To sing a song that old was sung: Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre, the play and the tradition

Abstract

Pericles, Prince of Tyre was, according to the title page of the 1609 quarto, "divers and sundry tines acted by his Majesties Servants, at the Globe on the Banck-side." There is an allusion to the play as early as 1596, and the play was often produced in London until the closing of the theaters in 1643, It was also produced at least once before Charles' Court in 1631. Despite the popularity of the play in the seventeenth century, nineteenth-century scholars and critics rejected the play as inferior and therefore unworthy of Shakespeare. Although this study assumes that the same Shakespeare who is credited with Hamlet and The Tempest was, in fact, also the author of Pericles, the identity of the historical author is not directly pertinent to the thesis here presented. This study is not concerned with documenting the single historical fact, which has often been argued, usually on a tissue of hypothetical arguments and value Judgments in the absence of pertinent evidence. Rather, the study is concerned with the Grounds for considering the play "worthy," particularly the grounds which the seventeenth-century audience accepted as criteria for judgment. This paper is, therefore, a study of the tradition within which a contemporary audience understood the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. That tradition included primarily the Apollonius of Tyre story, often told from Anglo-Saxon times through the seventeenth century as an example of chaste self-discipline and magisterial virtue. Gower's version of the story, included in the Confessio Amantis, is the "authority" to which Shakespeare alludes in Pericles, Shakespeare's character Gower acts as a one-man chorus. Shakespeare's dramatic version of the story in Pericles retains the moral lessons that the Confessio Amantis emphasizes; and both the Confessio Amantis and Pericles parallel and echo the moral principles stated in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, in King Alfred's Prefaces, and generally in medieval literature and sermons. The tradition within which Pericles was viewed and accepted was clearly both old and strong. Shakespeare reinforces for Elizabethans the strength of the tradition by emphasizing the secular and magisterial value of chaste love as a means of self-discipline and an outward and visible sign of steadfast virtue.