Pericles

by William Shakespeare

  EPILOGUE

  Gower recapitulates much of the play’s action and its moral lessons: he tells of Antiochus and his daughter’s divine punishment for their “monstrous lust”; of Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina’s tribulations, finally ended with joy and reunification; of Helicanus’ goodness; of Cerimon’s charity. He also tells us that Cleon and Dionyza, when the story of their attempted murder of Marina had broken out, were burned alive in their palace by the angry people of Tarsus. He wishes that “New joy wait on” the audience, and signals the ending of the play.

  PERICLES

  IN PERFORMANCE:

  THE RSC AND BEYOND

  The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

  We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can occur only when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

  Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways. We are also including an actor’s viewpoint here, that of Laura Rees, who played Marina to great acclaim in the 2005 production at Shakespeare’s Globe.

  FOUR CENTURIES OF PERICLES: AN OVERVIEW

  The stage history of Pericles closely reflects academic debates over the play’s authorship and canonicity. Rarely performed before the twentieth century, the play has more recently become a regular and popular part of the modern repertoire. Yet it has retained a marginal position that has allowed it to particularly appeal to itinerant and minority groups, appropriating the play’s discourses of migration and dislocation to find striking contemporary resonances in Pericles’ painful adventures.

  The play was witnessed by Zorzi Guistinian, the Venetian ambassador, resident in London between 1606 and 1608: a dating that matches the play’s title page claims for performance at the Globe prior to 1609. A play of the same name, which may have been Shakespeare’s, was in the repertory of a traveling company in York in 1609. Later documented appearances include performances at Whitehall in 1619 and the Globe again in 1631. When we consider the multitude of references to the play, including Ben Jonson’s 1629 condemnation of it as “some mouldy tale,”28 the picture appears to be one of continuous revival during the early modern period, appealing to both courtly and popular tastes.

  Despite its omission from the First Folio of 1623, Pericles was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be revived after the Restoration. John Rhodes staged it at the Cockpit Theatre in 1660, with Thomas Betterton as Pericles. The plot of a lost king restored to power no doubt appealed to supporters of Charles II. Although the play was included in all collected editions of Shakespeare between 1664 and 1724, Rhodes’ production was not revived, and it would be nearly two centuries before a play close to the Quarto text returned to the London stage.

  The most important performances in the eighteenth century came in the form of George Lillo’s adaptation Marina, staged in 1735 at Covent Garden. The Prologue tells its audience:

  With humour mix’d in your fore-fathers way,

  We’ve to a single tale reduc’d our play.

  Charming Marina’s wrongs begin the scene;

  Pericles finding her with his lost Queen,

  Concludes the pleasing task. Shou’d as the soul,

  The fire of Shakespear animate the whole,

  Shou’d heights which none but he cou’d reach, appear,

  To little errors do not prove severe.29

  This melodrama begins with Philoten, daughter of the deceased Cleon and Dionyza, instructing Leonine to kill the pious Marina, a plot thwarted by the pirates. Pericles’ return to Tarsus is fully dramatized, at the end of which Leonine and Philoten kill each other. The brothel scenes are played with relative fidelity to the original text and the action builds toward the climactic recognition scene. It was relatively unsuccessful however, and revived only twice.30

  After a century’s absence from the stage, the play was rescued from obscurity by Samuel Phelps, who produced it in an uncharacteristically spectacular version at Sadler’s Wells in 1854.31 The production was the biggest commercial success of Phelps’ theater, running for fifty-five performances. Phelps’ performance text (based partially on Lillo) dealt severely with three aspects that would long trouble the sensibilities of audiences and directors: the deliberately old-fashioned Gower Choruses, the incest of Antiochus and his daughter, and the “inappropriate” brothel sequence. Gower was cut entirely and replaced by new expository passages distributed among various characters, and the brothel scenes were combined and heavily cut:

  The scene was a marvel of delicate innuendo, with lots of verbal fencing about “honour” standing in for the droolingly lascivious wordplay of Pandar and Boult and the wolfish propositions of Lysimachus.32

  The cutting of the Antioch scene to avoid all references to incest, however, rendered the action unintelligible. In line with the age’s fear of female sexuality, more blame was placed on the lavish beauty of Antiochus’ daughter, on whom the curtain rose, than on the almost-sympathetic Antiochus. Critics agreed, however, on the power of the lead role in Phelps’ hands. Combining dignity and emotion, the reunion scene immediately became the play’s key draw:

  Grief has rendered [Pericles] almost incapable of hope, and, unwilling to believe the unaccustomed approach of joy, he looks at his child with fixed eye and haggard cheek, gasping with anxiety, till doubt at last gives way to certainty, and he falls weeping on the neck of Marina.33

  A critical and commercial success, Phelps’ production defined the play for the remainder of the century.

