Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Helena Haraštová
The Puzzle of Pericles:
the Play versus the Novel
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph. D.
2017
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. MgA. Helena Haraštová
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Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my husband and my daughter for their love, patience and understanding during the process of writing this thesis.
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Table of Contents Introduction ...... 1 1. Sources of Inspiration ...... 6 1.1 Apollonius of Tyre ...... 6 1.2 John Gower's Confessio Amantis ...... 8 1.3 Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures ...... 9 1.4 Change of Names ...... 11 1.5 Other Sources ...... 13 2. Pericles – the Play ...... 14 2.1 Historical Context ...... 14 2.2 Looking for the Genre ...... 18 2.3 Unique Structural Features: Choruses and Dumb-Shows ...... 21 2.4 Bad Quarto and the Theory of Ur-Pericles ...... 24 2.5 Two Different Parts ...... 27 2.6 Theories about Authorship ...... 28 2.6.1 Early Years ...... 28 2.6.2 Literary Experiment ...... 29 2.6.3 Improving Another Playwright's Work ...... 29 2.6.4 Collaboration ...... 31 3. The Novel ...... 33 3.1 Novelistic Version of the Successful Play (History, Popularity, Context) ...... 33 3.2 Who Was George Wilkins ...... 35 3.3 Genre and Style ...... 38 4. Comparison between Pericles and The Painful Adventures ...... 40 4.1 Language, Verses, Rhythm ...... 42 4.2 Composition, Plot and Story ...... 45 4.3. Characters ...... 48 4.3.1 Main Characters ...... 48 4.3.2 Minor Characters ...... 52 4.4 Themes and Meaning ...... 56 Conclusion ...... 59 Works Cited ...... 62 Summary ...... 66 Resumé ...... 68
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Introduction
“So, as always with Pericles, the key words are uncertainty and popularity.”
(Gossett 163)
Shakespeare's late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre (published in 1609) or just
Pericles, as it is often referred to and will be referred to in this thesis, is usually ascribed
(at least partly) to William Shakespeare. However, it remains one of the most mysterious works of the English theatre, and has always disturbed its readers. The text contains clear logical contradictions, countless corrupted verses as well as confusing and inhomogeneous passages.
When studying the play as it is known today, it seems unbelievable that it was extremely popular at the beginning of the 17th century. But to study the play as it is known today also means to search for an older version, the original without later corruptions. In such a challenging task, modern scholars have often resorted to a nearly forgotten novel entitled The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608) or just The Painful
Adventures by George Wilkins.
Pericles is definitely different from all other Shakespeare's dramas, since it is the only Shakespearian play which has only been preserved in the form of a bad quarto, as opposed to a number of other plays (see Maguire 3), first quartos of which are considered corrupted but which have also been preserved in other – better and more credible – versions.
Pericles is one of Shakespeare's late plays, not only because of the date of its assumed first appearance but also due to its romantic themes combining pre-Christian motifs with ideals typical of Christian medieval literature (for details, see Gossett 112– 1
121). The complexity of the plot, various settings, the unusually long time axis as well as the proximity to medieval genres only confirm the unique position of the play in the
Shakespearian canon.
Yet, the text is so full of evident errors and imperfections that it is very complicated to conceive of its original beauty. Philip Edwards calls Pericles “a hidden play, a play concealed from us by a text of confusion and with a clumsiness and poverty of language.”
(qtd. in Warren 478) But despite this, the story stays fascinating and powerful; modern theatre productions of Pericles usually gain great success (for more information about modern productions of Pericles, see Gossett 91–106). There is something in Pericles that did not allow the play to sink into oblivion.
This thesis will try to determine the substance of this unusual literary power, first by analysing the context, genre and stylistics of the play, then by introducing Wilkins's novel, and finally by comparing the play and the novel in terms of linguistic means, interpretation of the story, emphasizing various traits of the characters and working with specific timeless as well as temporal topics. It seems evident that the success and attractiveness of the play originate not only in the story but also in the unusual form, as well as the ambiguities about the authorship. That is why in this thesis, so much attention is given to various analyses of the primary sources. Hopefully this approach will lead to better understanding the key elements which cause that the play has always enthralled readers and the audience.
Any analysis of Pericles would be incomplete if older sources were not taken into account as the basic stepping stone. In fact, Prince Pericles is based on the character of
Apollonius of Tyre, a fictional king and a hero of many tales and manuscripts popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, and still quite well-known to the Elizabethan
2 audience. Of the available sources of the story, it is certain that Shakespeare and Wilkins knew John Gower's Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390) as well as Lawrence Twine's The
Pattern of Painful Adventures (1576), but there are other sources which might have been used. Chapter 1 deals both with the two main sources of the play and several other works that serve as an important source for better comprehending Pericles.
Although William Shakespeare is considered the play's author in almost all editions including the First (bad) Quarto of 1609, and there is hardly any reason to doubt his authorship, practically all contemporary scholars agree that Pericles was written “almost certainly not by Shakespeare alone.” (Gossett 1) The main attention of scholars has always been aimed to the puzzling difference between the first two acts and the rest of the play. These two parts differ in all possible ways and to comprehend the reason means to understand the origin as well as the exceptionality of the play. Nowadays, it is widely accepted that the author with whom Shakespeare wrote Pericles was George Wilkins
(ca.1576–1618), although there are still opinions maintaining the collaborator was someone else. The issue of dual authorship will be further discussed in the second part of chapter 2 of this thesis, which focuses on the play in detail.
Nevertheless, George Wilkins will probably always be remembered as the author of the novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It seems quite obvious that this work, printed in 1608, the year of the premiere of the play in Globe, exploits the popularity of the theatrical version; after all, Wilkins himself mentions success of the play in the introduction to his book. Yet, this thesis will hopefully prove that the novel is an autonomous piece of work, not a mere copy. It will attempt to prove so mainly by the comparison with the play but also by presenting various academic studies devoted to
Wilkins's work.
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It is surprising that studies written about Pericles and the novel usually concentrate on the question of authorship and the level of corruption in the play but there are only sporadic works concerning content and thematic similarities and differences. That is why chapter 3 of this thesis deals with the novel itself and its author, while, separately, chapter
4 aims to compare the play and the novel thoroughly. The general comparison is essential not only for literary historians to see how the play was composed but also for modern theatre-makers to ameliorate questionable parts of the play with the assistance of a text that might be closer to the original form of the play than the corrupted bad quarto version that is available today.
Since this thesis aims to present up-to-date information while not favouring any solution to the puzzle of Pericles that could be viewed as extreme, it uses mainly the third series of the Arden Shakespeare edition of Pericles, edited by Suzanne Gossett in 2004, who seems to be “moderately conservative,” (Bliss 356) that means sceptical enough to pay the same attention to different theories about the origin of the play but also open enough to give a lot of evidence in support of George Wilkins as the collaborator.
From time to time, examples from the reconstructed text of the Oxford Shakespeare edition is presented through Gossett, but as David Bevington criticizes in his review, the version presented by these editors is “often only indirectly based on Wilkins,” (504) as they tend to impose their own interpretation on the original text. Gossett even calls their approach extreme (39). Since they work with the novel by Wilkins as if it were another version of the play itself, the author of this thesis decided not to consult their edition of
Pericles as the main source of information. On the other hand, it is helpful to know that
Gary Taylor and MacDonald P. Jackson, the editors of the above-mentioned edition, were quite successful in attempting the first “full-scale reconstruction based upon Wilkins.”
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(Warren 478)
At the opposite end to the Oxford Shakespeare stands the New Cambridge
Shakespeare (1998), an edition by Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, who reject even those emendations to the First Quarto that have been accepted for hundreds of years
(Gossett 39), and deny any participation of Wilkins in the text (Warren 479). For
DelVecchio and Hammond's approach can easily be perceived as radical and it is definitely solitary, this thesis does not take their edition into account.
The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre is published very rarely, and that is the reason why a copy of the very first modern edition of it, edited by Professor Tycho
Mommsen (1857), is used in this thesis. After all, studies of German Shakespearian scholars of the 19th century, including Mommsen, are considered of high quality.
Mommsen's edition is an exact reprint of the 17th-century original, so it contains no later emendations.
The thesis is also based on numerous studies written throughout the 20th century
(Harry T. Baker, George B. Dickson, T. S. Graves etc.). The fact that even very old works, written about a hundred years ago, are cited here means that the debate about Pericles and The Painful Adventures has been topical and stormy in the modern period of
Shakespearian studies. Some of the older works cited in this thesis laid the foundations of the contemporary research and have not been disproved or put aside; on the contrary, their results determine later studies.
There are spelling differences concerning names between Pericles in the Arden edition of Shakespeare and Wilkins's novel, edited by Mommsen. In this thesis, the modern transcription, originating in the Arden Shakespeare, is used in all cases.
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1. Sources of Inspiration
1.1 Apollonius of Tyre
According to Hoeniger and others, there are only two sources, traces of which can be “demonstrated with certainty” (Hoeniger, Introduction xiv) in Shakespeare's Pericles: the last part of John Gower's poem Confessio Amantis, written in 1393, and Lawrence
Twine's novella The Pattern of Painful Adventures, first printed in 1576.
However, the story itself is significantly older and it is important to remember that it was still quite well-known in the 17th century in England (Hoeniger, Introduction xiii).
Gossett claims that it comes from the 3rd century AD or even an earlier date (Gossett 70), but it is impossible to track down its origin since the first surviving version comes from the 9th century. Allusions can be found in works that are several hundred years older, though, so it is probable that the story was initially a Hellenistic novel, originally written in Greek (Hoeniger, Introduction xiii). This cannot be proved since the oldest manuscripts are Latin but the presumption is supported by linguistic analyses suggesting that the oldest
Latin versions are translations from Greek (Mommsen XIII). What can be stated, however, is the fact that the story was almost certainly artificially invented as a fiction and was not part of any religious myth. And what is more, in no medieval source was the main character's name Pericles – he was always known as Apollonius of Tyre.
An Anglo-Saxon fragment written in the 9th century is the first version of the story known in today's Great Britain (Gossett 70). An incomplete prose of the same topic, written only two centuries later in Old English, was preserved in a unique manuscript which was found in the library of the Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.
John Gower's tetrameter poem was probably inspired by Geoffrey of Viterbo's Latin
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Pantheon, or Universal Chronicle, written around 1186 (Gossett 71, Hoeniger,
Introduction xiii). And there were about one hundred more adaptations of the story in the
Middle Ages, some of which seem more prominent than others: Gower's contemporary
Geoffrey Chaucer used some motives of the story in his introduction to The Man of Law's
Tale, it was also part of the comprehensive Latin Gesta Romanorum (Hoeniger,
Introduction xiii).
The Renaissance brought about a new wave of adaptations of the subject in the form of prose, poem and drama. Not all writers were enthusiastic about the ancient theme, though – for example, Ben Jonson regarded it as a “mouldy tale.” (qtd. in Hoeniger,
Introduction xiv) He was probably speaking about the non-traditional themes of incest, rape, life in a brothel, kidnap or seemingly dead people “returning” to life, common in the story. Of the Renaissance versions, Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful
Adventures is the most relevant to the subject of this thesis, as both Shakespeare and
Wilkins draw inspiration from this novella.
As Hoeniger suggests, there have been arguments that Pericles was based on an earlier play which has been lost (Hoeniger, Introduction xiv). As for this theory, Harry T.
Baker notes that in October 1587, a book The Historye of Apolonius and Camilla entered the Stationers' Register, a list of licenced publications by the guild of bookmakers and printers, and suggests this could have been a play based on the story of Apollonius and his wife (leaving out their daughter). He also says there are two Dutch plays written in
1634 which “follow their stories separately,” and deduces that these plays could be translations of two original English plays which Shakespeare could have known (Baker
109–10). What is more, Baker dares to suggest there are fragments of the original plays left in the first two acts of Pericles, as according to Baker there are “passages which seem
7 above Wilkins's level.” (Baker 111) Nevertheless, scholars who promote such assumptions have presented no evidence yet, and the history of the play is so complicated and shrouded in mystery that this hypothesis will perhaps never be confirmed.
1.2 John Gower's Confessio Amantis John Gower's extensive poem Confessio Amantis was completed around 1393, about one hundred years later it was printed and its popularity raised again around the year 1550 – approximately fourteen years before William Shakespeare was born – when it was published again at least twice (Gossett 71).
John Gower (1327–1408) was an eminent English poet who wrote his works in
Latin, French and English. Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession) is a 33,000-line long Middle English poem composed in octosyllabic couplets and divided into eight books and a prologue. In this most famous book of his, the main character of his poem,
Amans, desires to reveal his purpose in life, and Genius, Venus's priest, helps him re- discover his identity. The stories serve as clues which – in simple terms – indicate what is right and what is wrong, judged by Christian medieval standards. Besides the story of
Apollonius of Tyre (called “Appolinus of Tyr” here), present in the last book, there are other legends and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, including Diogenes, Socrates,
Jason and Medea, Theseus and Ariadne or Ulysses.
