Pericles (review)

Editing Periclesprobably constitutes punishment for sins committed in a prior life. Is it Shakespeare's? If a collaboration, who was the collaborator and who wrote what? In any case, what to do about the text? In the two editions reviewed, Suzanne Gossett and Roger Warren agree on answers to the Wrst two questions but differ dramatically in responding to the third.

Shakespeare's name appeared, alone, on the title page of the first quarto in 1609 (hereafter Q), but for reasons we can only guess at Pericleswas excluded from the 1623 First Folio. Later acceptance into the canon did not end the authorship debate; nor is it likely the Oxford and Arden3 editions will settle the dust for everyone, given that in the 1998 New Cambridge Shakespeare PericlesDoreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond argued for Shakespeare's sole authorship. Still, both Warren and Gossett make a persuasive case for collaboration, for George Wilkins (the major claimant) as co-author, and for Wilkins's primary contribution as Acts 1–2 (Oxford, Scenes 1–9). Gossett's discussion is especially full on the history of the authorship controversy, while Warren's is blessedly clear in explaining recent computer-based evidence. In Warren's words, the weight of the evidence suggests "the extreme unlikelihood that Shakespeare wrote Scenes 1–9 at any stage of his career"; it also indicates that "those scenes have much in common with Wilkins's other work" (62–63).

About the nature of the collaboration there is less agreement. Both editors fall prey to the "obvious temptation" to link bits of the play to authorial biographies (Warren, 70). Flights of fancy include Warren's speculation (70) that Wilkins "may have contributed to the commercial tone of the brothel scenes" because he "ran an inn that was probably also a brothel" (hence, too, the author of Measure for Measure . . .?) and Gossett's more theatrical (it "is easy to imagine: one night Shakespeare chats about travel tales with Wilkins") and subsequently psychoanalytic scenario (Gossett, 59, 161–63). Warren sees Wilkins as presenting the King's Men with the idea of a play on the Apollonius of Tyre story, perhaps even a draft (4–5); Gossett supposes the play to have been "collaboratively planned, with the senior dramatist dominating" (67). Certainly the question of origin is significant, yet without more factual information it is also unanswerable. Some will find both hypotheses irrelevant, since both accept the possibility that a nearly forgotten minor author might be partly responsible for a major turning point in Shakespeare's playwriting career.

DiYculties are compounded by the murkiness of the textual situation, for Periclesis the only clearly defective Shakespearean play text for which we have no better quarto or First Folio version. Worse, what we do have is The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre(1608) ,a prose narrative by George Wilkins claiming to be the "True History of the play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower." Explanations for the state of the quarto text vary, but here Gossett and Warren again initially agree. Both believe it to be a "reported text," cobbled together by one or more actors while the theaters were closed due to plague. But each weights the prose narrative differently, making the resulting texts hard to compare.

Because he believes The Painfull Adventuresto be close to what was performed, and so "gives a more adequate idea of certain episodes" (80), Warren follows Gary Taylor and MacDonald P. Jackson— Pericles' editors in the 1986 Oxford Complete Works—in making liberal use of Wilkins's narrative to "attempt to reconstruct the play that lies behind" Q; "merely to provide a cleaned-up reprint of the Quarto...