.......Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a stage play in the form of a comedy. Like other comedies, it ends happily. However, because the play contains tragic events, it is probably better classed as a tragicomedy. 
 
 

Key Dates
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Date Written: Between 1606 and 1608. 
First Performance: Probably between 1606 and 1608.
Publication: Pericles, Prince of Tyre was first published in in 1609 in a quarto edition containing errors. An edited version was published in 1664 in the third folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. (The play was not included in the First Folio, the first authorized collection of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623.) 

Sources

.......The probable main sources for the play were (1) "Apollonius of Tyre," one of one hundred forty-one stories in Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession), by John Gower (1330-1408), and (2) The Patterne of Painefull Adventures (1576), by Lawrence Twine. 

Settings
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.......Most of the action takes place in these ancient locales: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, and Mytilene. Two scenes take place on a ship at sea. 
.......Antioch (present-day Antakya) is in southern Turkey, northeast of Cyprus and northwest of Syria. Tyre (present-day Sur) is on the coast of southern Lebanon, just north of the Israeli border. Tarsus is in southern Turkey, about twelve miles north of the Mediterranean coast. Pentapolis is in north Africa and, in ancient times, consisted of five cities. Ephesus, near the sea in western Turkey, no longer exists but its ruins are near present-day Selcuk. Mytilene (present-day Mitilini) is on the Greek island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. 

Characters
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Protagonist: Pericles 
Antagonist: Evil in the form of Antiochus, Thaliard, and Other Characters Who Oppose Pericles 
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Pericles: Prince of Tyre. Noble young man who must flee Antioch after he discovers a dark secret: that the King of Antioch is committing incest. Pericles roams the Mediterranean world, facing challenges and setbacks. In some ways, he resembles the biblical Job with respect to his resilience.
Antiochus: King of Antioch. He is an evil man who beds his own daughter.
Daughter of Antiochus: Beautiful young woman whom the king reserves for himself.
Helicanus: Lord of Tyre, loyal to Pericles. He operates the government of Tyre in the absence of Pericles.
Escanes: A lord of Tyre.
Simonides: King of Pentapolis. Unlike Antiochus, Simonides is a just and upright ruler 
Thaisa: Princess, daughter of Simonides. Pericles wins her hand while sojourning in Pentapolis. Thaisa is a paragon of virtue and refuses to yield herself to the patrons of a brothel. 
Marina: Beautiful and virtuous daughter of Pericles and Thaisa. Her name is derived from mare (pronounced MAR ay), the Latin word for sea. (She was born on a ship under sail.) 
Lychorida: Nurse of Marina.
Cleon: Governor of Tarsus.
Dionyza: Wife of Cleon.
Lysimachus: Governor of Mytilene.
Cerimon: A lord of Ephesus.
Thaliard: A lord of Antioch who readily accepts a commission to assassinate Pericles.
Philemon: Servant of Cerimon.
Leonine: Servant of Dionyza.
Gower: Chorus. He comments on the drama at the beginning of each act. Click here for information about his role.
Marshal 
Bawd: Keeper of a brothel in Mytilene.
Pandar: Procurer and pimp at the brothel.
Boult: Pandar's servant.
Nestor, Nicander
Minor Characters: Lords, knights, gentlemen, sailors, pirates, fishermen, messengers.

Plot Summary
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003
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.......Pericles, Prince of Tyre, accepts a challenge to solve a riddle and thereby win the hand of the daughter of Antiochus, King of Antioch. Gower, a narrator who recites a prologue at the beginning of each of the five acts, describes her as a breathtaking beauty. Anyone desiring to marry her must first solve the riddle. There’s a catch, though. If a suitor provides the wrong answer to the riddle, he will be decapitated and his head hung high for all to see. In the presence of the king and his daughter, Pericles risks all and reads the riddle:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother’s flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father:
He’s father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you. (1.1.67)

A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him:
He asks of you, that never us’d to beg. (2.1.38-41)