According to Russell A. Peck, it is important to realize that the story of Apollonius works as the climax of the whole plot and thus stays in the centre of Gower's message to the readers: the most terrible sins are those that violate the rules of Nature (Peck xvi). In
Gower's view, such sins include self-love, self-profit and lechery. The core of the story, as it is understood in Confessio Amantis, proclaims that it is king Antioch's incest that causes not only his own destruction but also suffering of other people (Peck xvii) – but
8 the sinner is punished at the end so that evil no longer exists and good endures. Apollonius is presented as Antioch's opposite, he represents “Christian love, chastity, honesty and faith,” (Peck xvii) characteristic features worth following. This schematic interpretation is typical of medieval literature and differs significantly from Shakespeare and Wilkins's much more complex versions.
However, it is clear that Shakespeare was inspired by Gower's poem, at least formally. He adopted most of the names Gower uses, although in several cases he changed their bearers. Hoeniger also notices that half of the scenes in the play follow the order of events as they are recorded in Gower's poem, not as they are arranged in Twine or any other available source (Hoeniger, Introduction xv).
However, the most definite proof of Shakespeare's familiarity with the medieval source is the character of John Gower as the guide of the audience in the play. The fact that Gower is supposed to be present on the stage and proclaim verses in a literary style not dissimilar to the poet's original stylistics is unique in Shakespeare's work, and it definitely influences the overall impression of the play, enriching it with a specific exoticness. Nevertheless, as the following chapters will prove, the interpretation of the story in Pericles is much more modern than in Gower.
1.3 Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures
Yet, the interest of Elizabethans in Gower's poem would probably not have been so strong if Lawrence Twine, a writer, translator and Oxford scholar, had not published his novella The Pattern of Painful Adventures in 1576. Today, this “simple pamphlet”
(Gossett 106) is considered to be a prose translation of the French version of the 153rd story of the Latin Gesta Romanorum (Hoeniger, Introduction xiv). Twine's novella was
9 reprinted at least three times by 1607, the edition of 1607 being published only one year before the play Pericles was staged for the first time. Although Twine did not influence
Pericles as much as Gower did, there are strong connections especially in the brothel scenes (Muir 253); on the other hand, in the case of Wilkins's novel, about one third of the text is taken from Twine verbatim (Hoeniger, Introduction xvi), which constitutes the basis for almost all the differences between the play and Wilkins's novel.
The differences between Twine's novella and Shakespeare's play consist mainly in story details. As Twine no longer follows medieval clarity of Gower but does not come near Shakespeare's Renaissance syncretism, his interpretation of the story stays somewhere in the middle – for example, Apollonius is sent to find his lost wife by God in Gower, by the pagan goddess Diana in Shakespeare, but by an angel in Twine
(Gossett 115); Twine also focuses on “ups and downs of Fortune,” not on punishing evil as Gower or “meaning in human suffering” as the authors of the play (Hoeniger,
Introduction xvii). In fact, the Shakespearian looking for the purpose of suffering pervades many of his works and makes them timeless, while Gower's and Twine's versions of the story do not exceed common ideology of their historical periods.
Gossett also lists other details in which Twine and Shakespeare differ: whereas
Pericles donates food to starving Tarsians, Apollonius demands payment at first (75); whereas Marina knows she is growing up in a foster family, Tharsia discovers the truth when her nurse dies (75); a daughter of Lysimachus/Athanagoras is mentioned in Twine but not in Shakespeare (145); Twine writes about Apollonius's son born after his reunion with his wife but Shakespeare leaves this part out (145), as if he knew that such a complete happy ending would look false. It is worth noticing that Wilkins often follows Twine's version in details, so this is how much of the differences between the play and the novel
10 originated. Since Wilkins's novel does not really exceed Twine's novella and general features of Renaissance prose, it does not become timeless – unlike the play.
1.4 Change of Names
It has already been mentioned that Shakespeare changed names of several of the characters. It is reasonable to assume that some of the names were transformed to accord metrically with blank verse used in the play, for example, the shorter name Pericles is more suitable for creating rhythmic verses than the longer name Apollonius; however, a dramatist is also free enough to invent his own names for his characters which he finds both acoustically and semantically adequate so there is no need to reduce the motivations to a bare verse theory.
The table below (Fig. 1) contains the changes in names concerning Gower's,
Twine's and Shakespeare's versions of the original story:
Shakespeare Gower Twine Comment
Marina Thaise Tharsia It is almost sure that Shakespeare was
inspired by the Latin word mare, meaning
the sea, since Marina was born on board a
ship in a storm.
Thaisa unnamed Lucina Lucina is a Roman goddess of childbirth.
Lysimachus Athenagoras Athanagoras
Cleon Stranguilio Stranguilio
Simonides Artestrates Altistrates
Leonine Leonin In Shakespeare, Leonine is a killer hired by
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Dionyza to murder Marina, while in Gower,
Leonin is the owner of the brothel.
Pericles Appolinus Apollonius
Fig. 1: Comparison of the names in three versions of the story of Apollonius of Tyre.
Scholars have tried to answer the question of on what basis Shakespeare decided to name the hero of his play Pericles. Gossett (72–3) assembled three of the most distinguished theories. According to one of them, advocated by Victor Skretkowicz Jr. or the Shakesperian commentator of the 18th century George Steevens, the name Pericles is derived from Pyrocles, the main male character in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. Arcadia (as the title is often shortened to) was finished shortly before
Shakespeare started his career as a dramatist so it is reasonable to believe that the playwright was inspired by the prose writer. Shakespeare drew inspiration from Arcadia when writing some of his other plays, such as King Lear, after all (Shapiro 62). The name, however, might refer to the famous Athenian politician whom Plutarch praises for patience (Gossett 72). Shakespeare's Pericles is remarkable for his patience, too; moreover, the dramatist often resorted to fortunes of great ancient heroes throughout his career (Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra and others). Gossett quotes the Australian scholar Simon Palfrey who maintains that Shakespeare needed to commend Pericles for his “civic virtue” and efforts to maintain a “sustainable balanced state.” (qtd. in Gossett 73) It is true that Shakespeare's England was quite unstable and
James I, crowned the King of England and Ireland only five years before Pericles was written, promoted kingship to be revered and praised. Last but not least, the name Pericles reminds of the Latin word “periculum” (danger, peril).
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1.5 Other Sources
It should not be forgotten that a number of individual scenes in Pericles might have also been inspired by other literary sources. In his essay (138–39), William Elton reveals that in 1596, Lazarus Piot translated a collection of one hundred tales by Alexander van den Busche called The Orator: Handling a hundred seuerall Discourses, in forme of
Declamations: Some of the Arguments being drawn from Titus Liuius and other ancient
Writers, the rest of the Authors owne inuention: Part of which are of matters happened in our Age. It is believed that Shakespeare could have read the book since one of the stories resembles Merchant of Venice. And surprisingly, the 53rd tale called Of her who hauing killed a man being in the stewes claimed for her chastity and innocence to be an Abbesse contains a story not dissimilar to Marina's fortunes in Act 4 of the play.
Besides, Hoeniger (Introduction xviii) speaks about two biblical sources: the deuterocanonical book Maccabees 2, which describes a revolt against king Antioch IV
(reign 175–164 BC), and the Book of Jonah which includes a dialogue of fishermen similar to the one in Act 2 of the play. On the other hand, wittiness of the fishermen is depicted in John Day's Law Tricks, too (Hoeniger, Introduction xix).
Scholars also point out the scene in Act 1 where the famine in Tarsus is described.
This might have been inspired by multiple sources: Gossett (73–74) mentions Christ's
Tears over Jerusalem by Thomas Nashe, a tract published in 1593, and the fact that there were food riots in Midlands in 1607.
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2. Pericles – the Play
2.1 Historical Context
For contemporary lay reading and theatregoing audiences, the most startling fact which leaps to the eye when she opens the First Quarto edition of Pericles, Prince of Tyre is probably the boastful proclamation on the title page that the drama is a “much admired play,” and the ensuing specification “as it hath been diuers and sundry times acted by his
Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side” (Gossett 10) (Globe was considered one of the most prestigious stages in England). In The Painful Adventures of Pericles,
Prince of Tyre, published one year earlier, the author, too, declares that the story was
“excellently presented” in the Globe (Wilkins 7). Even if contemporary readers did not trust such exalting words – and it is necessary to add that such praising of a work of literature was not rare in the Renaissance – there is more evidence which scholars can turn to. First of all, it is the unusually high number of productions of Pericles between
1610 and 1631 about which records have been preserved – at the Globe (Gossett 79), at
Whitehall and even in the provinces (Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles”
461). Also, Pericles was one of the first plays to be revived after the Interregnum (Gossett
32). And what is more, Pericles must have been considered a play worth seeing both by travelling actors in the villages and the high circles, because it was played to please the
French and the Venetian ambassadors in 1606 or 1607 (Graves 546) and at the same time,
Pericles (similarly to King Lear) was often “acted in public places.” (Gossett 88) And last but not least, there has been a remarkable number of six quartos published by 1635
(Gossett 8), the second being published in 1609, the same year as the First Quarto, and the third only two years later (Gossett 32). That shows extraordinary popularity and
14 demand. The play must have been so well-known that other Jacobean dramatists, for example John Fletcher in The Woman's Prize, could openly refer to it (Gossett 3).
So, what might seem to be of poor quality today (especially the first two acts), was probably accepted with rapture in the 17th century among both commoners and nobility.
Although some people believe this proves that the original text must have been different from the version known today, there is a much simpler explanation: the play works better when staged than when read.
The date of the first performance of Pericles or even the dramatist's completion of the play will most likely never be known. It is certain, though, that the play entered the
Stationers' Register on May 20, 1608 (Gossett 16) and the very first reference to the work is only ten days older (Parrott 107), which means the premiere must have taken place earlier. T. S. Graves studied letters written by the Venetian and the French ambassadors in London in 1606 and 1607 who are known to have seen a Pericles performance during their stay in England, and came to the conclusion that the premiere must have taken place in November or December 1606 or very early in 1607 (Graves 546–47). But it has been specified later that theatres in London were closed between July and December 1606 and all of 1607 except a week in April because of plague (Gossett 55), so there are three possible dates: December 1606, April 1607 or the year 1608. The theatres were reopened in April 1608 and the new wave of plague came to the city in July when they were closed again so the premiere could have taken place between April and July 1608 (this dating is preferred by Gossett).
If this estimation is compared to Shakespeare's career, it becomes clear that the play was finished during some of the most difficult times in his life. In 1607, Shakespeare's youngest brother Edmund died aged twenty-seven. He survived his little son Edward only
15 by four months (Gossett 60). This tragedy certainly reminded Shakespeare of the death of his eleven-year-old son Hamnet in 1596 and influenced Shakespeare's mind so traces of it can be found in those parts of Pericles where the death of relatives is mentioned.
However, in February 1608, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna gave birth to a girl (Gossett
61), which probably significantly reduced Shakespeare's sorrow.
It has already been said that Pericles was uncommonly popular; but despite this fact, mysteries have accompanied the play since the beginning. In 1623 (seven years after
Shakespeare's death), the First Folio, or the first complete collection of Shakespeare's dramas, was published. It contained 36 works in cases of which Shakespeare's authorship was generally recognized. For many of the playwright's works, the First Folio has been a unique and irreplaceable source of reliable textual materials. However, Pericles (as well as The Two Noble Kinsmen and two lost plays, Love's Labour's Won and Cardenio) was not included in this set. The reason why the editors decided not to add Pericles to the First
Folio can only be guessed as there is no written documentation. Maybe they did not manage to acquire the original text or rights to print it. Maybe they knew the available text was in a bad condition so they did not want to publish a corrupted version. Maybe they knew that in this case, Shakespeare was not a sole author (Gossett 34).
In any case, Pericles did not appear in any collection until the publication of the
Third Folio in 1664; and what is more, it was not present in the first, 1663 edition of the
Third Folio, either; it was finally put into a supplement of the second issue (Gossett 36).
But there are several quartos of Pericles that are older, some of them published when
Shakespeare and his colleagues were still alive. If the text of the play published in the
1664 folio had not been Shakespeare's Pericles, the mistake would have been detected much earlier because the text in the Third Folio was taken from the previous quartos.
