Pericles: ‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss’

**Philip Rowe** (0:10)
Welcome to the History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 226, Pericles. It is time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.
Last time, before all that lovely detail about biblical allusion in Hamlet, I took you through Macbeth, still one of Shakespeare's most performed plays. But now we come to one that is rarely seen and vies with King John, Two Noble Kinsman and Timon of Athens as the least performed Shakespeare play. Pericles is also a play that did not appear in the first folio, and in fact did not make it into a folio edition until 1664, with the second printing of the third folio. More of that history in a moment, but it certainly raises interesting questions about why Hemmings and Condell did not include it in the first folio.
In this case, one thing we can do accurately is date the play. A manuscript copy, which was almost certainly a prompt book copy used by the Kingsmen for performances at the Globe, was registered with the Stationer's Office in May 1608 There's also mention of seeing a performance of the play by an Italian ambassador in London when he was visiting between January 1606 and November 1608, although he doesn't mention specifically when he saw the play. There's also a novel by George Wilkins called The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. That was published in 1608 and is without doubt based on the play. Finally, the play is mentioned in a pamphlet published in 1609, where it is referred to as New.
The only early printed edition of Pericles is a 1609 quarter, which is such bad quality that it is accepted to be a pirate version, written up from either the memories of actors who had minor parts in the play, or from members of the audience at The Globe who wrote out the text as they heard it. Even the printer doesn't seem to have taken much effort over it. The poetry is written out as if it were prose, and the prose sections are written out as if they were verse. Stage directions are very minimal, and there are many glaring errors and omissions.
The poor quality of this only printed edition may have been why the play was not included in the first folio. When the third folio was published twenty years later, a total of seven plays that were not included in the first and second folios, including Pericles, were added. Pericles is the only one of these plays that remains confirmed in the canon, with the other six now being considered to be not at Shakespeare's hand. The London Prodigal is now tentatively attributed to Thomas Decker, while Thomas Lord Cromwell remains anonymous. The history of Sir John Oldcastle is thought to be a collaboration between Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton and others, while The Puritan and A Yorkshire Tragedy are both now attributed to Thomas Middleton. Finally, The Legend Of Lecreen is thought to be by Charles Tilney, son of the master of the revels Sir Philip Tilney.
Shakespeare used two main sources that retold the original Greek tale to construct his play. John Gower's Confessio Amantis, published in 1393, and Lawrence Twine's The Pattern Of Painful Adventures, published in 1576 John Gower appears as a character in the play, acting as the chorus, and Twine's influence is thought to be most clearly seen in the brothel scenes in Act 4 Both the sources name the protagonist as Apollonius, following the Greek source, and scholars believe that Shakespeare chose to change the name to Pericles, borrowing it from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
Most scholars agree that Pericles is some sort of collaboration, but there are many ideas about who that collaborator may have been and under what circumstances. Part of the problem with such identification is the poor quality of that quarto version, where we can only guess at what has been lost in the transposition of the play onto the page. Everyone agrees that the quality of the dramatic tension and direction of the play and the quality of the poetry and prose within the play varies to a degree that is unique in the Shakespeare canon. It is particularly noted that these differences are very noticeable between the first two acts, so up to the wedding of Pericles and Thaisa, where the plot rambles and the characterisation is minimal, and the rest of the play where both elements improve greatly. The reunion of Pericles and Marina in Act 5 is one of the most admired scenes in the play, where a dramatic and psychological complexity which is lacking in the rest of the play is very much on show.
Some scholars have argued for this being a revision by Shakespeare of someone else's work, and a hasty one at that. But most favour a collaboration where the playwrights took different parts of the play. The candidates for this are William Rowley, Thomas Hayward, John Day or George Wilkins, with Wilkins being generally thought of to be the most likely candidate. And here is probably the right place for a mention for George Wilkins, because he is not in any way significant enough to get another one, and he does seem to be an odd person to have become a collaborator with Shakespeare. We don't know that much about him, but he is listed as an innkeeper in the Cowcross area of London, which was an area known for prostitution, the sort of area where a visitor might get caught off guard and robbed by the locals, and where Londoners went for the sedier side of entertainments. His name also turns up in the records several times for being involved in violent altercations, and in most cases the victim was a woman. Specifically mentioned is that he kicked a pregnant woman in the belly, and on another occasion that he knocked down and stamped on another. This has led most to the conclusion that his inn was operating as a brothel, and he was keeping a firm hand on the ladies in his employ.