Pericles
Page 20
From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they used the outdoor Globe only in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline, and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays, The Winter’s Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give …
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS:
A CHRONOLOGY
1589–91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)
1589–92 The Taming of the Shrew
1589–92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)
1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible)
1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable)
1591–92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591–92 perhaps revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)
1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others
1592/94 King Richard the Third
1593 Venus and Adonis (poem)
1593–94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem)
1593–1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover’s Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship)
1592–94/1600–03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)
1594 The Comedy of Errors
1595 Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595–97 Love’s Labour’s Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)
1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1595–96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595–96 King Richard the Second
1595–97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)
1596–97 The Merchant of Venice
1596–97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597–98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598 Much Ado About Nothing
1598–99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)
1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599 “To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)
1599 As You Like It
1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600–01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)
1600–01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99)
1601 “Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])
1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601–02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604 Measure for Measure
1605 All’s Well That Ends Well
1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton
1605–06 The Tragedy of King Lear
1605–08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)
1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)
1606–07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins
1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611 The Winter’s Tale
1611 The Tempest
1612–13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)
1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher
1613–14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND PICTURE CREDITS
Preparation of “Pericles in Performance” was assisted by a generous grant from the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning) of the University of Warwick for research in the RSC archive at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Thanks as always to our indefatigable and eagle-eyed copy editor Tracey Dando and to Ray Addicott for overseeing the production process with rigor and calmness.
Picture research by Michelle Morton. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for assistance with picture research (special thanks to Helen Hargest) and reproduction fees.
Images of RSC productions are supplied by the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, Stratford-upon-Avon. This library, maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, holds the most important collection of Shakespeare material in the UK, including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s official archive. It is open to the public free of charge.
For more information see www.shakespeare.org.uk.
1. Directed by Nugent Monck (1947) Angus McBean © Royal Shakespeare Company
2. Directed by Tony Richardson (1958) Angus McBean © Royal Shakespeare Company
3. Directed by Ron Daniels (1979) Joe Cocks Studio Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
4. Directed by Terry Hands (1969) Reg Wilson © Royal Shakespeare Company
5. Directed by Adrian Jackson (2003) Robert Day © Royal Shakespeare Company
6. Directed by Dominic Cooke (2006) Keith Pattison © Royal Shakespeare Company
7. Directed by Adrian Noble (2002) Manuel Harlan © Royal Shakespeare Company
8. Directed by Kathryn Hunter (2005) Donald Cooper © photostage.co.uk
9. Reconstructed Elizabethan Playhouse © Charcoalblue
FURTHER READING
AND VIEWING
CRITICAL APPROACHES
Healy, Margaret, “Pericles and the Pox,” in Shakespeare’s Romances: New Casebooks (2003), ed. Alison Thorne. Intriguing reading of the “medico-moral politics” of the play through its frequently overlooked representations of syphilis.
Jackson, MacDonald P., Defining Shakespeare—Pericles as Test Case (2003). Full and excellent account of the collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins on the play.
McDonald, Russ, Shakespeare’s Late Style (2006). Invaluable close study of Shakespeare’s somewhat strange and experimental language use throughout the late plays in general.
Mullaney, Stephen, “All That Monarchs Do: The Obscured Stages of Authority in Pericles,” in Shakespeare: The Last Plays (1999), ed. Kiernan Ryan. Argues for Pericles as a work that reflects Shakespeare’s changing attitude toward his role as a commercial playwright.
Nevo, Ruth, “The Perils of Pericles,” in Shakespeare: The Last Plays (1999), ed. Kiernan Ryan. Psychoanalytic reading that attempts to reveal the play as a profound tale of forbidden desire and oedipal guilt.
Relihan, Constance C., “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place,” in Shakespeare’s Romances: New Casebooks (2003), ed. Alison Thorne. Looks at how the play’s non-European setting complicates the traditional perceived generic characteristics of romance plays.
Skeele, David (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays (2000). Compendious selection of critical material on the play, with the volume divided equally between the play’s literary and performance heritages.
Skeele, David, Thwarting the Wayward Seas (1998). Book-length study that serves as a very good introduction to the play’s critical and theatrical fortunes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Traversi, Derek, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (1954). Examines the poetic and formal characteristics of Shakespeare’s later work. Chapter 2 deals with Pericles.
Wilson Knight, G., The Crown of Life (1947). Classic study of Shakespeare’s late plays: chapter 2 deals with Pericles.
THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE
Holland, Peter, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (1997). Features superb analysis of productions by Phyllida Lloyd, John Peter, and David Thacker.
Skeele, David (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays (2000). Compendious selection of critical material on the play’s stage history, from the mid-nineteenth century onward.
Warren, Roger, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1990). Excellent analysis of the staging considerations of Shakespeare’s late plays, with a chapter devoted to Pericles, using the 1986 Stratford, Ontario, and 1989 RSC productions as case studies.
AVAILABLE ON DVD
Pericles, directed by David Hugh Jones for the BBC Shakespeare series (1984, DVD 2005). One of the better entries in the BBC series, Mike Gwilym as Pericles, Amanda Redman as Marina, Juliet Stevenson as Thaisa, and Edward Petherbridge as Gower.
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in John Munro, ed., The Shakspere Allusion-Book, 2 vols. (1909), vol. 1, p. 209. The spelling and punctuation of quotations from this book have been modernized.
