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Pericles is the play’s titular hero, and his character arc closely follows the trajectory of the classic hero of romance. Before it came to designate the genre of erotic love stories, the term romance referred to adventure stories. The conventional hero of such adventure stories typically experiences some kind of disaster, which is followed by a series of events that add to his suffering, thereby testing his endurance as well as his virtue. The true hero of romance maintains his honor despite his deprivation, and he ultimately finds a way to overcome the overwhelming odds against him. This description applies precisely to Pericles, who suffers through numerous trials in this play. His first trial comes when he successfully decodes Antiochus’s riddle, only to realize that because of the answer, “incest,” he is as likely to be killed for answering it as for not answering it. Thus, he flees his own kingdom, only to suffer a shipwreck that washes him up on the shores near Pentapolis. There, he marries a beautiful princess, only to lose her in childbirth during a storm at sea, which then compels him to leave his newborn daughter with foster parents who, fourteen years later, hire an assassin to kill her.
The trials Pericles and his family suffers lead to their dispersion in various cities in and around the Aegean Sea. Yet whereas Pericles believes his wife and daughter have both died, the audience knows that both have miraculously survived what have at first appeared to be fatal incidents. His wife, Thaisa, is revived when the chest containing her body washes up on the shores of Ephesus, where she becomes a priestess at the Temple of Diana. Marina, meanwhile, is rescued from her would-be assassin by pirates, who sell her to a brothel in another town. But Pericles, who lacks the audience’s wider perspective, suffers under the collective weight of his losses. Yet despite the accumulation of woes, Pericles demonstrates humility in the face of fate. Instead of cursing the gods, he performs his mourning by refusing to cut his hair, donning garments of rough sackcloth, and taking a vow of silence. He is rewarded for his virtuous fortitude by two reunions: first with his “murdered” daughter Marina, and second with his “dead” wife Thaisa. With his family now restored to its proper wholeness, Pericles is set to resume control of his newly expanded kingdom.