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At the time of the publication of the First Quarto of Pericles as well as the publication of the Third Folio of Shakespeare's collected works, the hero of the play could easily be compared to the king currently sitting on the English throne – James I and, later,
Charles II (Gossett 37). It is true, though, that in a monarchy, any character that represents a ruler will naturally be connected with the current sovereign not only by the audience but also by the sovereign himself, and Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists were very well aware of it. The king's affection meant less restricted creation as the ruler was usually more benevolent to his favourite artists. A theory by T. S. Graves says that the scene in
1.4 in which Pericles saves the starving city of Tarsus by giving its inhabitants a shipload of corn was written to flatter and support the new English King James I who had recently issued a warrant for exportation of grain to Venice (Graves 551–52). Also, in autumn
1607, the King's little daughter Mary died, aged 2, and the King was devastated.
According to Graves (553), the dramatist's decision to name Pericles' daughter Marina instead of Thaise/Tharsia might also have roots in this tragedy.
It is not known why Shakespeare decided to adapt the ancient story or why he decided to do so in the last period of his career, even though in the Comedy of Errors, one of his earliest works, he had already used similar plot devices (Gossett 59), such as separation of close relatives during a storm on the sea or a travelling father looking for his lost family. But if his overall life experience in 1607 or 1608, including the deaths of his relatives, and his late liking for romance stories are taken into consideration, it is clear that Apollonius of Tyre and his adventures must have caught his attention when it appeared in front of him.
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2.2 Looking for the Genre
To be able to compare Pericles with Wilkins's novel, it is important to define the genre of the play. But to do so, many aspects must be taken into consideration because
Pericles does not resemble any other Shakespeare's work; it is original even if compared to other Jacobean dramas.
First of all, it has already been mentioned that the play falls within Shakespeare's late creative period, together with The Tempest, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline
(Aughterson 1). These plays, so different from their predecessors both in form and in content, are sometimes called romances and Pericles, as the first in the row, “represents a completely new experiment” for Shakespeare (Hoeniger, Introduction lxxv). It seems to be quite easy to find romantic elements (especially faithful love, virtue and chastity) in the dramatic narrative. As in the other late Shakespearian dramas, there is a tragic shipwreck, a mistaken identity, two parallel stories, a powerful bond between relatives who get lost but reunite in the end, a miraculous rescue (Gossett 111). The storyline is spectacular, ranging across the whole Mediterranean Sea, skipping from one town to another without respecting cultural differences between the regions. In a way, the romance is similar to a fairy tale in which the main character undergoes a lot of suffering to be saved and praised in the end. To define Pericles as a romance would probably be sufficient.
On the other hand, formally, Pericles has a lot in common with medieval genres, still influential in Jacobean England, especially a miracle play and a morality play.
According to a definition, a miracle play “presents a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom of a saint.” (“Miracle Play,” Encyclopaedia Britannica) Although in Pericles, the main character is a mere mortal, the dramatist depicts his fortunes in a 18 way similar to medieval authors of miracle plays – his strongest trait is moral integrity, he serves as an image of a perfect human and ruler, he never loses faith (albeit pagan) and wins back his relatives thanks to a miracle – and also, in fact, thanks to his resilience and fidelity. Gossett even speaks of his “proto-Christian virtues” (113) and these can still be traced clearly, albeit Shakespeare provides Pericles with many vivid and genuine feelings and thus does not form him as a lifeless model (see chapter 4.3.1 Main Characters). The proponent of the theory that Pericles has a lot in common with miracle plays is Hoeniger.
According to him, the characteristic features include “a choric presenter,” (Gower) “large number of loosely related episodes,” (structure) “a tragicomic development,” (Pericles and Marina losing and finding their loved ones) “supernatural powers” (help of Diana) and “an explicit didactic end” (summarized in the last Gower's scene) (Hoeniger,
“Introduction” lxxxviii). He also claims that the whole dramatic form of the play resembles medieval theatre since it is written as “pictures more than drama” (Arthos, qtd. in Hoeniger, “Introduction” lxxvii).
What is more, Marina, who in fact becomes the main heroine of the second part of the play, seems to be an ideal Christian maid: truthful, strong and devoted. Her ability to survive and maintain her virginity in a hostile world is nothing but a pure miracle. In her story, Pericles fulfils the definition of a miracle play even more than in the first part. In miracle plays, the Virgin Mary often has “the role of deus ex machina, coming to the aid of all who invoke her,” (“Miracle Play,” Encyclopaedia Britannica) and again, it is obvious that the plot in Pericles works the same way, since it is the goddess Diana who miraculously saves the happiness of the divided family.
On the contrary, in a morality play, “the characters personify moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or abstractions (as death or youth)” and “moral lessons are taught.”
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(“Morality Play,” Encyclopaedia Britannica) This seems to present a significant difference from the usual interpretation of Pericles but it should be taken into consideration that although Pericles and Marina's names are not based on human qualities, these qualities can easily be assigned to them: for example, Pericles symbolizes an ideal reign or justice, while Marina stands for chastity. Like in the case of the similarity to miracle plays, Pericles works with developed characters, not lifeless models, and so cannot be a mere personification, but then again, some features of the medieval genre are still present in the text. The play resembles a morality play especially in Gower's comments where the part of the medieval poet evaluates what is happening in the story.
Parrott (107) also notices that productions of the play were very spectacular, which must have been one of the reasons for their popularity. From the hints in the text, it is possible to imagine that the productions of Pericles were probably complemented with music, dance and sound effects; also, there are passages where dumb-shows are explicitly described. Spectacularity was typical of another theatrical genre of the Jacobean period – masques.
Some of the minor genres, existing in the theatre culture of Jacobean London, also have common features with Pericles. Gossett namely mentions city comedy which is full of ridiculous figures represented in Pericles by the fishermen and the brothel keepers
(111), and tragicomedy of court intrigue full of political plots represented in Pericles by the revolution in the absence of the sovereign in Tyre (112), the situation of poor fishermen (112), mentions of unemployment in Mytilene (123) or the gloomy atmosphere in Antioch (112). In a more general view, Pericles is a metaphor of various manners of governance and the formation of a monarch (Gossett 122).
In conclusion, Pericles is a result of mixing popular forms of the medieval and
20
Elizabethan (Jacobean) drama and “responds to what was popular and current on local stages.” (Gossett 76) The prevailing romance character of the drama is supplemented by traces of other theatrical genres so that the story creates a spectacular, eclectic unit. Such an original form, benefiting from the most interesting genres of the history and the present, is probably one of the reasons why Pericles has always been so attractive.
2.3 Unique Structural Features: Choruses and Dumb-
Shows
Pericles, being the first of the late Shakespeare's plays, was a kind of an experiment, in terms of both form and content (Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles”, 476).
There are, among other things, two original structural features that have no parallel in the
Shakespearian canon: choruses and dumb-shows. To understand what their function in the play is will be useful for comparing the structure of the play with the novel.
There is another play by Shakespeare where a chorus is present “more than occasionally” (Hoeniger, Introduction xix) – Henry V. In the historical play, there are six choruses, composing the prologues to each of the acts and the epilogue. But the style and purpose of the choruses in Henry V and Pericles differ significantly; not only does the
Chorus in Henry V speak mainly in modern English blank verse; the whole imagery of the choruses in Henry V is obviously of much higher quality than in the case of rather literal Gower. The chorus in Henry V does not evaluate the storyline from a distant position of an ancient poet, but rather approximates the context to the readers/audience.
In Pericles, choruses are places for the presenter of the story, John Gower (the dead poet coming back to this world only to narrate this tale), to dominate the stage. The idea
21 of reviving the medieval classic suggested itself since the Globe was located close to the church of St Saviour (now Southwark Cathedral) where Gower's remains are deposited
(Gossett 171) – Shakespeare and his collaborator must have seen the tomb many times, which might have given them the idea to write Pericles. Gower in the play, speaking a specific, old-fashioned language (see infrequent Middle English words such as “y- slacked” in 3.0.1, “eyne” = eyes in 3.0.5, “can” = began in 3.0.36), explains and comments the turns in the plot, dares to judge other characters and imposes his moral lectures on the audience; he thus introduces the genre of morality into the drama. He differs from all other characters in all possible ways. He comes to anticipate what is going to happen, and his function in the structure is mainly to decelerate, to cease, to “undramatize” the plot.
What is not typical of Shakespeare's most famous works is contrariwise typical of medieval narrative styles. In the past, a lot of scholars were even convinced that
Shakespeare had not written Gower's parts (Hastings 74) – so un-Shakespearian they seem to be. However, they might only prove Shakespeare's universal literary talent in a way not to be seen elsewhere.
Gower appears eight times – before each act, in the middle of Act 4 and Act 5 and in the epilogue. Scholars who look for evidence of dual authorship in the play often mark that there are significant changes in style, verse and vocabulary between particular choruses, as if two different dramatists created them. According to Hoeniger (Introduction lv), the first two choruses are “stiffer, more regular … predominantly end-stopped tetrameter lines,” while the other choruses “yield to a freer handling of the verse, with more pentameter lines and lines of nine or eleven syllables, and with significantly more syncopation and variation in the use of the caesura.” In another essay, Hoeniger notes that rhymed tags which are repeated in the choruses also repeat in the lines of Acts 1 and 2
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(“Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles” 470), so, if these two initial acts are believed to be written by another author, the repetition suggests the same author also worked on the choruses.
The dumb-shows appear in 2.0, 3.0 and 4.4. This medieval pantomime is included in a much more well-known Shakespeare's play – Hamlet. In scene 3.2 of the play, a group of travelling actors, instructed by the young prince Hamlet, perform a dumb-show during which king Claudius de facto proves himself guilty of murdering his brother. The dumb- show in Hamlet, therefore, represents one of the most important moments in the storyline and decides all the subsequent actions. The same cannot be said about the dumb-shows in Pericles. Since the storyline comprises of frequent travelling and follows separate fortunes of several characters, the dumb-shows basically function as shortcuts. Thanks to them, many extensive but marginal (or at least less important) situations are presented briefly and the drama can concentrate on those situations that form the heart of the story
(in 4.4 where the dumb-show presents a rather crucial moment – Pericles' “finding out” that Marina is dead – Gower immediately retells the situation).
What was original within Shakespearian dramatic canon, however, was not necessarily new within the Jacobean theatre as such. Choruses and, to a lesser extent, dumb-shows, were present on London's stages shortly before Pericles was published. In
1607, the King's Men produced Barnabe Barnes's play The Devil's Charter with a chorus and dumb-shows, and choruses were also included in The Travailes of the Three English
Brothers by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins (Hoeniger, Introduction xxi).
It is presumed that the author of the choruses in the latter title was Wilkins (Gossett 77).
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2.4 Bad Quarto and the Theory of Ur-Pericles
The form in which the text of Pericles has survived is in all probability the main reason why George Wilkins's brief novel has not fallen into oblivion and why such an ordinary book still attracts attention of theatre-makers, readers and scholars. The fact that
Pericles is only known in its bad quarto means that The Painful Adventures are often perceived as a source of additional information as well as an opportunity to ameliorate the theatrical text.
According to some theories, advocated by John Dryden, Harry T. Baker or T. S.
Graves, there even was an earlier version of Pericles, significantly different from the bad quarto, and Wilkins's novel might be based on this primary text. The border between an original version of Pericles (the inexisting “good quarto”) and a hypothetical earlier play
(which is often called Ur-Pericles) is difficult to determine; nevertheless, some kind of evidence of the existence of Ur-Pericles is given by Kenneth Muir who marks that
Wilkins's novel contains a lot of passages which are in fact blank verse written in prose, but these verses cannot be found in Pericles – so, they could have been taken from a different dramatic source (qtd. in Hoeniger, Introduction xlviii).
Other scholars, such as Hoeniger, believe that the bad quarto only contains errors made during the process of copying and printing the play, but represents, although not very accurately, original Shakespeare's (or rather, Shakespeare and Wilkins's) text
(Introduction xlix). Nevertheless, the full version of the play recorded in the bad quarto has been lost, and it is possible to guess what the original form was like by studying the most impressive parts of the current text and by comparing the omissions with George
Wilkins's novel. However, the question of why Shakespeare or members of his theatre company never intervened when the distorted version of the play was published, remains 24 unanswered.
