Public Eye and Private Place: Intimacy and Metatheatre in Pericles and The Tempest

Lysimachus: … O, you have heard something of my power and so stand aloof for more serious wooing. But I protest to thee, pretty one, my authority shall not see thee, or else look friendly upon thee. Come, bring me to some private place: come, come.

Pericles 4.5.93–97

In this speech from Pericles, Lysimachus demands that Marina stops what he is determined to read as playing hard to get, and submit to his sexual desire for her. The line "my authority shall not see thee, or else look friendly on thee" has been glossed by editors as either an implicit or an overt threat.¹ But his "authority" here is given an odd intentionality, suggesting that Lysimachus is already distancing himself from the acts he will soon be made ashamed to have thought of performing. This reading holds Lysimachus's public authority in tension with the private place to which he demands Marina take him: he requires that Marina submit not to his authority as a public figure but to his demands as a private customer of the brothel where she is being held captive. Marina next reminds him that his identity cannot be divided between public and private in this way, by recalling the quality intrinsic both to the successful performance of his public persona and to his self-respect: his honor. She thus persuades him to honor her speech with gold instead of buying her body with it.

In this moment, Pericles's audience is asked to imagine a "private place" in which sexual acts will be performed, and conceptualize a private persona that can hide away from public exposure. In turning Lysimachus from considering his "authority" to what should be inherent in that authority, his honor, Marina fascinatingly foregrounds the construction of his elite male subjectivity—Lysimachus's "honour" is either born or self-made:

Marina: If you were born to honour, show it now; If put upon you, make the judgement good That thought you worthy of it.

(4.5.99–101)

In effect, she exposes him both to self-examination and to the audience's critique, where before she has been the object of his gaze, and there follows a potentially comical exchange in which he seems to want both to stay with Marina and to leave the stage, the site of his exposure: he twice gives Marina gold for her virtue rather than for sex, then hurriedly tries to exit but is headed off by the "damned doorkeeper" (128), the brothel worker Bolt.

My reading here is close to Julia Reinhard Lupton's, who glosses Lysimachus's insistence that Marina "bring me to some private place" thus: "lead me away from the terrible visibility opened up by your speech; grant me refuge from the self you have led me to publish". Later, argues Lupton, Lysimachus "actively courts [Marina,] the very woman who has made him reveal the horror of his own frailty" (77); in this context, Lupton cites Hannah Arendt, who writes that courage begins with "leaving one's private place and showing who one is, disclosing and exposing one's self" (Arendt 186, Lupton 77). I want to quote at further length from this passage in Arendt's The Human Condition, as it speaks to this article's concern with gender, power and metatheatre. Arendt is discussing the Homeric hero when she writes the following, but her words can be productively applied not only to Lysimachus's sense of exposure but to the female figures in Shakespeare's "Late Plays" that I discuss here:

The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one's self into the world and begin a story of one's own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a willingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one's private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one's self...