The early folio editions of the plays, those of 1623 and 1632, omit the Pericles altogether, but later editions restore it to a place among the works of Shakespeare. Dr. Farmer contends that the hand of the great dramatist is visible only in the last act; but others controvert this opinion, and maintain, though he was not the fabricator of the plot, nor the author of every dialogue and chorus, that his genius is evident in several passages.
In Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere, supplemental volume, p. 13, we are informed: “The first edition of Pericles appeared in 1609,”—several years before the dramatist’s death,—“under the following title,—‘The late and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, &c. By William Shakespeare: London, Glosson, 1609.’”
According to the Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. i, Preface, “another edition was issued in the same year.” The publication was repeated in 1611, 1619, 1630 and 1635, so that at the very time when Shakespeare was living, his authorship was set forth; and after his death, while his friends and contemporaries were alive, the opinion still prevailed.
The conclusion at which Knight arrives, sup. vol. pp. 118, 119, is thus stated by him: “We advocate the belief that Pyrocles, or Pericles was a very early work of Shakspere in some form, however different from that which we possess.” And again, “We think that the Pericles of the beginning of the seventeenth century was the revival of a play written by Shakspere some twenty years earlier.... Let us accept Dryden’s opinion, that
“‘Shakespeare’s own Muse his Pericles first bore.’”
The Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. 10, ed. 1866, gave a firmer judgment:—“There can be no doubt that the hand of Shakespeare is traceable in many of the scenes, and that throughout the play he largely retouched, and even rewrote, the work of some inferior dramatist. But the text has come down to us in so maimed and imperfect a state that we can no more judge of what the play was when it left the master’s hand than we should have been able to judge of Romeo and Juliet, if we had only had the first quarto as authority for the text.”
Our own Hallam tells us,—“Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part, the work of Shakespeare:” but with great confidence the critic Schlegel declares,—“This piece was acknowledged to be a work, but a youthful work of Shakespeare’s. It is most undoubtedly his, and it has been admitted into several later editions of his works. The supposed imperfections originate in the circumstance that Shakespeare here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its proper sphere. Hence he even introduces Gower himself, and makes him deliver a prologue in his own antiquated language and versification. This power of assuming so foreign a manner is at least no proof of helplessness.”
There are, then, strong probabilities that in the main the Pericles was Shakespeare’s own composition, or at least was adopted by him; it belongs to his early dramatic life, and at any rate it may be taken as evidence to show that the Emblem writers were known and made use of between 1589 and 1609 by the dramatists of England.
Books of Emblems are not indeed mentioned by their titles, nor so quoted in the Pericles as we are accustomed to do, by making direct references; they were a kind of common property, on which everyone might pasture his Pegasus or his Mule without any obligation to tell where his charger had been grazing. The allusions, however, are so plain, the words so exactly alike, that they cannot be misunderstood. The author was of a certainty acquainted with more than one Emblem writer, in more than one language, and Paradin, Symeoni, and our own Whitney may be recognised in his pages. We conclude that he had them before him, and copied from them when he penned the second scene of the Second Act of Pericles.
The Dialogue is between Simonides, king of Pentapolis, and his daughter, Thaisa, on occasion of the “triumph,” or festive pageantry, which was held in honour of her birthday. (Pericles, act. ii. sc. 2, lines 17–47, vol. ix. pp. 343, 344.)