1 00:00:01,030 --> 00:00:07,960 I'm lecturing on parallelise today. And if you're a regular of this series and you're worried that you can't hear any 2 00:00:07,960 --> 00:00:14,170 rustling or coughing or occasional laughter from the audience of Oxford students, 3 00:00:14,170 --> 00:00:24,550 that's because I'm rerecording this lecture, not live, but specifically to be podcast because of a problem with the quality of the live recording. 4 00:00:24,550 --> 00:00:30,910 So today I'm lecturing on parallelise, which is a problematic play dating from around 16 07. 5 00:00:30,910 --> 00:00:38,320 It's always been on the edges of the Shakespearean canon. And that's in part because, as I'm going to focus my attention on today, 6 00:00:38,320 --> 00:00:47,970 it was not printed as part of the collected plays in the First Folio of sixteen, 27, 16, 23. 7 00:00:47,970 --> 00:00:54,180 We'll come on to why that might be. And more importantly, what its implications have been for readings of the play in a moment. 8 00:00:54,180 --> 00:01:00,280 But I want to start, as usual with a summary of the plot. 9 00:01:00,280 --> 00:01:03,720 parallelise is an episodic romance play, 10 00:01:03,720 --> 00:01:10,050 so its romance in the mediaeval sense of journeying or questing in the sense of a combination 11 00:01:10,050 --> 00:01:14,730 of human and supernatural events which often take place over a long period of time. 12 00:01:14,730 --> 00:01:25,260 So if you know any mediaeval romances like those of Mallery, for example, or the modern stories like the Lord of the Rings, 13 00:01:25,260 --> 00:01:29,490 which are heavily influenced by them, you'll have a sense what was meant. 14 00:01:29,490 --> 00:01:35,160 The play's narrated by a chorus figure, the poet John Gower, and he introduces stuff. 15 00:01:35,160 --> 00:01:46,790 Our first scene in Antioch. In Antioch, the king is in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, parallelise has travelled to Antioch to woo her. 16 00:01:46,790 --> 00:01:51,780 Unlike all her potential suitors, he has to answer a riddle. 17 00:01:51,780 --> 00:02:00,690 Realising that he is doomed to death, if he reveals the answer, incest, he will be executed, or if he fails to, he will also be executed. 18 00:02:00,690 --> 00:02:06,180 parallelise flees and he is pursued by an assassin from the king's court. 19 00:02:06,180 --> 00:02:13,750 And the escape from this assassin perpetuates propels his journey through the rest of the play. 20 00:02:13,750 --> 00:02:22,830 Arriving next in the Port of Tarsus, parallelise encounters a famine and distributes corn to relieve the city. 21 00:02:22,830 --> 00:02:29,010 Its rulers, Cleon and ioniser swear allegiance to paraphilias in gratitude for what he's done. 22 00:02:29,010 --> 00:02:33,750 He can't stay long there, though, because he's a hunted man. So he goes back to sea. 23 00:02:33,750 --> 00:02:41,520 Next, he is shipwrecked at Penn Topolice, where some fishermen retrieve his father's armour from the sea. 24 00:02:41,520 --> 00:02:44,340 Act caught the disguised parallelise wearing this. 25 00:02:44,340 --> 00:02:52,950 Rusty Armour presents himself in a tournament to win the hand of the daughter of King Simoneau D Fazer. 26 00:02:52,950 --> 00:02:58,250 He beats the other suitors in the tournament and gains stays in marriage. 27 00:02:58,250 --> 00:03:08,470 With the pregnant Feyza, he sets out for home. Entire. During a storm, though, Fazer apparently dies in childbirth and is cast overboard in a coffin. 28 00:03:08,470 --> 00:03:17,560 The grief stricken apparently takes his newborn baby daughter Marina to Tarsus, where he leaves her with Cleon and die Neisser for safekeeping. 29 00:03:17,560 --> 00:03:22,510 Fayza, though, is found on the shore by a physician who manages to revive her. 30 00:03:22,510 --> 00:03:28,120 He takes her to the temple of Diana in Ephesus. 31 00:03:28,120 --> 00:03:34,360 Time passes. Marina grows up. Downsizer is jealous of her and plans to have her murdered. 32 00:03:34,360 --> 00:03:39,270 So Diana is a high Hyers leonine to kill Marina. 33 00:03:39,270 --> 00:03:45,040 But he is interrupted by the arrival of pirates who objected her in mightily. 34 00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:52,240 And she is sold by the pirates to the brothel keeper. Bolt on the board tries to induct her into the sex trade. 35 00:03:52,240 --> 00:04:00,930 Marina refuses to take part. Discovering the death of his daughter as he thinks parallelise vows to spend the rest of his days. 36 00:04:00,930 --> 00:04:06,710 Hair and beard uncut. In mourning his wife and daughter. 37 00:04:06,710 --> 00:04:15,740 Meanwhile, in mightily in Marina's virtue, convert's, the governor like CIMIC us from his last and manages to maintain her chastity, 38 00:04:15,740 --> 00:04:20,810 Pericles arrives like Sumika suggests that Marina will chair him. 39 00:04:20,810 --> 00:04:25,760 She visits him and sings and they discover they are father and daughter. 40 00:04:25,760 --> 00:04:30,560 In a dream, parallelise is directed to Diana's temple. He arrives to find Facer. 41 00:04:30,560 --> 00:04:38,100 So the family is reunited. And Marina marries like smokers'. 42 00:04:38,100 --> 00:04:41,910 Now, we can see from this outline a number of correspondences with other of Shakespeare's plays. 43 00:04:41,910 --> 00:04:52,320 Most obviously, perhaps, apparently shares with The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline a cross generational story like Perjeta Marina in the 44 00:04:52,320 --> 00:04:57,750 empirically is grows from babyhood to marriage ability over the course of the play. 45 00:04:57,750 --> 00:05:08,380 And both are like inverse tragedies in being structured over this female life span from infancy to marriage ability like him. 46 00:05:08,380 --> 00:05:15,480 Ironi again in The Winter's Tale. Fazer dies shortly after childbirth and like her mania again, she returns from the dead. 47 00:05:15,480 --> 00:05:21,120 Both returns. Both of these wives returning are miraculous in their different ways. 48 00:05:21,120 --> 00:05:30,690 Like Cymbeline, parallelise has an episodic plot and a weakness, we might say, for flat or two dimensional storybook characters. 