Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  The danger of the task you undertake.

  —Act I, scene i, lines 1-2

  Tyre is a city on the Mediterranean coast, about 220 miles south of Antioch. It is much the more ancient of the two cities, for it was a flourishing town in the thirteenth century b.c. when the ancient Egyptian Empire was at its height.

  Tyre was an important port of the Canaanites, who were called Phoenicians by the Greeks. Its ships ventured far through the Mediterranean, founding what eventually became the still greater city of Carthage on the north African shore. Tyrian ships even ventured outside the Mediterranean, reaching Britain on the north and, as one tale has it, circumnavigating the African continent to the south.

  Tyre's stronghold was on a rocky island off the shore and this, combined with her navy, kept her secure against the land-based empires of Asia. She maintained her independence not only against David's Israelite Empire but against the much more dangerous Assyrian and Chaldean empires. Nebuchadrezzar subjected it to a thirteen-year siege from 587 to 574 b.c. and managed only a partial victory.

  The real end of Tyre's independence came in 332 b.c., when one much greater than Nebuchadrezzar banged against its gates. This was Alexander the Great himself. He had been sweeping through Asia Minor with scarcely any resistance and was now heading toward Egypt, when Tyre unexpectedly refused to yield. Even Alexander required seven full months to take Tyre, and when he completed the job, he was vengeful enough to have ten thousand of its citizens executed and another thirty thousand sold into slavery.

  Although Tyre recovered to some extent, it remained only a shadow of its former self, first under the Ptolemies of Egypt, then under the Seleucid Empire, and finally under the Roman Empire.

  It was in 198 b.c., just about the suggested time of the events of this play, that Antiochus the Great wrested the southern part of Syria from Egypt.

  Tyre vanished from the view of western Europe after the breakup of the Roman Empire, but reappeared in the time of the Crusades. The Crusaders captured it in 1124 and for over a century it remained one of the chief cities of the Christian "Kingdom of Jerusalem." When the Crusaders were finally driven out of the East, Tyre was destroyed. A small village, still bearing the old name, exists on its site now, in southern Lebanon.

  The original Greek version of the story of Pericles is lost, but a Latin prose romance based on that Greek version exists. It begins with the incest and riddle of Antiochus, and the young man who comes to win the princess is "Apollonius of Tyre." The "of Tyre" merely means he was born there, or lives there. To make him Prince of Tyre is an anachronism, for Tyre did not have independent rulers in Hellenistic times.

  Shakespeare did not use the name Apollonius. He was influenced, apparently, by a character in Arcadia, a romance written in 1580 by Sir Philip Sidney, which had as one of its heroes a character named Pyrocles. Pyrocles' nobility was something like that which Shakespeare had in mind for his own hero, and, perhaps for that reason, he used the name, converting it to the more common Greek form of Pericles.

  The only important historical Pericles was the leader of democratic Athens from 460 to 429 b.c. Under him, Athens was at the height of its power and culture and his rule may be taken as coinciding with the Golden Age of Greece. It must be emphasized, though, that the Pericles of Shakespeare's play has nothing whatever to do with Pericles of Golden Age Athens.

  … this fair Hesperides

  Pericles declares himself aware of the danger of wooing Antiochus' daughter, and she is brought out before him-a vision of loveliness. Antiochus says:

  Before thee stands this fair Hesperides,

  With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched;

  For deathlike dragons here affright thee hard.

  —Act I, scene i, lines 28-30

  This is a reference to the eleventh of the twelve labors which Hercules was supposed to undergo in the Greek myths. The Hesperides are so named from a Greek word meaning "west." They were the three daughters of Hesperus, the Evening Star (which always appears in the west after sunset), according to one version of the myth. Another version has them the daughters of the Titan Atlas, who gave his name to the Atlantic Ocean and who was associated with what was, to the Greeks, the Far West.

