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Part I Greek 8 Pericles, Prince of Tyre

The date of this play is usually given as 1608, and the last three acts are characteristically late Shakespearean in style The first two acts are, however, considered much inferior, and many critics feel that, except for a touch here and there, they were not written by Shakespeare

Whether that is so or not, the play, as it stands, is included in the collections of Shakespeare's plays and, for better or worse, will forever bear his name

ancient Gower

The play begins with an Introduction An old e and says:

To sing a song that old was sung,

From ashes ancient Gower is come,

- Act I, Introduction, lines 1-2

John Goas a fourteenth-century English poet (c 1330-1408) and a friend and contee I-54) Goas considered by his conteh not by h it ht they would have borne each other the ill will of competitors, they did not They dedicated books to each other

One of Gower's principal works is Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover), first published in 1383 In this work, a nulish couplets The tales are by no inal with Gower What he does is retell stories fro the most popular ones

In the eighth book of Confessio Amantis Gower tells a tale, taken from a Greek source, of which a version is presented in this play A prose version of the same story, "The Pattern of Painful Adventures," was published in 1576 by Laurence Twine Some scenes in Pericles are drawn from Twine, but Gower is the major influence

It is only in this play and in The Two Noble Kinse I-54) that Shakespeare so openly announces his source

Antiochus the great

Gower lays the scene of the play:

This Antioch, then; Antiochus the great

Built up this city for his chiefest seat,

The fairest in all Syria-

- Act I, Introduction, lines 17-19

This alone tells us that the time in which the tale is supposed to take place is in the Hellenistic period; that is, in the couple of centuries that followed the death of Alexander the Great In this period, Greek-language ypt and western Asia

The largest of these was established south and east of Asia Minor in 321 bc by Seleucus I, who had been one of Alexander's generals The realm is, in his honor, usually called the Seleucid Empire in the histories

Seleucus had made his first capital in ancient Babylon, but quickly abandoned it as too alien and un-Greek In its place, he constructed Seleucia on the Tigris, about twenty hly Greek city

Although the Empire covered vast tracts of what are now the nations of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, the portion most under the influence of Greek culture and thereforeand Greek-cultured descendants of Seleucus was the westernmost part, commonly called Syria by the Greeks

In Syria Seleucus founded a city which served as his western capital and nalish, we know it as Antioch It was located fifteen miles from the sea, near the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, and is now located in southwestern Turkey

About a century and three quarters after the founding of the Seleucid Empire, almost all the eastern provinces had fallen away and come under the rule of native princes What was left of the Greek kingdom was concentrated in the westernmost provinces and what had been the Seleucid Empire came more and more to be called simply Syria

Despite the vicissitudes of the Ereat metropolis In the days of the Roman Empire, when Rome had finally absorbed the last reest city of the Eer

The question is, nohich reat"? It is no use to try to decide by the actual events of the play, since these are all fictitious

There were thirteen dom named Antiochus, but one of them, the third of the name, did call himself Antiochus the Great This Antiochus III ruled froht back into the Seleucid fold (very tee eastern provinces that were breaking away, h the east alave hi himself "the Great"

Once that was accooverned by a boy king at the time, and also Asia Minor Had he succeeded, he would have united almost all of Alexander's Empire under his rule

Unfortunately for hi power of Ro that Western nation, he invaded Greece, but was defeated there in 191 bc The Roain in 190 BC Antiochus ended his reign in defeat and failure

Considering that in Pericles Antiochus the Great is pictured as ruling in ht arbitrarily place the fictitious events of this play about 200 bc This is twenty years after the suggested tihth and last of Shakespeare's Greek plays

her to incest

Gower goes on to explain that "Antiochus the great" was left a ith a beautiful daughter:

With who took,

And her to incest did provoke

- Act I, Introduction, lines 25-26

Incest is treated here as a horrible and unspeakable crih, it yptian Pharaohs routinelyperhaps that only their sisters had blood aristocratic enough to e suitable (Or perhaps it was a relic of matrilineal descent; of the times when the nature of fatherhood was not understood and when property could only be inherited through thehis sister, the Pharaoh could make sure that the sister's son, who later was to inherit the throne, would also be his own)