49 00:05:30,690 --> 00:05:40,100 The Queen, the stepmother in Cymbeline and Diron Annisa in apparently is, for instance, are both wicked stepmother figures. 50 00:05:40,100 --> 00:05:47,100 Like The Tempest, parallelise draws on the magical associations of the sea to separate and reunite families. 51 00:05:47,100 --> 00:05:52,340 And there are echoes of something similar in the play discussed two weeks ago, comedy of Errors. 52 00:05:52,340 --> 00:05:57,740 Like Emelia in Comedy of Errors, Faisa is taken to the abbey in Ephesus. 53 00:05:57,740 --> 00:06:05,210 Obviously, the place for shipwrecked wives sitting it out unimpeachably before their husbands are restored to them. 54 00:06:05,210 --> 00:06:10,250 There are other echoes to the brothel recall's measure for measure, and in both plays, 55 00:06:10,250 --> 00:06:16,610 it has a similar role in contradistinction to a place of sanctity. The convent in measure for measure the Abbey. 56 00:06:16,610 --> 00:06:22,640 Here in parallelise, pirates take on a similar random role in Hamlet. 57 00:06:22,640 --> 00:06:26,880 They do seem a sort of divisive last resort for Shakespeare. How do we get out of this one? 58 00:06:26,880 --> 00:06:34,650 Oh, let's get the pirates in. The chorus figure empirically is perhaps recall something of the structure of Henry the Fifth. 59 00:06:34,650 --> 00:06:38,570 Divided into acts by narrative speeches. 60 00:06:38,570 --> 00:06:44,960 And if we think about the place Shakespeare's most is written, most recently thinking about the play in 16 seven. 61 00:06:44,960 --> 00:06:47,630 We can see specific points of comparison. 62 00:06:47,630 --> 00:06:57,390 The famine, as in Khari Leanness, the murderous queen as in Macbeth, the reunion of father and estranged daughter from King Lear. 63 00:06:57,390 --> 00:07:04,320 So all that is to show that Pericles can be fitted thematically alongside any number of Shakespeare plays. 64 00:07:04,320 --> 00:07:07,550 Why then has it been such an outsider in the canon, 65 00:07:07,550 --> 00:07:17,130 a play only rarely performed and often discussed in apologetic terms, trying to explain away its plot and its language. 66 00:07:17,130 --> 00:07:22,200 Let's just take a step back and think about the way the First Folio has shaped Shakespeare's reputation. 67 00:07:22,200 --> 00:07:30,360 We've touched on this in other lectures, but the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, doesn't include poems. 68 00:07:30,360 --> 00:07:38,080 But the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 16 23 after Shakespeare's death. 69 00:07:38,080 --> 00:07:44,410 What is the importance? What's the significance of that volume? Well, for a start, it gives us half the place, which we don't. 70 00:07:44,410 --> 00:07:49,900 Otherwise we wouldn't otherwise have. But it gives us some ways of thinking about those plays as well. 71 00:07:49,900 --> 00:07:57,200 It's the First Folio that gives us the division of Shakespeare's plays into the three categories comedies, histories and tragedies, identifying genre. 72 00:07:57,200 --> 00:08:03,250 Therefore, rather than chronology or theme as their way of understanding Shakespeare's work. 73 00:08:03,250 --> 00:08:08,770 In the last lecture, thinking about teleology forward progression in Richard the Third. 74 00:08:08,770 --> 00:08:15,250 We discussed how the particular historical arrangement of the English history plays makes certain kinds of reading of those 75 00:08:15,250 --> 00:08:26,040 plays more prominent in the Folio than in their previous incarnations as more occasional publications or performances. 76 00:08:26,040 --> 00:08:33,630 The First Folio has, I think, contributed to ongoing critical difficulties in understanding connexions between Shakespeare's poetry and his plays, 77 00:08:33,630 --> 00:08:39,570 since it doesn't include the sonnets or the rape of an increase of Venus and Adonis. 78 00:08:39,570 --> 00:08:44,630 It inaugurates the editorial tradition of undervaluing quarto texts. 79 00:08:44,630 --> 00:08:53,000 What early bibliographies, often dubbed bad quartos following Hemming's and Kendall's description in the prefatory epistle to the FOLIA, 80 00:08:53,000 --> 00:08:55,400 to the great variety of readers. 81 00:08:55,400 --> 00:09:02,900 You may have seen some of these plays for sale individually before Hemming's and Kandal admit to potential buyers of this expensive book. 82 00:09:02,900 --> 00:09:08,970 In fact, a keen play buyer might already own versions of half the plays that are being republished in the Folio, 83 00:09:08,970 --> 00:09:14,270 and that might be a material factor in weighing up whether it's attractive to purchase. 84 00:09:14,270 --> 00:09:18,440 But Hemming's, I've got to say, you may have already bought them, but those versions were pirated ones. 85 00:09:18,440 --> 00:09:24,020 Back to those pirates. Here they say we have published them as well. 86 00:09:24,020 --> 00:09:30,380 Before you were abused with diver stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and 87 00:09:30,380 --> 00:09:36,020 deformed by the frauds and stealth of injurious impostors that expose them. 88 00:09:36,020 --> 00:09:42,020 Even those are now offered, to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest. 89 00:09:42,020 --> 00:09:51,840 Absolute in their numbers as he conceived them. The idea that the folio texts are cured and perfect of their limbs, 90 00:09:51,840 --> 00:09:57,570 like the claim in the same letter that Shakespeare never blotted a line and therefore never revised his plays, 91 00:09:57,570 --> 00:10:03,420 have only recently begun to be recognised by scholars as a sales pitch rather than as 92 00:10:03,420 --> 00:10:09,740 an accurate documentary account of Shakespeare's writing and publishing practises. 93 00:10:09,740 --> 00:10:13,280 Most prominently, perhaps, of all the folios legacy tours. 