certain feminine ideal, which first and foremost includes intact virginity, the quality that ultimately leads us into contact with the only palpably human elements in the play—the employees of the Mitylene whorehouse.
Given the plot-heavy adventure through the first three acts, it is easy to avoid recognizing the main characters’ lack of depth; once we meet Boult, Pandar, and the Bawd, however, the discrepancy between characterizations is too great to ignore. These three strive in vain to rid Marina of her maidenhead and enrich themselves in the process���well beyond what they have achieved lately in the market:
Bawd:
We were never so much out of creatures. We have but
poor three, and they can do no more than they can
do; and they with continual action are even as good as rotten.
Pandar :
Therefore let's have fresh ones, whate'er we pay for
them. If there be not a conscience to be used in
every trade, we shall never prosper.
Bawd:
Thou sayest true: 'tis not our bringing up of poor
bastards,--as, I think, I have brought up some eleven—
Boult:
Ay, to eleven; and brought them down again. But
shall I search the market?
Bawd:
What else, man? The stuff we have, a strong wind
will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden.
Pandar:
Thou sayest true; they're too unwholesome, o'
conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead, that
lay with the little baggage.
Boult:
Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat
for worms. But I'll go search the market.
Exit.
Their scheming seems at first horrible, particularly given Marina’s youth, innocence, and recent near-death experience. But once we learn that she has the upper hand and can thwart their every attempt at selling her, even converting her clients to chivalry in the process, we realize the joke is on us as well as her pimps; unlike in Measure for Measure, we may sit back and enjoy these well-written scenes, safe in the knowledge that designed depravity cannot win the day. Perhaps Shakespeare was too bored by the traditional story to put in the difficult human-infusing effort for the leads, or maybe he just loved composing these common, comically tawdry characters above all others (see also Falstaff of the Henry IV plays and the seedy Viennese personalities of Measure for Measure). In any case, Act IV through the reunion scene of Act V is high-grade Shakespeare interposed in a middling affair.
In mulling over the reunion scene, it seems difficult at first to justify such a positive response to melodrama. And yet Shakespearean language can transform what ought to be overripe, rotting sentimentalism into something truly poignant. As in the finale of The Winter’s Tale, Pericles’ reunion with his daughter Marina achieves that Bard-specific alchemy of aesthetic brilliance combined with human ardor and wonderment, leaving me well beyond any critical detachment. Pericles’ realization is slow; when at the penultimate moment of belief in the presence of his living daughter he cries out to his loyal friend…
O Helicanus! strike me, honour'd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.
…it is evidence of the Bard’s preternatural abilities that I want to rush in and present him, Pericles, that flattest of Shakespearean leads, with the final confirmation that yes! his daughter lives and stands before him.
Although the writing inconsistency is undeniable, it feels more acute within the Shakespeare material than between that of Wilkins and the Bard. After writing some of the most internally-active and personality-driven characters of all time (Hamlet, Iago, Rosalind, et al.), Shakespeare somewhat bizarrely chooses to leave the major players in Pericles as impenetrable blanks, knowable only by their type. For our title character, that means being courageous, honorable, and in all things mannishly commendable, only just human and unfortunate enough to earn our sympathy. For Marina, it is the same story except with a certain feminine ideal, which first and foremost includes intact virginity, the quality that ultimately leads us into contact with the only palpably human elements in the play—the employees of the Mitylene whorehouse.
Given the plot-heavy adventure through the first three acts, it is easy to avoid recognizing the main characters’ lack of depth; once we meet Boult, Pandar, and the Bawd, however, the discrepancy between characterizations is too great to ignore. These three strive in vain to rid Marina of her maidenhead and enrich themselves in the process���well beyond what they have achieved lately in the market:
Bawd:
We were never so much out of creatures. We have but
poor three, and they can do no more than they can
do; and they with continual action are even as good as rotten.
Pandar :
Therefore let's have fresh ones, whate'er we pay for
them. If there be not a conscience to be used in
every trade, we shall never prosper.
