A prince solves a riddle and must flee because he has solved it
Antiochus's riddle conceals incest with his daughter; the right answer is a death sentence
Shakespeare · Late romances
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
c. 1607–08
Late romance — probably co-written with George Wilkins, from Gower's Confessio Amantis
A medieval poet rises from the dead to narrate an episodic sea-romance. A prince solves a riddle that exposes a king's incest and must flee for his life; he is shipwrecked, wins a tournament and a bride, loses her to a storm at sea and consigns her coffin to the waves, leaves his newborn daughter with foster-parents who try to have her killed, and is reunited with both after fourteen years of silence and grief. Left out of the First Folio, it was one of the most popular plays of its day.
How to spot them
- ▸A chorus in old-fashioned rhyme, spoken by the ghost of a medieval English poet
- ▸A riddle at Antioch whose true answer is that the king sleeps with his own daughter
- ▸A queen dies in childbirth in a storm and is thrown overboard in a caulked chest
- ▸A daughter is sold to a brothel in Mytilene and converts every customer to virtue
- ▸A father who has not spoken for fourteen years hears the music of the spheres
Scenes, characters & lines
A rusty suit of armour is hauled up in a fisherman's net in time for a tournament
The armour of the prince's father, recovered at Pentapolis, where he wins Thaisa
A coffin is washed ashore at Ephesus and the woman inside revives
Lord Cerimon restores Thaisa, who becomes a priestess of Diana
A girl in a Mytilene brothel talks her clients out of their purpose
Marina, sold by pirates, defeats the Bawd, the Pander and Boult with her virtue
'A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear'
The sea burial of the queen, cast 'scarcely coffin'd in the ooze' with spices and a scroll
A foster-mother plots the murder of the ward who outshines her own daughter
Dionyza of Tarsus sets Leonine on Marina, who is carried off by pirates instead
A goddess appears in a dream and sends the hero to her temple at Ephesus
Diana's vision, which brings about the second reunion
Key ideas
- Modern scholarship generally gives the first two acts to George Wilkins and the last three to Shakespeare, the recognition scenes being unmistakably his
- Gower's narration, in deliberately archaic four-stress couplets, frames the play as an old tale told rather than an action shown
Quick-fire facts
- •Omitted from the First Folio of 1623; it was added to the second issue of the Third Folio in 1664, with six other plays now mostly rejected
- •The 1609 quarto is badly printed, probably from memory, and is the only early text
- •The chorus is John Gower, the 14th-century poet whose Confessio Amantis supplies the story, along with Laurence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures
- •George Wilkins published a prose novel, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, in 1608
- •It was among the most popular plays of its time, revived at the Restoration with Thomas Betterton in the title role
- •The name Pericles has nothing to do with the Athenian statesman; the hero of the source is called Apollonius of Tyre
- •Ben Jonson called it 'a mouldy tale' in a bad-tempered ode of 1629
- •Marina's name is given because she was born at sea
Drill it — 9 cards
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