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I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother’s flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labor
I found that kindness in a father.
He’s father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live resolve it you. (1.1.66–73)
The opening scene of the play takes place in Antioch, where Pericles has come to seek the hand of the princess, whose beauty has lured many suitors. However, as John Gower has already explained in his prologue, foul play is afoot in Antioch. Shortly after the queen died, King Antiochus took up an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Furthermore, he wants to keep the princess for himself, which has led him to devise a law that makes it impossible for a suitor to win her hand. This law requires any potential suitor to solve a riddle in order to win the princess’s hand. However, if he fails to unravel the mystery, he must forfeit his life. Many suitors have already died in the pursuit, and Antiochus asks Pericles if he accepts the risk involved. When Pericles affirms that he’s ready, Antiochus casts down a scroll inscribed with the riddle, the text of which is quoted here.
Upon reading this riddle, Pericles immediately recognizes the secret it reveals: namely, that the princess has found a “husband” in the form of her father. The solution to the riddle places Pericles in a double bind. If he pretends to be stumped, then Antiochus will execute him. But if he gives the correct answer, he’ll be publicly acknowledging a sin that the king would prefer to keep secret—in which case he will probably be killed anyway. Pericles therefore tries to hedge his bets, implying that he knows the answer but won’t say it. This solution wins him a forty-day stay on his execution, allowing him to escape temporarily with his life. But Pericles’s fear of Antiochus ultimately leads him to leave his kingdom, which marks the beginning of his many trials and tribulations. His encounter with the text of the riddle is therefore the play’s inciting event. Importantly, the riddle also inaugurates the play’s thematic emphasis on the importance of proper familial relations. The gods will soon punish Antiochus and his daughter with a fiery death. And in order for Pericles and his family to be reunited, they will each have to prove their virtue to ensure they will embody the structure of a “good” family.
They do abuse the King that flatter him,
For flattery is the bellows blows up sin;
The thing the which is flattered, but a spark
To which that wind gives heat and stronger glowing;
Whereas reproof, obedient and in order,
Fits kings as they are men, for they may err.
When Signior Sooth here does proclaim peace,
He flatters you, makes war upon your life. (1.2.41–48)
As the play’s second scene opens, Pericles sits by himself in his palace in Tyre, fretting about the fate of his kingdom now that King Antiochus believes that his secret is out. He worries that an assassin may be after him, or that his kingdom will be invaded without warning. Thus, when his loyal advisor Helicanus enters, he finds Pericles shrouded in melancholy. But instead of addressing his superior with soft words that would ameliorate his concern, Helicanus speaks firmly to Pericles with this brief discourse on the folly of flattery. Helicanus says that it’s a bad idea to flatter a king, since this will only puff up his ego and fan the metaphorical flames of pride and ambition. In short, flattery is harmful. By contrast, “reproof” has the virtue of reminding a king that he is nothing more than a man, a message that encourages humility. Though he speaks in somewhat abstract terms here, Helicanus is essentially telling Pericles not to expect him to try to cheer him up.
On a deeper level, however, Helicanus is also announcing the play’s key theme related to the virtue of humility. In this case, he specifically presents humility as an essential quality of a good leader. It’s important to note that Helicanus’s speech comes immediately after the scene where we met the tyrannical Antiochus, whose haughty and imposing nature induced Pericles to flattery, saying: “Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will; / And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?” (1.1.108–109). Fearing for his life, Pericles thought it best to bolster Antiochus’s vision of himself as closer to a god than a man. Now that he’s safe, though, he’s quick to agree with his advisor’s perspective on flattery: “heaven forbid / That kings should let their ears hear their faults hid” (1.2.66–67). By implicitly affirming the importance of humility, Pericles shows himself to be a good leader as well as a virtuous man.
Antiochus from incest lived not free,
For which the most high gods not minding longer
To withhold the vengeance that they had in store
Due to this heinous capital offense,
Even in the height and pride of all his glory,
When he was seated in a chariot of
An inestimable value, and his daughter with him,
A fire from heaven came and shriveled up
Those bodies even to loathing, for they so stunk
That all those eyes adored them, ere their fall,
Scorn now their hand should give them burial. (2.4.2–12)
After Pericles has survived a shipwreck and successfully participated in a jousting tournament in Pentapolis, the scene briefly shifts back to Tyre. News has just arrived there pertaining to Antiochus and his daughter, the incestuous pair we first met in the play’s opening scene. Helicanus reports to his fellow advisor, Escanes, that these two figures have both died grisly deaths. They were both “seated in a chariot of / An inestimable value” when “a fire from heaven”—that is, a bolt of lightning—struck and started a fire that reduced them to “shriveled” forms. It’s notable that Helicanus’s account is as extended as it is, offering such grotesque details as the stench of their bodies, which kept even those who had respected them from giving them a proper burial. It’s also telling that Helicanus makes special mention of the “inestimable value” of the chariot they were scorched in. Evidently, he wants to underscore how their ostentatious wealth couldn’t save them. Indeed, he seems to take the image of an expensive chariot getting struck by lightning as symbolic of the corrupting power of riches.