Bawd:
Thou sayest true: 'tis not our bringing up of poor
bastards,--as, I think, I have brought up some eleven—
Boult:
Ay, to eleven; and brought them down again. But
shall I search the market?
Bawd:
What else, man? The stuff we have, a strong wind
will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden.
Pandar:
Thou sayest true; they're too unwholesome, o'
conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead, that
lay with the little baggage.
Boult:
Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat
for worms. But I'll go search the market.
Exit.
Their scheming seems at first horrible, particularly given Marina’s youth, innocence, and recent near-death experience. But once we learn that she has the upper hand and can thwart their every attempt at selling her, even converting her clients to chivalry in the process, we realize the joke is on us as well as her pimps; unlike in Measure for Measure, we may sit back and enjoy these well-written scenes, safe in the knowledge that designed depravity cannot win the day. Perhaps Shakespeare was too bored by the traditional story to put in the difficult human-infusing effort for the leads, or maybe he just loved composing these common, comically tawdry characters above all others (see also Falstaff of the Henry IV plays and the seedy Viennese personalities of Measure for Measure). In any case, Act IV through the reunion scene of Act V is high-grade Shakespeare interposed in a middling affair.
In mulling over the reunion scene, it seems difficult at first to justify such a positive response to melodrama. And yet Shakespearean language can transform what ought to be overripe, rotting sentimentalism into something truly poignant. As in the finale of The Winter’s Tale, Pericles’ reunion with his daughter Marina achieves that Bard-specific alchemy of aesthetic brilliance combined with human ardor and wonderment, leaving me well beyond any critical detachment. Pericles’ realization is slow; when at the penultimate moment of belief in the presence of his living daughter he cries out to his loyal friend…
O Helicanus! strike me, honour'd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.
…it is evidence of the Bard’s preternatural abilities that I want to rush in and present him, Pericles, that flattest of Shakespearean leads, with the final confirmation that yes! his daughter lives and stands before him.
March 23, 2023
„Перикъл“ е много приятен и смислен романс... Въпреки че не е от най-великите Шекспирови творби, историята ми донесе бурни емоции и определено си заслужава четенето!
„Във честен дом, спасена от разврата,
Марина разцъфтяла е завчас:
във танца за богиня е призната
и славена за сладкия си глас;
книжовниците с мъдрост удивила,
шевици тя тъй дивни майстори,
че в тях черешки и цветя от свила
на истинските сякаш са сестри.
Затуй безброй възпитанички има
и с тях бродира, пее и чете,
а мерзостната сводница й взима
това, с което я обсипват те…
Но временно оставили я, нека
при нейния баща се върнем пак:
след бурята черупката му лека
спокойно е понесъл вятър благ
и ей го, стига Митилин, където
живее дъщеря му в тъжен плен,
градът когато сбран е край морето
да чествува Нептуновия ден.
Над кораба съгледал черно знаме,
лети към него в лодка Лизимах…
И следващата сцена тъкмо там е
и ний ви молим с волния размах
на своята фантазия отново
да създадете кораб и море.
Започваме. Стаили шум и слово,
внимавайте и слушайте добре!“
Превод: Валери Петров
„Във честен дом, спасена от разврата,
Марина разцъфтяла е завчас:
във танца за богиня е призната
и славена за сладкия си глас;
книжовниците с мъдрост удивила,
шевици тя тъй дивни майстори,
че в тях черешки и цветя от свила
на истинските сякаш са сестри.
Затуй безброй възпитанички има
и с тях бродира, пее и чете,
а мерзостната сводница й взима
това, с което я обсипват те…
Но временно оставили я, нека
при нейния баща се върнем пак:
след бурята черупката му лека
спокойно е понесъл вятър благ
и ей го, стига Митилин, където
живее дъщеря му в тъжен плен,
градът когато сбран е край морето
да чествува Нептуновия ден.
Над кораба съгледал черно знаме,
лети към него в лодка Лизимах…
И следващата сцена тъкмо там е
и ний ви молим с волния размах
на своята фантазия отново
да създадете кораб и море.