2. Quoted in Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, vol. 1, p. 248.
3. Ben Jonson, “Ode to Himself” (c. 1629), quoted in Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, vol. 1, p. 341.
4. John Dryden, A Defence of the Epilogue, Or, An Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of the Last Age (1672), quoted in Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, vol. 2, p. 174.
5. John Dryden, “A Parallel Betwixt Painting and Poetry,” in C. A. Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting (1695), quoted in Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, vol. 2, p. 403.
6. John Dryden, “An Epilogue,” in Miscellany Poems (1684), quoted in Munro, The Shakspere Allusion-Book, vol. 2, p. 303.
7. MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (2003), p. 166.
8. Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life, &c of Mr. William Shakespeare, in The Works of Shakespeare (1709), quoted in William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2, 1693–1733, ed. Brian Vickers (1974), p. 192.
9. Lewis Theobald, The Works of Shakespeare (1733), quoted in Vickers, William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, p. 500.
10. Henry Tyrell, The Doubtful Plays of Shakespere (1860), quoted in Pericles: Critical Essays, ed. David Skeele (2000), p. 58.
11. F. G. Fleay, Shakespeare Manual (1876), p. 211.
12. The most detailed summary of the authorship debate, the various candidates, and the methodologies employed can be found in Jackson, Defining Shakespeare; Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond mount a strident argument for Shakespeare’s sole authorship in their Cambridge University Press edition (1998).
13. Edward Dowden, Shakspere, Literature Primers (1877), pp. 60, 55–6.
14. David Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas: A Critical and Theatrical History of Pericles (1998), pp. 33–4.
15. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1947), pp. 70, 73.
16. Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare’s Final Period,” Independent Review 3 (August 1904), pp. 114–15 (p. 415).
17. Suzanne Gossett, ed., Pericles (2004), p. 54.
18. William Watkiss Lloyd, Essays on the Life and Plays of Shakespeare (1858), quoted in Skeele, Pericles: Critical Essays, p. 55.
19. C. L. Barber, “ ‘Thou That Beget’st Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969), pp. 111–30 (p. 61).
20. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981), pp. 194, 196–7, 213, 214.
21. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Material Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (1992), p. 196.
22. Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (1987), pp. 59, 60.
23. Margaret Healy, “Pericles and the Pox,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (1999), pp. 92–107 (pp. 101, 104).
24. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1995), p. 147.
25. Amelia Zurcher, “Untimely Monuments: Stoicism, History, and the Problem of Utility in The Winter’s Tale and Pericles,” ELH 70 (2003), pp. 903–27 (pp. 904, 921, 922).
26. Constance C. Relihan, “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place,” Philological Quarterly 71 (1992), pp. 281–99 (pp. 281, 291–2).
27. Stuart M. Kurland, “ ‘The Care … of Subjects’ Good’: Pericles, James I, and the Neglect of Government,” Comparative Drama 30 (1996), pp. 220–44 (p. 220).
28. Ben Jonson, “Ode (To Himself),” Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (1925–32), vol. 6, pp. 492–3.
29. George Lillo, Marina: A Play of Three Acts (1738), p. 7.
30. See Sonia Massai, “From Pericles to Marina: ‘While Women Are to Be Had for Money, Love, or Importunity,’ ” Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998), pp. 67–77.
31. For detailed information on this production, see Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas.
32. Ibid., p. 41.
33. The Times (London), 16 October 1854.
34. Chronicle, 25 April 1900.
35. Morning Leader, 26 April 1900.
36. Birmingham Post, 16 August 1947.
37. Observer, 17 August 1947.
38. Daily Herald, 9 July 1958.
39. Liverpool Daily Post, 9 July 1958.
40. Ibid.
41. Plays and Players, October 1973.
42. New York Times, 15 December 1980.
43. Boston Globe, 13 October 1983.
44. The Times (London), 2 November 1983.
45. Punch, 23 January 1985.
46. Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 March 1987.
47. Independent, 15 March 1990.
48. Mail on Sunday, 29 May 1994.
49. Guardian, 31 March 2003.
50. Independent, 22 February 2005.
51. Guardian, 6 June 2005.
52. B. A. Young, Financial Times, 3 April 1969.
53. Irving Wardle, The Times (London), 3 April 1969.
54. Michael Billington, Guardian, 5 April 1979.
55. Ibid.
56. Peter Holland, English Shakespeares (1997), p. 64.
57. Ibid., p. 65.
58. Benedict Nightingale, The Times (London), 8 July 2002.
59. Billington, Guardian, 8 July 2002.
60. Paul Taylor, Independent, 10 July 2002.
61. Ibid.
62. Billington, Guardian, 8 July 2002.
63. Taylor, Independent, 10 July 2002.
64. Sam Marlowe, The Times (London), 26 July 2003.
65. Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 3 August 2003.
66. Taylor, Independent, 17 November 2006.
67. Charles Spencer, Telegraph, 17 November 2006.
68. David Nathan, Sun, 3 April 1969.
69. Billington, Guardian, 5 April 1979.
70. Taylor, Independent, 10 July 2002.
71. Young, Financial Times, 30 July 1969.
72. Young, Financial Times, 5 April 1979.
73. Billington, Guardian, 14 September 1989.
74. Billington, Guardian, 8 July 2002.
75. Nightingale, The Times, 8 July 2002.
76. Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, 30 July 2003.
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