Written. 1607-8 (?)
Published. 1608.
Source of the Plot. The plot is taken from an English prose version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance. This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576, under the name of The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures (etc., etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his Confessio Amantis. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.
The Fable. Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.
Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and marries her.
Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter, dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus, and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina, the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus. He then returns to Tyre.
Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen, deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina. Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and musician.
Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He learns that she is his daughter. The goddess Diana bids him go to her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends happily with the reuniting of the family.
The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre in the year 1608, probably after the play had been produced.
The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play (in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It is not known how it came to pass that Shakespeare took the play in hand. From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a theatre on which many depended for bread.