Pericles was printed in 1609 by Henry Gosson, a publisher who had specialized in pamphlets and had published some of Wilkins's works before, but never a theatre play
(Gossett 18). A lot of the errors were surely made by his two printers, while three compositors are probably responsible for a large part of the rest, as Gary Taylor and
MacDonald P. Jackson, editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, believe (Gossett 20). All in all, there are several kinds of corruption in Pericles: some were present in the author's manuscript, other were added during the process of reporting and writing down the performed text and other were created in the printing house. It is known that reporters tended to repeat certain words or phrases, although they were originally used only once in the text (for example, “a pretty moral” in 2.1.35 and 2.2.43), so today it is impossible to decide whether the author of the play had a limited vocabulary, or his extensive vocabulary was scaled down by the reporter. In other cases, the causes of corruption are impossible to determine, for example, a verse is certainly missing in Diana's speech in
5.1.229–30. Warren (480) shows another example in the scene 1.2.34–38 where
Helicanus criticises two lords as flatterers but there is no sign of flattery in their lines; it is highly probable that something had been left out here. An example of illogicality can be found in 1.2.113 and 1.4.86: while in the former scene, Pericles decides to travel to
Tarsus to find safety and protection, in the latter scene he claims “we have heard your miseries” – but he would certainly not have headed for the city if he had known about the starvation.
Corruption sometimes emerges where the printer could not read the reporter's record clearly or when a person who was writing down the text misheard a person who was dictating it. Warren (485) quotes 1.3.27–28 “the Kings seas must please,” which is
25
(in modern editions) usually corrected as “the King's ears it must please.” A similar error occurs in verse 1.4.39 where “too sauers” obviously means “two summers.” (Musgrove
399) Also, misunderstandings in the process of printing the First Quarto led to passages in which it is not clear whether a word is part of the line or a stage direction, for example
“Musicke” in 1.1.6–7 (Gossett 13) or the name “Antioch” in 1.1.56–7 (Gossett 182).
Some specific words are also unclear, for example “unsistered” in 3.3.28–30 which should probably be read as “unscissored.” (Gossett 46–48)
In 1978, Sydney Musgrove analysed errors in Pericles, too, and came to a new conclusion that the bad quarto is a mixture of a reported text and foul papers, i.e. the first draft of the author, not intended for publishing. As evidence, he submitted examples of various spellings which fit well into the verses where variant readings appear: Helicanus–
Hellican–Hellicane (394) and Tyre–Tyrus (395). According to Musgrove (395), the fact that these spelling variations respond to metrical needs proves that the author himself worked with several variations and the differences were not made by reporters or printers.
Since the very first quartos, editors made efforts to ameliorate the quality of the text by correcting minor errors. However, they faced a logical problem – the only available sources were the quartos published earlier. Most of the errors were thus transmitted from one edition to another with only subtle changes. Improvements which were later admired and vastly followed were inserted in 1780 by Edmond Malone, a Shakesperian scholar from Ireland (1741–1812). His goal was reasonable:
… not to attain the impossible – an ideal text hypothetically identical to the
authorial final draft delivered to the King's Men one early spring day in 1608
– but to create a credible, bibliographically defensible, reading and
performance script. (Gossett 38)
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Even today, this idea seems to be the right track to have a reliable and consistent play which can be successfully performed and understood.
2.5 Two Different Parts
Corrupted and confusing lines and metrical irregularities occur throughout the play, from the very first scene to the very last. Yet, despite ubiquitous errors caused by textual distortion, a clear parting line seems to be present in the middle of the text – it divides the play into two separate sections, easily distinguishable from each other. While the first half of the play, Acts 1 and 2, contains a lot of simple and repeated rhymes, average quality of verses and rather schematic characters, the second half of the play, Acts 3, 4 and 5, appears to be much more vivid and complex in verse and in stylistics; its characters are more authentic. Also, the second part has a lot of features typical of Shakespeare's works, while in the first two acts, Shakespearian scenes are surprisingly rare (scenes 2.1.1–4 or 2.1.12–
34 serve as an example). This is why scholars have always been looking for a second author.
The most visible difference between both parts concerns lexicology (Gossett 172) and versification (Hastings 72). Of Acts 1 and 2, a slow “jog-trot rhythm of lines”
(Hoeniger, Introduction xxix) is typical, while in Acts 3, 4 and 5, the verses are often irregular and at the same time smooth. One of the most beautiful passages in the play is the beginning of scene 3.1, which is probably also the place where Shakespeare replaced
Wilkins as the main author.
Regarding the lines written in prose, the difference is more blurred but again, the content can be divided into two distinct groups, only one of which is typical of
Shakespeare's plays – containing a “humorous, not satirical, touch … witty phrasing and
27 quibbles which follow through from sentence to sentence.” (Hastings 73) That applies mainly to the brothel scenes in the second part, for example the dialogue between Bawd and Bolt in 4.5, where stylistics is Shakespearian.
But the main difference between both parts concerns the interpretation of the story itself. While in the first part, the play follows a continual maturing of Pericles – originally a scared, selfish and too young a king, later an honest man, bravely fighting his destiny – in the second part of the play, the story emphasizes the relationship between a father and a daughter and also between a husband and a wife. The latter is indisputably connected with a certain degree of pathos but Shakespeare manages to present these topics as timeless and thus attractive and thrilling.
2.6 Theories about Authorship Theories about the authorship of Pericles are numerous and varied and have always attracted attention to the play. It is possible that even the editors of the First Folio, Henry
Condell and John Heminges, doubted Shakespeare's exclusive authorship and that is why they excluded the play from their publication in 1623; and it is certain that Shakespeare's sole authorship was denied by one of the first editors of Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe
(1674–1718) (Vickers). As it has already been said in this thesis, modern scholars have not reached an agreement on this fundamental question yet, although in the last decades, the belief that Shakespeare had a collaborator and that it was George Wilkins has prevailed. The following chapter presents the most common modern theories concerning the authorship of Pericles.
2.6.1 Early Years According to this theory, the first acts originated in Shakespeare's early years, but then Shakespeare put them off and returned to them in around 1607. The basis of such a
28 theory lies in John Dryden's famous verse “Shakespeare's Muse her Pericles first bore”
(Hoeniger, “How Significant Are Textual Parallels?” 27) which influenced generations of critics mainly in the 18th and 19th century.
However, Shakespeare's early plays do not resemble Pericles at all, with the exception of The Comedy of Errors (see chapter 2.1 of this thesis). The versification of
Pericles is completely different from what Shakespeare wrote early in his career.
Furthermore, there is no evidence of existence of a play like that before 1590 (Muir 253).
2.6.2 Literary Experiment
The other theory proclaiming Shakespeare as a sole author asserts that he wrote the whole play in his late years and deliberately used what could be called Gowerian style, that is “stiffness of the lines, frequent moralizing, imagery, rhythm” and “very liberal rhyming.” (Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles” 476) “We have seen how
Shakespeare … may be winking at his audience in some of the play's most absurdly devised episodes,” says Hoeniger (476), convinced that the editors of the First Folio worried that future readers would not be able to understand this specific stage witticism, and because of that, they decided not to publish the text (478).
But why Shakespeare would use such an experimental technique only in the first two acts of the play, without leaving even the smallest hint, why he would use such a specific vocabulary, not similar to any of his other works, these questions remain unanswered. Hoeniger himself later changed his mind and started to look for
Shakespeare's collaborator.
2.6.3 Improving Another Playwright's Work
According to this theory, Shakespeare or the King's Men company were given a
29 complete playbook written by a minor dramatist, maybe in hope of success and glory in the Globe. Since the subject was interesting but the form was of poor quality, Shakespeare decided to rework the text. William T. Hastings, one of the proponents of this theory, enumerates logical reasons:
1. Shakespeare had been inspired by other playwrights many times in the past;
2. Shakespearian passages can be detected in the first two acts of the play, too;
3. Shakespeare's participation in the text increased in time as he found his employment more and more interesting, mainly in the story of Marina (Hastings 71)
Hastings believes that active collaboration is “highly improbable” (69) because
Shakespeare would not co-operate with inferior writers.
This theory was valued the most at the turn and in the first decades of the 20th century (Hastings himself published his essay in 1939). For example, in 1908 Harry T.
Baker – together with other scholars – proclaimed that Pericles was written by
Shakespeare and George Wilkins, and when he compared Wilkins's novel The Painful
Adventures to the play, he noted: “Wilkins … was following the phraseology of his own complete dramatic version of Pericles … Possible borrowings may well be his own phrases, which Shakspere … thought good enough to retain.” (Baker 106) Baker's idea was simple: First, Wilkins completed his play and then decided to transform it into a novel which would respect his original attitude to the theme. It seems that this theory disappeared slowly after the World War Two. In 1948, one of its last supporters, Thomas
Marc Parrott, imagined Wilkins, spurned and disappointed, protesting against the changes that had converted his own play into a completely different piece of work; as a result,
Parrott thinks, Wilkins created a novel that was not revised by anyone (Parrott 109).
Parrott calls Shakespeare “a reviser not a collaborator,” (113) which again suggests that
30 the famous dramatist would never want to co-operate with a minor artist equally.
Nevertheless, however logical such an opinion sounds, it has been disproved by a whole set of evidence in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
2.6.4 Collaboration
Pericles is not the only Shakespeare's play where a collaboration with another author has been considered probable; the same questions have accompanied Henry VIII,
Titus Andronicus, Henry VI or the Hecate scenes in Macbeth (Hoeniger, “How Significant
Are Textual Parallels?” 27). According to modern research, some of the most distinguished writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton or George Peele are considered to have been Shakespeare's co-authors (The New Oxford Shakespeare vii– viii).
It is interesting that although the theory of collaboration between Shakespeare and another playwright in Pericles spread no earlier than in the second half of the 20th century, indications that Pericles could partly be written by George Wilkins are much older. Most likely, the first scholar who proposed Wilkins as the second author was the German
Anglicist Nikolaus Delius in 1868. In 1908, his idea was backed by Harry T. Baker (Baker
100). In 1919, H. Dugdale Sykes also supported this presumption after he had studied the ellipsis of relative pronouns in nominative and verbal antitheses both in the play and in the novel (Gossett 63, Hoeniger, Introduction lxi). David Lake, M. W. A. Smith, E. A. J.
Honigmann, Gary Taylor, MacDonald P. Jackson, Jonathan Hope and others are among later advocates of this theory; with the aid of computer analyses, they have gathered new proofs (Gossett 64–6). In fact, among contemporary Shakespearian scholars, only the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare edition, Doreen DelVecchio and Antony
Hammond, still reject Wilkins as one of the co-authors of Pericles (Gossett 68). Although 31 some of their arguments seem reasonable, they are trying to oppose results from objective computer analyses (supported by other arguments), which are hardly beatable.
More or less, the computerized statistical analyses have given irrefutable evidence that Acts 1 and 2 have extremely much in common with Wilkins's other works (Warren
63). Without the computers, modern scholars would only be able to analyse the style of the two parts and guess, as William T. Hastings had to do in 1939 when he argued that
Shakespeare had a collaborator because the topic of a brothel, an incest and the whole wandering story are not Shakespearian enough (Hastings 67) and because there is still a lot of “dullness” in the text (Hastings 68) – and such arguments would not be very convincing.
However, it is necessary to state that the problem of authorship and collaboration has not been solved out completely yet. Some scholars still believe the true collaborator has not been discovered yet, or they are convinced it was Thomas Heywood or William
Rowley (Hoeniger, Introduction lvii–lviii). F. D. Hoeniger changed his opinion on the possible collaborator several times and finally, after studying textual parallels in the works of John Day, he proposed Day as the probable collaborator (Hoeniger, “How Significant
Are Textual Parallels?” 29–32). However, as he himself admits (Hoeniger 35), there is no direct evidence to support such an original suggestion.
Some of the strongest arguments for Wilkins are also connected with the play's rhymes, or more precisely the links between rhymes in the first part of Pericles and
Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. A groundbreaking investigation was accomplished by David J. Lake in 1975 who showed how features of the rhymes in the first two acts of the play are connected to the rhymes in Miseries; he even found several identical rhymes (Jackson 240–1). MacDonald P. Jackson followed in Lake's work in
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1993; he compiled a list of all the rhymes which Pericles and Miseries contain and confirmed that the vast majority of rhyme correspondence between them fall into the first two acts of the play (Jackson 242). The similarity is astounding – it is twice as common as in comparison with any other Shakespeare's play (Jackson 245). In 2003, Jackson published his new, complex analysis of Miseries and Pericles which focused on versification, rhymes, high-frequency words, stylistic quirks, linguistic forms, uses of the relative pronoun and verbal parallels (Jackson, Defining Shakespeare) – and again, he proved that Wilkins was almost certainly the collaborator. Lake and Jackson's work terminates theories about Shakespeare writing the first two acts quite convincingly.
3. The Novel
3.1 Novelistic Version of the Successful Play (History,
Popularity, Context)
George Wilkins's novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre would have probably been forgotten forever if it had not been strongly connected with a play ascribed to William Shakespeare. In the case of Pericles, however, it seems that the preservation of the novel has been beneficial for the play, too, since it has helped modern scholars understand the play better. The mutual similarity and interconnection makes both of the works worthy of study and academic interest.
