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Summary
Gower enters and recounts the events that have just transpired. He then announces that Thaisa is now pregnant before introducing a dumb show. Gower relates how news of the deaths of Antiochus and his daughter at last came to Pericles in Pentapolis. Pericles also hears of the plan of some in Tyre to crown Helicanus, and he determines that he must go home to halt a mutiny. In Pentapolis, people rejoice that their heir apparent is already a king, and they hurry him off to Tyre. Pericles boards a ship for Tyre with Thaisa and Lychorida, a nurse. Out at sea, a tempest besets the ship, threatening to destroy it.
On deck, Pericles bemoans his fate in becoming caught by another tempest. Lychorida appears with a newborn infant and tells Pericles that Thaisa is dead. Pericles asks the gods how they can so cruelly snatch away the good things they bestow on humans. Lychorida hands him his child, saying that her future life will surely be calm in contrast to a birth amidst such violence. The shipmaster declares that Thaisa’s body must be tossed overboard, following the sailors’ belief that the sea will not be calm until the dead are off the ship. The shipmaster offers a chest to put the body in, along with some of Pericles’s jewels and spices and a note. Pericles agrees, but he regrets that he cannot give her a proper burial. He then asks about their location, and the shipmaster says the ship is near Tarsus. Fearing that the child won’t survive the remainder of the journey to Tyre, Pericles asks to land at Tarsus instead.
In Ephesus, the kindly doctor Cerimon and his aid Philomon provide fire and food to those suffering from the wicked storm. Two gentlemen enter and discuss how Cerimon is well known for his charity. Philemon leaves then reenters with a chest that has been discovered floating on the sea. Inside, they find a corpse with some treasures and a letter asking those who find the body to give it a proper burial, since the woman, named Thaisa, had been the daughter of a king. Cerimon looks at the body and determines that she is not yet dead. He administers some medicines, and she soon stirs awake.
Meanwhile, Pericles arrives in Tarsus and tells Cleon and Dionyza about his misfortune. He charges the governor and his wife with the care of his child and asks them to raise her as a noble. Wanting to repay Pericles for rescuing Tarsus from the famine, Cleon promises to do so. Pericles leaves, swearing he won’t cut his hair until his daughter, whom he names Marina, marries.
Back in Ephesus, Cerimon explains to Thaisa that some jewels and a letter lay in the chest with her. She recognizes the writing as belonging to Pericles, and she laments that she will never see him again. Thus, she expresses a desire to become a vestal virgin at the local temple to the goddess Diana. Cerimon offers to help her, and she thanks him.
Analysis
Act 3 introduces a new snag in Pericles’s life. As he rushes home to Tyre to resume leadership of his realm, he is caught in another storm, and disaster rears its ugly head again. This time, the tempest doesn’t destroy his ship, but the tumultuous seas do contribute to the difficult birth of Pericles and Thaisa’s child, resulting in the mother’s (apparent) death. For a man who has thus far proven so upstanding, it’s difficult to comprehend how he should be fated to so much tragedy. But there is little time for him to react to his situation. The tempest continues to rage, and meanwhile the ship’s crew believes that the only way to quell the sea’s fury is to cast Thaisa’s body overboard, perhaps as an offering to the sea-god Neptune. The urgency of the situation leads Pericles to make the hasty decision to seal Thaisa’s body in a chest and throw it overboard. With this done, he can concentrate his attention on keeping the newborn babe alive—a task that, he determines, can only be accomplished by making a stop at Tarsus.
Despite the new misfortune that has come his way, Pericles maintains his hallmark humility. He comes close to cursing the gods when he first hears that his beloved wife has died in childbirth. But he knows he has a child to care for, and he manages to pull himself together. In the aftermath of these events, Pericles recognizes that the sea is much more powerful than he is and that he must learn to accept what has befallen him. This is the message he conveys to Cleon and Dionyza upon arriving in Tarsus: “We cannot but obey the powers above us. / Could I rage and roar as doth the sea / She lies in, yet the end must be as ’tis” (3.3.12–14). The humility Pericles demonstrates in the face of a power greater than him subtly recalls the conversation he had with Helicanus back in act 1, scene 2, where they discussed the fact that even kings are only human. Pericles’s trials have repeatedly demonstrated this fact, underscoring that even he is not immune to the vagaries of fate.
As Pericles deals with the aftermath of his wife’s apparent death, Shakespeare introduces us to yet another kingdom and its leaders. The tempestuous waters conspire to deliver Thaisa’s coffin to the shores of Ephesus, where the wiseman and physician Cerimon is widely celebrated both as a healer and as a supporter of the common people. He offers a further example of worthy leadership, with his claim that “virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches” (3.2.31–32) subtly echoing Helicanus’s earlier insistence that a king should remain humble. His perceptive nature allows him immediately to see what no one onboard the storm-wracked ship could see: that Thaisa is, in fact, alive. Cerimon manages to revive Thaisa using his medicines. But upon waking, Thaisa quickly gives up hope of ever seeing Pericles ever again, perhaps believing that the ship must have met its ruin. Like Pericles, Thaisa chooses to accept her fate rather than rage against it. Thus, instead of seeking to return to her native Pentapolis or investigating whether her husband and child might have survived the storm, she chooses to remain in Ephesus and devote herself to the great Temple of Diana there.
The temple in this play has a similar function to the nunnery in some of Shakespeare’s other plays, the nunnery being a nonreproductive alternative to marriage. Female characters are often threatened with the nunnery if they don’t obey their father in questions of marriage, as in the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The nunnery may also serve as a refuge for women in mourning. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet thought of the nunnery as an option when her world seemed to be falling to pieces. Finally, the nunnery is also seen as a place to contain lunacy and dangerous female sexuality, as when Hamlet suggests Ophelia go to a nunnery so she can stop luring men, particularly him. Yet in all these cases the nunnery is an idea or a threat, and no one actually makes it there—except for Thaisa. Her case is somewhat different; having already been married, the nunnery for her is not a place of containment, but a place to retreat from a world she no longer cares to partake in if Pericles is not in it.
