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
rustling or coughing or occasional laughter from the audience of Oxford students,
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.
So today I'm lecturing on parallelise, which is a problematic play dating from around 16 07.
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,
it was not printed as part of the collected plays in the First Folio of sixteen, 27, 16, 23.
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.
But I want to start, as usual with a summary of the plot.
parallelise is an episodic romance play,
so its romance in the mediaeval sense of journeying or questing in the sense of a combination
of human and supernatural events which often take place over a long period of time.
So if you know any mediaeval romances like those of Mallery, for example, or the modern stories like the Lord of the Rings,
which are heavily influenced by them, you'll have a sense what was meant.
The play's narrated by a chorus figure, the poet John Gower, and he introduces stuff.
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.
Unlike all her potential suitors, he has to answer a riddle.
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.
parallelise flees and he is pursued by an assassin from the king's court.
And the escape from this assassin perpetuates propels his journey through the rest of the play.
Arriving next in the Port of Tarsus, parallelise encounters a famine and distributes corn to relieve the city.
Its rulers, Cleon and ioniser swear allegiance to paraphilias in gratitude for what he's done.
He can't stay long there, though, because he's a hunted man. So he goes back to sea.
Next, he is shipwrecked at Penn Topolice, where some fishermen retrieve his father's armour from the sea.
Act caught the disguised parallelise wearing this.
Rusty Armour presents himself in a tournament to win the hand of the daughter of King Simoneau D Fazer.
He beats the other suitors in the tournament and gains stays in marriage.
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.
The grief stricken apparently takes his newborn baby daughter Marina to Tarsus, where he leaves her with Cleon and die Neisser for safekeeping.
Fayza, though, is found on the shore by a physician who manages to revive her.
He takes her to the temple of Diana in Ephesus.
Time passes. Marina grows up. Downsizer is jealous of her and plans to have her murdered.
So Diana is a high Hyers leonine to kill Marina.
But he is interrupted by the arrival of pirates who objected her in mightily.
And she is sold by the pirates to the brothel keeper. Bolt on the board tries to induct her into the sex trade.
Marina refuses to take part. Discovering the death of his daughter as he thinks parallelise vows to spend the rest of his days.
Hair and beard uncut. In mourning his wife and daughter.
Meanwhile, in mightily in Marina's virtue, convert's, the governor like CIMIC us from his last and manages to maintain her chastity,
Pericles arrives like Sumika suggests that Marina will chair him.
She visits him and sings and they discover they are father and daughter.
In a dream, parallelise is directed to Diana's temple. He arrives to find Facer.
So the family is reunited. And Marina marries like smokers'.
Now, we can see from this outline a number of correspondences with other of Shakespeare's plays.
Most obviously, perhaps, apparently shares with The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline a cross generational story like Perjeta Marina in the
empirically is grows from babyhood to marriage ability over the course of the play.
And both are like inverse tragedies in being structured over this female life span from infancy to marriage ability like him.
Ironi again in The Winter's Tale. Fazer dies shortly after childbirth and like her mania again, she returns from the dead.
Both returns. Both of these wives returning are miraculous in their different ways.
Like Cymbeline, parallelise has an episodic plot and a weakness, we might say, for flat or two dimensional storybook characters.
The Queen, the stepmother in Cymbeline and Diron Annisa in apparently is, for instance, are both wicked stepmother figures.
Like The Tempest, parallelise draws on the magical associations of the sea to separate and reunite families.
And there are echoes of something similar in the play discussed two weeks ago, comedy of Errors.
Like Emelia in Comedy of Errors, Faisa is taken to the abbey in Ephesus.
Obviously, the place for shipwrecked wives sitting it out unimpeachably before their husbands are restored to them.
There are other echoes to the brothel recall's measure for measure, and in both plays,
it has a similar role in contradistinction to a place of sanctity. The convent in measure for measure the Abbey.
Here in parallelise, pirates take on a similar random role in Hamlet.
They do seem a sort of divisive last resort for Shakespeare. How do we get out of this one?
Oh, let's get the pirates in. The chorus figure empirically is perhaps recall something of the structure of Henry the Fifth.
Divided into acts by narrative speeches.
And if we think about the place Shakespeare's most is written, most recently thinking about the play in 16 seven.