After the death of Alexander the Great, one of his generals, Ptoledoypt was ruled by his descendants, all of ere nayptian customs in order to remain popular with their subjects Ptolemy II took for his second wife, for instance, his full sister, Arsinoe As a result, first she, and then he, received the surna lover") He did not have children by her Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolee I-318), was e was purely fore

Furthermore, in the Persian dominions in the days before Alexander's conquest, nicest was not abhorred and father-daughter unions were allowed Antiochus the Great ruled over most of the core of the old Persian Empire It is not on record that he followed Persian custom in this respect, but that old custom may have been in the mind of the anonymous Greek writer who first invented the tale which worked its way down the centuries and came to rest in Shakespeare's Pericles

Prince of Tyre

To keep his luscious daughter froht her hand, Antiochus forced all to attempt to solve a riddle Failure to solve the riddle was punished with death and numerous suitors had already suffered that penalty

The play itself begins before the palace at Antioch, where a young suitor has come to present himself for the hand of the princess Antiochus says:

Young Prince of Tyre, you have at large received

The danger of the task you undertake

- Act I, scene i, lines 1-2

Tyre is a city on the Mediterranean coast, about 220 miles south of Antioch It is much thetown in the thirteenth century bc when the ancient Egyptian Eht

Tyre was an important port of the Canaanites, ere called Phoenicians by the Greeks Its ships ventured far through the Mediterranean, founding what eventually becae on the north African shore Tyrian ships even ventured outside the Mediterranean, reaching Britain on the north and, as one tale has it, circu the African continent to the south

Tyre's stronghold was on a rocky island off the shore and this, coainst the land-based eainst David's Israelite Eerous Assyrian and Chaldean ee froed only a partial victory

The real end of Tyre's independence caed against its gates This was Alexander the Great hih Asia Minor with scarcely any resistance and was now heading toward Egypt, when Tyre unexpectedly refused to yield Even Alexander required seven full months to take Tyre, and when he coh to have ten thousand of its citizens executed and another thirty thousand sold into slavery

Although Tyre recovered to some extent, it remained only a shadow of its forypt, then under the Seleucid Empire, and finally under the Roman Empire

It was in 198 bc, just about the suggested time of the events of this play, that Antiochus the Great wrested the southern part of Syria froypt

Tyre vanished from the vieestern Europe after the breakup of the Roman Empire, but reappeared in the time of the Crusades The Crusaders captured it in 1124 and for over a century it redom of Jerusalem" When the Crusaders were finally driven out of the East, Tyre was destroyed A s the old name, exists on its site now, in southern Lebanon

The original Greek version of the story of Pericles is lost, but a Latin prose roins with the incest and riddle of Antiochus, and the young man who comes to win the princess is "Apollonius of Tyre" The "of Tyre" merely means he was born there, or lives there To make him Prince of Tyre is an anachronism, for Tyre did not have independent rulers in Hellenistic times

Shakespeare did not use the name Apollonius He was influenced, apparently, by a character in Arcadia, a romance written in 1580 by Sir Philip Sidney, which had as one of its heroes a character na like that which Shakespeare had in mind for his own hero, and, perhaps for that reason, he used the na it to the more common Greek form of Pericles

The only important historical Pericles was the leader of democratic Athens froht of its power and culture and his rule e of Greece It h, that the Pericles of Shakespeare's play has nothing whatever to do with Pericles of Golden Age Athens

this fair Hesperides

Pericles declares hihter, and she is brought out before him-a vision of loveliness Antiochus says:

Before thee stands this fair Hesperides,

With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched;

For deathlike dragons here affright thee hard

- Act I, scene i, lines 28-30

This is a reference to the eleventh of the twelve labors which Hercules was supposed to undergo in the Greek"west" They were the three daughters of Hesperus, the Evening Star (which always appears in the west after sunset), according to one version of the hters of the Titan Atlas, who gave his name to the Atlantic Ocean and as associated as, to the Greeks, the Far West