94 00:10:13,280 --> 00:10:19,700 It has seemed to give an authoritative imprimatur to the players included in it all the rest, 95 00:10:19,700 --> 00:10:25,040 say Hemming's and Condell absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, absolute in their numbers. 96 00:10:25,040 --> 00:10:32,600 So it does seem to give us the absolute canon of Shakespeare's plays and therefore implicitly to make an authoritative statement about the plays. 97 00:10:32,600 --> 00:10:43,320 It does not include. The catalogue page to the Folio includes the titles of 35 plays. 98 00:10:43,320 --> 00:10:48,030 In fact, there are 36 plays in the volume, Troilus and Cressida is also included. 99 00:10:48,030 --> 00:10:53,040 But it doesn't make it onto the catalogue, probably because the rights for it came after that page had been printed. 100 00:10:53,040 --> 00:11:00,280 The Folio is a huge logistical printing enterprise and was printed over several months. 101 00:11:00,280 --> 00:11:06,280 Of the players we now consider Shakespeare in the Folio does not include the two noble kinsmen. 102 00:11:06,280 --> 00:11:12,100 That's a play published under the joint names of Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 16 34. 103 00:11:12,100 --> 00:11:21,440 Nor does it include parallelise published in Quarto under Shakespeare's sole name in 60 No.9. 104 00:11:21,440 --> 00:11:26,390 Now sometimes argued that these players are excluded because they were known to be collaborative. 105 00:11:26,390 --> 00:11:33,050 But we know Henry the 8th, which is in the Foleo, is also collaborative, again with John Fletcher. 106 00:11:33,050 --> 00:11:40,430 And in addition, a new wave of scholarship has identified all kinds of collaboration in Shakespeare's collected works. 107 00:11:40,430 --> 00:11:48,410 We now know that collaboration, which could mean any number of practises from joint working, you know, working together, 108 00:11:48,410 --> 00:11:58,700 revising existing plays, play patching, adding a speech or two, finishing a play, providing the plot for someone else to finish. 109 00:11:58,700 --> 00:12:03,360 These are all not quite normal practises in the early modern theatre. 110 00:12:03,360 --> 00:12:12,120 The majority of plays performed during this period are in in one of these senses, if not more than one collaborative, 111 00:12:12,120 --> 00:12:19,530 for a long time, the criticism maintained that Shakespeare was immune to this industry wide practise. 112 00:12:19,530 --> 00:12:28,830 But now various kinds of investigation, much of it aided by computer stihler metric testing, have suggested different and new collaboration's. 113 00:12:28,830 --> 00:12:33,840 We now think that the first part of Henry the Sixth was probably written with Nash, 114 00:12:33,840 --> 00:12:42,450 that Titus Andronicus was probably written with George Peel, that Timon of Athens was probably written with Middleton as well as the two. 115 00:12:42,450 --> 00:12:51,760 Fletcher collaboration's Henry the eighth and two Noble Kinsman. And thanks to the recent complete Oxford edition of Middleton's Works, 116 00:12:51,760 --> 00:12:56,770 we now have a strongly argued case that the texts we have of measure for measure and of Macbeth, 117 00:12:56,770 --> 00:13:05,740 both published only in the First Folio, show evidence of later revision, probably for a stage revival by Thomas Middleton. 118 00:13:05,740 --> 00:13:10,090 So current scholarship would suggest that a number of plays which are included 119 00:13:10,090 --> 00:13:14,050 in the First Folio show signs of collaborative work of one sort or another, 120 00:13:14,050 --> 00:13:19,940 and that therefore it is not fully logical to suggest that parallelise is excluded for that reason. 121 00:13:19,940 --> 00:13:25,030 I'm going to talk about the implications of collaboration on parallelise in a minute. 122 00:13:25,030 --> 00:13:33,340 In addition, recent cases have been made for Shakespearean traces in other plays that we don't usually think of as Shakespeare's. 123 00:13:33,340 --> 00:13:40,900 So Shakespeare is one of the collaborators in the sense that quite possibly unperformed manuscript play Thomas Moore. 124 00:13:40,900 --> 00:13:45,580 He probably contributed his bits to the play in about sixteen oh four. 125 00:13:45,580 --> 00:13:49,450 It's really well worth looking at. John Jowett, New Ardern Edition. 126 00:13:49,450 --> 00:13:57,340 If you're interested in Shakespeare's representation of outsiders, for instance, this is a play featuring a riot against immigrants in London. 127 00:13:57,340 --> 00:14:05,380 Or if you're interested in Shakespeare's religious attitudes, since Thomas Moore was, of course, renowned as a Catholic martyr. 128 00:14:05,380 --> 00:14:12,450 It's also been suggested that the domestic tragedy Ardern of Faversham has signs of Shakespeare in it that Shakespeare may have written. 129 00:14:12,450 --> 00:14:20,320 The additional passages to the popular revenge tragedy, the Spanish tragedy and the history plays, including Thomas of Woodstock and Edward. 130 00:14:20,320 --> 00:14:24,010 The third might also be, at least in part, by him. 131 00:14:24,010 --> 00:14:31,060 All of these cases are backed up by compelling recent scholarship, although only Thomas Moore has been canonised, as it were, 132 00:14:31,060 --> 00:14:37,930 by inclusion in the Ardern series and in many collected Shakespeare editions, including the Oxford and the RISC. 133 00:14:37,930 --> 00:14:47,510 So with a number of other potentially Shakespearean plays which like parallelise, are also on the margins of the canon. 134 00:14:47,510 --> 00:14:52,820 Added to this list should be the last plays Frances Myhre is writing in 15, 135 00:14:52,820 --> 00:15:00,170 Ninety-eight praises a play amongst a list of current Shakespeare players called Love's Labour's Won. 136 00:15:00,170 --> 00:15:05,420 It's a play which is either lost or which represents an alternative title for a romantic comedy. 137 00:15:05,420 --> 00:15:13,960 We know under a different name. Much ado or all's well that ends well have been proposed in that regard. 