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Riddles
Riddles play an important role in Pericles, starting with the riddle Antiochus presents in the play’s opening scene. Pericles arrives in Antioch knowing that to win the hand of the princess there he’ll first have to solve a riddle that no previous suitor has solved. Pericles quickly deduces the riddle’s implication that Antiochus is committing incest with his daughter. Facing death should he fail to solve the riddle, yet unable to speak aloud the grotesque secret he’s uncovered, Pericles opts to flee Antioch. This first riddle therefore marks the play’s inciting incident. Just as a riddle marks the beginning of Pericles’s suffering, riddles also mark the end. The reunion scene between Pericles and Marina features several riddling moments that must be solved before mutual recognition is achieved. “What countrywoman? / Here of these shores?” asks Pericles to his as-yet unrecognized daughter, who responds cryptically: “No, nor or any shores, / Yet I was mortally brought forth, and am / No other than I seem” (5.1.115–19). Thaisa also presents a riddle of her own as she struggles to recognize her long-lost husband: “Are you not Pericles? Like him you spake, / Like him you are. Did you not name a tempest, / A birth and death?” (5.3.37–39).
Tempests
The story of Pericles is punctuated by three tempests. The first tempest occurs at the top of act 2. As Pericles sails from Tarsus home to Tyre, his ship encounters a terrible storm and sinks. He survives the shipwreck and washes up near Pentapolis, symbolically reborn. The second tempest occurs at the top of act 3. After Pericles has married Thaisa and gotten her pregnant, they set sail to return to Tyre, where Pericles plans to resume his rule. Along the way, they encounter violent storm that coincides with Thaisa’s labor. She gives birth during the storm and appears to die in the process. Her apparent death causes concern among the ship’s crew, who worry that the storm won’t cease if they have a corpse onboard. Thus, they cast the chest containing Thaisa’s body overboard and sail on. The third tempest in the play is metaphorical, and it strikes near the end of act 4, when Pericles finds out about Marina’s apparent death. As Gower puts it, “He bears / A tempest which his mortal vessel tears, / And yet he rides it out” (4.4.30–32). As the language of endurance suggests, this tempest, along with the others in the play, functions symbolically as a test of Pericles’s fortitude.
References to Diana
Pericles features numerous references to Diana, culminating in the eventual appearance of the goddess herself in act 5, scene 1. There, she comes to Pericles in a dream and instructs him to sail to the city of Ephesus, where there is a great temple devoted to her. Diana’s instructions enable the final reunion between Pericles and his wife, Thaisa, whom he believed to have died fourteen years prior, but who has actually been in Ephesus, serving as a “votaress” to the city’s patron goddess. In classical mythology, Diana is a figure associated with chastity and fertility, both of which have significance resonance in this play. Chastity is held as the most important feature of a young, unmarried woman. Whereas Antiochus’s daughter has given her chastity away to her own father in a monstrous act of incest, Marina demonstrates the strength of her virtue by retaining her virginity even while ostensibly employed in a brothel. Fertility is also thematically important in Pericles, as the guarantor both of reproduction and renewal. The title character is perhaps the key figure of fertility in that he facilitates the birth of a virtuous child, but also in the way he delivers the grain that revitalizes a famine-stricken Tarsus.