         [W]e are gentlemen
That neither in our hearts nor outward eyes
Envy the great nor do the low despise. (2.3.27-29) 

If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.
Diana, aid my purpose! (4.2.74)

Though wayward fortune did malign my state,
My derivation was from ancestors
Who stood equivalent with mighty kings. (5.1.104-106)

He bears 
A tempest, which his mortal vessel tears, 
And yet he rides it out. (4.4.30-32) 

If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.
Diana, aid my purpose! (4.2.74)

In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward:
In Pericles, his queen and daughter, seen,
though assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserved from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last. (5.3.101-106)

Few love to hear the sins they love to act. (1.1.87)
Repetition and parallel construction help make memorable this line spoken by Pericles.

They do abuse the king that flatter him:
For flattery is the bellows blows up sin;
The thing which is flatter’d, but a spark,
To which that blast gives heat and stronger glowing. (1.2.42-45)
Helicanus uses metaphors to compare flattery to a bellows and the object of the flattery to a spark.

Antiochus from incest liv’d not free:
For which, the most high gods not minding longer
To withhold the vengeance that they had in store,
Due to this heinous capital offence,
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 shrivell’d up
Their bodies, even to loathing; for they so stunk,
That all those eyes ador’d them ere their fall
Scorn now their hand should give them burial. (2.4.3-14)
Helicanus uses synechdoche—substitution of a part to stand for the whole—in Lines 13 and 14, in which the word eyes represents persons.

I am a maid, 
My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes,
But have been gazed on like a comet. (5.1.99-101)
In a simile, Marina, preaching chastity, compares herself to a comet.

Following are examples of figures of speech in Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Alliteration

As these before thee thou thyself shalt bleed. (1.1.61)

what may make him blush in being known,  (1.2.25)

’Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss (1.2.87)

should he doubt it, as no doubt he doth (1.2.94)

Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven! 
Wind, rain, and thunder, remember, earthly man 
Is but a substance that must yield to you (2.1.3-5)

Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges, 
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou, that hast 
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, 
Having call’d them from the deep. (3.1.3-6)

A city on whom plenty held full hand, 
For riches strew’d herself even in the streets; 
Whose towers bore heads so high they kiss’d the clouds (1.4.24-26)

Thou God of this great vast [sea], rebuke these surges, 
Which wash both heaven and hell (3.1.2-3)

Her face the book of praises, where is read 
Nothing but curious pleasures . . . . (1.1.18-19)
Comparison of the face of the daughter of Antiochus to a book

             peaceful night— 
The tomb where grief should sleep (1.2.7-8)
Comparison of night to a tomb and grief to a living creature

So sharp are hunger’s teeth, that man and wife 
Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life. (1.4.47-48)
Comparison of hunger to a creature with teeth

A man whom both the waters and the wind, 
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball 
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him (2.1.38-40)
Comparison of Pericles to a ball and seas to a tennis court

Give me a gash, put me to present pain, 
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me 
O’erbear the shores of my mortality, 
And drown me with their sweetness. (5.1.224-227)
Comparison of joy to a rushing sea and mortality to land along a shore

One sorrow never comes but brings an heir 
That may succeed as his inheritor 1.4.66-67)
Sorrow becomes a person.

[S]he comes apparell’d like the spring. (1.1.15)
Comparison of the daughter of Antiochus to spring

    [D]eath remember’d should be like a mirror, 
Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error. (1.1.48-49)
Comparison of death to a mirror

       [V]ice repeated is like the wandering wind, 
Blows dust in others’ eyes, to spread itself (1.1.91-92)
Comparison of vice to the wind

        [H]is son’s like a glow-worm in the night, 
The which hath fire in darkness, none in light (2.3.47-48)
Pericles compares himself to a firefly.

.......In keeping with the setting of the play, the dialogue contains many allusions to ancient deities of Greek mythology. Shakespeare generally uses the Roman name for the deities. In some instances, the Roman name is the same as the Greek.  