  On the far western section of the north African coast there was supposed to be a garden containing a tree bearing golden apples (oranges, I wonder?), which was guarded by an ever watchful dragon. Hercules achieved this task, as he did all others, but Antiochus seems to doubt that Pericles can do the equivalent.

  … to Tharsus

  Antiochus presents the riddle Pericles must solve. It is a silly riddle and quite transparent. Pericles sees the answer at once and is horrified. He carefully hints at the truth and Antiochus is, in his turn, horrified.

  Pericles sees that to have solved the riddle is as dangerous as to have missed it and leaves hurriedly for Tyre. Antiochus sends a servant after the young prince to poison him.

  Even at Tyre, Pericles is uneasy. He is not far enough from Antioch and he feels that Antiochus will come against him with an army and bring misery on the whole city. (And well he might, for in actual history, Tyre became part of Antiochus' dominions in 198 b.c.)

  Pericles tells his loyal lord, Helicanus, the story and says he intends to go into exile:

  Tyre, I now look from thee then, and to

  Tharsus Intend my travel…

  —Act I, scene ii, lines 115-16

  No city named Tharsus is to be found in the gazetteers.

  The name is very similar to Tarsus, an important city on the southern coast of Asia Minor, best known to us as the place where Antony and Cleopatra first met (see page I-343) a century and a half after the time of Pericles, and where St. Paul was born a few decades later still.

  Tarsus, however, is only about 170 miles west of Antioch and was as firmly in the Seleucid grip as was Tyre itself. It is interesting to wonder if perhaps Tharsus is a distortion of Thasos, a small island in the northern Aegean Sea. There are places in the play where Thasos would fit well.- However, it is most likely that Tharsus is a completely fictitious place, no more to be located on the map than the Bohemia of The Winter's Tale (see page I-156).

  … the Trojan horse …

  Pericles leaves Tyre just in time to escape Antiochus' poisoning emissary, but he finds matters in Tharsus not well. Its governor, Cleon, and his wife, Dionyza, bewail the fact that the prosperous city has been reduced by a two-year famine to a point of near cannibalism. Even as they are wailing, a fleet of ships appears on the horizon. At first they suspect it is an enemy come to take advantage of their weakness, but it is the noble Pericles. He enters with his attendants and says:

  … these our ships you happily [i.e., perhaps] may think

  Are like the Trojan horse [which] was stuffed within

  With bloody veins expecting overthrow,

  Are stored with corn to make your needy bread,

  —Act I, scene iv, lines 91-94

  The Trojan horse was the final stratagem of the Greeks, who after ten years' siege of Troy (see page I-89) had abandoned hope of conquest by direct attack. The climactic scene of the war is not described in Homer's Iliad or in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It is, however, described in Vergil's Aeneid.

  The Greeks built a giant hollow horse, filled it with their best warriors, then pretended to abandon the siege and sail away. The Trojans were easily convinced that the horse was an offering to Minerva (Athena) and that it was a good luck token which, if accepted, would forever protect the city against conquest. It was accordingly taken into the city and that night the Greek warriors emerged and opened the gates to the remainder of the army (which had secretly returned). Then began the bloody task of sacking the city.

  Pericles' ships, however, were not filled with warriors, but with food.

  … our country of Greece…

  Gower emerges at the beginning of the Second Act to explain that Pericles is treated with great honor at Tharsus but that word comes to him from
Tyre that Antiochus is indeed anxious to have him killed and that even Tharsus will not be safe.

  Pericles therefore takes to the sea again and this time is wrecked. He is washed on shore all alone, all his companions and goods gone.

  The Second Act opens, then, on the shore of the Pentapolis, which apparently is where Pericles has been washed up. He approaches some fishermen, asking their help for pity, pointing out that he has never had to beg before. The First Fisherman replies sardonically:

  No, friend, cannot you beg?

  Here's them in our country of Greece

  gets more with begging than we can do with working.

