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The Propriety of the Good Family
Perhaps the most important theme in Pericles relates to the propriety of the good family. A good family is understood to be linked by loving and virtuous bonds. In addition to being morally upright, a good family is also expected to be reproductive, producing and rearing honorable children. In a sense, then, the good family is characterized by an appropriate balance between chastity and fertility. Chastity is required to preserve virtue until marriage, and fertility is required to ensure that the family’s line extends into the future. The pairing of these principles strongly recalls Diana, the hunting goddess who both guards chastity and bestows fertility. The good family is therefore aligned with the guiding principles represented by this goddess. The connection to Diana helps identify Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina as the play’s chief example of a “good” family. All three have an important connection to the goddess: Pericles receives a personal visitation from her, Thaisa pledges as a votaress at her temple in Ephesus, and Marina swears by her to preserve her virginity. In their connections to Diana, all three demonstrate enduring humility and virtue, overcoming their separate trials and eventually being rewarded with a joyful reunion.
In addition to presenting the audience with a shining example of a good family, the play also emphasizes the importance of propriety in familial relations through negative examples. The first negative example is that of the royal family of Antioch. We learn from Gower that the queen of Antioch has died, and in the wake of her death, the king has instigated an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Furthermore, he wants to keep the princess for himself, which has led him to devise a law making it impossible for a suitor to win her hand. Not only is their incest unlawful, but it also violates the pillars of chastity and fertility. The princess is forced into sexual activity before marriage, and that sexual activity is (at least in this play) nonreproductive. The second negative example is that of Cleon, Dionyza, and their daughter. For one thing, the governor and his wife preside over a famine-stricken region—a situation that strongly symbolizes infertility. For another thing, Dionyza attempts to ensure her daughter’s future by trying to have Marina murdered—a morally corrupting act that winds up getting her whole family killed. Both “bad” families in the play wind up dead, punished by the gods.
The Virtue of Humility
The genre of romance tends to require its heroes to stay humble. The archetypal hero of romance suffers many trials and tribulations that test his endurance as well as his virtue. The true hero must therefore demonstrate fortitude by accepting that there are powers greater than him. In short, he must exhibit the virtue of humility. This theme first arises in the discourse around leadership in the play’s opening scenes. King Antiochus is a figure whose imposing presence compels Pericles to flatter him by 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). The notion that kings are basically gods is clearly the opposite of humility, and in this play such an attitude also marks a bad leader. A contrasting perspective arises in the following scene, where Pericles’s loyal advisor Helicanus insists that leaders are still just men. It is for this reason that Helicanus disapproves of the use of flattery when engaging with leaders, “For flattery is the bellows blows up sin; . . . / Whereas reproof, obedient and in order, / Fits kings as they are men, for they may err” (1.2.42, 45–46).
Pericles shines as the play’s exemplary figure of humility. As a leader, he prioritizes his people’s safety over his own, which is why, despite having an assassin on his tail, he is so reluctant to leave Tyre. When he does leave Tyre, he soon faces a series of escalating tragedies. When a tempest wrecks his ship and delivers him to the shores of a place where nobody knows him, he doesn’t curse his fate. Instead, he recognizes that he is but an “earthly man” and must yield to the superior powers of “wind, rain, and thunder” (2.1.2). Later, when his wife appears to die at sea and he’s forced to leave his infant daughter with foster parents, Pericles again concedes, “We cannot but obey the powers above us” (3.3.12). Finally, when he learns of his daughter’s apparent death, he doesn’t rage against the gods as he might want to. Instead, he exchanges his royal garb for a robe of rough sackcloth and vows never again to cut his hair or wash his face. Mirroring Pericles, Thaisa and Marina both demonstrate humility in the face of their varied hardships. In the end, the family is rewarded for their virtuous humility with a joyful reunion.
The Deceptive Nature of Appearances
Pericles frequently demonstrates the proverbial truth that appearances can be deceiving. This theme is closely tied to the genre of romance, which often features people in disguise, sleeping potions that mimic death, and other similarly deceptive devices. Although Shakespeare doesn’t use costumes or potions in this particular romance, he continues to emphasize the importance of this conventional theme. Perhaps the most obvious example of deceptive appearances comes in act 2, after the shipwrecked Pericles washes up near Pentapolis. Dressed in the rusted armor three fishermen have scavenged from the sea, Pericles shows up at King Simonides’s court to participate in a jousting tournament there. The local lords laugh at this ill-dressed and unknown knight, but Simonides cautions: “Opinion’s but a fool that makes us scan / The outward habit by the inward man” (2.2.58–59). Though Simonides seems to get the phrasing backward, his intention is clearly aligned with the modern-day saying, Don’t judge a book by its cover. And he turns out to be right, since this ramshackle knight ends up winning the tournament.
However, the most important examples of deceptive appearances in the play relate to the apparent deaths of Thaisa and Marina. In Thaisa’s case, her apparent death while at sea during a tempest spooks the shipmaster, who enjoins Pericles to cast her body overboard in the belief that this act will quell the storm. The urgency of the situation leads to her quick disposal. As the audience soon learns, though, the chest they seal her body in washes up on the shores of Ephesus, where it’s brought to the local wiseman and physician, Cerimon, who has no trouble reviving her. As for Marina, her apparent death is doubly deceiving. First, her would-be assassin lies to his employer, Dionyza, convincing her that he completed his task. Second, Dionyza builds a monument to Marina that she uses to convince Pericles of his daughter’s death. But in truth, she is alive, forced to work in a brothel whose proprietors encourage her to feign shame as a way to earn pity and extort more money from their clientele. But though presented as a prostitute, Marina turns out to be an evangelist for virtue who secretly converts her customers to chastity. In all these cases, appearances are deceiving.