Above all, though, Helicanus interprets this event as an instance of divine justice. The incestuous relationship between Antiochus and his daughter constituted a “heinous capital offense” that was punished by a bolt from heaven. He doesn’t mention any gods by name, but the underlying message is clearly that some divine figure has seen fit to execute them. For Shakespeare’s audiences, the ambiguous implication here might have suggested both the Christian God, who would punish the sin of incest, and a classical god like Jove (aka Zeus), who was known to cast lightning to punish hubris. Either way, the emphasis is on their punishment, which demonstrates what’s ultimately at stake for noble families that fail to uphold a certain standard of morality. The violent punishment of Antiochus and his daughter foreshadows the even more violent punishment of Cleon and Dionyza later in the play. In Gower’s epilogue, he relates how when they found out that the governor and his wife had Marina murdered, the people of Tarsus revolted and burned them alive in their palace. These two examples of “bad” noble families help shed light on what it is that makes Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina so “good.”
I hold it ever
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend,
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god. ’Tis known I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o’er authorities, I have,
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me and to my aid the blessed infusions
That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones;
And can speak of the disturbances
That Nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honor,
Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags
To please the fool and death. (3.2.30–47)
In act 3, scene 2, the chest containing Thaisa’s body washes up on the shores of Ephesus, an ancient Greek city located on the coast of what today is known as Turkey. Ephesus is a well-known spiritual site. In the ancient period it was host to the great Temple to Diana, where Thaisa will end up serving as a priestess. For audiences in Shakespeare’s time, Ephesus would have been known for its significance in the New Testament, which describes how the apostle Paul preached and founded a church there. The spiritual resonances of this city are reflected in the appearance of Cerimon, a great wiseman and physician whose care for his fellow Ephesians marks him as a great figure of charity. The audience’s first introduction to Cerimon occurs in this scene, and the lines quoted above represent his first major speech in the play.
At this point, Thaisa’s chest has not yet been recovered, so his words don’t relate to her apparent death. Rather, they arguably relate to the play’s ongoing concern with what makes a good leader. Cerimon is the only figure of authority we ever meet in Ephesus, so we are invited to consider him as a leader, and his words here represent something like a theory of leadership. The key point of this “theory” is that the usual trappings of kingship aren’t worth much. “Nobleness and riches” may seem like the height of wealth, but they both have a corrupting influence. By contrast, Cerimon celebrates the value of “virtue and cunning,” since they can help establish a person’s enduring reputation. In this sense, his claim that virtue and cunning can “mak[e] a man a god” must be understood in terms of integrity rather than ambition. Cerimon’s integrity stems from his commitment to studying the natural world, from which he has learned the healing arts that makes him so beloved of his people. It is also what will enable him to revive Thaisa, install her as a priestess in Diana’s temple, and eventually help her reunite with her long-lost husband.
The fairest, sweetest, and best lies here,
Who withered in her spring of year.
She was of Tyrus, the King’s daughter,
On whom foul death hath made this slaughter.
Marina was she called, and at her birth,
Thetis, being proud, swallowed some part o’ th’ earth.
Therefore the Earth, fearing to be o’erflowed,
Hath Thetis’ birth-child on the heavens bestowed.
Wherefore she does—and swears she’ll never stint—
Make raging battery upon shores of flint. (4.4.35–44)
In act 4, scene 4, Gower appears to describe how, fourteen years after leaving Marina in Tarsus, Pericles finally makes the journey from Tyre to collect his long-lost daughter. When he arrives, he learns the terrible news of Marina’s death. Of course, the audience knows that she isn’t really dead. Rather, she has been kidnapped by pirates and sold into prostitution in another city. But in Tarsus, everyone has been deceived into believing that she’s dead. This deception began with Leonine, the assassin Dionyza hired to kill Marina, whom she felt was unfairly outshining her own daughter in beauty as well as virtue. Leonine didn’t manage to complete his task before Marina was abducted, but he decided to lie to his employer and say that he killed the young woman and deposited her body in the sea. Believing his report, Dionyza then poisoned Leonine to contain the secret. Finally, she commissioned the construction of a monument to honor Marina, which she designed to deceive both the people of Tarsus and Marina’s own father, should he ever return to reclaim her. The lines quoted above make up the epitaph on her monument, which Gower recites for the audience.
In writing this epitaph, Dionyza has taken everything she envied in Marina and reframed them as admirable traits. Thus, there is truth to the opening statement that “the fairest, sweetest, and best lies here,” for these are precisely the reasons Dionyza ordered her assassination. Shortly thereafter, the epitaph shifts into a mythic mode. Taking her name’s association with the sea as a point of departure, the epitaph represents Marina as the daughter to a sea nymph named Thetis, famous mother to the great Greek warrior Achilles. Thetis was apparently so pleased with Marina that her symbolic element, the ocean, “swallowed some part o’ th’ earth.” This act of encroachment caused the Earth to retaliate by killing the sea’s pride and joy: Marina. This manufactured myth is a strangely romantic dissimulation meant to hide Dionyza’s guilt. But in a subtle way, the final lines betray her hand. This myth is framed as a “just-so” story that explains why the sea continually “make[s] raging battery upon shores of flint”—a violent form of retribution that mirrors Dionyza’s own anger. By contrast, as the perfect picture of humility and reserve, Marina would never rage in this way.