  —Act II, scene i, lines 67-69

  The Pentapolis ("five cities") is a district on the north African shore about 550 miles west of Alexandria and 950 miles southwest of Antioch. The chief of the five cities was Cyrene, and the region is still called Cy-renaica today. It is the northeasternmost section of the modern nation of Libya and was much in the news in 1941 and 1942, when the British and Germans were fighting back and forth across it in the Desert War.

  Obviously, the Pentapolis is not in Greece in the modern sense, where that is specifically the land occupying the southernmost portion of the Balkan peninsula. Yet Shakespeare, or whoever wrote this scene, was (perhaps unknowingly) not really incorrect in the wider sense of Greece as including any area where Greek language and culture was dominant (see page I-172).

  A knight of Sparta. ..

  The ruler of Pentapolis is Simonides, and his daughter, Thaisa, is having a birthday the next day. Various knights are to fight at a tournament in her honor (a queer intermingling of medieval custom with the ancient background).

  Pericles no sooner hears this than fishermen come in dragging a suit of armor which has entangled their nets in the sea. It is Pericles' own armor, lost in the shipwreck. Now he too can join the tournament and engage in a second type of contest for the beautiful daughter of a king.

  Simonides and Thaisa appear in the next scene, seated in a pavilion in the fashion of medieval sponsors of a tournament. The competing knights pass by, presenting their shields with the identifying device on each.

  Thaisa describes the first for her father:

  A knight of Sparta, my renowned father;

  And the device he bears upon his shield

  Is a black Ethiop reaching at the sun.

  The word, Lux tua vita mihi.

  —Act II, scene ii, lines 18-21

  Sparta was at one time the leading military city of Greece, but in 371 b.c., nearly two centuries before the apparent time of the play, it had been catastrophically defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra. From that time on, Sparta sat paralyzed, refusing to change with the times, and never admitted it was no longer the leader of Greece. In 200 b.c. it was in its last stages of independence and still produced good fighters.

  There is nothing impossible, then, in the appearance of a Spartan in the competition, although he could scarcely be a "knight" in the medieval sense. Nor is it at all likely that he would have a Latin motto ("Thy light is life to me") on his shield, since in the time of Antiochus the Great, Latin was, to the cultivated Greeks, a barbarous and uncouth native Italian dialect, nothing more.

  A prince of Macedon…

  The second knight is described by Thaisa as:

  A prince of Macedon, my royal father;

  And the device he bears upon his shield

  Is an armed knight that's conquered by a lady;

  The motto thus, in Spanish, Piu per dolcessa che per forza.

  —Act II, scene ii, lines 24-27

  Macedon was a kingdom on the northwest shore of the Aegean Sea, Greek in language and culture, but backward in the time of Athens' Golden Age, and playing little part in Greek history at the time.

  It rose to prominence in 359 b.c. when a remarkable man, Philip II, began his period of rule over it. Under his guidance, it came to dominate Greece, and under his son, Alexander the Great, it conquered the Persian Empire.

  Macedon was greatly weakened by the conquest, in point of fact, as most of its soldiers and best citizens departed forever to rule over distant areas in Asia and Africa. It suffered also from barbarian invasions in the third century b.c. Nevertheless, Macedon managed to maintain control over the entire Balkan peninsula, including Greece proper. In 200 b.c., however, it stood at the brink of downfall, for war with Rome was beginning and this war Macedon was eventually to lose utterly.

  It is not inappropriate that a Macedonian should be represented here, but what is he doing with a motto "in Spanish," a language which did not yet exist and would not for nearly a thousand years? (The Signet Shakespeare gives the motto in Italian, anyway, another language which did not yet exist. It means "More by gentleness than by force.")

  … a fire from heaven…

  The third knight is from Antioch, the fourth and fifth are not identified geographically, and the sixth knight, in rusty, shabby armor, is Pericles. It is Pericles, of course, who wins the tournament, and Thaisa is much taken with his handsome appearance. There is a gala celebration and it looks as though Pericles' luck has turned.