Unlike the play, the novel was practically lost for a long time. In the 1850s, the
German Shakespearian scholar Tycho Mommsen found a complete original copy of the novel in a public library in Zurich (Mommsen 1) and reprinted it in Germany in 1857.
Thanks to his discovery, Shakespearian scholars started to study the novel and re-evaluate
33 their attitude to the play. Nevertheless, it was eighteen years earlier, in 1839, that John
Payne Collier, an English Shakespearian critic, had noticed the existence of the novel for the first time in modern history and remarked upon its link to Shakespeare's play. He found a copy – the only one known and probably existing, besides the one from Zurich – in the possession of an unnamed English gentleman (Mommsen 3). Thanks to these two researchers, the novel could be rediscovered and the mystery around Pericles could at least partly be removed.
However, Mommsen and Collier shared some simplifying ideas about the novel.
For example, they believed that the play was written by Shakespeare alone and Wilkins had nothing to do with it (Mommsen 27); what is more, Collier developed a theory according to which Wilkins attended the performances of Pericles only to take notes so that he could later transform the play into a transcript suitable for printing, but he later decided to publish it in the form of a novel (Mommsen 35). Wilkins was thus considered to be a mere reporter in the case of Pericles, although both Mommsen and Collier knew his other works and thus were aware of the fact that he was a playwright himself.
Harry T. Baker supposed that Wilkins was not a mere reporter or Shakespeare's collaborator, but the author of the original play which he had finished on his own and handed it over to the King's Men; and that as a result, his manuscript became the possession of the company and unavailable to him, so he could not publish the original text although he was disappointed by all the changes Shakespeare made to it (113). A similar theory is supported by Graves (545) or Hoeniger (Introduction xl).
It is necessary to admit that Wilkins was indeed a minor playwright so he could hardly oppose Shakespeare's ideas about his play. If he really was Shakespeare's predecessor, not his collaborator, it is then understandable that he could have felt spurned.
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But as the next chapter of this thesis shows, information about George Wilkins's life and death is very sporadic so none of such theories can be fully confirmed or rejected.
The novel The Painful Adventures was published in 1608, at the time when theatres in London were closed because of plague. That means that both the people who had already seen (and liked) the play and those who had not managed to see it before the closure were its potential readers. It is not surprising that the novel became demanded.
But advantages of the right timing came to an end a year later, since in 1609, the play itself was published and as a result, the novel lost its exclusivity and went “out of business.” (Parrott 111) Although Pericles was reprinted many times since then, The
Painful Adventures remained an isolated rarity.
3.2 Who Was George Wilkins
Although in the past decades, Shakespearian scholars have taken great interest in
The Painful Adventures and its author, the life and career of George Wilkins (ca. 1576–
1618) is still mostly uncovered. Like in the case of many other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, his talent was completely outshone by William Shakespeare, Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Jonson and several other figures.
But still, the historical investigation of the last years has brought some hints. At the time of William Shakespeare, there were at least three George Wilkinses in London, one of whom owned an inn where (as it is documented) a friend of Shakespeare's took a chamber in 1605 (Dickson 197). It might have been here where the two playwrights encountered for the first time and where they discussed the story of Apollonius of Tyre
(if they ever did). Gossett believes the two authors were verifiably in touch at least between 1604 and 1608 (Gossett 56).
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There is no direct evidence about George Wilkins's family. It is supposed that he was married and in 1605, his wife gave birth to a son (Gossett 162). There has been a theory, popular especially in the 18th and the 19th centuries, according to which Wilkins's father was a poet of the same name; that is the reason why William Carew Hazlitt, author of the Handbook to the Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain
(1867), distinguished between the novelist “George, the Younger” and the playwright
“George, the Elder.” (Hazlitt 656) Today, scholars usually believe that these works, once ascribed to a father and son, were written by one person.
Wilkins was possibly an actor – there is evidence that he was a member of the King's
Company and later the Queen's Company, which “was admittedly inferior.” (Baker 101)
But none of the surviving documents about Wilkins come from the period after
1608, the year when The Painful Adventures was printed. Although the year 1618 seems more probable, it is still possible that George Wilkins died soon after his literary success
(that would not be surprising as there was plague in London). After all, Gossett mentions
Wilkins became a drunk and a troublemaker (Gossett 57) so an inglorious death in a rather young age would be expectable. But maybe Wilkins simply quit the world of literature – there is no evidence for either of such theories.
Fortunately, his literary works, all published between 1606 and 1608, have been documented much better than Wilkins's life. There are three other works usually attributed to him: Three Miseries of Barbary: Plague, Famine, Civil War (1606), The Travails of the Three English Brothers (collaboration, 1607) and The Miseries of Enforced Marriage
(1607). Often, Law Tricks (collaboration, 1608) is also associated with Wilkins and it is suggested that he is the author of the translation of The Historie of Iustine (1608), too.
Dickson (201) and Hoeniger (Introduction lx) identically mention a collection of jokes
36
Jests of Cocke Watte to Make you Merry (collaboration, 1606 or 1607) as well.
Apart from The Painful Adventures, it was The Miseries of Enforced Marriage that, being quite a successful work, brought some unstable popularity to its author. Gossett defines the play, written in prose, as “a domestic tragicomedy built around the social and religious complications of private betrothals and the abuses of wardship.” (Gossett 57)
Obviously, Wilkins had the courage to cover an uncomfortably topical theme of his time.
The Miseries was staged by the King's company in 1606 and published one year later; it became so popular that eventually, three quartos were printed, in 1611, 1629 and 1637
(Mommsen 8). Mommsen goes so far as to claim that “the style strongly rivals
Shakespeare,” (Mommsen 9) but this statement should be viewed with incredulity since
Mommsen was one of the discoverers of the novel and as such was probably very enthusiastic and not very objective about Wilkins.
The pamphlet Three Miseries of Barbary, taking place in Northern Africa, contains a textual parallel to the scene of famine in Pericles (1.4) (Hoeniger, Introduction lx) so it is sometimes compared to the examined play, although the overall topic is different.
The historical play The Travels of the Three English Brothers was written by
Wilkins, John Day and William Rowley. Scholars have usually agreed in the question of which parts were written by whom. This is important because when Wilkins's authorship of Pericles was analysed, parts of Pericles were compared to those parts of The Travels which are traditionally ascribed to Wilkins. If the agreement was not general, such a comparison could come to the conclusion that Pericles was partly written by Day or
Rowley.
No other writings by George Wilkins have been preserved or are known to have existed.
37
3.3 Genre and Style
From what has already been written about The Painful Adventures in this thesis it should be clear now that Wilkins's most famous work is not a typical novel, not even in the context of its time. It fulfils the basic definition of a novel, though: it contains a long fictional story, develops several characters, the story is full of action and narrated in prose; nevertheless, the literary style is a combination of a “report of a play,” (Hoeniger,
Introduction xl) Twine's translation of the Gesta Romanorum (Baker 101) and Wilkins's own contribution.
It is indeed striking that in some passages, especially dialogues, the novel gives an impression of an elaborate, readable description of a theatre performance, for example in chapter 4 where the presentation of foreign knights takes place (Wilkins 29–30). Making a report of a theatre performance was obviously not Wilkins's purpose; however, the slow and detailed narration of numerous passages suggests that Wilkins was inspired not only by the text of Pericles, but also by its stage realisation.
After all, reasons mentioned in previous chapters of this thesis lead to a conclusion that Wilkins was writing his novel without having the possibility to simultaneously study the original playbook, so he could only rely on his memory and probably some kind of a draft which he might have created before writing the complete version of the play or its part. As a result, a lot of passages in the novel were transferred verbatim from Lawrence
Twine's translation of the Gesta Romanorum which was probably much more easily accessible. Even the title of Wilkins's novel refers to Twine's The Pattern of Painful
Adventures. It seems that the novelist constantly consulted Twine's adaptation of the story
38
(Hoeniger, Introduction xliii), so that where he could not or did not want to follow the play he could basically copy Twine. The proximity of Twine and Wilkins was obvious even to the 19th-century discoverer of the novel Mommsen, who in 1857 wrote:
“Coincidences between Twine and Wilkins are too numerous and too literal to be ascribed to mere chance.” (Mommsen VII) Some scholars, such as Parrott, conclude that Wilkins only desired to take advantage of the success of Pericles and also of the fact that the production could not be staged because of plague, and thus he created a book “done in haste to catch the tide of popularity.” (Parrott 111) But the reason why Wilkins consulted
Twine's narration is almost certainly not time pressure but an understandable need to adhere to an older version of the story of Apollonius, since Pericles was not available to him. The argument that Wilkins should have avoided copying is relevant, but in the
Elizabethan literature, adopting and simple copying other people's works was common and not considered immoral.
Moreover, The Painful Adventures is not a mere copy of some parts taken from
Twine. There are passages which “by their force of argument, by their descriptive vivacity or felicity of imagery and expression, seem vastly superior to the powers of any George
Wilkins, and are, nevertheless, sought in vain in other sources, or in the Drama such as we possess it.” (Mommsen VIII) Simply put, in its best parts, the novel works as a great, autonomous, thrilling piece of work and proves Wilkins to be a talented writer, not a mere reporter. For example, in chapter 1, the author presents the moving story of Antioch's daughter which cannot be found in the play (Wilkins 12–14), and Dionyza's soliloquy in chapter 9 (Wilkins 59) contains original themes, too (Baker 107). However, Wilkins did not manage to achieve Shakespeare's ability to present archetypal themes in a timeless manner; however sophisticated his text is, it remains a typical product of the 17th century,
39 rather than a timeless work which would truly speak to modern readers.
The Painful Adventures obviously cannot be a mere adaptation of Pericles which also takes Twine into consideration simply because it contains different motivations, different character traits (although names remain the same), divergences in details of the plots and expanded speeches (Gossett 49). It is an independent work of art and should not be understood as a supplement to the play or a simple literary adaptation.
4. Comparison between Pericles and The Painful
Adventures
The aim of this part of the thesis is to analyse the differences between Shakespeare's and Wilkins's play and Wilkins's novel so that it were clear that both works are independent creations with specific artistic contributions of their authors.
To compare a play with a novel means to be aware of the structural and stylistic differences between both literary forms, and still be able to describe the connections between the two texts which include language, storyline, characters and, last but not least, an overall meaning and themes.
In the case of Pericles and The Painful Adventures, the situation is complicated by the assumed dual authorship. The differences between the two parts of the play have already been mentioned in this thesis, and thus will not be emphasized in the following chapters, although in the comparison, they will again be distinguishable.
The play of Pericles consists of five acts and an epilogue; all of the acts start with a chorus. Act 1 and Act 3 are divided into five scenes (including the opening choruses),
Act 2 and Act 4 into six scenes (including the opening choruses and another Gower's appearance in 4.4) and Act 5, being shortest, into four scenes, including two chorus 40 appearances of John Gower (5.0 and 5.2 in modern editions). Just as other Shakespeare's plays, though, Pericles was not arranged so clearly when it was published for the first time; later publishers (especially Edmond Malone in 1790) introduced such a division and also supplied the play with basic stage directions which were, in most cases, missing in the 1609 printed edition. Nevertheless, it was a common attitude in Shakespeare's time to publish plays without organized structure so this fact should not be surprising at all.
Contrariwise, it is worth mentioning that the structure of the play would be unusually distinct even if all the stage directions and act and scene divisions were removed. The reason lies in the mosaic form of narration, similar to a chronicle; that is, the long and complex storyline is divided into logical units which are quite autonomous, with a clearly marked beginning and an end. Also, the interruptions by the character of John Gower as the storyteller help the readers and the audience not to get lost.
George Wilkins's novel was structured and segmented by the author himself. It starts, as it was common in the 17th century, with an epistle. It is noteworthy that in this epistle, Wilkins calls the novel “a poore infant of my braine,” (Wilkins 3) which suggests that he was one of the authors (or, rather, the author) when the new version of the ancient story – the one presented both on stage and, later, in the novel – was devised.
After the epistle, “The Argument of the whole Historie” (which functions as a resumé of the story) is attached, and after that, there is a list of “Personages mentioned in this Historie,” which is a component typical of theatre plays rather than novels. Eleven chapters follow, each being introduced by a short summary of the subsequent events. The first three chapters accord approximately with Act 1, chapters 4 to 6 (first part) with Act
2, chapters 6 (second part) to 8 (first part) with Act 3, chapters 8 (second part) to 10 with
Act 4 and the last, eleventh chapter, accords approximately with Act 5.
