ARTicles vol. 1 i.4: The Triumph of Pericles

There will probably be more productions of Periclesplaying across the world over the next six months than at any time in the play’s history. When the A.R.T. first discussed the project with Andrei Serban, we had no idea that major revivals were also being planned in Britain (directed by Adrian Noble for the R.S.C.), Tokyo (staged by Yukio Ninagawa in a production currently playing at the Royal National Theatre in London), at Chicago’s Court Theatre, and the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Periclesis also appearing this spring in countless smaller venues, from the Weston High School in Greater Boston to the Culture Project in New York. The play has not always received so much attention. In 1629 the playwright Ben Jonson dismissed Shakespeare’s fantastical epic as a “mouldy tale,” and the Edwardian critic Lytton Strachey brushed it off as “a miserable, archaic fragment.” Periclesenjoyed considerable success in the decades following its composition, but we have no evidence of any revivals in the whole of the eighteenth century. Although there have been several major productions of Periclesin the last fifty years, the play has never attained the popularity of, say, Hamletor The Merchant of Venice. Even now, some four centuries after Shakespeare wrote Pericles, the play remains shrouded in mystery. The text was not published in the First Folio of 1623, and the only Quarto edition, printed in 1609, is notorious for its editorial muddles. We have no firm date of composition, though most scholars agree that Pericles was written around 1607, shortly after Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. No one can explain with certainty why the first half of the play seems stylistically so different from the second. Was Shakespeare revising a lesser writer’s work, or did he collaborate with another dramatist? Those critics who maintain that the whole play is Shakespeare’s must construct elaborate explanations for the shifts in verse form and characterization, which are seldom entirely convincing. Mercifully, most of these concerns evaporate when Periclesis performed–despite the textual inconsistencies and semantic cruxes, the play works well on stage. But directors, designers, and actors who take on Periclesfind themselves confronting another set of questions. Should we search for unity in the play’s sprawling structure, or celebrate its crazy idiosyncrasies? What is the genre of Pericles–comedy or tragedy, medieval morality play, or Jacobean court masque? Since we can’t say for certain when Pericleswas written, we also don’t know whether it was premiered at the Globe (which would suggest a relatively simple first production) or at the Black Friars, an indoor theater constructed in 1608 for elaborately staged entertainments. Most of these questions will never be answered definitively, but as Andrei Serban begins to rehearse his production at the A.R.T., it is worth summarizing some critical and theatrical responses to this fascinating and troubling play. Nowhere in Shakespeare is the journey from corruption and despair to spiritual and romantic bliss more fully realized than in Pericles. The play’s profound optimism may in part explain its newfound popularity; perhaps it offers some comfort in our current political and economic despair. While writing the last plays of his career (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest) Shakespeare seems to have become fascinated by the therapeutic effects of time. Each but The Tempestopens with a swiftly-paced three-act tragedy that drives the protagonists to a moment of crisis. Shakespeare then fast-forwards the action by several years (in The Tempestthat hiatus has already passed before the start of the play) and picks up the narrative when the process of healing begins. These plays may no longer seem as homogenous a group as when the Victorian critic Edmond Dowden labeled them “romances,” but they do undeniably share thematic and stylistic elements: All four dramatize complex relationships between fathers and daughters, all experiment with freer verse forms than Shakespeare’s earlier work, and all temper a brutal, efficiently constructed tragedy with the restoration of a divine world order. John Gower, the fourteenth-century poet that Shakespeare resurrects to narrate Pericles, remarks in his prologue that the story of the play used to be told “for restoratives”–that is, for its recuperative, medicinal qualities. As the play opens, the kingdoms of Pericles’ world need urgent healing: Antioch is ruled by an incestuous and murderous King, and the famine-ridden city of Tarsus by the cowardly Cleon and his cruel wife Dionyza; the lords of Pericles’ own Tyre are seditious; ships on the Mediterranean are assailed by pirates and storms; even the brothels of Mytilene are in danger of closing, so efficiently has their client-base been eroded by venereal disease. Through these corrupt and barren lands Pericles wanders, alone and increasingly desolate, always losing whatever he loves most. He is forced to abandon the daughter of Antiochus, his kingdom, his wife, his daughter, and his religious belief–until by the opening of the final act he has been reduced to a shadow, devoid of language, affect, and hope. Then, in the play’s most famous sequence, a miracle occurs; the Prince is rescued from the gulf of his despair as his family, his home, his speech, and his spiritual faith are restored to him. Pericles himself is one of the play’s only morally neutral characters. His function is primarily reactive; Shakespeare dramatizes him more frequently as the victim of circumstance rather than the author of his own destiny. Pitted against a hoard of colorful (and often hilarious) degenerates–Antiochus, Thaliard, Dionyza, Leonine, the brothel keepers, and pirates–are a host of virtuous characters, including the loyal Helicanus, the wise King Simonides, the magician Cerimon, the goddess Diana, Thaisa, and Marina (who in her angelic purity is a sister to the other heroines of the late plays, Miranda, Imogen, and Perdita.) In the context of such moral polarization, Pericles’ position in the play has generated almost four centuries of scholarly debate. Nineteenth-century critics often characterized the prince as a Job figure, who faces a sequence of increasingly rigorous spiritual tests until his suffering is finally rewarded. The schematic morality of Pericles, and the hero’s quest that forms its fundamental structure, link the play closely to an earlier English dramatic tradition, the allegorical morality plays. In such dramas as Everyman (written around 485 A.D., some eighty years after the death of John Gower) a human figure encounters a series of anthropomorphic representations of the vices and virtues–Lust, Sloth, Discretion, Valor, and so forth–each of whom tests and tempers his character until his soul is ready to ascend to heaven. Other critics have argued that