Part 17 (1/2)
_The Fable._ Act I. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to guess a riddle propounded by the King. If he guess rightly, he will be rewarded by the hand of the Princess in marriage. If he guess wrongly, he will be put to death. The riddle teaches him that the Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from Antioch to Tyre, and there takes s.h.i.+p to avoid the King's vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.
Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and marries her.
Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter, dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ash.o.r.e at Ephesus, and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina, the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
He then returns to Tyre.
Act IV. The years pa.s.s. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm that she pa.s.ses the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen, deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.
Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and musician.
Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He learns that she is his daughter. The G.o.ddess Diana bids him go to her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends happily with the reuniting of the family.
The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of _The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre_ in the year 1608, probably after the play had been produced.
The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play (in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It is not known how it came to pa.s.s that Shakespeare took the play in hand.
From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great mind, that Shakespeare was not deeply interested in the play, but that he re-wrote the last three acts so that his company might play the piece and make money by it. The play has often succeeded on the stage, and the knowledge that it would succeed may have weighed with the manager of a theatre on which many depended for bread.
There is little that is precious in the play. The scenes in the brothel at Mitylene (in Act IV) have power. Many find their unpleasantness an excuse for saying that Shakespeare never wrote them. They are certainly by Shakespeare. Cant would always persuade itself that the power to see clearly ought not to be turned upon evil. Those who can read--
_Bawd._ ... they are so pitifully sodden.
_Pandar._ ... The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.
_Boult._ Ay ... she made him roast-meat for worms--
with disgust at Shakespeare's foulness, yet without horror of heart that the evil still goes on among human beings, must be strangely made. These scenes, the very vigorous sea scenes, including the account of the storm at sea, put into the mouth of Marina--
”My father, as nurse said, did never fear, But cried 'Good seamen!' to the sailors, galling His kingly hands, haling ropes; And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea That almost burst the deck....
Never was waves nor wind more violent: And from the ladder-tackle washes off A canvas-climber. 'Ha,' says one, 'wilt out?'
And with a dropping industry they skip From stem to stern; the boatswain whistles, and The master calls and trebles their confusion”--
and the scene in which Cerimon, the man withdrawn from the world to study the bettering of man, revives the body of Thaisa, are the most lovely things in the play.
_Cymbeline._
_Written._ (?)
_Published_, in the folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ Holinshed's _Chronicles_ tell of Cymbeline and the Roman invasion. A story in Boccaccio's _Decameron_ (giorn.
2, nov. ix) retold in English in Kinde Kit's _Westward for Smelts_, and popular in many forms and many literatures, tells of the woman falsely accused of adultery.
_The Fable._ Cymbeline, King of Britain, has lost his two sons. His only remaining child, a daughter named Imogen, is married to Posthumus. His second wife, a cruel and scheming woman, plots to destroy Posthumus so that her son, the boorish Cloten, may marry Imogen.
Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an incomparable chast.i.ty. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.
Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is killed by one of the sons.
The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.