  Its Stratford fortunes began with three performances in April 1900 under the direction of John Coleman, who also played Pericles. Critical hindsight has not been kind to the production, which was received favorably by many critics, despite the ongoing uncertainty over the question of authorship. Coleman cut the “irrelevant” Gower and the first act entirely, instead devoting his first two acts to the meeting of Pericles and Thaisa. Concern for Victorian decorum was particularly felt in the rewriting of the Marina episodes. In the words of the Chronicle:

  The difficulty as regards the share of Marina in the story is got over rather lamely by the girl, after capture by the pirates, being taken to the market-place at Mytilene, where she is sold as a slave to the governor, Lysimachus, who, in the Coleman version, does not show in such a favourable light as in that of Shakespeare. He brings Marina with a party of dancing women to one of his bacchanalian revels, and attempts to clasp her in his arms, whereupon she rushes to the balcony of the palace and threatens to throw herself into the sea beneath if he come a step nearer. The act ends with the body of the supposed Marina being placed on a funeral pyre, which is lighted just as the wretched Pericles rushes in to learn the fate of his daughter.34

  While the textual edits were derided, the production’s sets and decorum were praised. Coleman himself was felt to be excessive by some reviewers, but others felt he demonstrated the best of the
“old school,” particularly in his passionate appeal to Diana. T. B. Thalberg’s Lysimachus was heavily criticized:

  Lysimachus, for instance, is in this version, but a meaningless stage-type, sobered from a bout of drunkenness by a sudden attempt at suicide on the part of Marina. How great a fall from the firm study of character represented by the quiet, gentlemanly Lysimachus of Shakespeare.35

  The appeal for many, though, was in seeing those characters with Shakespearean resonances. Miss Wetherall’s Dionyza was singled out for praise, the actress channeling aspects of Lady Macbeth into the malicious queen, and Marina was seen to be closely related to Miranda and Perdita.

  Two world wars had passed before the play returned to Stratford, this time under the direction of Nugent Monck and with the still-young Paul Scofield in the lead role. Monck continued the tradition of cutting the Antioch scenes, to the disappointment of many critics, but restored Gower, establishing the convention of having the character sing many of his choric speeches. Monck’s priority was to insist on the play’s coherence as a narrative whole, and Scofield was central to this:

  Paul Scolfield’s [sic] approach to Pericles is quiet and restrained. Always he gives the impression of emotion very present but well in hand. In the recognition scene this discipline has a rich effect, for Mr. Scolfield’s suggestion of trembling affection is much more moving than would be any dramatic outburst.36

  The restored brothel scenes were a resounding success, with John Blatchley’s Bolt “a nice smear of oily insolence … the period version of a ‘spiv.’ ”37 Against this seedy backdrop, Daphne Slater was an outstanding Marina, displaying an innocence and pathos that were particularly powerful as she knelt before her father in the recognition scene.

  1. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 1947, directed by Nugent Monck, with Paul Scofield as Pericles, Irene Sutcliffe (second left) as Thaisa, and Daphne Slater (kneeling) as Marina. Scofield’s Pericles was “quiet and restrained”: in the recognition scene his “suggestion of trembling affection is much more moving than … any dramatic outburst.”

  Tony Richardson’s 1958 production was the third and final at the Stratford Memorial Theatre before the inception of the modern RSC. Gower was central to this production, which adopted a framing device featuring a group of sailors listening rapt to his story and responding appropriately, hissing Dionyza for example. The part of Gower was originally offered to Paul Robeson, who was unable to get a visa, so it was then offered to the West Indian actor Edric Connor, who became the first black actor to perform on the Stratford stage. Claiming that “I am going to kill the ‘Jim Crow’ idea of the Negro on the stage,”38 Connor half-spoke, half-sang his lines in a calypso style, emphasizing throughout that Pericles was a story being told. As a result, the action was heightened, as if taking place in the overactive imaginations of the sailors. The conceit was not to the taste of all reviewers, many of whom complained of Connor’s inaudibility, but the device was to prove lastingly influential.

  A hollow ship provided the base of the set, which rocked and swayed during a spectacular storm sequence: “Rigging and trees toss about. Huge areas of the stage rise solidly into the air, stews appear up out of the ground. Troops of stars speed across the sky.”39 This was the first Stratford production to include the Antioch scenes, decorated with skulls mounted on processional poles and Paul Hardwick playing Antiochus as a majestic monster. Lysimachus, too, was redeemed as “a thoughtless but generous-hearted playboy.”40 Richard Johnson played Pericles with conviction, and the production found heart under the stage trickery, particularly in Cerimon’s mystical revival of Thaisa.