  As for Antiochus, his luck has taken a final downturn. At Tyre, Heli-canus, who rules in Pericles' absence, tells what has happened. Apparently the gods are annoyed at Antiochus' incest and, as Helicanus says:

  Even in the height and pride of all his glory,

  When he was seated in a chariot

  Of an inestimable value, and

  His daughter with him, a fire from heaven came,

  And shriveled up their bodies, even to loathing.

  —Act II, scene iv, lines 6-13

  In actual history, Antiochus the Great did not die such a death. His defeat by Rome placed a heavy burden on him in the way of tribute. He tried to raise the money by forcing the priesthood to disgorge the treasures hoarded in their temples. He was supervising the stripping of such a temple when the populace, aroused by the priests, mobbed and killed him in 187 b.c.

  A younger son of Antiochus III, Antiochus IV, ruled from 175 to 163 b.c., and he may well have contributed to the picture Shakespeare draws of "Antiochus the great." It was Antiochus IV who particularly beautified Antioch as the eastern provinces fell farther and farther away. It was Antiochus IV who made a name for himself in history as a king of intolerable wickedness, which also fits the picture in Pericles.

  Antiochus IV, like his father, was browbeaten by Rome (not even daring to meet them in battle) and, partly out of chagrin at that, turned against those Jews of his kingdom who would not accept Greek culture. The Jews rose in bloody revolt and the tale of that revolt is told in the Books of Maccabees, which form part of the Apocrypha but are accepted in the Catholic version of the Bible.

  Antiochus IV died of tuberculosis during a campaign in the eastern provinces. In the First Book of Maccabees (a sober historical account) his death is recounted undramatically, except that he is reported to have, in rather unlikely fashion, died regretting his actions against the Jews and recognizing that he was being punished for what he had done.

  In the Second Book of Maccabees (a more emotional account, and filled with tales of martyrdom and miracles) Antiochus is supposed to have died in agony, swarming with worms and rotting away while still alive: "and the filthiness of his smell was noisome to all his army. And the man, that thought a little afore he could reach to the stars of heaven, no man could endure to carry for his intolerable stink" (2 Maccabees 9:9-10).

  The death of Antiochus IV as reported in 2 Maccabees undoubtedly contributed to the death of Antiochus in Pericles, for Helicanus says that after Antiochus and his daughter had shriveled under the fire from heaven:

  … they so stunk

  That all those eyes adored them ere their fall

  Scorn now their hand should give them burial.

  —Act II, scene iv, lines 11-13

  … make for Tharsus

  Pericles' fortune continues to climb, for he marries Thaisa and then hears from Tyre that Ant
iochus is dead and that the Tyrians long for Pericles' return.

  He and his now pregnant wife, Thaisa, go on board ship to return to Tyre. Once again a storm strikes and at its height Thaisa goes into labor and is delivered of a baby girl. She apparently dies in the process and the superstitious sailors will not have a corpse on board. They place her in a coffin and shove it overboard.

  The battered ship is near Tharsus and Pericles feels they cannot make Tyre. He cries out:

  O make for Tharsus!

  There will I visit Clean, for the babe

  Cannot hold out to Tyrus.

  There I'll leave it

  At careful nursing

  —Act III, scene i, lines 77-80

  To go from the Pentapolis to Tyre and be driven by the storm toward Tharsus is within belief if it is really Tarsus that the name implies; but it is much less credible if Tharsus is Thasos.

  … through Ephesus…

  The scene now shifts to Ephesus and the home of Cerimon, a skillful doctor. A follower says to him:

  Your honor has through Ephesus poured forth

  Your charity, and hundreds call themselves

  Your creatures, who by you have been restored;

  —Act III, scene ii, lines 43-45

  Ephesus, the great and prosperous city of the time of The Comedy of Errors, is still great and prosperous in the time of Pericles.

  This queen will live…

  At this moment, servants enter with a chest that has been cast up from the sea. It is the casket containing Thaisa, along with a note from Pericles asking that if the dead body be found, it be piously buried.