Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles

prolixity in PERICLES 595 DEANNE WILLIAMS Papa Don=t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles In Shakespeare=s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as Northrop Frye observes, >fatherdaughter incest keeps hanging over the story as a possibility= (44). Most critics, however, are reluctant to extend the question of incest beyond the borders of Antioch, and quick to exempt the hero, Pericles, from scrutiny on this matter. 1 As C.L. Barber puts it, >we begin with overt incest, and arrive at a sublime transformation of the motive= (64). Certainly such a reading is consistent with the play=s source material. The Latin romance of Apollonius of Tyre, which Shakespeare adapted from John Gower=s version in the Confessio Amantis (circa 1375), presents the sexual relationship between Antiochus and his daughter as an emblem of tyranny, while the platonic, paternal affection displayed by Apollonius towards his own daughter is an extension of his capacity for benevolent rule. However, to regard the hero=s impeccable character as the opposite of Antiochus=s moral monstrosity is to overlook the central drama of Shakespeare=s Pericles, in which the hapless hero struggles against falling into a classic folktale scenario, according to which the daughter takes her dead mother=s place as the consort of the king, her father. The question of the authorship of Pericles is famously fraught. Omitted from the First Folio, although included in the Third and Fourth, the play survives in one form: that of the >bad= first quarto of 1609. Whereas Pericles was extremely popular in the seventeenth century, the popular theory that the play is the product of collaboration can be traced back only as far as the eighteenth century: in the Prologue to his adaptation of the play, Marina (1738), George Lillo explains the necessity to exculpate Shakespeare from what he considers to be the play=s >rude wild scenes= (3). Lillo proposes xxxxxxx I would like to thank Seth Lerer, Stephen Orgel, David Riggs, Patricia Parker, Tina Jones, Gabrielle Sugar and Peter Mallios, as well as two anonymous readers, for their most helpful contributions to this project. 1 John Dean contrasts Antiochus=s >destructive passion= against the >chaste, creative love= of Pericles (14B24); John Pitcher sees the danger of incest solely in terms of the possibility of Pericles finding himself in the brothel where Marina is being held captive (14B29); Mark Taylor argues that Antiochus provides a >foil= for Pericles=s more appropriate expressions of familial love (72); Lynda E. Boose argues that witnessing incest at Antioch allows Pericles 596 deanne williams to >reject the implicit seductiveness= of his encounter with Marina (339); Alexander Leggatt sees the incest rectified by the >images of healthy courtship and sexual love, and of normal family relations= that proceed (167). that the bard=s >bright, inimitable lines= were mixed with, although easily distinguished from, those of his collaborator: >as gold though mix=d with baser matter shines.= The struggle to determine the identity of Shakespeare=s base collaborator continues, with George Wilkins emerging as the favourite, charged with composing the first two acts of the play, which critics have judged substandard. The controversy concerning the authorship of Pericles provides a classic example of the problem that Stephen Orgel identifies in seeking out the >Authentic Shakespeare=: >it defines Shakespeare as the best poet, and then banishes from the canon whatever is considered insufficiently excellent= (2).1 In other words, we look outside of Shakespeare to explain the aspects of Pericles that do not meet our impossibly high standards for what is >Shakespearean.= Moreover, to use a collaborator to explain the impression that Pericles sounds and feels somehow unShakespearean overlooks the extent to which many of Shakespeare=s plays which have not been banished for insufficient excellence are the product of collaboration, from Middleton=s witch scenes in Macbeth to the hand of Fletcher in Henry VIII. Finally, the impression that Pericles contains lines and scenes that do not accord with our collective idea of Shakespeare not only discounts the wide range of tone and diction available throughout Shakespeare=s work, but also overlooks the dramatic motivation for establishing an alternative voice in Pericles: >to sing a song that old was sung= (Prologue...