It is deeply interesting to trace in this sombre yet fantastically romantic play of Pericles the germs of all his succeeding works.
Marina and her mother, long lost and late recovered by a sorrowing king, are the preliminary studies for Perdita and Hermione in A Winter's Tale. Perdita, as her name tells us, is lost and is living, ignorant of her parentage, in a strange country. Marina's flower-strewing suggests Perdita's distribution of blossoms, accompanied by words which reveal a profound understanding of flower-nature, and Hermione is recovered by Leontes as is Thaisa by Pericles.
The wicked stepmother in Cymbeline corresponds to the wicked foster-mother in Pericles. She hates Imogen as Dionyza hates Marina. Pisanio is supposed to have murdered her as Leonine is believed to have slain Marina, and Cymbeline recovers both sons and daughter as Pericles his wife and child.
The tendency to substitute some easy process of explanation, such as melodramatic music or supernatural revelation, in the place of severe dramatic technique, which appears at this time, betrays a certain weariness of the demands of the art. Diana appears to the slumbering Pericles as Jupiter does to Posthumus in Cymbeline.
But it is for The Tempest that Pericles more especially prepares us. The attitude of the melancholy prince towards his daughter seems to foreshadow that of the noble Prospero towards his child Miranda. Prospero is also living in exile from his home. But it is Cerimon who approaches more nearly in character to Prospero. Note his great speech:
"I held it ever,
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and richer: careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend;
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god. 'Tis known I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o'er authorities, I have,
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me and to my aid the blest infusions
That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones;
And I can speak of the disturbances
That Nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death" (Act iii. sc. 2).
The position in which Thaisa and Pericles stand in the second act towards the angry father, who has in reality no serious objection to their union, closely resembles that of Ferdinand and Miranda before the feigned wrath of Prospero. Most notable of all is the preliminary sketch we find in Pericles of the tempest which ushers in the play of that name. Over and above the resemblance between the storm scenes, we have Marina's description of the hurricane during which she was born (Pericles, Act iv. sc. I), and Ariel's description of the shipwreck (Tempest, Act i. sc. 2).
Many other slight touches prove a relationship between the two plays. In The Tempest (Act ii. sc. I), as in Pericles (Act v. sc. I), we have soothing slumbrous music and, mention of harpies (Tempest, Act iii. sc. 3, and Pericles, Act iv. sc. 3). The words "virgin knot," so charmingly used by Marina:
"If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep" (Act iv. sc. 2),
are also employed by Prospero in reference to Miranda in The Tempest (Act iv. sc. I); and it will be observed that these are the only two instances in which they occur in Shakespeare.