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4.1 Language, Verses, Rhythm
From what has been written about the play and the novel in this thesis, one would easily come to the conclusion that the language and stylistics used in both works are extremely close to each other. However, this is not true. Hoeniger says that The Painful
Adventures “echoes the play's language frequently,” although “verbal parallels are fewer than one would expect.” (Hoeniger, Introduction xl–xli) His proclamation is supported by
Jackson's computer analysis (Jackson, “Defining Shakespeare”) and was also proved by a simple computer analysis of word occurrences in the play and in the novel, which was accomplished using a free software utility Text Analyzer; this analysis proved that frequent words do not correspond between the two works. Basically, phrases rarely duplicate, and when they do, they are either part of someone's speech (for example, when
Pericles introduces himself to Thaisa, compare Shakespeare 2.3.78–82 to Wilkins 32), or an inserted poem (for example, Antioch's riddle, compare Shakespeare 1.1.65–72 to
Wilkins 16). Such parallels are so rare that it is impossible to accuse Wilkins of copying the play or making his work easier by using his (already written) part of the play.
It is, however, crucial to realize that the language of the first two acts of the play is very different from the language in Acts 3, 4 and 5. In the first two acts, there are features typical of Wilkins's works (Gossett 175):
frequent assonance (for example, 2.1.5–6: “Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks / Washed me from shore to shore, and left me breath”);
unusual frequency of the pronouns “which” and “this” at the beginning of phrases, the so-called Latin resumptive (for example, 1.0.17 “This Antioch ...”; 1.0.20 “This king ...”; 1.0.35 “Which to prevent he made a law”; 1.1.58 “Which read and not 42 expounded, 'tis decreed”);
frequent use of the auxiliary verb “doth” (for example, 1.1.103 “By man's oppresion, and the poor worm doth die for't”; other uses follow in 1.1.116, 1.1.121,
1.1.138 and so on); the auxiliary “doth” occurs nine times in Act 1 and Act 2 and only four times in Acts 3, 4 and 5, although the second half of the play is longer.
These features, especially the second and the third one, are present in the novel, too.
In the first chapter, for example, we can read sentences starting with “Which question getting way betwixt grief and her utterance …” (Wilkins 13) or “Which will of his, when
Fame had blowne abroade, and that by this Lawe there was found a possibilitie for the obtayning of this Lady …” (Wilkins 14). Also, out of seven occurences of “doth” in the novel, five are used as the auxiliary verb.
But in Acts 3, 4 and 5, such features are as rare as in other Shakespeare's dramas.
Other linguistic differences between the first two acts and the rest of the play are described in chapter 2.5 Two Different Parts of this thesis.
The majority of the text in Pericles is composed in blank verse, although numerous rhymed passages can be found, especially in the first two acts and the choruses. The rhymes appear and disappear in a not always logical way, and what is more, the rhythm is often not very regular; the reason might be that the rhythm disappeared in the process of reporting, transcribing or printing the play. Some passages, especially in the brothel
(lines of Bolt, Bawd and Pander), are written in prose; the combination of prosed and versed lines, taking in turns according to who is speaking, is, after all, typical of
Shakespeare.
Unsurprisingly, Wilkins's novel is written in prose. However, from time to time, it
43 is interspersed by poems which are integral parts of the story – Antioch's riddle (Wilkins
16), Pericles' letter in Thaisa's coffin (Wilkins 46), the inscription on Marina's monument
(Wilkins 58), Marina's song (Wilkins 75). These poems are not copied from the play, since they differ significantly (only Antioch's riddle is almost the same in both works), but they never change the general meaning. The novel versions are sometimes even used instead of the original in the play, as Marina's epitaph in the Oxford edition, where the editors reasoned that the original verses (Shakespeare 4.4.34–43) are of worse quality (Gossett
344).
The rhythm of the play is similar to the rhythm of the novel, since both works use similar means of changing the settings: while in the play, it is Gower who enables the plot to move from one scene to another swiftly, so that a lot stays “between” the staged scenes
(Hoeniger speaks of “selected scenes”, see Hoeniger, “Gower and Shakespeare in
Pericles” 472), the novel directly asks the reader to move on in the story.
On the other hand, the aspect in which the play and the novel differ considerably is the degree of drama in the texts. Although the play is often considered little dramatic, the novel seems to completely lack drama even in those passages that are dramatic and lively in itself (see the shipwreck near Pentapolis, Wilkins 26, or the dialogue of the fishermen,
Wilkins 27). The text is lengthy, garrulous and full of description, indirect speech and details that make it impossible to create a really dramatic situation. A good example is the scene of the storm and the birth of Marina in Wilkins 43–45; although Shakespeare narrates this part in a mere monologue, it is much more dramatic and resembles similar monologues in King Lear or The Tempest (see Shakespeare 3.1.1–14). Baker notices that
Wilkins is not skilful in the dramatic technique, so he immediately “loses delicacy of effect, skilful motivation, and dramatic selection” in passages where he abandons the play
44 and follows Twine's novella (Baker 102). Nevertheless, Baker seems to be too critical of
Wilkins; in the novel, the dramatic effect often emerges unexpectedly, in speeches which are surprisingly moving (see Marina's encounter with Lysimachus, Wilkins 64–67).
It is interesting that while in the climax of the play, when Pericles comes to realize that he has just encountered his allegedly dead daughter, the dramatic character of the text rises significantly (see Shakespeare 5.1), the novel seems to be losing all traces of drama as the story proceeds. This tendency culminates on the last two pages where Wilkins manages to summarize a rather long sequence of events: the panders are burnt to death, their servant is rewarded by Marina for his help, Marina marries Lysimachus, Pericles inherits Pentapolis, Pericles rewards the fishermen, then he returns to Tarsus where Cleon and Dionyza are stoned to death, later Pericles gains Antioch, Thaisa gives birth to a boy
Simonides, Pericles gets old and dies, his large kingdom is divided between Marina and the son, and Thaisa dies (Wilkins 78–9). It seems as if Wilkins was in a hurry so he decided to finish his interpretation as soon as possible.
4.2 Composition, Plot and Story
Besides linguistic differences, the play and the novel also differ in their approach to the storyline. These differences can be divided into compositional differences and plot details. Different attitudes to the characterisation of various characters are an important part of this category, too, so they are analysed separately in the following chapter.
The different compositions are determined by the specifics of each literary form and the fact that in the play, John Gower appears in his choruses and interrupts and decelerates the rhythm of the play; Gower is not present in the novel (although his image can be found on the original title page of the first quarto) and the narrator of the plot is the writer himself. 45
Not always is the scene order identical to the chronology in the novel, because in the play, the plot often hops from one place to another and back, interrupting scenes in dramatic moments; the empty Shakespearian stage is probably the main reason since it is easy to build tension in this way. Wilkins in the novel, on the contrary, tends to narrate long passages without any interruption. For example, the whole story of how Thaisa gave birth to a girl, was considered dead, thrown overboard, found, treated and cured in
Ephesus and how she went to live in the temple of Diana can be found in chapter 7 in one homogenous narration.
But such differences usually only serve the literary form; there are other differences, though, that are very frequent. These are details in the plot, usually small, but noticeable.
Due to such differences Wilkins could modify or fine-tune everything he found imperfect in the play, or simply put emphasis on different aspects of the story. There are tens of such differences between Pericles and The Painful Adventures. Some of them were already mentioned in the previous chapter, several more notable examples include:
To kill Pericles, the murderer Thaliard intends to use a pistol in the play
(Shakespeare 1.1.167), but a poison in the novel (Wilkins 18)
Thaliard does not manage to encounter Helicanus in the novel (Wilkins 21), but in the play, they meet and Helicanus even addresses him by his name (Shakespeare
1.3.30), which suggests that Thaliard is not a mere serf but a noble courtier
In the novel, when Pericles arrives at starving Tarsus, he sells wheat to the inhabitants and donates the obtained money to the city (Wilkins 23–24), but in the play, he donates the wheat straight to the people (Shakespeare 1.4.94)
In the play, the annual God Neptune's feast is taking place when the ships of
46
Pericles approach the coast of Mytilene, but in the novel, Lysimachus is simply walking in the harbour when he notices the ships
After Pericles can see Diana, he accepts Lysimachus' invitation to his palace in the play, but in the novel, the whole company stays on board the ship
In the play, Thaisa asks Pericles to prove his identity by showing his ring from
Simonides, but in the novel, no such evidence is required
The majority of the different details do not change the overall meaning of the story and they serve as evidence that Wilkins was influenced by Twine when writing the novel
(the details often accord with Twine's solution of the corresponding situation). However, like in the case of the linguistic differences, many of the plot differences suggest a corruption in the survived text of Pericles – for example, Thaliard's pistol is a clear anachronism, created probably by misreading the original “poison”.
What is more, in Acts 3, 4 and 5, it is possible to find different motivations and emphases which slightly change traits of the characters. For example, before allegedly dead Thaisa is thrown into the sea, Pericles in the play spends most of their last moments saying good-bye to her (Shakespeare 3.1.56–64), but Pericles in the novel spends a lot of the time on quarrels with the sailors (Wilkins 45). Therefore, this particular scene describes a significantly different character of the main hero in the play and in the novel.
Generally, Wilkins tends to add details which are missing in the play. That is why in the novel, Lysimachus hides himself in a room next to Marina's chamber in order to listen to her dialogues with other customers of the brothel (Wilkins 67); he clearly doubts whether she had told him the truth. Due to this detail, the relationship between
Lysimachus and Marina seems more realistic. In the play, as soon as Marina convinces
47 him, Lysimachus believes her fully, which seems to be a psychologically weak scene because, in addition, Marina's convincing speech in the play is quite short (see
Shakespeare 4.5.90–121).
In conclusion, it is possible to say that in the play and in the novel, different situations are emphasized as crucial: the play has its peak at the end of the story when
Pericles recognizes his lost daughter, and later when he meets his wife in Ephesus. This enables Shakespeare to give the audience and readers a strong message: a good human being can always hope in a happy ending, even if their life seems to be full of suffering.
On the contrary, Wilkins pays as much attention to the mentioned scenes as to many other events in the story: Marina's saving her chastity and various minor motifs (Antioch and his daughter, life of the ruler's family in Tarsus, death of Lychorida). Therefore, his narration lacks a clear climax and only jumps from one theme to another.
4.3. Characters
The different characteristics of the characters in the play and in the novel are a result of several factors: First, the diverse length of the characters' speeches (especially in the case of Marina); second, the literary form of novel allowing more description and the literary form of drama allowing more action (this is important mainly in the case of
Antioch's daughter and Thaliard); and third, Wilkins obviously wanted to present different traits in some of his characters, and therefore emphasized different details and motivations.
4.3.1 Main Characters
At first sight, both in the novel and the play, Pericles seems to be a typical good character, experiencing various adversities and hard times and achieving a deserved 48 reward in the end. He is fair, peaceable, faithful, humble and compassionate. Wilkins in the novel remarks that “in that part of the world there was in those dayes no Prince so noble in Armes, or excellent in Artes, and had so generall and deserued a report by fame”
(Wilkins 15); these virtues are mentioned in the play, too (Shakespeare 2.3.79), and verified in both sources in the tournament in Pentapolis (Wilkins 31, Shakespeare 2.2.58) and later that night when Pericles enchants Simonides by his music playing (Wilkins 35,
Shakespeare 2.5.24–27). Moreover, throughout the play, Pericles' love towards his family is crucial (and often exceeds his sense of responsibility for his kingdom).
On the other hand, however, it is mainly the novel where – significantly more than in the play – other interesting and more negative traits of Pericles' character are revealed.
Primarily, Pericles is timid and often sinks into depression. This might be linked to his inexperience caused by his young age, since it is usually old Helicanus who helps him get better; also, Pericles' fears decrease with age.
Nevertheless, the examples of Pericles' depression and worries are frequent, especially in the first two acts of the play and the corresponding chapters of the novel.
After returning home from Antioch, he is “troubled in mind” and worried that Antioch would declare war on his kingdom (Wilkins 19, Shakespeare 1.2.2–33). He even
“abandons all familiar society” (Wilkins 19) and would have probably stayed passive if
Helicanus had not spoken to him critically – which Pericles appreciates. His depression returns after the shipwreck (Wilkins 26, Shakespeare 2.1.1–11), after the tournament in
Pentapolis (Wilkins 31, Shakespeare 2.3.52), and especially when he believes that his daughter is dead (detailed description of Pericles's sorrow in Wilkins 71 and Shakespeare
4.4.25–30). His timidity returns when Simonides shows him the letter written by Thaisa
– he immediately gets worried that the ruler will want to kill him (Wilkins 38,
49
Shakespeare 2.5.43).
Other rather negative traits of Pericles can be found in the story. He leaves his newborn baby in Tarsus not because he believes that the foster parents would give Marina better education or upbringing, but because he decides to get back to Antioch and seize the city (Wilkins 50). For the next fourteen years, he does not show interest in Marina's life (Wilkins 70).