138 00:15:13,960 --> 00:15:20,590 Recent interest in another lost play Cardini show has been very active for a lost play. 139 00:15:20,590 --> 00:15:29,800 It has had a surprising number of performances writing. It has become one of the must do tasks of a certain vintage of Shakespeareans. 140 00:15:29,800 --> 00:15:37,240 They've been versions in the last few years by Stephen Greenblat, by Gary Taylor and by Greg Doran. 141 00:15:37,240 --> 00:15:41,740 Cardinia was apparently co-written with Fletcher but has not survived unless 142 00:15:41,740 --> 00:15:47,930 the controversial play Double Falsehood is a restoration adaptation of it. 143 00:15:47,930 --> 00:15:53,150 Added to this is the evidence that Shakespeare's name is used on a number of title pages in this period, 144 00:15:53,150 --> 00:16:01,640 attached perhaps for commercial reasons to plays. We now do not think he wrote a Yorkshire tragedy for one or the London Puritan. 145 00:16:01,640 --> 00:16:05,390 Both now tend to be attributed to Middleton. 146 00:16:05,390 --> 00:16:14,690 This is a long excuse as to suggest that all this detail gives us a view of the extent of Shakespeare's canon is in flux. 147 00:16:14,690 --> 00:16:18,590 We no longer subscribe to the view that the Folio gives us the authoritative 148 00:16:18,590 --> 00:16:23,420 and final judgement on the full extent of Shakespeare's writing and debates 149 00:16:23,420 --> 00:16:32,890 about Shakespeare's authorship and the presence of collaboration in his work are currently undergoing a very heated period in Shakespeare studies. 150 00:16:32,890 --> 00:16:36,640 If you Google the work on Middleton as a reviser of Macbeth, for instance, 151 00:16:36,640 --> 00:16:40,840 you'll be able to take the high temperature of that particular academic spat. 152 00:16:40,840 --> 00:16:46,600 Let's try and bring some of this back to paraphilias and have gone on in a bit of a curve around it. 153 00:16:46,600 --> 00:16:52,720 So it's the play's absence from the First Folio that has placed it on the margins of Shakespeare's work. 154 00:16:52,720 --> 00:17:02,920 And so, too, has recent work on it as a collaboration. It's now generally thought on the basis of stylistic evidence that the first two acts of 155 00:17:02,920 --> 00:17:08,410 parallelise were written by George Wilkins and that Shakespeare supplied the remainder. 156 00:17:08,410 --> 00:17:17,500 The second half of the play. Wilkins is a writer associated with a number of texts from the period 16 hours six to eight, 157 00:17:17,500 --> 00:17:21,490 including a domestic tragedy called the Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 158 00:17:21,490 --> 00:17:25,930 which takes as its source the same true crime story as prompts a Yorkshire tragedy. 159 00:17:25,930 --> 00:17:30,670 That play attributed to Shakespeare on its title page. 160 00:17:30,670 --> 00:17:37,870 He also wrote a travel play collaboratively with Rowly and Day called The Travels of the Three English Brothers. 161 00:17:37,870 --> 00:17:46,040 It has some structural and thematic connexions with parallelise and which is itself, of course, a travel play of sorts. 162 00:17:46,040 --> 00:17:55,810 But collaboration is like the designation early. I talked about in relation to the comedy of errors, a kind of shorthand for negative associations, 163 00:17:55,810 --> 00:18:01,710 its connotations are not simply chronological, but evaluative. 164 00:18:01,710 --> 00:18:11,560 And in this case, collaboration tends to signal something which is unfinished, divided, uneven or in some other way unsatisfactory. 165 00:18:11,560 --> 00:18:17,110 We tend to look for collaboration only where we find the aesthetic work lacking, say, 166 00:18:17,110 --> 00:18:23,230 in time and of Athens, and therefore we judge collaboration by its failure to produce an integrated drama. 167 00:18:23,230 --> 00:18:29,330 For instance. Where Shakespeare is one of the authors in a proposed collaboration, 168 00:18:29,330 --> 00:18:38,170 a further factor enters to say that part of the play is not by Shakespeare is immediately to suggest that that part of it is not very good. 169 00:18:38,170 --> 00:18:46,220 And in the case of Pericles, this is not at all helped by the unpleasant character of George Wilkins, as we know from biographical records. 170 00:18:46,220 --> 00:18:47,960 We all know this shouldn't matter. 171 00:18:47,960 --> 00:18:56,030 But his dodgy career as an innkeeper [INAUDIBLE] brothel keeper put on trial for kicking a pregnant woman in the belly doesn't help. 172 00:18:56,030 --> 00:19:05,100 It's strange, in fact, that nobody has suggested Wilkins wrote the bits he might have been best suited for the scenes in the mightily in brothel. 173 00:19:05,100 --> 00:19:13,710 Judgements about the authorship of parallelise have been inseparable from judgements, evaluative judgements of it. 174 00:19:13,710 --> 00:19:21,300 In their new Cambridge edition, Doreen Delvecchio and Anthony Hammond strike out in a different direction. 175 00:19:21,300 --> 00:19:23,920 For them, the play is not collaborative, 176 00:19:23,920 --> 00:19:30,600 and it's well worth reading their introduction to the new Cambridge edition to see how they come to the conclusion. 177 00:19:30,600 --> 00:19:34,530 The connexion, though, in their argument is the same as in the old one. 178 00:19:34,530 --> 00:19:38,730 For them, the play is not collaborative because it is good. 179 00:19:38,730 --> 00:19:43,350 It is integrated, sophisticated, capable of successful performance. 180 00:19:43,350 --> 00:19:48,990 And therefore, in their view, it cannot be collaborative or it doesn't need to be seen as collaborative. 181 00:19:48,990 --> 00:19:55,980 We can see here that by arguing that apparently it is not collaborative. In fact, the negative associations of collaboration are confirmed. 182 00:19:55,980 --> 00:20:02,070 To argue that a play is good is necessarily to argue that it is single authored. 183 00:20:02,070 --> 00:20:07,110 Something similar actually happens in Jonathan Bates Ardern edition of Titus Andronicus. 184 00:20:07,110 --> 00:20:09,870 He took the decision he could not rehabilitate. 