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To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man’s infirmities
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
It hath been sung at festivals,
On ember eves and holy days,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.
The purchase is to make men glorious,
Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius. (1.Chorus.1–10)
John Gower opens the play with these lines, which serve as his self-introduction. The primary function of this introduction is to establish Gower’s role as a chorus. This fourteenth-century poet has been revived “from ashes” to serve as our narrator, and he will now sing an ancient song “to glad [our] ears and please [our] eyes.” Yet perhaps even more important is the way Gower’s speech mimics medieval verse forms. Instead of the expected blank verse, Shakespeare gives us rhymed iambic tetrameter. This form carries a hint of old-fashioned feeling, which offers a suitably antiquated framing for the “ancient” romance to follow. In this way, Gower implicitly authorizes the audience to enjoy a tale that comes to us from antiquity—a point he makes slightly more explicit in the Latin proverb that closes the quote: “And the older a good thing is, the better.”
See how belief may suffer by foul show!
This borrowed passion stands for true old woe.
And Pericles, in sorrow all devoured,
With sighs shot through and biggest tears o’ershowered,
Leaves Tarsus and again embarks. . . .
He bears
A tempest which his mortal vessel tears,
And yet he rides it out. (4.4.23–32)
Gower speaks these lines immediately after a “dumb show” (or pantomime) depicting Pericles as he learns that Marina has died. This quote nicely demonstrates Gower’s role as a figure “who stand[s] in the gaps to teach . . . / The stages of our story” (4.4.8–9). Not only does he recount events that have happened. He also offers commentary that underscores points of thematic and psychological significance. In this case, he frames Pericles’s woes as an internal tempest that echoes the prior—and very real—tempests that have disrupted his life.
In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward.
In Pericles, his queen, and daughter seen,
Although assailed with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserved from fell destruction’s blast,
Led on by heaven, and crowned with joy at last. (5.Epilogue.1–6)
These lines make up the first part of Gower’s epilogue, where he doesn’t summarize the events of the play, but rather goes through a roster of its key characters, reminding us of their various fates. Doing this at the close of the play underscores the contrasts between these figures. In the case of the passage quoted above, the key contrast is between families characterized by “bad” and “good” structures. Antiochus and his daughter clearly represent the “bad” family structure, since they engaged in incest after the mother of the family died. By contrast, Pericles and his wife and daughter clearly represent the “good” family structure. They have been “preserved from fell destruction’s blast” because they have each proven the fortitude of their virtue. Unlike the royal family of Antioch, which died in a lightning-induced fire, the royal family of Tyre is worthy of being “crowned with joy.”
