About This Production

Pericles, Prince of Tyre draws from a range of sources dating back as far as the third century A.D., to when it is thought that Apollonius of Tyre, an ancient Greek fable of unknown authorship, was penned. While the story itself was lost forever in its original Greek, it has survived in numerous translations, the first of which appeared in Latin and is mentioned in the second half of the sixth century by Venantius Fortunatus, a Christian poet and bishop. In A Primer of Medieval Latin (1953), Charles Beeson called Apollonius "the favorite romance of the Middle Ages, familiar to all the peoples of Europe."

Commonly found medieval texts of Apollonius include Pantheon, a verse interpretation done in the late-12th century by Godfrey of Viterbo that treated the story as an authentic history; a Latin prose version done in the ninth century called the Historia Apollonii Tyrii; and chapter 153 of the massive compendium of folktales known as the Gesta Romanorum that was put together in the late-13th or early-14th century. An Old English translation that appeared in the mid-11th century was the first rendering of the tale into English vernacular. In Old English Apollonius of Tyre (1958), Peter Goolden referred to this translation as "the first English novel." The story was later translated into English by the poet John Gower, who included it in his Confessio Amantis (1390) as an exemplum (moralized tale) against incest. It was Gower's translation of Apollonius that was to serve as the primary basis for Shakespeare's Pericles.

The character Pyrocles in Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590) likely inspired the change of the title character's name from Apollonius to Pericles. Though Pericles is attributed to William Shakespeare, the style of the first two acts so varies from what is customary in his writing that many think that this part of the play was written instead by a contemporary of Shakespeare, George Wilkins. One piece of evidence that suggests Wilkins' collaboration is a novel that he wrote called The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), thought to be a stage report of Pericles. Collaboration was a fairly common practice for dramatists during this period, and, considering that Shakespeare was the chief dramatist for the King's Men, where he had a professional interest in developing new talent, it is not extraordinary that Shakespeare would collaborate with a younger writer such as Wilkins.

Pericles was likely written from 1607 to 1608 and first performed in 1608-09. Only a significantly damaged text, a so-called "bad quarto," of Pericles exists. It was the poor opinion of the play itself and of Wilkins— whom Harold Bloom in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) calls a "lowlife hack"— that led to its exclusion from the First Folio (1623). Pericles went on to become one of Shakespeare's most frequently published and produced plays before the closing of the theatres in 1642—there were six quarto editions of Pericles published between 1609 and 1635, compared to eight for Richard III between 1597 and 1637 and five for Hamlet between 1603 and 1637.

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