On the far western section of the north African coast there was supposed to be a garden containing a tree bearing golden apples (oranges, I wonder?), which was guarded by an ever watchful dragon Hercules achieved this task, as he did all others, but Antiochus seems to doubt that Pericles can do the equivalent

to Tharsus

Antiochus presents the riddle Pericles must solve It is a silly riddle and quite transparent Pericles sees the answer at once and is horrified He carefully hints at the truth and Antiochus is, in his turn, horrified

Pericles sees that to have solved the riddle is as dangerous as to have missed it and leaves hurriedly for Tyre Antiochus sends a servant after the young prince to poison him

Even at Tyre, Pericles is uneasy He is not far enough froainst hi ht, for in actual history, Tyre became part of Antiochus' dominions in 198 bc)

Pericles tells his loyal lord, Helicanus, the story and says he intends to go into exile:

Tyre, I now look from thee then, and to

Tharsus Intend my travel

- Act I, scene ii, lines 115-16

No city naazetteers

The name is very similar to Tarsus, an important city on the southern coast of Asia Minor, best known to us as the place where Antony and Cleopatra first e I-343) a century and a half after the time of Pericles, and where St Paul was born a few decades later still

Tarsus, however, is only about 170 rip as was Tyre itself It is interesting to wonder if perhaps Tharsus is a distortion of Thasos, a sean Sea There are places in the play where Thasos would fit well- However, it is most likely that Tharsus is a completely fictitious place, no more to be located on the e I-156)

the Trojan horse

Pericles leaves Tyre just in ti eovernor, Cleon, and his wife, Dionyza, bewail the fact that the prosperous city has been reduced by a two-year fa, a fleet of ships appears on the horizon At first they suspect it is an enee of their weakness, but it is the noble Pericles He enters with his attendants and says:

these our ships you happily [ie, perhaps] may think

Are like the Trojan horse [which] was stuffed within

With bloody veins expecting overthrow,

Are stored with corn to make your needy bread,

- Act I, scene iv, lines 91-94

The Trojan horse was the final stratagee I-89) had abandoned hope of conquest by direct attack The climactic scene of the war is not described in Homer's Iliad or in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida It is, however, described in Vergil's Aeneid

The Greeks built a giant hollow horse, filled it with their best warriors, then pretended to abandon the siege and sail away The Trojans were easily convinced that the horse was an offering to Minerva (Athena) and that it was a good luck token which, if accepted, would forever protect the city against conquest It was accordingly taken into the city and that night the Greek warriors eates to the rean the bloody task of sacking the city

Pericles' ships, however, were not filled arriors, but with food

our country of Greece

Gower e of the Second Act to explain that Pericles is treated with great honor at Tharsus but that word comes to him from Tyre that Antiochus is indeed anxious to have him killed and that even Tharsus will not be safe

Pericles therefore takes to the sea again and this time is wrecked He is washed on shore all alone, all his coone

The Second Act opens, then, on the shore of the Pentapolis, which apparently is where Pericles has been washed up He approaches so out that he has never had to beg before The First Fisherman replies sardonically:

No, friend, cannot you beg?

Here's them in our country of Greece

gets

- Act II, scene i, lines 67-69

The Pentapolis ("five cities") is a district on the north African shore about 550 miles west of Alexandria and 950 miles southwest of Antioch The chief of the five cities was Cyrene, and the region is still called Cy-renaica today It is the northeasternmost section of the modern nation of Libya and was much in the news in 1941 and 1942, when the British and Ger back and forth across it in the Desert War

Obviously, the Pentapolis is not in Greece in thethe southernmost portion of the Balkan peninsula Yet Shakespeare, or whoever wrote this scene, was (perhaps unknowingly) not really incorrect in the wider sense of Greece as including any area where Greek language and culture was doe I-172)

A knight of Sparta

The ruler of Pentapolis is Si a birthday the next day Various knights are to fight at a tourna of round)

Pericles no sooner hears this than fisherled their nets in the sea It is Pericles' own armor, lost in the shipwreck Now he too can join the tournae in a second type of contest for the beautiful daughter of a king

Simonides and Thaisa appear in the next scene, seated in a pavilion in the fashion of hts pass by, presenting their shields with the identifying device on each