Започваме. Стаили шум и слово,
внимавайте и слушайте добре!“
Превод: Валери Петров
September 21, 2020
The church folks are having a fit
It matters to us not one bit
Trash gives us a rise
And we're not surprised
You named this new venue Cockpit
It matters to us not one bit
Trash gives us a rise
And we're not surprised
You named this new venue Cockpit
January 18, 2019
Pericles tertemiz, soylu bir genç. Bir Kralın kızına talip oluyor, Kralın soracağı soruyu bilirse evlenecek, bilemezse ölüme gidecek diğer birçok damat adayı gibi.
Sevdiklerini kaybediyor, Tanrıların gazabına uğruyor, müthiş acılar çekiyor. Entrikalar, tesadüfler, ızdıraplar, sevinçler bir arada yaşanıyor.
Sevdiklerini kaybediyor, Tanrıların gazabına uğruyor, müthiş acılar çekiyor. Entrikalar, tesadüfler, ızdıraplar, sevinçler bir arada yaşanıyor.
July 1, 2007
a shakespeare play with gratuitous pirates and a prostitute who talks men into finding religion - what's not to love?
May 8, 2016
Probably not one of the best among Shakespeare’s plays, this romance is still quite enjoyable. The version which I saw was recorded in 2015 at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario, Canada). It was extremely well acted and the presentation was beautiful. Instead of employing John Gower as a narrator, a chorus of priestesses of Diana were introduced. Some of the narration was even beautifully sung, a touch which I loved.
Many of the themes that Shakespeare was interested in make another appearance in Pericles. There is some exploration of what it takes to be a good ruler. People are lost and found again. Other people fall instantly in love (a perennial happening in the Bard’s plays). And purity, beauty, and royalty are rescued from the disaster.
For me, the most moving line was uttered by Pericles, when he finds the wife that he has believed dead for years. He himself had pushed her coffin overboard during the storm. When they are reunited, he declares, “O, come, be buried a second time within these arms.” That one little sentence brought tears to my eyes.
I can see where modern audiences might not be impressed by the lack of logic in several aspects of the play—for instance, why does Pericles wife become a priestess of Diana instead of contacting him to let him know that she is alive? Plus, the coincidence of Pericles, his queen, and his daughter, all ending up in one place at play’s end is beyond belief. Pericles acknowledges this when he cries, “This, this. No more, you gods! Your present kindness makes my past miseries sports.”
If you are a fan of the Bard, I would recommend that you see Pericles performed. If you are unsure about Shakespeare, try one of his better known plays, perhaps Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, and if you enjoy those, consider seeing Pericles.
Many of the themes that Shakespeare was interested in make another appearance in Pericles. There is some exploration of what it takes to be a good ruler. People are lost and found again. Other people fall instantly in love (a perennial happening in the Bard’s plays). And purity, beauty, and royalty are rescued from the disaster.
For me, the most moving line was uttered by Pericles, when he finds the wife that he has believed dead for years. He himself had pushed her coffin overboard during the storm. When they are reunited, he declares, “O, come, be buried a second time within these arms.” That one little sentence brought tears to my eyes.
I can see where modern audiences might not be impressed by the lack of logic in several aspects of the play—for instance, why does Pericles wife become a priestess of Diana instead of contacting him to let him know that she is alive? Plus, the coincidence of Pericles, his queen, and his daughter, all ending up in one place at play’s end is beyond belief. Pericles acknowledges this when he cries, “This, this. No more, you gods! Your present kindness makes my past miseries sports.”
If you are a fan of the Bard, I would recommend that you see Pericles performed. If you are unsure about Shakespeare, try one of his better known plays, perhaps Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, and if you enjoy those, consider seeing Pericles.
November 21, 2018
This was a reread for me so I knew what I was getting into. In my efforts to read the whole of Shakespeare's cannon I made the mistake of trying to read this out loud to the kids several years ago. The first scene put an end to that as it is about incest. The rest of the play reads more like a lesser Winter's Tale. I often wonder how these things came about in Shakespeare's mind. It appears he only collaborated on this one so maybe A Winter's Tale was his own improvement minus the incest.
