On the title-page of the first quarto edition of Pericles, in 1609, are these words: "The late, and much admired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre.... By William Shakespeare." "The late"—the play cannot have been acted before 1608, for there is no contemporary mention of it before that date, whereas from 1609 onwards it is frequently noticed. "The much admired play"—everything witnesses to the truth of these words.[1] Many contemporary references testify to the favour the play enjoyed. In an anonymous poem, Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap (1609), Pericles is mentioned as the new play which gentle and simple crowd to see:
"Amazde I stood, to see a Crowd
Of civill Throats stretched out so lowd
(As at a New Play). All the Roomes
Did swarm with Gentiles mix'd with Groomes,
So that I truly thought all These
Came to see Shore or Pericles."
The previously mentioned prologue ([p. 539]) to Robert Tailor's The Hog has Lost his Pearl (1614) cannot wish the play anything better than that it may succeed as well as Pericles:
"And if it prove so happy as to please,
Weele say 'tis fortunate like Pericles."
In 1629, Ben Jonson, exasperated by the utter failure of his play The New Inn, affords evidence, in the ode addressed to himself which accompanies the drama, of the persistent popularity of Pericles:
"No doubt some mouldy tale
Like Pericles, and stale
As the shrieves crusts and nasty as his fish—
Scraps out of every dish
Thrown forth and raked into the common tub,
May keep up the Play-club."
In Sheppard's poem, The Times displayed in Six Sestyads. Shakespeare is said to equal Sophocles and surpass Aristophanes, and all for Pericles' sake:
"With Sophocles we may
Compare great Shakespeare: Aristophanes
Never like him his Fancy could display,
Witness the Prince of Tyre, his Pericles."
This play was not included in the First Folio edition, probably because the editors could not come to an agreement with the original publisher; for these pirates were protected by law as soon as the book was entered at Stationers' Hall. During Shakespeare's lifetime and after his death it was one of the most popular of English dramas.
Pericles was formerly considered one of Shakespeare's earliest works, an opinion held strangely enough by Karl Elze in our own day. But all English critics now believe, what Hallam was the first to discover, that the language of such parts of it as were written by Shakespeare belongs in style to his latest period, and it is unanimously declared to have been written somewhere about the year 1608, after Antony and Cleopatra and before Cymbeline and The Tempest. (See, for example, P. Z. Round's introduction to the Irving edition, or Furnival's Triar Table of the order of Shakespeare's Plays, reprinted in Dowden and elsewhere.) My own opinion of course is, that Pericles follows naturally upon Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, and forms an appropriate overture to the succeeding fantastically idyllic plays. The reader will have noticed that, unlike Dowden and Furnivall, I have not been able to assign so early a date for the whole series of pessimistic dramas as 1608 would imply.[2] I assume that certain portions of Pericles were forming in Shakespeare's mind even in the midst of the venom to which he was giving vent for the last time in Timon of Athens. In such periods of violent upheaval there may be an undercurrent to the surface-current in the mind of a poet as well as in another man's, and it is this undercurrent which will presently gain strength and become the prevalent mood.