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Pericles, probably written in 1607–1608, came late in Shakespeare’s career, after some of his most powerful dramas, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello. Yet this play is very different from those previous tours-de-force, at once incorporating elements from tragedy and yet ultimately resolving the play’s tensions in the joyful way more closely associated with comedy. In this way, the play could be thought of as a tragicomedy that contains formal links to several of Shakespeare’s more experimental late plays, such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.
As in most of Shakespeare’s other plays and the writings of his contemporaries, Shakespeare used earlier authors and common stories as source material for the play. The fourteenth-century poet John Gower, who appears in the play itself as a kind of chorus, wrote the most important direct source for Pericles, a story about Apollonius of Tyre in his Confessio Amantis. Via intermediaries, this story probably dates to a fifth- or sixth-century Latin text, and before that perhaps from a Greek romance influenced by the Odyssey. Other sources, including that of Pericles’s name, may have been Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Plutarch’s Lives, one of Shakespeare’s favorite sources.
The actual authorship of Pericles has been long debated and never resolved. It is probable that another playwright named George Wilkins wrote the first nine scenes and Shakespeare wrote the remaining thirteen. Dual authorship offers a good explanation for the stylistic differences between the two parts of the play. In the first part, the language closely reflects John Gower’s fourteenth-century language rather than that of Shakespeare or his contemporaries. Though both Wilkins and Shakespeare use iambic pentameter, Wilkins uses more rhyming couplets ending with the end of the line, while Shakespeare relies on his characteristic use of enjambment, where a phrase or idea doesn’t end at the end of a line, but carries over to the next. Structurally, the dual-author theory works as well, since the actions of the first half of the play repeat themselves for the most part in the second half, with various episodes repeating or reflecting each other.
Another interesting problem about Pericles is the unreliability of its source text. Almost all of Shakespeare’s other plays, first published in Quarto form, draw directly on the author’s manuscript or the actor’s promptbooks. Pericles, however, was assembled out of reports by actors and spectators. Elizabethan citizens and actors lived in a world where far less printed text was available, so memorization was common. The capacity of their memory was probably much greater than our own—but certainly they were not flawless. For this reason, no really authoritative text of Pericles exists.
Various editors approach the problem of reliability differently, making greater or lesser efforts to increase the intelligibility of the play. Editors of the Oxford edition of the plays, which many further adaptations draw from, decided to use the First Quarto version of this play, largely unchanged. Other editors have drawn on another of Wilkins’s plays about Pericles to add more to the story. But if the First Quarto edition was already based on reported speech, then any edition that tries to further reconstruct what the original Pericles may have been probably strays even farther from any “original text.”
But it is important to remember that none of Shakespeare’s texts are really word-for-word “original.” Shakespeare worked in collaboration with a company of actors, and he probably worked with them to change or improve speeches, so his plays were constantly in the process of changing and adapting. It is incorrect to conceive of the “original text” as one that Shakespeare wrote at his desk and then simply presented to his actors, which they performed verbatim. Most likely what he first wrote substantially changed during rehearsals and again during performances. What was published in the First Quarto is probably a combination of the first text, the changes, and reportage from actors. Pericles is an extreme example, a play based almost entirely on reportage.