Aesculapius (3.2.133): A god of medicine in Greek mythology. He was the son of Apollo.
Apollo (3.2.82): In Greek and Roman mythology, the god of prophecy, music, poetry, and medicine. His alternate name, Phoebus, means brightness, and he was thus also considered the god of the sun.
Cupid (1.1.41): Roman name for Eros, the god of love in Greek mythology. 
Dian or Diana (5.1.276-285): Roman name for Artemis, the goddess Diana,  appears in a vision 5.1.
Hymen (Prologue, Act 3): In Greek mythology, the god of marriage. 
Jove (1.1.9): Roman name for Zeus, king of the Olympian gods in Greek mythology.
Juno (2.3.34): Roman name for Hera, the queen of the Olympian gods in Greek mythology.
Neptune (Prologue, Act 5): Roman name for Poseidon, the god of the sea in Greek mythology.
Nicander (3.1.65-66): Greek physician and poet of the second century BC.
Or till the Destinies do cut his thread of life (1.2.117): Destinies refers to the Fates. In Greek mythology, they were three goddesses—Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis—who controlled the destiny of each human.
Priapus (4.6.4): In Greek mythology, a god of sexual potency and procreation.

Anachronisms
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.......Shakespeare sets Pericles, Prince of Athens in ancient times. However, King Antiochus's henchman, Thaliard, plans to murder Pericles with a pistol, which of course had not yet been invented. In Pentapolis, Pericles participates in what appears to be a medieval-style jousting tournament against five knights. The combatants wear armor, bear shields emblazoned with coats of arms, carry lances, and abide by the rules of chivalry. What gives? 
.......Maybe Shakespeare, like Albert Einstein, thought time and space were relative concepts, able to be bent and warped by another force. In Pericles, it is not the pull of gravity that does the trick (as in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity) but the pull of the imagination, which is infinitely more powerful—and whimsical. 

Pandar and the Evolution of an English Word

.......In Pericles, the name of a minor character, Pandar, appears to be an allusion to Pandarus, an ally of the Trojans in Homer’s account of the Trojan War in The Iliad. In medieval and Renaissance literature, writers cast Pandarus in the role of a go-between, or matchmaker, in a love affair between the Trojan prince Troilus and the Trojan woman Cressida. In time, the word panderer (derived from Pandarus and Pandar) evolved into popular use to identify an agent who brings lovers together or, in less euphemistic words, to identify a pimp, a procurer, or a whoremonger. Among the writers who wrote about Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus (or Pandar) were Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and, of course, Shakespeare.
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The Role of Gower

.......Shakespeare based Pericles, Prince of Tyre on a work by the fourteenth century author John Gower. (See Sources, above.) He is the same Gower (resurrected, by the magic of Shakespeare's quill) who acts as chorus and narrator of Pericles. His role is (1) to present a short introduction to each act, helping to give the play a once-upon-a-time, fairytale atmosphere; (2) to comment on the morality of the characters; and (3) to review the progress of events. 
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Pirates Ex Machina
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.......Just as Leonine is about to murder Marina, pirates appear to drive Leonine off. This is not the first time that pirates appear from nowhere to save the day in a Shakespeare play. They also rescue Hamlet when he is bound for England to be executed. 

Study Questions and Essay Topics

1. Which character in the play is the most admirable? Which is the least admirable?
2. Many incidents in the play help to define what kind of man Pericles is. For example, his quick solution of the riddle reveals that he is highly intelligent. Also, his distribution of corn at Tarsus reveals that he is generous and compassionate. Write a character study of Pericles in which you discuss these and other incidents to reach conclusions about the qualities Pericles possesses.
3. After recovering, Thaissa becomes a priestess of the goddess Diana. Who was Diana? Why were many young women devoted to her. While conducting research to answer this question, be aware that Diana’s Greek name was Artemis.
4. What or who caused the death of Antiochus and his daughter?
5. In what ways do the misadventures of Pericles resemble those of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible?
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