We can see specific points of comparison.
The famine, as in Khari Leanness, the murderous queen as in Macbeth, the reunion of father and estranged daughter from King Lear.
So all that is to show that Pericles can be fitted thematically alongside any number of Shakespeare plays.
Why then has it been such an outsider in the canon,
a play only rarely performed and often discussed in apologetic terms, trying to explain away its plot and its language.
Let's just take a step back and think about the way the First Folio has shaped Shakespeare's reputation.
We've touched on this in other lectures, but the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, doesn't include poems.
But the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 16 23 after Shakespeare's death.
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.
Otherwise we wouldn't otherwise have. But it gives us some ways of thinking about those plays as well.
It's the First Folio that gives us the division of Shakespeare's plays into the three categories comedies, histories and tragedies, identifying genre.
Therefore, rather than chronology or theme as their way of understanding Shakespeare's work.
In the last lecture, thinking about teleology forward progression in Richard the Third.
We discussed how the particular historical arrangement of the English history plays makes certain kinds of reading of those
plays more prominent in the Folio than in their previous incarnations as more occasional publications or performances.
The First Folio has, I think, contributed to ongoing critical difficulties in understanding connexions between Shakespeare's poetry and his plays,
since it doesn't include the sonnets or the rape of an increase of Venus and Adonis.
It inaugurates the editorial tradition of undervaluing quarto texts.
What early bibliographies, often dubbed bad quartos following Hemming's and Kendall's description in the prefatory epistle to the FOLIA,
to the great variety of readers.
You may have seen some of these plays for sale individually before Hemming's and Kandal admit to potential buyers of this expensive book.
In fact, a keen play buyer might already own versions of half the plays that are being republished in the Folio,
and that might be a material factor in weighing up whether it's attractive to purchase.
But Hemming's, I've got to say, you may have already bought them, but those versions were pirated ones.
Back to those pirates. Here they say we have published them as well.
Before you were abused with diver stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and
deformed by the frauds and stealth of injurious impostors that expose them.
Even those are now offered, to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest.
Absolute in their numbers as he conceived them. The idea that the folio texts are cured and perfect of their limbs,
like the claim in the same letter that Shakespeare never blotted a line and therefore never revised his plays,
have only recently begun to be recognised by scholars as a sales pitch rather than as
an accurate documentary account of Shakespeare's writing and publishing practises.
Most prominently, perhaps, of all the folios legacy tours.
It has seemed to give an authoritative imprimatur to the players included in it all the rest,
say Hemming's and Condell absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, absolute in their numbers.
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.
It does not include. The catalogue page to the Folio includes the titles of 35 plays.
In fact, there are 36 plays in the volume, Troilus and Cressida is also included.
But it doesn't make it onto the catalogue, probably because the rights for it came after that page had been printed.
The Folio is a huge logistical printing enterprise and was printed over several months.
Of the players we now consider Shakespeare in the Folio does not include the two noble kinsmen.
That's a play published under the joint names of Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 16 34.
Nor does it include parallelise published in Quarto under Shakespeare's sole name in 60 No.9.
Now sometimes argued that these players are excluded because they were known to be collaborative.
But we know Henry the 8th, which is in the Foleo, is also collaborative, again with John Fletcher.
And in addition, a new wave of scholarship has identified all kinds of collaboration in Shakespeare's collected works.
We now know that collaboration, which could mean any number of practises from joint working, you know, working together,
revising existing plays, play patching, adding a speech or two, finishing a play, providing the plot for someone else to finish.
These are all not quite normal practises in the early modern theatre.
The majority of plays performed during this period are in in one of these senses, if not more than one collaborative,
for a long time, the criticism maintained that Shakespeare was immune to this industry wide practise.
But now various kinds of investigation, much of it aided by computer stihler metric testing, have suggested different and new collaboration's.
We now think that the first part of Henry the Sixth was probably written with Nash,
that Titus Andronicus was probably written with George Peel, that Timon of Athens was probably written with Middleton as well as the two.
Fletcher collaboration's Henry the eighth and two Noble Kinsman. And thanks to the recent complete Oxford edition of Middleton's Works,
we now have a strongly argued case that the texts we have of measure for measure and of Macbeth,
both published only in the First Folio, show evidence of later revision, probably for a stage revival by Thomas Middleton.