185 00:20:09,870 --> 00:20:18,360 That plays aesthetic reputation and seriously engage with the fact that it was collaboratively authored or the question that it was collaboratively, 186 00:20:18,360 --> 00:20:24,690 collaboratively authored in the same argument. Now, Titus Andronicus has gained its place in the canon. 187 00:20:24,690 --> 00:20:32,500 We can look again at the question of collaboration. We're not quite there yet, though, critically with parallelise. 188 00:20:32,500 --> 00:20:37,360 I don't know whether parallelise is co-authored, and I don't really know how we would know. 189 00:20:37,360 --> 00:20:42,760 But I am interested in the way that the question over Shakespeare's complete authorship 190 00:20:42,760 --> 00:20:48,460 might resonate with some of the themes of this play of parentage and isolation. 191 00:20:48,460 --> 00:20:51,760 How we could link the question about collaboration with more thematic, 192 00:20:51,760 --> 00:20:58,850 critical approaches to parallelise and how we might investigate whether or how this play works. 193 00:20:58,850 --> 00:21:02,470 And I want to do this not in the grudging or apologetic spirit of much criticism, 194 00:21:02,470 --> 00:21:09,440 apparently, but in an attempt to regain the spirit of the Quarto title page. 195 00:21:09,440 --> 00:21:13,190 The text published under Shakespeare's sole name in 16 09, 196 00:21:13,190 --> 00:21:21,440 describes it as the late and much admired play corporately as Prince of Tyre with the true relation of the whole history, 197 00:21:21,440 --> 00:21:30,410 adventures and fortunes of the sad prince as also the no less strange and worthy accidents in the birth and life of his daughter, Marina. 198 00:21:30,410 --> 00:21:37,050 As it has been diverse and sundry times acted by His Majesty's servants at the Globe on Bankside. 199 00:21:37,050 --> 00:21:40,590 There were two editions of this much admired play in 60 No. 200 00:21:40,590 --> 00:21:48,360 Nine, No other play by Shakespeare since the early histories first published a decade earlier had had such immediate print popularity. 201 00:21:48,360 --> 00:21:58,230 A third quarter edition followed in 16 11. Thomas Pavi printed it in 16 19 as part of his collection of Shakespeare plays. 202 00:21:58,230 --> 00:22:07,560 This flash of publications, plus a novelised version of the story by George Wilkins printed in 16 08, all a test apparently is popularity. 203 00:22:07,560 --> 00:22:12,870 It's in sharp contrast to its later marginalisation in this period. 204 00:22:12,870 --> 00:22:18,150 It is much the most popular play of Shakespeare's in print in in print terms. 205 00:22:18,150 --> 00:22:24,240 It it is. It is his only big success or of of the 17th century. 206 00:22:24,240 --> 00:22:29,670 And it is quite possibly also the most popular play in print of the Jacobin period by anyone. 207 00:22:29,670 --> 00:22:34,770 Lots of allusions to it in wider literary culture confirm this popularity. 208 00:22:34,770 --> 00:22:41,630 The mock romance the night of the Burning Passell, which was probably performed quite shortly after Pericles was first stage sites. 209 00:22:41,630 --> 00:22:51,070 It is just the kind of thing the citizen wife would want to see in Fletcher's play The Woman's Prise, a sequel to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. 210 00:22:51,070 --> 00:23:00,810 There's a joke about wishing the master's wife were in a chest on board ships that she could be lost overboard, which seems to draw on faces. 211 00:23:00,810 --> 00:23:10,070 Shipwreck Robert Taylors. The hug had lost its pearl hopes in its prologue to be as popular as parallelise. 212 00:23:10,070 --> 00:23:14,060 In 16, 29, writing about the poor reception of his own play, 213 00:23:14,060 --> 00:23:21,800 the new N Johnson mocked audiences who would rather see some mouldy tale like parallelise. 214 00:23:21,800 --> 00:23:27,380 So there's evidence then that Parkis had a hold on audiences and readers and that it was a popular play. 215 00:23:27,380 --> 00:23:33,850 We owe it, surely, to try to understand why. From the start. 216 00:23:33,850 --> 00:23:42,710 parallelise engages compellingly with these questions of authority and authorship in bringing on the mediaeval poet John Gower, 217 00:23:42,710 --> 00:23:52,700 who's confessing our mantis was one of the sources for the play, apparently stages its own questioning of who writes this story. 218 00:23:52,700 --> 00:23:58,010 Pericles comes via, but not from Gower. Didn't make the story up either. 219 00:23:58,010 --> 00:24:07,130 The plot of the play has a much longer folkloric history, deriving from the popular and widely circulated ancient Greek tale of Apollonius of Tyre, 220 00:24:07,130 --> 00:24:12,840 who wanders around the Mediterranean world searching for his lost family. 221 00:24:12,840 --> 00:24:16,510 Gower's opening to the play confirms this ancient lineage. 222 00:24:16,510 --> 00:24:18,880 This is his opening. 223 00:24:18,880 --> 00:24:29,170 To sing a song that old was sung from ashes ancient Gower is come assuming man's infirmities to glad your ear and please your eyes. 224 00:24:29,170 --> 00:24:36,890 It has been sung at festivals on Amber Eves and holidays, and lords and ladies in their lives have read it for restorative. 225 00:24:36,890 --> 00:24:42,550 The purchase is to make men glorious at bonum quo ante EQUASS a Malleus. 226 00:24:42,550 --> 00:24:50,920 That's a good thing. Improves with age. If you born in these latter times when witts more ripe except my rhymes and that to hear an old man 227 00:24:50,920 --> 00:24:57,820 sing mighty your wishes pleasure bring I for you would wish and that I might waste it for you. 228 00:24:57,820 --> 00:25:04,550 Like taper light. The stress on the familiarity of this tale is insistent. 229 00:25:04,550 --> 00:25:09,380 This is a song that old was sung ancient Gower is an old man. 230 00:25:09,380 --> 00:25:14,340 The Latin tag is a good thing, improves with age. 231 00:25:14,340 --> 00:25:22,590 In a period in which Newnes had a high cultural value, especially in the theatre where new blood, new plays, where its lifeblood. 