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Named in honor of her birth at sea, Marina is the daughter of Pericles and Thaisa. With her mother apparently deceased and Pericles forced to make the perilous journey back to Tyre, circumstances dictate that Marina grows up fostered by Cleon and Dionyza of Tarsus. As she reaches adolescence, it’s clear that she has inherited her parents’ virtues. She is in fact so beautiful and skilled that she inadvertently steals attention away from Cleon and Dionyza’s daughter, with whom she has grown up. Marina’s brilliance thus earns her the envy of Dionyza, who attempts to have her killed. Thus begins Marina’s own series of trials—a series that parallels that suffered by her father. Marina manages to escape her would-be assassin, but only because she is kidnapped by pirates who turn around and sell her into prostitution in another town. Yet like her father, Marina endures her trials with remarkable fortitude. Despite the pressure placed on her to relinquish her virginity and so bring in profit, Marina employs her considerable charm to convert the brothel’s clients to chastity. Her virtue ultimately enables her to escape prostitution, reunite with her father, and become engaged to an honorable man.
As a daughter, Marina stands in symbolic relation to the other daughters who appear in the play. One point of contrast already mentioned above exists between Marina and the daughter of Cleon and Dionyza, whom she outshines in every way. Marina’s excess of beauty, talent, and virtue indicates a superiority that eventually spurs Dionyza to violence. Perhaps more obviously, Marina represents a symbolic counterpoint to the silent and unnamed princess we meet in the play’s important opening scene. Antiochus’s daughter, as we learn, is involved in an incestuous relationship with her father—a fact that, in the world of the play, marks both participants as equally sinful. Marina’s reunion with her own father is initially marked by an undertone of incest, since she is brought to cheer up the morose Pericles. She may not be expected to engage him sexually, but her summoning nonetheless comes with a subtle erotic charge. But any hint of incest is quickly dispelled, and their mutual recognition ensures a virtuous reunion that restores the proper relation between father and daughter. In this regard, Pericles and Marina are symbolically aligned with another virtuous father–daughter pair: Simonides and Thaisa.