So current scholarship would suggest that a number of plays which are included
in the First Folio show signs of collaborative work of one sort or another,
and that therefore it is not fully logical to suggest that parallelise is excluded for that reason.
I'm going to talk about the implications of collaboration on parallelise in a minute.
In addition, recent cases have been made for Shakespearean traces in other plays that we don't usually think of as Shakespeare's.
So Shakespeare is one of the collaborators in the sense that quite possibly unperformed manuscript play Thomas Moore.
He probably contributed his bits to the play in about sixteen oh four.
It's really well worth looking at. John Jowett, New Ardern Edition.
If you're interested in Shakespeare's representation of outsiders, for instance, this is a play featuring a riot against immigrants in London.
Or if you're interested in Shakespeare's religious attitudes, since Thomas Moore was, of course, renowned as a Catholic martyr.
It's also been suggested that the domestic tragedy Ardern of Faversham has signs of Shakespeare in it that Shakespeare may have written.
The additional passages to the popular revenge tragedy, the Spanish tragedy and the history plays, including Thomas of Woodstock and Edward.
The third might also be, at least in part, by him.
All of these cases are backed up by compelling recent scholarship, although only Thomas Moore has been canonised, as it were,
by inclusion in the Ardern series and in many collected Shakespeare editions, including the Oxford and the RISC.
So with a number of other potentially Shakespearean plays which like parallelise, are also on the margins of the canon.
Added to this list should be the last plays Frances Myhre is writing in 15,
Ninety-eight praises a play amongst a list of current Shakespeare players called Love's Labour's Won.
It's a play which is either lost or which represents an alternative title for a romantic comedy.
We know under a different name. Much ado or all's well that ends well have been proposed in that regard.
Recent interest in another lost play Cardini show has been very active for a lost play.
It has had a surprising number of performances writing. It has become one of the must do tasks of a certain vintage of Shakespeareans.
They've been versions in the last few years by Stephen Greenblat, by Gary Taylor and by Greg Doran.
Cardinia was apparently co-written with Fletcher but has not survived unless
the controversial play Double Falsehood is a restoration adaptation of it.
Added to this is the evidence that Shakespeare's name is used on a number of title pages in this period,
attached perhaps for commercial reasons to plays. We now do not think he wrote a Yorkshire tragedy for one or the London Puritan.
Both now tend to be attributed to Middleton.
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.
We no longer subscribe to the view that the Folio gives us the authoritative
and final judgement on the full extent of Shakespeare's writing and debates
about Shakespeare's authorship and the presence of collaboration in his work are currently undergoing a very heated period in Shakespeare studies.
If you Google the work on Middleton as a reviser of Macbeth, for instance,
you'll be able to take the high temperature of that particular academic spat.
Let's try and bring some of this back to paraphilias and have gone on in a bit of a curve around it.
So it's the play's absence from the First Folio that has placed it on the margins of Shakespeare's work.
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
parallelise were written by George Wilkins and that Shakespeare supplied the remainder.
The second half of the play. Wilkins is a writer associated with a number of texts from the period 16 hours six to eight,
including a domestic tragedy called the Miseries of Enforced Marriage,
which takes as its source the same true crime story as prompts a Yorkshire tragedy.
That play attributed to Shakespeare on its title page.
He also wrote a travel play collaboratively with Rowly and Day called The Travels of the Three English Brothers.
It has some structural and thematic connexions with parallelise and which is itself, of course, a travel play of sorts.
But collaboration is like the designation early. I talked about in relation to the comedy of errors, a kind of shorthand for negative associations,
its connotations are not simply chronological, but evaluative.
And in this case, collaboration tends to signal something which is unfinished, divided, uneven or in some other way unsatisfactory.
We tend to look for collaboration only where we find the aesthetic work lacking, say,
in time and of Athens, and therefore we judge collaboration by its failure to produce an integrated drama.
For instance. Where Shakespeare is one of the authors in a proposed collaboration,
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.
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.
We all know this shouldn't matter.
But his dodgy career as an innkeeper [INAUDIBLE] brothel keeper put on trial for kicking a pregnant woman in the belly doesn't help.