232 00:25:22,590 --> 00:25:28,920 It's very striking. Opening the language is self consciously archaic. 233 00:25:28,920 --> 00:25:40,500 mediaevalism not mediaeval. And it confirms its antique qualities, its kind of retrospective nostalgic tone in the meta of that speech. 234 00:25:40,500 --> 00:25:49,770 I just read this is not in Shakespeare's usual iambic pentameter metre, but in the optos, syllabic couplets, rhyming couplets. 235 00:25:49,770 --> 00:26:00,870 That structure Gower's confessing our Manti's. So the play introduces itself via a dead poet come from the ashes as participating in a historic 236 00:26:00,870 --> 00:26:07,200 oral circulation of stories that stress on singing suggests the ancient opening of the Iliad. 237 00:26:07,200 --> 00:26:17,750 For instance. The chorus in this play is more present than in any other of Shakespeare's Gower's is actually the second largest role in the play, 238 00:26:17,750 --> 00:26:28,790 attesting to the importance of narration telling rather than showing foregrounding the storyteller author rather than the agents or actors. 239 00:26:28,790 --> 00:26:34,490 Gower's presence empirically pushes questions of authorship away from the science of attribution and 240 00:26:34,490 --> 00:26:40,550 more towards theories of into text duality which acknowledge the interrelatedness of all texts. 241 00:26:40,550 --> 00:26:50,800 The text, as Bart wrote memorably in the death of the author, is a tissue of citations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture, 242 00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:55,520 a tissue of citations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. 243 00:26:55,520 --> 00:27:02,960 Thinking about Shakespeare in a web of interrelated texts, both his own sources, but also his work as the source of other things, 244 00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:08,870 such as the novelised version of the play published by Wilkins to cash in on the popularity of the stage play. 245 00:27:08,870 --> 00:27:18,370 These kinds of thoughts dissenter individual authorship more fruitfully, I think, than trying to dissect the play between collaborators. 246 00:27:18,370 --> 00:27:22,820 The opening speech from goWe that I just quoted moved straight into CNN setting. 247 00:27:22,820 --> 00:27:24,650 We are in Antioch. 248 00:27:24,650 --> 00:27:33,680 I tell you what mine authors say, says Gower, disavowing his own invention, perhaps because of the sordid tale he's about to unfold. 249 00:27:33,680 --> 00:27:37,580 This king onto him took a pair who died and left a female heir. 250 00:27:37,580 --> 00:27:48,530 So buxom, blithe and full of faces haven't had lent to all his grace, with whom the father liking took her to incest did provoke bad child. 251 00:27:48,530 --> 00:27:55,970 Worse father to entice his own to evil should be done by none. 252 00:27:55,970 --> 00:28:00,950 That the play moves from its dispersal of authorial identity in the voice of GAWA, 253 00:28:00,950 --> 00:28:08,650 on to this parable of perverse generation and incest further complicates its own depictions of creation. 254 00:28:08,650 --> 00:28:15,820 If we think about paternity as a very common metaphor for artistic creation, 255 00:28:15,820 --> 00:28:21,310 particularly literary creation, we can start to see how these two themes come together. 256 00:28:21,310 --> 00:28:26,860 The play itself is created out of this incestuous relationship with which it begins. 257 00:28:26,860 --> 00:28:34,990 Pericles himself and his character take shape under the pressure of the twisted marriage plot set by the incestuous king. 258 00:28:34,990 --> 00:28:43,000 His peregrinations, which structure the rest of the play, are motivated by this traumatic early encounter. 259 00:28:43,000 --> 00:28:47,890 If sexual reproduction, two people coming together to create something new. 260 00:28:47,890 --> 00:28:58,840 It's a kind of submerged metaphor for collaborative authorship. Then the vision of sexuality we get here in Antioch is particularly troubling. 261 00:28:58,840 --> 00:29:07,370 parallelise is faced with a riddle, this is the riddle voiced by the daughter, she's never given a name until until his daughter. 262 00:29:07,370 --> 00:29:11,930 I am no VIPR yet. I feed on mother's flesh, which did me breed. 263 00:29:11,930 --> 00:29:17,260 I sought a husband in which labour I found that kindness in a father. 264 00:29:17,260 --> 00:29:21,410 He is father, son and husband. Mild eye, mother, wife. 265 00:29:21,410 --> 00:29:27,650 And yet his child. How they may be. And yet in two, as you will live. 266 00:29:27,650 --> 00:29:34,410 Resolve it. You. The trouble with this riddle is that it is not rocket science. 267 00:29:34,410 --> 00:29:36,750 It goes under the guise of being cryptic. 268 00:29:36,750 --> 00:29:46,980 But really it dares the Souters of the Antiochian Princess to name what cannot be named parallelise is response is to flee by flight. 269 00:29:46,980 --> 00:29:51,420 I'll shun the danger that I fear this fear of incest. 270 00:29:51,420 --> 00:30:02,020 The fear of the truth is what chases parallelise around the Mediterranean, from Antioch to Tarsus to Tyre to Pente apples to mightily to emphasise. 271 00:30:02,020 --> 00:30:08,230 And so even though incest is articulated in the early part of the play, the part generally attributed to Wilkins. 272 00:30:08,230 --> 00:30:14,410 Remember, he's supposed to written the first two acts. It establishes the entire play's motif. 273 00:30:14,410 --> 00:30:21,370 We begin with the king and his daughter. We end with Pericles and Marena, another prince and daughter. 274 00:30:21,370 --> 00:30:29,650 Far then from being broken or discontinuous or inarticulate. The play circles rather too much on this motif. 275 00:30:29,650 --> 00:30:39,640 It is uncomfortably, tightly structured as Ruth Nivo, in a delicate and revealing psychoanalytical study of parallelise has argued, 276 00:30:39,640 --> 00:30:43,540 the riddle is for parallelise a recognition of darkness in himself. 