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Shakespeare's share in Pericles.

In the novel this becomes :

Poor inch of nature! ... thou art as rudely welcome to the world as ever princess' babe was, and hast as chiding a nativity as fire, air, earth, and water can afford thee.

There may be other passage so clearly Shakespearean as this, not only in what it copies but what it adds ;1 but one such suffices to show that Shakespeare's hand had been set upon the play when Wilkins paraphrased it, and creates a presumption for the view that all that he ever did to it was already done. And what he had already was beyond question recently done ; for all the marks of Shakespeare in Pericles are marks of Shakespeare's ripest time. We may therefore confidently date his share in 1607-08.

What his share amounted to is within certain limits, as has been said, unmistakable. The first two acts, helplessly reproducing the incoherent series of Pericles' pre-nuptial adventures, are equally devoid of the brilliance of his youth and of the subtle technique of his maturity. They combine the imperfect craft of the 'prentice with the dulness of the journeyman. Here and there, however, Shakespeare has certainly touched what he did not care to remodel, as in the lines

The blind mole casts
Copp'd hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is throng'd
By man's oppression; and the poor worm doth die for 't

(i. I. 100 f.) -lines sharply contrasted, in their careless nobility of phrase and their defiance of rhythmic symmetries, with the careful rhetoric in which they are embedded.

But the opening of the third act, by one of the 1 Mr. Collier adduces several in iv. 6. : 'If you were born to striking ones, especially Marina's honour, show it now.' expostulation with Lysimachus

most amazing transitions in literature, suddenly steeps
us in the atmosphere of high poetry which we have
here for a moment breathed. In the tossing ship
Marina has her rude welcome to the world, and
throughout the rest of the play, Shakespeare's
comings-in and goings-out tend to follow hers. Next
to the birth-scene in clear Shakespearean quality
is the recognition-scene (v. I.), then, her dialogue
with Dionyza by the shore (iv. 1.), and her brief
passionate appeal to Lysimachus, passing into a wail
of agony (iv. 6.) :

If you were born to honour, show it now;
If put upon you, make the judgement good
That thought you worthy of it. ...
O, that the gods
Would set me free from this unhallow'd place,
Though they did change me to the meanest bird

That flies i' the purer air !
Besides exhibiting Shakespearean style, these Affinities of
portions of Pericles abound in Shakespearean motives. the Shake-
Especially close affinities bind them with the Pericles with

Shake. 'Romances' which immediately followed them. For speare's the most part Pericles presents these common motives in a cruder form, so that it has been plausibly said to hold the same relation to The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline that the Two Gentlemen holds to Twelfth Night and As You Like it. Like The Tempest, these Marina-scenes open with storm, and Pericles, confronting its tragic cruelty, is as grand a figure as Prospero. Marina stands 'flower-like among her flowers' like Perdita, and reads the poisonous tenderness of a jealous foster-mother, like Imogen. The meeting of Pericles with Thaisa and with Marina is drawn with as profound a feeling for joy as that of Leontes with Perdita and with Hermione. Hence the attractive theory which supposes the ‘Marina.

.

spearean

Romances.'

Marina-scenes of Pericles to represent an unfinished drama of Shakespeare's own, to which the tedious flourish of the first two acts of an older play on the entire story was prefixed.

But this theory is not without difficulties. With all the extraordinary power of single scenes, the Marina' has not, as it stands, any more than the Pericles story as a whole, the dramatic substance, the backbone, of Shakespeare's most romantic' plots. It is like The Winter's Tale divested of the tragedy of Hermione. The most critical moment of Marina's career, that in which she turns the governor of Mytilene from his evil purpose, can hardly have appealed to Shakespeare, with its Spenserian breadth and simplicity, as proper for the central situation of a drama. And the earlier crisis, in which Dionyza plots her death, is treated with a marked subordination of dramatic to epic effect. We are hardly made aware of Dionyza's jealousy, when we find her putting the last touches to the murderer's instructions :

Thy oath remember ; thou hast sworn to do't :