Pericles must have committed some great crime for which he is now being punished. Writing in 1968, the scholar John Cutts suggested that Pericles was tainted by the incestuous desire of Antiochus, and, like Adam in the Garden of Eden, succumbs to greed and lust, thereby unleashing sin into the world. In the first half of the twentieth century a third group of critics, including Derek Traversi and G. Wilson Knight, argued that the reasons for Pericles’ suffering were not as important as the play’s archetypal patterns. Pericles was not, they suggested, a fully drawn character so much as a figure from one of the ancient “vegetation” myths described in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough(1922), Carl Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious(1934), and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance(1920)–the anthropological study that T. S. Eliot claimed as the source for The Waste Land(1922). These critics located Pericles in the same matrix as the Fisher King, a pagan fertility symbol who languishes in his barren winter kingdom until spring brings rain and new life to the earth. One such critic, Richard Wincor, argued in 1950 that it was misguided to search for modern psychology in Pericles, for the play’s subject was “no longer the individual, but the entire picture of the seasons . . . Shakespeare’s protagonist is Supernature.” Of all these scholarly approaches, the third group–the myth critics–has had the strongest impact on productions of Periclesin the past fifty years. In order to understand the profound change in stage practice that ensued, we should look briefly at the first major episodes in the play’s production history. Until the late 1960s Pericleswas generally staged as an extravagant spectacle, in which the details of the characters’ psychological and spiritual development were less important than the scale and ambition of the physical production. The first such staging (and the first major revival of the play since the late seventeenth century) was directed in 1854 by Samuel Phelps, at the Sadler’s Wells theatre in London. The text was censored to fit the taste of the age, and Phelps set much of the production in a painstakingly detailed series of Greek landscapes (though, in fact, none of the play takes place in Greece, and Shakespeare’s Periclesis no relation to his namesake, the fifth-century ruler of Athens.) Phelps’ staging drew on the latest Victorian technology and was a public success, though the ambitious production was not without critical detractors. A reviewer in The Timesnoted that the “wondrous pictures” could not “hide the paucity of the dramatic interest,” though he praised the realistic special effects, noting that “when Pericles is thrown upon the sands, it is with the very best of rolling seas . . . when the storm afterwards rocks his vessel, it rocks in real earnest, and spectators of delicate stomachs may have uneasy reminiscences.” The spectacular tradition continued for several decades, as did the habit of expunging the play’s distasteful episodes–it was usual until well into the twentieth century to expurgate the brothel scenes and the details of Antiochus’ relationship with his daughter. In 1900 John Coleman, a student of Phelps, announced that he too had decided to “expunge the first act, eradicate the banality of the second, to omit the irrelevant Gower chorus, and altogether to eliminate the obscenity of the fourth act.” In 1947 the first production by the Royal Shakespeare Company also dispensed with the first act, though the stylized stage design was simpler than any of the realistic pageants that preceded it. The second R.S.C. production, directed by Tony Richardson in 1958, harkened back to the spectacular tradition, with outlandish costumes and a set reminiscent of an enormous ship. Critics were again divided–one found the extravaganza “pictorially magnificent,” while another thought that Richardson was attempting “to stun our understanding with sound and fury and make it almost as difficult to follow the sense as the nonsense.” Richardson’s directorial concept was equally elaborate. Troubled by the apparently disparate elements of the play’s structure, he embedded Pericles within another narrative. According to theatre historian David Skeele, Richardson’s Gower told his story “to a group of rough, primitive Byzantine sailors, and . . . all of the exotic characters and locales, the pirates and kings, the palaces and brothels, [were] shown as though conjured in the lurid imaginations of the listeners.” Richardson’s desire to find unity in Periclesbecame a common goal in the latter half of the twentieth century. Two R.S.C. revivals in particular, directed by Terry Hands (1969) and Ron Daniels (1979) turned to the myth criticism of Traversi and Wilson Knight in search of a thematic framework that would tidy up the play’s unruly narrative. In contrast to the tradition of spectacular pageants, Hands set the play in an empty white box, using simple costumes and a sequence of ritual dances to represent the passage of time and the repeated cycles of human existence. The effect was striking; critics noted that the play’s “ancient mysteries” were revealed as if for the first time, and praised Hands for having “woven a whole of such singular lucidity from this . . . tantalizing play.” The Periclesof Ron Daniels (later A.R.T.’s Associate Director) was even more economical. Set on a bare circle of wood, the play became a series of ritualized bouts between the forces of good and evil, life and death. The cast was heavily doubled to emphasize patterns and juxtapositions within the play–Diana was paired with Dionyza, for example, and Marina with the sinister daughter of Antiochus. By the end of the twentieth century there existed two distinct schools of Periclesproduction–a minimalist, spiritual model and an extravagant pageant that emphasized the play’s broad comedy and exotic locations. In the past two decades, a new generation of visionary directors (including Michael Grief, Phyllida Lloyd, Yukio Ninagawa, and Peter Sellars, who chose Periclesto begin his Artistic Directorship of the Boston Shakespeare Theatre in 1983) has confronted the play’s sprawling form directly, embracing and even celebrating the complex, asymmetrical structure that earlier productions sought to tame. Early indications suggest that Andrei Serban will take a similar approach, emphasizing the stylistic complexity of Shakespeare’s play by combining spectacular and minimalist elements in a single production. As I write, my colleague Neil Bartlett, Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London, has just e-mailed to say that he too is in the process of designing and casting a Periclesfor production this summer. And so the wave of popularity continues, carrying this mysterious play towards new incarnations and interpretations beyond anything we can imagine.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.