277 00:30:43,540 --> 00:30:54,220 This is Niva. Antiochus is his uncanny double and the progress of the play is the haunting of parallelise by the Antiochus in himself. 278 00:30:54,220 --> 00:31:00,640 The incest fear which he must repress and from which he must flee. 279 00:31:00,640 --> 00:31:09,910 Also provocative and so interesting, I think, about nymphos argument is that she suggests that Antioch is really an internal or a psychic 280 00:31:09,910 --> 00:31:15,760 landscape of parallelise rather than a situation into which she happens to bowl up. 281 00:31:15,760 --> 00:31:22,630 He has he is causally related to what he cannot acknowledge rather than coincidentally related to it. 282 00:31:22,630 --> 00:31:25,960 This might help us think more about causation and coincidence, 283 00:31:25,960 --> 00:31:32,920 both ways of understanding the relation between one event and another more widely across this play. 284 00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:37,660 And you may want to think about the subsequent events in parallelise and how they might look if we saw them as being 285 00:31:37,660 --> 00:31:47,070 motivated by rather than simply happening to parallelise the winning of Faisa in a tournament and her subsequent death, 286 00:31:47,070 --> 00:31:51,250 the threat to Marena, the famine in Tarsus, etc. 287 00:31:51,250 --> 00:31:58,030 The episodic travel structure of the play blinds us into thinking that these are events that the unfortunate 288 00:31:58,030 --> 00:32:08,180 parallelise bumps into a more psychoanalytical vision of the play would identify them as events he brings with him. 289 00:32:08,180 --> 00:32:16,010 We can see, I think, instinctively here that the journeying in the play can be read as psychological rather than actual. 290 00:32:16,010 --> 00:32:21,950 And further that journeying and encountering these events or playing out these 291 00:32:21,950 --> 00:32:30,710 episodes stand in for parallelise rather absent or inscrutable personality. 292 00:32:30,710 --> 00:32:35,610 The reunion apparently is a marina at the end of the play is often identified as its poetic highlight, 293 00:32:35,610 --> 00:32:39,690 these seen perhaps in the play that we're most happy to attribute to Shakespeare. 294 00:32:39,690 --> 00:32:50,070 T.S. Eliot calls it one of the great recognition scenes in Shakespeare and writes a very interesting and quite powerful poem, I think about Marina. 295 00:32:50,070 --> 00:32:55,230 Based on it, it comes about, you'll remember, because like Smokers', 296 00:32:55,230 --> 00:33:05,670 the governor of my in a one time brothel customer has been so impressed by Marina's tenacious virginity that he's been sent away cold as a snowball, 297 00:33:05,670 --> 00:33:13,080 as the disgusted proprietors describe it. They're worried that, in fact, Marina is going to do for their trade. 298 00:33:13,080 --> 00:33:20,940 When my civicus hears of a grief stricken man who has come by ship to Michaeline, he prescribes Marina as the perfect antidote. 299 00:33:20,940 --> 00:33:26,040 She questioned less with her sweet harmony and other chosen attractions. 300 00:33:26,040 --> 00:33:32,130 Would a lawyer and make a battery through his deafened parts, which now Midway's stopped. 301 00:33:32,130 --> 00:33:36,210 She is all happy as the fairest of all, and her fellow mates. 302 00:33:36,210 --> 00:33:41,660 Now, upon the leafy shelter that abuts against the island side. 303 00:33:41,660 --> 00:33:46,250 Description here is a slightly awkward one. There are potentially sexual undertones to attraction, 304 00:33:46,250 --> 00:33:54,110 a law and deafened parts which echo a disturbingly really with light democracies encounter with Marena, 305 00:33:54,110 --> 00:34:03,260 which did, of course, take place in the brothel. It's also a strange suggestion that Marina is sitting in some pastoral arbour with other maids 306 00:34:03,260 --> 00:34:10,060 rather than as she actually is trying grimly to hang on to her hymen in a dockside brothel. 307 00:34:10,060 --> 00:34:15,460 Unknown, though, to listen smokers, the play players here returning parallelise to the scene of its original of his original 308 00:34:15,460 --> 00:34:20,800 trauma is returning him to that father daughter incest from which he has been running, 309 00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:28,190 but which has turned out to be inside himself rather than exterior Marina's hasty marriage to lie. 310 00:34:28,190 --> 00:34:36,640 Civicus is one of the ways the play desperately tries to resist this inevitable encounter between father and daughter. 311 00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:41,620 It's constantly trying to start again, to rewrite, to move on, 312 00:34:41,620 --> 00:34:47,500 to have its last three acts cut free from the first two to leave behind that TDE 313 00:34:47,500 --> 00:34:53,200 Chancellor George Wilkins and his terrible incest legacy over this play to escape. 314 00:34:53,200 --> 00:35:00,640 What was established right at the beginning? The production apparently is in Regent's Park in London in summer 2011, 315 00:35:00,640 --> 00:35:11,020 did just that cutting axe one and two to produce a production widely advertised as suitable for ages six and above. 316 00:35:11,020 --> 00:35:18,500 The play, I think is not itself so easily divisible nor so comfortably insulated. 317 00:35:18,500 --> 00:35:27,610 Antiochus and his daughter, we learn, are consumed by a thunderbolt. A fire from heaven came and shrivelled up those bodies, even to loathing. 318 00:35:27,610 --> 00:35:33,490 But the meeting of Pericles and Marina shares, disquietingly, in their incestuous rhetoric. 319 00:35:33,490 --> 00:35:36,640 Just as this is plausible that the same actor would have played Antiochus, 320 00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:44,590 his daughter and Marina, now that begats him, that did the beget, parallelise exclaims. 