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.
Judgements about the authorship of parallelise have been inseparable from judgements, evaluative judgements of it.
In their new Cambridge edition, Doreen Delvecchio and Anthony Hammond strike out in a different direction.
For them, the play is not collaborative,
and it's well worth reading their introduction to the new Cambridge edition to see how they come to the conclusion.
The connexion, though, in their argument is the same as in the old one.
For them, the play is not collaborative because it is good.
It is integrated, sophisticated, capable of successful performance.
And therefore, in their view, it cannot be collaborative or it doesn't need to be seen as collaborative.
We can see here that by arguing that apparently it is not collaborative. In fact, the negative associations of collaboration are confirmed.
To argue that a play is good is necessarily to argue that it is single authored.
Something similar actually happens in Jonathan Bates Ardern edition of Titus Andronicus.
He took the decision he could not rehabilitate.
That plays aesthetic reputation and seriously engage with the fact that it was collaboratively authored or the question that it was collaboratively,
collaboratively authored in the same argument. Now, Titus Andronicus has gained its place in the canon.
We can look again at the question of collaboration. We're not quite there yet, though, critically with parallelise.
I don't know whether parallelise is co-authored, and I don't really know how we would know.
But I am interested in the way that the question over Shakespeare's complete authorship
might resonate with some of the themes of this play of parentage and isolation.
How we could link the question about collaboration with more thematic,
critical approaches to parallelise and how we might investigate whether or how this play works.
And I want to do this not in the grudging or apologetic spirit of much criticism,
apparently, but in an attempt to regain the spirit of the Quarto title page.
The text published under Shakespeare's sole name in 16 09,
describes it as the late and much admired play corporately as Prince of Tyre with the true relation of the whole history,
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.
As it has been diverse and sundry times acted by His Majesty's servants at the Globe on Bankside.
There were two editions of this much admired play in 60 No.
Nine, No other play by Shakespeare since the early histories first published a decade earlier had had such immediate print popularity.
A third quarter edition followed in 16 11. Thomas Pavi printed it in 16 19 as part of his collection of Shakespeare plays.
This flash of publications, plus a novelised version of the story by George Wilkins printed in 16 08, all a test apparently is popularity.
It's in sharp contrast to its later marginalisation in this period.
It is much the most popular play of Shakespeare's in print in in print terms.
It it is. It is his only big success or of of the 17th century.
And it is quite possibly also the most popular play in print of the Jacobin period by anyone.
Lots of allusions to it in wider literary culture confirm this popularity.
The mock romance the night of the Burning Passell, which was probably performed quite shortly after Pericles was first stage sites.
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.
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.
Shipwreck Robert Taylors. The hug had lost its pearl hopes in its prologue to be as popular as parallelise.
In 16, 29, writing about the poor reception of his own play,
the new N Johnson mocked audiences who would rather see some mouldy tale like parallelise.
So there's evidence then that Parkis had a hold on audiences and readers and that it was a popular play.
We owe it, surely, to try to understand why. From the start.
parallelise engages compellingly with these questions of authority and authorship in bringing on the mediaeval poet John Gower,
who's confessing our mantis was one of the sources for the play, apparently stages its own questioning of who writes this story.
Pericles comes via, but not from Gower. Didn't make the story up either.
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,
who wanders around the Mediterranean world searching for his lost family.
Gower's opening to the play confirms this ancient lineage.
This is his opening.
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.
It has been sung at festivals on Amber Eves and holidays, and lords and ladies in their lives have read it for restorative.
The purchase is to make men glorious at bonum quo ante EQUASS a Malleus.
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
sing mighty your wishes pleasure bring I for you would wish and that I might waste it for you.
Like taper light. The stress on the familiarity of this tale is insistent.
This is a song that old was sung ancient Gower is an old man.
The Latin tag is a good thing, improves with age.
In a period in which Newnes had a high cultural value, especially in the theatre where new blood, new plays, where its lifeblood.
It's very striking. Opening the language is self consciously archaic.
mediaevalism not mediaeval. And it confirms its antique qualities, its kind of retrospective nostalgic tone in the meta of that speech.
I just read this is not in Shakespeare's usual iambic pentameter metre, but in the optos, syllabic couplets, rhyming couplets.