  Beyond Stratford, the play’s early-twentieth-century fortunes were not widely spread. The infrequency of its early performances has had lasting effects, including a failure to establish itself in the regular repertory of non-English-speaking countries or on the silver screen. Jacques Rivette’s 1961 film Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) is a rare exception to both, a French-language backstage drama centered around a group rehearsing Pericles. A straight screen production would wait until the BBC’s 1984 version, one of the better entries in its complete series of films. Taking advantage of the possibilities of television, Edward Petherbridge’s Gower wanders through the action, narrating over dissolves between scenes and addressing the camera directly. The production’s melancholic tone is set by Mike Gwilym’s solemn Pericles, whose embattled endurance is exaggerated by camera close-ups. The banquet and extended dance at Tarsus are played at a leisurely pace, giving Pericles and Thaisa time to build on their initial glances, and the recognition scene—played in a small cabin with Gwilym muttering his lines under his breath in a dreamlike denial—effectively captures Pericles’ struggle to accept good fortune.

  2. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 1958, directed by Tony Richardson, with Edric Connor as Gower. The first black actor to perform on the Stratford stage, he claimed he was “going to kill the ‘Jim Crow’ idea of the Negro on the stage.” The Sailors, from left to right, include Roy Dotrice (to the immediate left of Gower), Thane Battany (in shadow), and Edward de Souza (far right).

  Tony Robertson directed the first of his three productions for Prospect Theatre in Edinburgh and London, 1973–74, with Derek Jacobi as Pericles. Set in an eastern Mediterranean brothel, the production attempted to contrast the purity of its central characters with the “iridescent purulence” of the brothel and its “inspired grotesques.”41 In 1980 Robertson returned to the play in New York with the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company. Here, “male and female prostitutes solicit their clientele, and old Gower … is turned into a sardonic master of ceremonies.”42 Pericles was a Madison Avenue businessman, handed a copy of the play by Gower, who began acting it out with the help of the locals. Deborah Wright Houston doubled Thaisa and Marina, removing her prostitute costume as she became the latter. Robertson continued to push the conceit to extremes in his 1983 version for the Acting Company, to the point of having two imaginary infants drop-kicked across the stage at the close of Act 1, to the disgust of reviewers.

  Following Richardson and Robertson, more directors were choosing to place the play within a meta-theatrical storytelling framework. At the 1974 New York Shakespeare Festival, Edward Berkeley began with a troupe of actors entering in two covered wagons and performing circus entertainments, then presented Pericles in a spirit of partial parody, the actors presenting their characters throughout rather than becoming them. While drawing attention to the play’s humor and folktale aspects, it denied any psychological or emotional investment. The 1979 production for the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival split the role of Pericles among three actors, breaking the character into three distinct eras, the oldest of which wore Gower’s costume, taking on that character’s wisdom and gravity. The following year, Edward J. Feidner’s production at Champlain created scenery such as the foamy sea from the bodies of actors and had Vincent Rossano’s Gower present throughout to narrate events.

  Peter Sellars directed the play in Boston in 1983, recreating the spirit of Richardson’s production by casting a local street jive artist, Brother Blue, to play the part of Gower, singing and rapping in complex rhythms. The African American actor Ben Halley Jr. “looks like a young Paul Robeson and plays Pericles in the grand manner of the 19th-century field marshals of the stage.”43 In the same year, David Ultz’s company blended music hall and pantomime in London that placed Gerard Murphy’s Pericles against a backdrop of hinged boxes from which the characters at the various ports of call were repeatedly revealed. Doubling was again used to provide unity:

  The kings in Pericles’s various ports of call are all played by Brian Protheroe, who draws a nice distinction between the lusts of Antioch and Cleon’s passion for model building—whenever Pericles arrives there is always some new monument to show off.44

  In 1985, Declan Donnellan directed a seminal production for Cheek by Jowl with only seven actors. Amanda Harris doubled as Antiochus’ daughter and Marina, emphasizing a duality in the two c
haracters, and simple visual images were used to tie together the emotional nuances of the plot: “the sheet that serves as Pericles’s and Thaisa’s bed becomes the bundle that is the infant Marina, and the same sheet grows into the shroud in which Thaisa is buried, drowned.”45 With the only pieces of set two long wooden casks which served as beds, ships, and coffins, the emphasis was placed on the family relationships rather than spectacle.

  The 1987 Hartford Stage Company, reviving Wilkins’ title The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, created “a modern Mediterranean never-never land where Pericles mingles with glitterati, Arab terrorists, street punks, cruise-ship tourists, prostitutes, vestal virgins, blue collar fishermen and an Elizabethan narrator who tells our hero’s story,” yet found moments of pathos and quiet amid the chaos.46 This mixture of styles and periods had by now become a hallmark of productions, as in Paul Barry’s 1989 New Jersey production, which imagined a tacky cruise party encountering Caribbean folklore as told by local storytellers.