Pericles, Prince of Tyre

It was published in 1609 as a quarto, was not included in Shakespeare's collections of works until the third folio, and the main inspiration for the play was Gower's Confessio Amantis.

[a] Modern textual studies suggest that the first two acts, 835 lines detailing the many voyages of Pericles, were written by a collaborator, who may well have been the victualler, panderer, dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins.

The play opens in the court of Antiochus, king of Antioch, who has offered the hand of his beautiful daughter to any man who answers his riddle; but those who fail shall die.

Pericles, the young Prince (ruler) of Tyre in Phoenicia (Lebanon), hears the riddle, and instantly understands its meaning: Antiochus is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

Pericles returns to Tyre, where his trusted friend and counsellor Helicanus advises him to leave the city, for Antiochus surely will hunt him down.

He is rescued by a group of poor fishermen who inform him that Simonides, King of Pentapolis, is holding a tournament the next day and that the winner will receive the hand of his daughter Thaisa in marriage.

Fortunately, one of the fishermen drags Pericles' suit of armour on shore that very moment, and the prince decides to enter the tournament.

The choruses spoken by Gower were influenced by Barnabe Barnes's The Diuils Charter (1607) and by The Trauailes of the Three English Brothers (1607), by John Day, William Rowley, and Wilkins.

[9] Most scholars support 1607 or early 1608 as most likely, which accords well with what is known about the play's likely co-author, George Wilkins, whose extant literary career seems to span only three years, 1606 to 1608.

[4] The Cambridge editors reject this contention, arguing that the play is entirely by Shakespeare and that all the oddities can be defended as a deliberately old-fashioned style; however, they do not discuss the stylistic links with Wilkins's work or any of the scholarly papers demonstrating contrary opinions.

In 1629, Ben Jonson lamented the audiences' enthusiastic responses to the play: No doubt some mouldy tale, Like Pericles; and stale As the Shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish— Scraps out of every dish Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub (Ben Jonson, Ode (to Himself)) In 1660, at the start of the Restoration when the theatres had just re-opened, Thomas Betterton played the title role in a new production of Pericles at the Cockpit Theatre, the first production of any of Shakespeare's works in the new era.

For example, nineteenth-century scholar Edward Dowden wrestled with the text and found that the play "as a whole is singularly undramatic" and "entirely lacks unity of action.

"[17] The episodic nature of the play combined with the Act Four's lewdness troubled Dowden because these traits problematised his idea of Shakespeare.

[17] T. S. Eliot found more to admire, saying of the moment of Pericles' reunion with his daughter: "To my mind the finest of all the 'recognition scenes' is Act V, sc.

"[citation needed] The New Bibliographers of the early twentieth century Alfred W. Pollard, Walter Wilson Greg, and R. B. McKerrow gave increased attention to the examination of quarto editions of Shakespearean plays published before the First Folio (1623).

And, while the play's textual critics have sharply disagreed about editorial methodology in the last half-century, almost all of them, beginning with F. D. Hoeniger with his 1963 Arden 2 edition, have been enthusiastic about Pericles.

(Other, more recent, critics have been Stephen Orgel (Pelican Shakespeare), Suzanne Gossett (Arden 3), Roger Warren (Reconstructed Oxford), and Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond (Cambridge)).

"[20] The Venetian ambassador to England Zorzi Giustinian and the French diplomat Antoine Lefèvre de la Boderie saw a play titled Pericles.

Phelps cut Gower entirely, satisfying his narrative role with new scenes, conversations between unnamed gentlemen like those in The Winter's Tale, 5.2.