'Tis but a blow, which never shall be known (iv. I. I). And the raptures of the final re-union are made poignant by no mingling of remorse. Blameless sufferers embrace, but no Leontes, no Alonso, no Iachimo, Posthumus, or Cymbeline looks on. The real criminals are in the conclusion simply ignored. Neither the vengeance which Pericles proposed to inflict, nor the 'nobler virtue of pardon which his later counterparts bestow, gives dramatic significance to their fate; but they fall by a popular uprising, and this last act of their story is huddled away in an Epilogue. The so-called 'Marina' is an assemblage of striking parallels to the Romances, but is not, as a whole, a parallel.

And a great part even of the "Marina' itself is only intermittently of clear Shakespearean quality. It would be rash to say that the Mytilene-scenes in the fourth act are too repulsive for him to have written; certainly the loathsome figures of Boult and his crew are drawn with a drastic vigour of which there is hardly a trace in the first two acts. But powerful realism of this kind was within the compass of many a Jacobean dramatist, when he could draw direct from the low life of daily experience. It is where his common experience fails him, that the common dramatist betrays himself. ( Certainly such phenomena as the conversion of Lysimachus and Boult must have been as startling in London as in Ephesus; and it is at this point that the writer of the Mytilenescenes discloses his psychological ineptitude.) We may perhaps recognise Shakespeare in Marina's virginal protest, but its instantaneous effect upon hardened men must be attributed to a hand less subtle or more perfunctory than his. Similarly, the majority of the choruses' in acts iv. and v., while differing in measure and in style from those of i. and ii., show only here and there a Shakespearean touch. The Gower of i. and ii. speaks in rude octosyllabic verse like his own, sprinkled with antique forms. In iv. and v. he archaises no more and cultivates the five-foot measure, the ornate phrase, and the interwoven rhymes of the Elizabethan sonneteer. And the opening 'chorus' of act v., otherwise clumsy enough, contains, in its description of Marina's dainty feminine craft, a little vignette full of Shakespearean flavour.

It therefore seems probable, as most critics have held, that Shakespeare rather elaborated another man's Pericles, scene by scene, here more, here less, according to the fluctuating attractions of the theme,

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than that he seriously plotted a 'Marina,' still less a
Pericles, of his own.

What the other Pericles was, and who the other
man, are questions which an editor of Shakespeare
who prints large portions of the other man's work
cannot altogether pass by, but which we have no
means of decisively answering. Delius inferred from
George Wilkins' description of his novel as a poore
infant of my brain,' that he was also the author of
the drama from which it was taken. And Mr. Fleay,
on this hint, constructed a romance (or rather two
if not three romances) of theatrical jealousies and
rivalries, in which Shakespeare as well as Wilkins
played a part. Wilkins, a latter-day Greene, resents
the suppression of his Pericles by Shakespeare's riper
work; instead, however, of emulating the earlier
Greene's malignant snarl at the upstart crowe,' he
contents himself with reproducing his own Pericles in
a novel, claiming it as his own in a phrase so
cautiously inoffensive that Mr. Fleay was the first to
divine what he meant. Upon this, Shakespeare or
Shakespeare's company hastens to publish his
Pericles, probably as an answer to Wilkins.' Two
circumstances alone give some slight plausibility to
these conjectures. Wilkins in 1607 left the King's
Company, and joined the rival company of the

1 It is impossible to be sure winter [1608 - 9] and hurriedly that one has Mr. Fleay's final printed in 1609 as a practical opinion. In one place (Shake

Wilkins'

prose speare, p. 245) Wilkins pub- version.' Thus Shakespeare's lished his novel, 1608, because Pericles was written after a he was probably "annoyed by book which quotes it, and pubthe adoption of Shakespeare's lished as a practical answer' version of the Marina story in- to one inspired by 'annoyance' stead of his own.' In another at the adoption' of work not passage of the same volume yet written.

Such are the re(p. 61), Marina, the part of sults of reducing dramatic hisPericles which replaced Wilkins' tory to a function of theatrical work, .. was written in this feuds.

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