As to the incest-It is not dealt with gratuitously at all. It is told with a blatant moral underpinning. Certainly not something to be read aloud to children but not entirely without merit if you don't count that it is not that great of a play altogether.
2018: This play has grown on me as I age. I am moving my rating from 2 to 3.5. There is the possibility that this play may be the most moral of all Shakespeare’s plays, after all he was aging when he wrote it late in his career.
As to the incest-It is not dealt with gratuitously at all. It is told with a blatant moral underpinning. Certainly not something to be read aloud to children but not entirely without merit if you don't count that it is not that great of a play altogether.
2018: This play has grown on me as I age. I am moving my rating from 2 to 3.5. There is the possibility that this play may be the most moral of all Shakespeare’s plays, after all he was aging when he wrote it late in his career.
April 16, 2017
From BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3:
A gripping new production of one of Shakespeare's later and least performed plays, Pericles, in which murder, incest, intrigue, shipwrecks and prostitution tear King Pericles' family apart.
Adapted for radio and directed by acclaimed British theatre writer/director Neil Bartlett with a multicultural cast including opera legend Sir Willard White as Gower, the RSC's rising star Paapa Essiedu as Pericles and renowned British film actress Adjoa Andoh as Dionyza. A Greek chorus trio provides an innovative way to deliver pirates, fishermen, knights and villains galore.
Pericles is a problem play on stage given the long script, wordy passages, multiple shipwrecks and sea storms, and large number of locations. With a pacey, music-rich new adaptation for radio by Neil Bartlett and the rich, beguiling tones of Willard White as Gower, Pericles becomes a lively, shocking and moving roller-coaster journey, perfect for radio drama, and reclaims Pericles as one of Shakespeare's plays definitely worthy of more frequent productions.
Marina's song composed by Simon Deacon
Pianist, Josef Janik
A Bona Broadcasting production for BBC Radio 3.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08kyb9b
4* Antony and Cleopatra
4* A Midsummer Night's Dream
3* Twelfth Night
5* Lenny Henry in Shakespeare's Othello
5* Richard III
3* The Tempest
5* Hamlet
3* Romeo and Juliet
3* As You Like It
5* Macbeth
4* The Taming of the Shrew
4* Julius Caesar
3* The Winter's tale
5* King Lear
4* Henry VI
4* Henry VIII
4* Pericles
TR The Comedy of Errors
About Shakespeare (fiction&non-fiction):
3* Mistress Shakespeare by Karen Harper
3* Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works by Robert Nye
3* Shakespeare's Local by Pete Brown
4* Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor
2* Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith
3* Another Shakespeare by Martyn Wade
4* 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro
4* Molière et Shakespeare by Paul Stapfer
3* A Play for the Heart: The Death of Shakespeare by Nick Warburton
4* William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo
A gripping new production of one of Shakespeare's later and least performed plays, Pericles, in which murder, incest, intrigue, shipwrecks and prostitution tear King Pericles' family apart.
Adapted for radio and directed by acclaimed British theatre writer/director Neil Bartlett with a multicultural cast including opera legend Sir Willard White as Gower, the RSC's rising star Paapa Essiedu as Pericles and renowned British film actress Adjoa Andoh as Dionyza. A Greek chorus trio provides an innovative way to deliver pirates, fishermen, knights and villains galore.
Pericles is a problem play on stage given the long script, wordy passages, multiple shipwrecks and sea storms, and large number of locations. With a pacey, music-rich new adaptation for radio by Neil Bartlett and the rich, beguiling tones of Willard White as Gower, Pericles becomes a lively, shocking and moving roller-coaster journey, perfect for radio drama, and reclaims Pericles as one of Shakespeare's plays definitely worthy of more frequent productions.