What is more, when Pericles is desperate, he resorts to agressivity: he strikes Marina on the face and pushes away Thaisa when he believes they are foreigners who abuse his sorrow (Wilkins 76 and 78). In the novel, such violence results in revealing the truth, because Marina and Thaisa are provoked to speak about their life. But again, the play moderates Pericles' aggression; it is mentioned in the text but not emphasized
(Shakespeare 5.1.74).
The reason why the play varnishes Pericles' character is probably the form – unlike in the novel, the playwright(s) could not afford to devote precious lines of the drama to a detailed psychological explanation of negative situations. Hoeniger reduces the problem by saying that Pericles (in the play) is drawn as an “impeccably good man, a man without defect,” and as such, he differs from Shakespeare's tragic heroes; Pericles and Marina undergo intense suffering, though both are “wholly good.” (Hoeniger, Introduction lxxxi)
But as numerous examples mentioned above prove, this proclamation cannot be accepted without objection.
In the novel, it is possible to read more information about Marina's childhood than in the play. She was brought up as a sister to Cleon and Dionyza's daughter, started school at the age of five, was educated in the seven liberal sciences (Wilkins 70), that is grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, and she was kidnapped by the
50 pirates and sold to the brothel in Mytilene at the age of fourteen (Wilkins 71). The play does not mention her academic education, as if her talent for singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, sewing and embroidering were more important – and in fact, they are, because it is these skills that help her change the brothel to a school for noble women.
Both in the play and the novel, Marina is a talented speaker. Her speeches help her to survive, remain a virgin and even find her family. Her lines are, however, often so frank and cunning (similarly to Thaisa's expressing) that they sound impudent: when the bawde commands her to behave well in front of the “honourable” Lysimachus, Marina promptly answers, “Heauen graunt that I may finde him so.” (Wilkins 63, analogously in
Shakespeare 4.5.56 and 4.5.61) When she is alone with Lysimachus who wants to have sex with her, she openly asks him: “Do you know this house to be a place of such resort, and will come into't?” (4.5.84–85) And when she finally meets Pericles, she criticizes him for not behaving as a king (Wilkins 75).
When Marina's virginity is endangered, she emphasizes her chastity in the novel and her faithfulness in the play (obviously, these traits are closely related). The reason might be, again, simple: In the novel, Marina's speech to Lysimachus and her speech to
Pander (the servant) are long and as such, contain phrases like “This building, the workmanship of heauen, made vp for good, and not to be the exercise of sinnes intemperaunce,” (Wilkins 65) “Kill me, but not deflower me” (Wilkins 66) and “Let me euen now, now in this minute die, and Ile accompt my death more happy than my birth.”
(Wilkins 66) In the play, both of her principal speeches are shorter, so she repeatedly simply invokes gods to protect her (Shakespeare 4.5.103, Shakespeare 4.5.150,
Shakespeare 4.5.182 etc.). Nevertheless, Marina in the play remains as courageous and brave as Marina in the novel; she only seems to be more vulnerable because
51 circumstances help her more than in the novel.
Although Thaisa does not get as much space in the story as Pericles and Marina, her character both in the novel and the play is described vividly. She is noble, courageous, faithful, loving, and what makes her character especially lively is her cunningness. Thaisa seems to have a good relationship with her father, with whom she speaks as frankly as her familial and social status allows her, so it is natural for her to tell him that she likes
Pericles; on the other hand, her manners make her praise Pericles only decently (“Sure he's a gallant gentleman,” Shakespeare 2.3.31, and “To me he seems like diamond to glass,” Shakespeare 2.3.35). Aside, she comments on the fact that Pericles attracts her in a sexual way (“Wishing him my meat,” Shakespeare 2.3.31), and her affection is openly expressed in her letter to Simonides, in which she does not ask her father for a permission
(Wilkins 40). Her determination is clearer in the novel where the letter is shown, while in the play, Simonides only comments its contents; the novel also emphasizes her resoluteness in the scene of Pericles' departure where Thaisa convinces her father to allow her to travel with her husband, although she is almost nine months pregnant (Wilkins 42).
But since Simonides helps her to achieve a happy marriage with Pericles, although she often only hints her thoughts, it is obvious that the father–daughter relationship functions well in this case. It is the opposite of the perverted relationship between Antioch and his daughter, especially as it is presented in the novel.
4.3.2 Minor Characters
Hoeniger asserts that since Pericles is a romantic bibliography, there is no space for the development of minor characters; as a result, only the fishermen in Pentapolis and the brothel-keepers are portrayed realistically (Hoeniger, Introduction lxxix). However, the comparison of the play with the novel brings evidence that the minor characters in both 52 sources are not so two-dimensional as Hoeniger believes.
The ruler in Mytilene, Lysimachus, is a case example of the distinct descriptions in the play and in the novel. According to the novel, the reason why Lysimachus wants to have sex with Marina is, surprisingly, mercy – the sovereign realizes that many vicious men will try to buy the virginity of this newcomer, but she seems to be “rather a deseruing bedfellow for a Prince”; so, he wants to spare her violence and perversities (Wilkins 62).
He comes to the brothel in secrecy and exceptionally (Wilkins 63). When he stays alone with Marina, however, as if intoxicated by the place, he demands sex and even threatens to punish all the inhabitants of the brothel if she does not oblige him (Wilkins 65) – but as soon as Marina convinces him that she is telling him the truth about herself, he becomes virtuous again, regretting his former behaviour: “I hither came with thoughtes intemperate, foule and deformed.” (Wilkins 66–67)
Hoeniger comments that “Wilkins presents Lysimachus as a cruder and more obviously sensual man than he is in the play,” (Hoeniger, Introduction xlvii) but this can be easily disproved. According to the play, Lysimachus might be a regular customer in the brothel, since Bawd recognizes him in his disguise (Shakespeare 4.5.24). When he enters the house – and it seems that he does not know about Marina's presence yet – his first question sounds rather lecherous: “How now, how a dozen of virginities?”
(Shakespeare 4.5.27–28) For this Lysimachus, virginity is but a commodity. The way
Lysimachus changes his mind after Marina's short speech suggests that in this passage of the play, corruption is presumable, especially if we take into account the fact that
Lysimachus in the play later claims that he came to the brothel “with no ill intent”
(Shakespeare 4.5.114). Despite his assertion, or rather because of it, he seems to be hypocritical.
53
Among the villains, two female characters make a rather different impression in the play and in the novel: Antioch's daughter and Dionyza. While Wilkins's novel offers some compassion for the former, the play shows more understanding for the latter.
Wilkins uses the convenient form of the novel to describe elaborately Antioch's traits and behaviour, especially in the connection with his daughter; Antioch is described as a mighty, powerful and very cruel tyrant who treats his daughter with “pittilesse” love
(12); in fact, the relationship between him and his daughter is described as a repeated rape. On the contrary, the play speaks about their relationship as a mutual act of them both. “Bad child, worse father” (1.0.27) is the definition articulated by the character of
Gower which suggests the relationship is not a torment for the young girl.
In the novel, Antioch's daughter is obviously overpowered by her possessive father, despite “prayers and teares,” (13) and a long description of her suffering, including shame in front of her nurse (13), assures the reader that the girl should be considered a victim.
Such detailed pictures of her melancholy and sorrow cannot be found in the play; contrariwise, the play lays emphasis on her beauty (1.0.23–26) and provocations. The daughter in the play only pronounces two verses (1.1.60–1), in which she wishes good luck to Pericles, but in the novel, she falls in love with Pericles (16–17). As such, she serves as a tragic opposite to Thaisa.
The characteristic of Dionyza, on the other hand, is more elaborate in the play, in her dialogue with Cleon in scene 4.3. The novelist briefly notes that her jealousy, which leads to the decision to have Marina murdered, is caused by people in the street who keep mocking her own daughter (Wilkins 55). Shakespeare is more expansive:
She did distain my child, and stood between
Her and her fortunes. None would look on her,
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But cast their gazes on Marina's face,
Whilst ours was blurted at and held a malkin
Not worth the time of day. (Shakespeare 4.3.31–35)
Dionyza in the play acts because she is a loving mother who cannot bear the suffering and humiliation of her daughter. On the contrary, she is very cruel and heartless towards Cleon, her husband, who is clearly weaker than her, and in their dialogue in
4.3.14–50, she even resembles the ambitious Lady Macbeth.
Another difference can be traced in the characteristic of Thaliard. While in the novel, the murderer is a typical villain, Shakespeare lets him speak openly about his own motivations – and from what he says, it is easy to understand that he is in the thrall of a tyrant and thus cannot do what he wants:
Here must I kill King Pericles, and, if I do it not, I am sure to be hanged at
home: 'tis dangerous. (…) if a king bid a man be a villain, he's bound by the
indenture of his oath to be one. (Shakespeare 1.3.1–9)
As for other differences, they are unimportant: Cleon, for example, seems more passive and weaker in the play than in the novel (see Shakespeare 1.4); Bolt, the servant in the brothel (whose name is Pander in the novel), gets more space in the play to explain why he serves in such a dishonest house is his fear that otherwise, he would have to become a soldier and be killed or crippled in a war (4.5.173–6).
Among the good minor characters, differences between the play and the novel are slight and apply to details, not general character traits. In Helicanus, for example, both sources emphasize his loyalty, saneness and the ability to encourage Pericles in passages where the king feels depressed and passive. Similarly, in Simonides, both the play and the novel emphasize his sense of justice, uprightness and understanding that “one duty of
55 an early modern father, especially a king, is to find his daughter a suitable husband.”
(Gossett 251) In the play, Simonides even lies to his guests about Thaisa's decision after the celebration (he says that she made a vow not to break her virgin honour for another year, see Shakespeare 2.5.3–12, even though in fact, Thaisa confided her love for Pericles to her father); this passage cannot be found in the novel, but it does not change the understanding of the character of Simonides.
4.4 Themes and Meaning
Regarding main themes and their meaning, it should be evident now that the play and the novel do not differ in what they claim, but they are dissimilar in how they work with the general topics.
Both the play and the novel present the idea of a perfect politician, not only in the character of Pericles (who slowly reaches some kind of a political ideal), but also in the character of Simonides and partly Helicanus. “He is no readier to command, than we his subiects are willing to obey” (Wilkins 28) is a definition of perfect government, given by one of the fishermen who describes Simonides. In the Jacobean England, debates about duties and limits of a king were topical (Gossett 124), so it is logical that neither
Shakespeare or Wilkins wanted to stay aloof. The deterrent examples of tyrany (Antioch), emphasized in the novel, and political weakness (Cleon), emphasized in the play, contribute to the discussion, too. However, Wilkins tends to proclaim various characteristics of all the rulers in the story as constant; Shakespeare, on the contrary, elaborates their development, especially in the case of Pericles who gradually matures, and Cleon, who becomes an incompetent king as well as protector of a child he promised to shelter.
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In the play, the story of Cleon also signifies that it is not possible to swear allegiance in vain. By saying, “The which when any shall not gratify, / Or pay you with unthankfullness in thought, / Be it our wives, our children or ourselves, / The curse of heaven and men succeed their evils!” (Shakespeare 1.4.99–102), Cleon curses himself and his own family. What is more, he repeats his curse later when he says “By you relieved, would force me to my duty / But if to that my nature need a spur / The gods revenge it upon me and mine / To the end of generation.” (Shakespeare 3.3.24–26) The motive of self-conviction and just retribution of gods is thus very strong in the play. It is surprising that Wilkins does not work with this theme in his novel; on the contrary, he emphasizes Pericles' personal revenge (Wilkins 79).
When analysing the play, Hoeniger asserts that “clearly the course of Pericles' life is shaped mainly by Providence and only secondarily by his human contacts and his own actions,” (Hoeniger, Introduction lxxx) and it is possible to add that in the novel, the opposite is true, since Wilkins hardly ever uses interventions of supernatural or divine powers in his interpretation of the story. The fact that he prefers to remain sober-minded is also obvious in the last chapter where Pericles only dreams about goddess Diana
(Wilkins 77), while Shakespeare allows the divine being to appear on stage (Shakespeare
5.1.227) so it is not clear whether Pericles is sleeping, hallucinating, or experiencing a true deus ex machina. In such passages where Shakespeare utilizes magical themes, the play looks more mysterious, which definitely increases its attractiveness. The sober realism of Wilkins seems to keep the novel from becoming a truly timeless work.
Other topics could be found in the play and the novel, but for this comparison, it is enough to conclude that Shakespeare is much more skilful at universalizing various themes which could have remained specific and thus uninteresting. Wilkins, on the
57 contrary, tends to concretize motifs which would otherwise have had a potential to connect with modern readers. Although he is talented enough to present a rather astonishing passage, the overall impression of his novel – and the first two acts of the play, too – is unconvincing. Despite some very powerful parts, the text does not cross its historical period.
