Pericles

by William Shakespeare

I've decided that I need to keep reading Shakespeare---read the best and it influences you and your choices.

And for some reason, I am now fond of Shakespeare's older comedy/fantasy/dramas. It's as if Shakespeare became Lord Dunsany in his old age. And you know, I think that Shakespeare is writing a bit of Sci Fi too. Although, I think that Shakespeare always had it in him, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare has a 14th century poet named John Gower narrate this tale. Mr. Gower was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, and I want to know why Gower? Why not Chaucer? I mean, Shakespeare has got John of Gaunt, Mr. Chaucer's patron and brother-in-law all over the Histories. Why not here? (Gower wrote the poem about Pericles that Shakespeare used as the basis for this play, but still---Chaucer!)

Anyway, Mr. Gower narrates the tale in the Middle English of Mr. Chaucer (and this brings up the question---why didn't Shakespeare do Beowulf? Come on---fights, monsters---I like to think that the banquet scene in Macbeth and the three witches was a precursor for Grendel kicking the knights' asses after their drunken revelry and meeting Grendel's mom (or say, Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's wife, that "flinty queen")).

Forget Mr. Gower, back to the tale. And this play is a tale---not so much a play. There are great skips of time and action and place in it. It is a 'narration play'.

The hero, Pericles, goes courting for a princess and finds one. He has to solve a riddle to get her. Unfortunately, he 'gets' the riddle---his soon to be princess bride has been deflowered by her father and they are going at it hot and heavy. So hot, in fact, later in the play, they will burn up---literally---burn up in the middle of the city in full view of everyone. That was one hot town. Oh come on---Shakespeare puns all the time!

Pericles is in a quandary. He really doesn't want a wife who puts her daddy first in all things. And if Pericles declines to marry her, politely, he is a guest in their town after all, he is likely to be butchered by daddy who knows that anyone who knows the riddle, KNOWS.

Pericles manages to escape and fake his death with a shipwreck and finds a more suitable mate who is also a princess, but an ignorant one. They marry and have a baby and go on a cruise, and dammit, a real shipwreck occurs and wrecks that family.

All these families in this play are being torn apart by fate, human nature, desire, and the weather.

The baby, a daughter (gasp!), is rescued from the sea and raised by another royal family and she outshines their own daughter, so good bye to rescued but abandoned again Marina (get the name---a Shakespeare pun), she is sold to a brothel. Uh oh, this is getting close to the beginning of the play with sex problems. Marina is so pure, that she glamours all the pimps and customers and preaches the word of purity (or the goddess or whatever) and keeps her virtue. See, that first princess just didn't try hard enough or maybe her daddy had the magic persuasion, we really don't go into that.

Pericles has never met a shipwreck or sea squall that he can't survive (sounds like a super hero to me) and ambles into town and like any sailor heads for the nearest brothel. And you bet, it's the one that Marina has run into the ground with her preaching---make philosophical questions not lust---and Pericles is perilously (hah, now I get his name) close to making the 'sin of the father and daughter' again.

But no one can shut Marina up and she starts telling her tale and Pericles realizes that she is his daughter (happy proper family reunion) and Diana, the goddess, (couldn't Shakespeare have put a kracken in here?) shows up and tells Pericles to sail away to her temple with Marina.

Now Diana is not the goddess of the sea, just a niece of one, so why, after all his lousy sailing experiences, Pericles would do this appalls me. I would just tell Diana, "Stay we will, on dry land, and the sea may swell and drown her own according to her moods and the tides." Only more poetically than that.

But Pericles manages to actually not sink to the bottom of the sea on this trip and finds his wife, alive in the temple of Diana (that sex virtue thing again) and also finds a suitable husband for Marina. And everybody is happy until the next sea voyage.