Thaisa describes the first for her father:

A knight of Sparta, my renowned father;

And the device he bears upon his shield

Is a black Ethiop reaching at the sun

The word, Lux tua vita mihi

- Act II, scene ii, lines 18-21

Sparta was at one ti military city of Greece, but in 371 bc, nearly two centuries before the apparent time of the play, it had been catastrophically defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra Froe with the tier the leader of Greece In 200 bc it was in its last stages of independence and still produced good fighters

There is nothing impossible, then, in the appearance of a Spartan in the coht" in the medieval sense Nor is it at all likely that he would have a Latin ht is life to me") on his shield, since in the time of Antiochus the Great, Latin was, to the cultivated Greeks, a barbarous and uncouth native Italian dialect, nothing more

A prince of Macedon

The second knight is described by Thaisa as:

A prince of Macedon, my royal father;

And the device he bears upon his shield

Is an arht that's conquered by a lady;

The motto thus, in Spanish, Piu per dolcessa che per forza

- Act II, scene ii, lines 24-27

Macedon was a kingdoe and culture, but backward in the ti little part in Greek history at the time

It rose to proan his period of rule over it Under his guidance, it came to dominate Greece, and under his son, Alexander the Great, it conquered the Persian Empire

Macedon was greatly weakened by the conquest, in point of fact, as most of its soldiers and best citizens departed forever to rule over distant areas in Asia and Africa It suffered also from barbarian invasions in the third century bc Nevertheless, Macedon ed toGreece proper In 200 bc, however, it stood at the brink of downfall, for ith Ro and this war Macedon was eventually to lose utterly

It is not inappropriate that a Macedonian should be represented here, but what is he doing with a e which did not yet exist and would not for nearly a thousand years? (The Signet Shakespeare gives the e which did not yet exist It entleness than by force")

a fire from heaven

The third knight is froraphically, and the sixth knight, in rusty, shabby armor, is Pericles It is Pericles, of course, ins the tournament, and Thaisa is ala celebration and it looks as though Pericles' luck has turned

As for Antiochus, his luck has taken a final downturn At Tyre, Heli-canus, who rules in Pericles' absence, tells what has happened Apparently the gods are annoyed at Antiochus' incest and, as Helicanus says:

Even in the height and pride of all his glory,

When he was seated in a chariot

Of an inestimable value, and

His daughter with him, a fire from heaven came,

And shriveled up their bodies, even to loathing

- Act II, scene iv, lines 6-13

In actual history, Antiochus the Great did not die such a death His defeat by Rome placed a heavy burden on him in the way of tribute He tried to raise the e the treasures hoarded in their te of such a temple when the populace, aroused by the priests, mobbed and killed him in 187 bc

A younger son of Antiochus III, Antiochus IV, ruled from 175 to 163 bc, and he may well have contributed to the picture Shakespeare draws of "Antiochus the great" It was Antiochus IV who particularly beautified Antioch as the eastern provinces fell farther and farther away It was Antiochus IV whoof intolerable wickedness, which also fits the picture in Pericles

Antiochus IV, like his father, was browbeaten by Ro to rin at that, turned against those Jews of his kingdom ould not accept Greek culture The Jews rose in bloody revolt and the tale of that revolt is told in the Books of Maccabees, which form part of the Apocrypha but are accepted in the Catholic version of the Bible

Antiochus IV died of tuberculosis during a can in the eastern provinces In the First Book of Maccabees (a sober historical account) his death is recounted undramatically, except that he is reported to have, in rather unlikely fashion, died regretting his actions against the Jews and recognizing that he was being punished for what he had done

In the Second Book of Maccabees (a more emotional account, and filled with tales of martyrdoony, swar ahile still alive: "and the filthiness of his sht a little afore he could reach to the stars of heaven, no man could endure to carry for his intolerable stink" (2 Maccabees 9:9-10)

The death of Antiochus IV as reported in 2 Maccabees undoubtedly contributed to the death of Antiochus in Pericles, for Helicanus says that after Antiochus and his daughter had shriveled under the fire from heaven:

they so stunk

That all those eyes adored them ere their fall