Marina's song composed by Simon Deacon
Pianist, Josef Janik
A Bona Broadcasting production for BBC Radio 3.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08kyb9b
4* Antony and Cleopatra
4* A Midsummer Night's Dream
3* Twelfth Night
5* Lenny Henry in Shakespeare's Othello
5* Richard III
3* The Tempest
5* Hamlet
3* Romeo and Juliet
3* As You Like It
5* Macbeth
4* The Taming of the Shrew
4* Julius Caesar
3* The Winter's tale
5* King Lear
4* Henry VI
4* Henry VIII
4* Pericles
TR The Comedy of Errors
About Shakespeare (fiction&non-fiction):
3* Mistress Shakespeare by Karen Harper
3* Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works by Robert Nye
3* Shakespeare's Local by Pete Brown
4* Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor
2* Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith
3* Another Shakespeare by Martyn Wade
4* 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro
4* Molière et Shakespeare by Paul Stapfer
3* A Play for the Heart: The Death of Shakespeare by Nick Warburton
4* William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo
October 8, 2022
“Pericles” is an episodic play, very Dickens like in its large cast of characters, sprawling locales, and spanning many years. The first two acts of the play are generally considered to have been written by George Wilkins, and one can clearly see Shakespeare’s pen at work in the last three acts. And the play works. It is enjoyable to read (again, especially the last 3 acts) and fun to watch performed.
I gave "Pericles" a 3.5 star rating compared to other Shakespeare, not to literature as a whole. The Bard is in a class of his own.
The text boasts many interesting supporting characters, but one of my favorites is Dionyza, the prototypical jealous evil queen/stepmother out of fairytales. Her silky fake sweetness is a delight to read. In a play full of intriguing supporting players, she stands out.
Like most of Shakespeare, “Pericles” has some moments that seem especially relevant to our times. In Act 4:2 pimps in a brothel discuss their female acquisitions and the scene is one of the most disturbing in Shakespeare. Considering the modern sex trade it is eerily present day. It is skin crawling, and Shakespeare spares no subtly while having them detail their view of females and the commodity of sex. His making one of the pimps a female ups the queasiness in the scene even more.
Contrasting this is Act 5, which is one of the most tender in all of the Bard’s output. His last plays had a resounding sentimentality much greater than his earlier work. Personally, I like those moments very much.
“Pericles” is an epic adventure, spread out over 14 years with grace, reunification and redemption to end it all in a satisfying manner. It is a very pleasing read.
As for the Pelican Shakespeare series, they are my favorite editions since the scholarly research is usually top notch and the editions themselves look good as an aesthetic unit. It looks and feels like a play and this compliments the text's contents admirably. The Pelican series was recently reedited and has the latest scholarship on Shakespeare and his time period. Well priced and well worth it.
I gave "Pericles" a 3.5 star rating compared to other Shakespeare, not to literature as a whole. The Bard is in a class of his own.
The text boasts many interesting supporting characters, but one of my favorites is Dionyza, the prototypical jealous evil queen/stepmother out of fairytales. Her silky fake sweetness is a delight to read. In a play full of intriguing supporting players, she stands out.
Like most of Shakespeare, “Pericles” has some moments that seem especially relevant to our times. In Act 4:2 pimps in a brothel discuss their female acquisitions and the scene is one of the most disturbing in Shakespeare. Considering the modern sex trade it is eerily present day. It is skin crawling, and Shakespeare spares no subtly while having them detail their view of females and the commodity of sex. His making one of the pimps a female ups the queasiness in the scene even more.
Contrasting this is Act 5, which is one of the most tender in all of the Bard’s output. His last plays had a resounding sentimentality much greater than his earlier work. Personally, I like those moments very much.
“Pericles” is an epic adventure, spread out over 14 years with grace, reunification and redemption to end it all in a satisfying manner. It is a very pleasing read.
As for the Pelican Shakespeare series, they are my favorite editions since the scholarly research is usually top notch and the editions themselves look good as an aesthetic unit. It looks and feels like a play and this compliments the text's contents admirably. The Pelican series was recently reedited and has the latest scholarship on Shakespeare and his time period. Well priced and well worth it.
May 4, 2019
I must write fan-fiction about this. It will be an erotic love story between the ingenue writer who wrote the first half of the play (Harold Bloom harshly describes him as “a lowlife hack, possibly a Shakespearean hanger-on…a whoremonger”), between this rough trade and *daddy Shakespeare*: so encouraging, so wise with his wisdom, his fairy tale logic, able to write dreamy passages like these:
A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly: nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells. O Lychorida,
Bid Nestor bring me spices, ink and paper,
My casket and my jewels; and bid Nicander
Bring me the satin coffer: lay the babe
Upon the pillow: hie thee, whiles I say
A priestly farewell to her: suddenly, woman.
