Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare. There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare’s coadjutor in ‘Timon’ was George Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic power, who, in ‘The Miseries of Enforced Marriage’ (1607), first treated the story that afterwards served for the plot of ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy.’ At any rate, Wilkins may safely be credited with portions of ‘Pericles,’ a romantic play which can be referred to the same year as ‘Timon.’ Shakespeare contributed only acts III. and V. and parts of IV., which together form a self-contained whole, and do not combine satisfactorily with the remaining scenes. The presence of a third hand, of inferior merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity on occasion) are best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.) From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues. But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare’s own contributions, narrating the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck. At many points he here anticipated his latest dramatic effects. The shipwreck is depicted (IV. i.) as impressively as in the ‘Tempest,’ and Marina and her mother Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the ‘Winter’s Tale.’ The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were spoken by an actor representing the mediæval poet John Gower, who in the fourteenth century had versified Pericles’s story in his ‘Confessio Amantis’ under the title of ‘Apollonius of Tyre.’ It is also found in a prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence Twyne’s ‘Patterne of Painfull Adventures’ in 1576, and again in 1607. Afte