Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was probably the earliest, as it is certainly the weakest, of the dramatic romances. But the story was one of the most popular in all fiction, and Pericles was, no doubt, in its time what its first title-page claimed for it, a 'much-admired play.' Its hero is a wandering knight of chivalry, buffeted by storm and misfortune from one shore to another. The five acts which tell his adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great surges of good and ill luck. The significance of his daughter's name, Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea is not only her birthplace, but is the symbol throughout of Fortune and Romance. From the polluted coast of Antioch, where Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis, where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand of the Princess Thaïsa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaïsa safely to land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. Here, upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter; and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind influence of Diana, their goddess. We are never far from the sound of the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."
Pericles in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a dramatic romance. The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts. He was supplemented, when his affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the beginning of Act III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles speaks to the storm at sea:—
"Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! ...
The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard."
In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the similar scene in The Tempest; in the character of Marina, girlish and fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are scarcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who, like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the dramatic romances which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of her character.
Authorship and Date.—The play was entered to Edward Blount in the Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably written but little before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664). The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the printing rights. The former of these hypotheses is generally favored, since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower." The author was George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. He is generally accepted as Shakespeare's collaborator. The claims of William Rowley for a share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.
Source.—Shakespeare used Gower's Confessio Amantis, and the version in Laurence Twine's Pattern of Painful Adventures, 1606. The tale is also in the Gesta Romanorum.
Cymbeline.—"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,
A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,
That hath her husband banish'd."
Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline, king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her slain, shake in the least degree her true affection. Such constancy cannot fail of its reward, and in the end Imogen wins back both father and husband.
In such a story, where virtue's self is made to shine, other characters must of necessity suffer. Posthumus, Imogen's husband, appears weak and impulsive, foolish in making his wife's constancy a matter for wagers, and absurdly quick to believe the worst of her. His weakness is, however, in part atoned for by his gallant fight in defense of his native Britain, and by his outburst of genuine shame and remorse when perception of his unjust treatment of Imogen comes to him. Cymbeline, the aged king, has all the irascibility of Lear, with none of his tenderness. The wicked Queen and her son are purely wicked. Only the faithful servant, Pisanio, a minor figure, has our sympathy in this court group.