*
Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! O, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes! O, how, Lychorida,
How does my queen? Thou stormest venomously;
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard. Lychorida!--Lucina, O
Divinest patroness, and midwife gentle
To those that cry by night, convey thy deity
Aboard our dancing boat; make swift the pangs
Of my queen's travails!
A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly: nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin'd, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells. O Lychorida,
Bid Nestor bring me spices, ink and paper,
My casket and my jewels; and bid Nicander
Bring me the satin coffer: lay the babe
Upon the pillow: hie thee, whiles I say
A priestly farewell to her: suddenly, woman.
*
Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! O, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes! O, how, Lychorida,
How does my queen? Thou stormest venomously;
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard. Lychorida!--Lucina, O
Divinest patroness, and midwife gentle
To those that cry by night, convey thy deity
Aboard our dancing boat; make swift the pangs
Of my queen's travails!
Read
April 30, 2019an underrated shakespeare play in my opinion. Like, unpopular opinion but it's actually good & more enjoyable then Some Plays (cough. king lear. )
December 14, 2020
December 2020: Read again with PS. Bumping it up a star because it's so ridiculous and fun.
Read with PS in June! Had so much fun revisiting this wacky play.
Read with PS in June! Had so much fun revisiting this wacky play.
June 18, 2023
The title character doesn't die and everyone gets a happy ending? Are we sure Shakespeare wrote this? 🤔😂🙈
I said this in my update when I finished this, and turns out, Shakespeare didn't really write this, though he probably wrote some parts of it. Aside from the above, it doesn't have the usual layers of meanings to the prose that you'd expect from the Bard, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Pericles figures out that Antiochus is a skeezy slime bucket (his poor daughter) and has to flee for his life, which ends up working out pretty well for him. Is this a comedy? Definitely not. Is this a tragedy? I would have said yes in the first three acts. I'm not really sure what this play is attempting to be.
I said this in my update when I finished this, and turns out, Shakespeare didn't really write this, though he probably wrote some parts of it. Aside from the above, it doesn't have the usual layers of meanings to the prose that you'd expect from the Bard, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Pericles figures out that Antiochus is a skeezy slime bucket (his poor daughter) and has to flee for his life, which ends up working out pretty well for him. Is this a comedy? Definitely not. Is this a tragedy? I would have said yes in the first three acts. I'm not really sure what this play is attempting to be.
March 30, 2017
I would guess this is a pretty obscure, rarely performed Shakespeare play these days, but back in his day it was really popular and it was revived quickly later in the 17th Century when the theatres re-opened after the plague had closed them. This shows a fairly big shift in taste, because Pericles is a pretty faithful adaptation of a prose Romance that is akin to Mediaeval Saintly Lives Romances, complete with preposterous plot with numerous ridiculous coincidences, exiled/orphaned/mistaken for dead characters, undeserved suffering and triumphant return home.
I like that kind of tale, just accepting the silliness, and was amused by the goings on; how many times can one person get shipwrecked? How many supposedly dead relatives can you be unexpectedly re-united with? Basically, it's a romp and I'm not surprised contemporary audiences loved it en mass; it's the equivalent of a bad "guilty pleasure" Hollywood movie nowadays.
There's some debate as to whether Shakespeare wrote all of it. Many have noted "marked improvement" after about ~2/5 the way through. Few argue that Shakespeare had no hand in it, these days.
Some people thought it was a very early play, because not very good but later scholarship suggests otherwise. I suspect that, given that it is actually a late play and very faithful to its source material, that Shakespeare, who was then by then very busy running a theatre company (admittedly jointly with others) and acting, had less time to write than in earlier years and needed a new play in a particular hurry.
