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Summary
Gower enters and recounts how Marina escaped the brothel and moved to an honest house. She thrives teaching music and needlework, and she gives her extra money to the Bawd. Meanwhile, Pericles has been at sea and now arrives Mytilene. Lysimachus sets out to meet Pericles on his ship.
On Pericles’s ship, Helicanus tells Lysimachus where they are from, and he explains that the king has not spoken for three months. Lysimachus sees Pericles and tries to speak to him, but Pericles won’t respond. Lysimachus says that there is a woman in Mytilene whom he believes can convince Pericles to talk, and he sends one of his men to get Marina.
When Marina arrives, Lysimachus comments on her beauty and sends her in with her maid to talk to Pericles. Marina tells Pericles that she has also endured great grief. She was born of a king, but now she is bound in servitude. Pericles speaks to her, and he notes in an aside that she seems very like his late wife, Thaisa. He asks her to tell him about her parentage, saying that if her story is any bit as horrible as his own has been, then he will deem himself to have been weak in his suffering.
She tells him that her name is Marina, but Pericles interrupts her, saying she mocks him. She goes on to speak about her father the king and how she was born at sea. Pericles can’t believe it, and he asks about her mother. Marina says that her mother died in childbirth and that she was cared for by a nurse named Lychorida. Pericles believes he must be dreaming as he further listens to Marina recount how Cleon and Dionyza plotted her death in Tarsus and how pirates intervened by kidnapping her. Finally, Marina reveals that she is the daughter of King Pericles.
Pericles calls in Helicanus to tell him if he sees anything unique about Marina, but he doesn’t. Pericles reveals his identity to Marina, then demands that she say the name of her mother aloud. She names Thaisa, and Pericles is overjoyed.
Left alone, Pericles sleeps and is visited by the goddess Diana, who tells him to go to her temple in Ephesus and, before all who are assembled there, to tell the story of the loss of his wife and rediscovery of Marina. When he wakes, Pericles declares his intention to go to Ephesus. But before leaving, he promises Marina to Lysimachus.
Analysis
In Mytilene, Marina has apparently become a renowned figure. In the previous act, we have already seen the force of her virtue. Not only was she able to maintain her virginity against all odds, but she also became something of a moral evangelist, convincing the men who paid to have sex with her to relinquish their lust and commit themselves to chastity. Since then, Bolt has clearly fulfilled his promise to help Marina out of prostitution, for, as Gower relates, she is now flourishing. Putting to work the many talents she developed in Tarsus, and which contributed to Dionyza’s envy, Marina is now locally beloved and admired in Ephesus. Her talents and charms are so well-known that it isn’t even Lysimachus but one of his lords who first suggests they summon her to help the melancholy Pericles. The fact that Marina succeeds in getting Pericles to talk once again showcases the nobility of her speech. And as she connects with Pericles about misfortune, Shakespeare makes explicit how father and daughter alike are exemplary for remaining virtuous in their suffering.
Although it takes some time for Pericles to recognize his implication in Marina’s story, the truth eventually comes out, offering the play’s first genuine moment of emotional catharsis. After so much misfortune and dispersal, Shakespeare finally begins to draw the narrative threads back together, resolving tensions and reuniting the play’s central “good” family. The audience celebrates as Pericles and Marina are united after so much suffering. Their capacity to endure until this moment marks them as the play’s supreme father–daughter pairing, at once mirroring Simonides and Thaisa and diametrically opposed to Antiochus and his daughter. As scene 1 begins, there is perhaps a tinge of incestuous possibility in the way Marina, who has previously been attached to a brothel, is offered to the king. However, her innate virtue dispels any hint of eroticism. The miraculous appearance of Diana, the goddess of chastity, further confirms the virtuous nature of this happy reunion, even as it points to one last reunion to come, when Pericles and Marina (together with her new fiancé, Lysimachus) set off to find Thaisa in Ephesus.