321 00:35:44,590 --> 00:35:49,790 Now, that begat him. That did the begat as he and Marina recognise each other, 322 00:35:49,790 --> 00:35:58,870 but also recalling unconsciously the language of incestuous coupling that neither he nor the play can quite shake off. 323 00:35:58,870 --> 00:36:05,330 Gower's epilogue brings together the two families. Even as he tries to distinguish them, you'll hear I don't know quite what to make of this. 324 00:36:05,330 --> 00:36:13,210 You'll here is broken into iambic pentameter. He's caught up with the play's own time or something in Antiochus and his daughter. 325 00:36:13,210 --> 00:36:20,260 You have heard of monstrous lust that the dew unjust reward empirically is his queen and daughter seen. 326 00:36:20,260 --> 00:36:31,540 Although assailed with fortune, fierce and keen virtue preserve from fell destruction's blast laid on by heaven and crowned with joy at last. 327 00:36:31,540 --> 00:36:39,040 So the play's epilogue tries to reinstate the theme of lawful as opposed to unlawful love that structured its source book to Gower's, 328 00:36:39,040 --> 00:36:46,200 confessed Diamantis. In doing so, it suggests a version of the play as a kind of morality tale. 329 00:36:46,200 --> 00:36:51,730 A production at the Globe in London in 2005 had Corin Redgrave play the old 330 00:36:51,730 --> 00:36:56,980 parallelise as an onstage chorus watching his younger self played with Robert Lucke, 331 00:36:56,980 --> 00:37:05,270 say, going through his adventures. The music of the spheres in the reunion scene, Music of the Spheres, 332 00:37:05,270 --> 00:37:11,450 is an otherworldly sort of harmonic system which signals the cosmic order of the planets. 333 00:37:11,450 --> 00:37:19,190 And also, apparently, his dream vision of Diana suggests that something like a divine benediction has fallen onto the play. 334 00:37:19,190 --> 00:37:26,290 parallelise is suffering and his peregrination come to stand for the human journey towards grace. 335 00:37:26,290 --> 00:37:33,920 And this more spiritual interpretation of the play may echo one striking aspect of the play's early performance history. 336 00:37:33,920 --> 00:37:36,020 We know that parallelise, along with King Lear, 337 00:37:36,020 --> 00:37:44,860 was performed by a group of represent Catholic actors in the North Riding of Yorkshire in sixty nine to 10. 338 00:37:44,860 --> 00:37:50,890 Perhaps the Marion echoes of faces resurrection sequence parallel to the revivification, 339 00:37:50,890 --> 00:37:56,470 as we've heard of her in The Winter's Tale, were part of its appeal in this context. 340 00:37:56,470 --> 00:37:59,680 Catholic connotations in the play, in particular, 341 00:37:59,680 --> 00:38:09,070 the combination of music and sent out fades as the rediscovery and their echoes of Marian iconography are well worth exploring. 342 00:38:09,070 --> 00:38:15,430 On the other hand, the providential power which organises the play does not seem to be explicitly Christian. 343 00:38:15,430 --> 00:38:21,310 The pre-Christian setting of the plot perhaps alleviates the need to tie it into religious forms of orthodoxy. 344 00:38:21,310 --> 00:38:27,430 We might think here also about the play's anxieties about maternity in this Marijan context. 345 00:38:27,430 --> 00:38:30,940 The banishment of the female body at the point of childbirth, 346 00:38:30,940 --> 00:38:35,650 as in The Winter's Tale and less obviously in comedy of errors and the absence of mothers elsewhere 347 00:38:35,650 --> 00:38:41,890 in the canon has been linked by some scholars with social anxieties about female sexuality. 348 00:38:41,890 --> 00:38:46,900 These anxieties have their institutional framing in the religious ceremony of churching, where, 349 00:38:46,900 --> 00:38:56,050 after a period of segregation following childbirth, the woman is reassumed into society following rituals of purification. 350 00:38:56,050 --> 00:38:59,430 If Pericles is running away from the threat of incest, he is also connected. 351 00:38:59,430 --> 00:39:04,990 Lee running away from the female, he's drawn towards it and repelled in equal measure, 352 00:39:04,990 --> 00:39:09,460 just as the play conflates the archetypes of virgin and [INAUDIBLE] in its depiction of 353 00:39:09,460 --> 00:39:18,150 Marina in the brothel and ultimately finds its presiding goddess in the chaste Diana. 354 00:39:18,150 --> 00:39:24,810 So in today's lecture, I tried to approach the question, apparently its reputation and its place in the Shakespearean canon by 355 00:39:24,810 --> 00:39:31,350 investigating the fact and the significance of its omission from the First Folio. 356 00:39:31,350 --> 00:39:34,380 I've pointed out how popular apparently is was in the Jacobean period. 357 00:39:34,380 --> 00:39:39,090 Much more so than any of Shakespeare's other late plays, which we now tend to value more, 358 00:39:39,090 --> 00:39:44,130 and therefore our marginalisation of this play from our considerations of Shakespeare's canon, 359 00:39:44,130 --> 00:39:48,240 a distinctly out of step with early modern appreciations. 360 00:39:48,240 --> 00:39:55,110 I've tried to show how the suggestion that the work is collaborative tends to go hand in hand with the suggestion that it is not very good. 361 00:39:55,110 --> 00:39:59,760 But I've tried mostly to turn this theme of collaboration onto the play itself 362 00:39:59,760 --> 00:40:04,870 to think about attitudes to sexuality and the overshadowing presence of incest. 363 00:40:04,870 --> 00:40:10,860 The thing at which parallelise is trying to escape from as a model for a kind of perverse creativity 364 00:40:10,860 --> 00:40:16,860 across the play and also to think about its own self-conscious and unusual depiction of Gower. 365 00:40:16,860 --> 00:40:25,630 As an author figure. So I've tried to make my analysis of this play, ask the question about why it is excluded from the addition of collective plays, 366 00:40:25,630 --> 00:40:31,630 and to make that a question with interpretive rather than strictly factual implications. 367 00:40:31,630 --> 00:40:42,370 My next lecture is going to be, in fact, at the time of recording this, it already has been King John.