I suspect modern audiences tolerate the preposterous plots of the comedies because they are too busy laughing but reject the same in Pericles because it's considered "serious" and they can't take it seriously, which conflict leaves them disliking it. But it's a Romance; it shouldn't be taken seriously. The preposterousness is part of the fun and a feel good ending makes one - feel good!
Not all of Shakespeare is profound...
I like that kind of tale, just accepting the silliness, and was amused by the goings on; how many times can one person get shipwrecked? How many supposedly dead relatives can you be unexpectedly re-united with? Basically, it's a romp and I'm not surprised contemporary audiences loved it en mass; it's the equivalent of a bad "guilty pleasure" Hollywood movie nowadays.
There's some debate as to whether Shakespeare wrote all of it. Many have noted "marked improvement" after about ~2/5 the way through. Few argue that Shakespeare had no hand in it, these days.
Some people thought it was a very early play, because not very good but later scholarship suggests otherwise. I suspect that, given that it is actually a late play and very faithful to its source material, that Shakespeare, who was then by then very busy running a theatre company (admittedly jointly with others) and acting, had less time to write than in earlier years and needed a new play in a particular hurry.
I suspect modern audiences tolerate the preposterous plots of the comedies because they are too busy laughing but reject the same in Pericles because it's considered "serious" and they can't take it seriously, which conflict leaves them disliking it. But it's a Romance; it shouldn't be taken seriously. The preposterousness is part of the fun and a feel good ending makes one - feel good!
Not all of Shakespeare is profound...
August 15, 2017
I re-read this play co-authored by William Shakespeare and an unknown dramatist because it figured in a great New Wave film by Jacques Rivette called Paris nous appartient (1961). It is by no means the Bard's greatest comedy, and it takes place all over the Eastern Mediterranean: in Tyre, Ephesus, Tarsus, Antioch, Pentapolis, and Mytilene.
Pericles (unrelated to the Athenian leader of the same name) is a king who learns the correct answer to a riddle, whose answer is that Antiochus, King of Antioch, had an incestuous relationship with his own daughter. Lest the word go out to his people, he arranges to have Pericles killed. Suspecting Antiochus, Pericles sails to Pentapolis, where he weds Thaisa, daughter of King Simonides. Learning that Antiochus and his daughter were dead, he decides to return to Tyre. But a giant storm comes up, during which his daughter Marina is born but Thaisa supposedly dies in childbirth.
Well, Thaisa doesn't actually die: Her coffin is found at Ephesus with Thaisa alive. For some odd reason, Pericles leaves Marina with the King of Tarsus -- for a period of many years. She is kidnapped by pirates and sold by them into a bawdy-house. Rather than sinking into prostitution, she encounters Pericles, and both encounter Thaisa at Ephesus. Whew!
It's a wild plot, scattered over a wide territory and taking a couple of decades, but it is not quite so horrible as one would think.
Pericles (unrelated to the Athenian leader of the same name) is a king who learns the correct answer to a riddle, whose answer is that Antiochus, King of Antioch, had an incestuous relationship with his own daughter. Lest the word go out to his people, he arranges to have Pericles killed. Suspecting Antiochus, Pericles sails to Pentapolis, where he weds Thaisa, daughter of King Simonides. Learning that Antiochus and his daughter were dead, he decides to return to Tyre. But a giant storm comes up, during which his daughter Marina is born but Thaisa supposedly dies in childbirth.
Well, Thaisa doesn't actually die: Her coffin is found at Ephesus with Thaisa alive. For some odd reason, Pericles leaves Marina with the King of Tarsus -- for a period of many years. She is kidnapped by pirates and sold by them into a bawdy-house. Rather than sinking into prostitution, she encounters Pericles, and both encounter Thaisa at Ephesus. Whew!
It's a wild plot, scattered over a wide territory and taking a couple of decades, but it is not quite so horrible as one would think.
February 9, 2012
Ben Jonson called this a 'moldy tale'. He was being charitable. It's rank Jacobean cheese.
The author, who wrote some fairly successful plays in the 1590s, never really lived up to his early promise. Sad.
The author, who wrote some fairly successful plays in the 1590s, never really lived up to his early promise. Sad.
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