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Conclusion
This thesis aimed to answer the question of what key elements determine the success and attractiveness of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre which has only survived in the form of its bad quarto. Also, the goal of this thesis was to prove that George Wilkins's novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which was strongly influenced by the play, is not a mere copy but rather an interesting autonomous work which interprets the story of Pericles in its own, original way.
In the first chapter, the main sources of both adaptations were presented: John
Gower's Confessio Amantis, Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures and several other works. The differences between these older versions of the story and the two studied works were summarized to show the variety of approaches towards the ancient topic and to prove that both Shakespeare and Wilkins interpreted the story originally.
Although the play is formally based on Gower's medieval poem, in terms of ideas, it becomes much more modern. Contrariwise, Wilkins's novel is based on a later source
(Twine), but in reality, it remains more conservative.
In the second chapter, detailed information about the origin of the play, the historical context and formal characteristics of Pericles was presented: the genre indefiniteness, the choruses and the dumb-shows as features coming from medieval genres, the vast textual corruption and the surprising difference between Acts 1 and 2 and Acts 3, 4 and 5. When looking for the reasons for the attractiveness of Pericles, it is essential to know such characteristics – they make the play unique and mysterious; Pericles has always provoked, and thus allured attention.
The second part of the second chapter dealt with the problem of dual authorship.
Several most common theories were mentioned but the issue could not be solved in this 59 thesis, since it is a complex matter, studied by the most significant Shakespearian scholars of the present. Nevertheless, it was shown that the idea of Wilkins being Shakespeare's collaborator seems to be very probable; and such a conclusion helps deliberate over the similarities and differences between the play and the novel.
The third chapter, which focused on Wilkins's novel, proved that although The
Painful Adventures have always been considered a mere reworking of the play and very little has been known about its author, it is a specific piece of work which sometimes astonishes by its elaboration, original interpretations and emphases.
The most important conclusions, though, can be found in the fourth chapter of the thesis, in which the play and the novel were compared in terms of their linguistic means, composition and processing the storyline, interpretation of the characters and general meaning and themes contained in the works. It is natural that these two works differ formally, as a playbook and a novel will always have different specifications; but in this case, it is surprising to see how much they differ in terms of word occurrences, phrases and verses. If the novel was more or less a copy of the play, then frequent similarities would occur. But modern computer analyses proved that the language of Wilkins's novel is not very similar to the language of the play, especially when it is compared to Acts 3,
4 and 5. Also, the degree of drama in the two texts differ, and suddenly it becomes clear that Pericles, which is often considered quite undramatic, contains a lot of dramatic scenes and situations that are written in such an ingenious way that they can be compared to some of Shakespeare's best plays. What is more, details of the plot, composition and traits of the characters also prove how different the novel and the play are.
Last but not least, is was suggested that although Wilkins attempted to deal with similar topics as Shakespeare, he was not able to create a truly timeless work. In
60 conclusion, the fourth chapter proved that even though Wilkins wrote The Painful
Adventures as an answer to the success of Pericles, he wanted to set his novel apart from the play. But, since he was a worse story-teller, his creation became an average work of his time, while the play – thanks to its second part, in particular – is still topical today. In fact, it is not so important to know whether Wilkins was the original author of Pericles,
Shakespeare's collaborator or he had nothing to do with the play; what is crucial is that he tried to surpass the attractiveness of the play – and he failed.
The key elements which cause Pericles, unlike The Painful Adventures, to be popular despite its obvious poor quality are, according to the research provided in this thesis, the unusual form which combines various genres, the still unanswered question of the authorship thanks to which Pericles departs from the traditional Shakespearian canon, and also the way it interprets the ancient story and makes it timeless. In contrast to the novel, the play is powerful in the scenes where pathos is present, because Shakespeare knows how to convince the reader/audience that such situations are related to their own lives. The story of the young ruler Pericles who learns how to be a good human being, as well as the story of Pericles, the father and husband who finds his lost loved ones after many years of depression and despair, are themes which will never become outdated, and it is Wilkins's failure that he did not manage to bring his interpretation of the story to a definite climactic moment where such topics would resonate.
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Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Shakespeare, William, and George Wilkins. Pericles. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. 3rd ed.
London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print. Arden Shakespeare.
- - -. “Perikles.” Trans. Martin Hilský. Dílo. Prague: Academia, 2011. 1339–74. Print.
Wilkins, George. Pericles Prince of Tyre. A novel by George Wilkins, printed in 1608,
and founded upon Shakespeare's play. Ed. Tycho Mommsen. Oldenburg:
Gerhard Stalling, 1857. Internet Archive. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
- - -. The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Internet Shakespeare Editions,
edited by Tom Bishop, and Andrew Forsberg, modern ed. U of Victoria, n. d.
Web. 10 Nov. 2016.
Secondary Sources:
“About Us.” The Stationers’ Company. The Stationers’ Company. N. d. Web. 25 Feb.
2017.
Aughterson, Kate. Shakespeare: The Late Plays. N. p.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Analysing Texts.
Baker, Harry T. “The Relation of Shakspere's Pericles to George Wilkins's Novel, The
Pain-Full Aduentures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” PMLA 23 (1908): 100–18.
JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Bevington, David. “Determining the Indeterminate: The Oxford Shakespeare.” Rev. of
The Oxford Shakespeare, by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare Quarterly 38.4
(1987): 501–19. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Bliss, Lee. “Review.” Rev. of The Arden Shakespeare “Pericles”, by Suzanne Gossett, 62
and The Oxford Shakespeare “Pericles”, by Roger Warren, Gary Taylor and
MacDonald P. Jackson. Shakespeare Quarterly 56.3 (2005): 354–6. JSTOR.
Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Collier, J. Payne. Preface. Pericles Prince of Tyre. A novel by George Wilkins, printed in
1608, and founded upon Shakespeare's play. By George Wilkins. Ed. Tycho
Mommsen. Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1857. Internet Archive. Web. 20 Oct.
2016.
Dickson, George B. “The Identity of George Wilkins.” The Shakespeare Association
Bulletin 14 (1939): 195–208. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Elton, William. “’Pericles’: A New Source or Analogue.” The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 48 (1949): 138–39. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Gossett, Suzanne. Introduction. Pericles. By William Shakespeare, and George
Wilkins. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print. 1–163.
The Arden Shakespeare.
Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Ed. Russell A. Peck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980.
Print.
Graves, T. S. “On the Date and Signification of 'Pericles'.” Modern Philology 13 (1916):
545–56. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Hastings, William T. “Shakspere's Part in 'Pericles'.” The Shakespeare Association
Bulletin 14 (1939): 67–85. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Hazlitt, William Carew. Handbook to the Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of
Great Britain: From the Invention of Printing to the Restoration. London, 1867.
Print.
Hoeniger, F. David. “Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles.” Shakespeare Quaterly 33
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(1982): 461–79. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
- - -. “How Significant are Textual Parallels? A New Author for Pericles?” Shakespeare
Quaterly 11 (1960): 27–37. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
- - -. Introduction. Pericles. By William Shakespeare, and George Wilkins. Ed. F. D.
Hoeniger. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. i–xcvii. Print. The Arden
Shakespeare.
Jackson, MacDonald P. Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case. Oxford: Oxford U
P, 2003. Oxford Scholarship Online. Web. 25 Feb. 2017.
- - -. “Rhyming in 'Pericles': More Evidence of Dual Authorship.” Studies in Bibliography
46 (1993): 239–49. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean suspect texts: the “bad” quartos and their contexts.
Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996. Print.
“Miracle Play.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 20 Jul. 1998.
Web. 25 Feb. 2017.
Mommsen, Tycho. Introduction. Pericles Prince of Tyre. A novel by George Wilkins,
printed in 1608, and founded upon Shakespeare's play. By George Wilkins. Ed.
Tycho Mommsen. Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1857. Internet Archive. Web. 20
Oct. 2016.
“Morality Play.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc., 21 Sep.
2009. Web. 25 Feb. 2017.
Muir, Kenneth. The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays. N. p.: Psychology P, 2004. Print.
Musgrove, Sydney. “The First Quarto of Pericles Reconsidered.” Shakespeare Quaterly
29 (1978): 389–406. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Parrott, Thomas Marc. “Pericles: The Play and the Novel.” The Shakespeare Association
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Bulletin 23 (1948): 105–13. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.
Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. Washington:
Washington Square P, 2004. Print. Folger Shakespeare Library.
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& Faber, 2015. Print.
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Summary
This thesis analyses two works dating back to the beginning of the 17th century: the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written around 1608 by William Shakespeare and (probably)
George Wilkins, and George Wilkins's novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, published in 1608, which is clearly influenced by the play.
The aim of the thesis is, first, to compare these two adaptations of the ancient story in terms of linguistic means, composition and plot, characters, and themes, and second, to determine why Pericles remains so attractive, although it only survived in the form of a bad quarto, while The Painful Adventures are almost unknown, although its condition is so good that the novel is often used when editors need to ameliorate the corrupted places in the play.
The first chapter of the thesis deals with some of the older versions of the story of
Pericles, or rather, Apollonius of Tyre (Apollonius of Tyre is the original name of the main character who was extremely popular in medieval Europe). The thesis shows how John
Gower's Confessio Amantis, Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painfull Adventures and several other works correspond with Shakespeare's and Wilkins's adaptations and in what issues they differ from these sources.
In the second chapter, the play Pericles is analysed in detail, including various theories about its origin and authorship. The most probable conclusion is that George
Wilkins was Shakespeare's collaborator who wrote Acts 1 and 2 or that he was even the original author of the whole play, which was later reworked by Shakespeare.
In the third chapter, the novel The Painful Adventures is analysed in detail; the aim of this part of the thesis is to prove that the novel is not a mere copy of the play but an
66 autonomous work.
The fourth chapter contains the main part of the thesis, the comparison of both works. It gives enough evidence to prove that the novel differs from the play significantly, although main themes remain the same.
In the conclusion, the reasons for the attractiveness and success of the play are defined: the unusual form, the puzzle of dual authorship, and the ability of Shakespeare to find timeless topics in the narrative.
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Resumé
Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá analýzou dvou děl, pocházejících z počátku 17. století: divadelní hry Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Perikles), napsané kolem roku 1608
Williamem Shakespearem a (pravděpodobně) Georgem Wilkinsem, a románu George
Wilkinse The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Obtížná dobrodružství
Perikla, prince tyrského – dosud nepřeloženo), který vyšel roku 1608 a je očividně hrou inspirovaný.
Cílem této práce je, za prvé, porovnat obě zmíněné adaptace původně antického příběhu, a to co do výběru lingvistických prostředků, kompozice, práce s dějem, charakterů postav a témat, a za druhé, určit, proč právě Perikles stále přitahuje čtenáře i diváky, ačkoli se dochoval pouze ve formě špatného kvarta, zatímco Obtížná dobrodružství Perikla jsou téměř neznámá, i když se román zachoval v tak dobrém stavu,
že jej editoři často využívají, chtějí-li vylepšit zkomolená a poničená místa v textu hry.
První kapitola práce se věnuje starším verzím příběhu o Periklovi, respektive o
Apolloniovi tyrském (Apollonius tyrský je původní jméno hlavní postavy vyprávění, jež bylo ve středověké Evropě mimořádně oblíbené). Práce ukazuje, jak báseň Confessio
Amantis Johna Gowera, novela The Pattern of Painful Adventures Lawrence Twina a několik dalších děl souvisí s adaptacemi Shakespeara a Wilkinse a v čem se tato dvě díla od svých zdrojů odlišují.
Ve druhé kapitole je dopodrobna analyzována hra Perikles, a to včetně rozmanitých teorií o jejím původu a autorství. Nejpravděpodobnější je závěr, ze kterého vyplývá, že
George Wilkins se Shakespearem spolupracoval a sám napsal první a druhé dějství hry nebo že byl dokonce původním autorem celé hry, kterou později Shakespeare
68 přepracoval.
Třetí kapitola se zabývá podrobnou analýzou románu The Painful Adventures; cílem této části práce je dokázat, že román není pouhou kopií hry, ale že jde o samostatné dílo.
Čtvrtá kapitola obsahuje hlavní část práce, srovnání obou děl. Přináší dostatek důkazů o tom, že se román od hry významně odlišuje, ačkoli klíčová témata zůstávají shodná.
V závěru bakalářské práce jsou uvedeny důvody atraktivity a úspěchu zkoumané hry: jsou jimi neobvyklá forma, záhada týkající se autorství a Shakespearova schopnost zachytit v příběhu nadčasová témata.
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