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
oral circulation of stories that stress on singing suggests the ancient opening of the Iliad.
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,
attesting to the importance of narration telling rather than showing foregrounding the storyteller author rather than the agents or actors.
Gower's presence empirically pushes questions of authorship away from the science of attribution and
more towards theories of into text duality which acknowledge the interrelatedness of all texts.
The text, as Bart wrote memorably in the death of the author, is a tissue of citations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,
a tissue of citations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Thinking about Shakespeare in a web of interrelated texts, both his own sources, but also his work as the source of other things,
such as the novelised version of the play published by Wilkins to cash in on the popularity of the stage play.
These kinds of thoughts dissenter individual authorship more fruitfully, I think, than trying to dissect the play between collaborators.
The opening speech from goWe that I just quoted moved straight into CNN setting.
We are in Antioch.
I tell you what mine authors say, says Gower, disavowing his own invention, perhaps because of the sordid tale he's about to unfold.
This king onto him took a pair who died and left a female heir.
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.
Worse father to entice his own to evil should be done by none.
That the play moves from its dispersal of authorial identity in the voice of GAWA,
on to this parable of perverse generation and incest further complicates its own depictions of creation.
If we think about paternity as a very common metaphor for artistic creation,
particularly literary creation, we can start to see how these two themes come together.
The play itself is created out of this incestuous relationship with which it begins.
Pericles himself and his character take shape under the pressure of the twisted marriage plot set by the incestuous king.
His peregrinations, which structure the rest of the play, are motivated by this traumatic early encounter.
If sexual reproduction, two people coming together to create something new.
It's a kind of submerged metaphor for collaborative authorship. Then the vision of sexuality we get here in Antioch is particularly troubling.
parallelise is faced with a riddle, this is the riddle voiced by the daughter, she's never given a name until until his daughter.
I am no VIPR 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 is father, son and husband. Mild eye, mother, wife.
And yet his child. How they may be. And yet in two, as you will live.
Resolve it. You. The trouble with this riddle is that it is not rocket science.
It goes under the guise of being cryptic.
But really it dares the Souters of the Antiochian Princess to name what cannot be named parallelise is response is to flee by flight.
I'll shun the danger that I fear this fear of incest.
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.
And so even though incest is articulated in the early part of the play, the part generally attributed to Wilkins.
Remember, he's supposed to written the first two acts. It establishes the entire play's motif.
We begin with the king and his daughter. We end with Pericles and Marena, another prince and daughter.
Far then from being broken or discontinuous or inarticulate. The play circles rather too much on this motif.
It is uncomfortably, tightly structured as Ruth Nivo, in a delicate and revealing psychoanalytical study of parallelise has argued,
the riddle is for parallelise a recognition of darkness in himself.
This is Niva. Antiochus is his uncanny double and the progress of the play is the haunting of parallelise by the Antiochus in himself.
The incest fear which he must repress and from which he must flee.
Also provocative and so interesting, I think, about nymphos argument is that she suggests that Antioch is really an internal or a psychic
landscape of parallelise rather than a situation into which she happens to bowl up.
He has he is causally related to what he cannot acknowledge rather than coincidentally related to it.
This might help us think more about causation and coincidence,
both ways of understanding the relation between one event and another more widely across this play.
And you may want to think about the subsequent events in parallelise and how they might look if we saw them as being
motivated by rather than simply happening to parallelise the winning of Faisa in a tournament and her subsequent death,
the threat to Marena, the famine in Tarsus, etc.
The episodic travel structure of the play blinds us into thinking that these are events that the unfortunate
parallelise bumps into a more psychoanalytical vision of the play would identify them as events he brings with him.
We can see, I think, instinctively here that the journeying in the play can be read as psychological rather than actual.
And further that journeying and encountering these events or playing out these
episodes stand in for parallelise rather absent or inscrutable personality.
The reunion apparently is a marina at the end of the play is often identified as its poetic highlight,
these seen perhaps in the play that we're most happy to attribute to Shakespeare.
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.
Based on it, it comes about, you'll remember, because like Smokers',
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,
as the disgusted proprietors describe it. They're worried that, in fact, Marina is going to do for their trade.
When my civicus hears of a grief stricken man who has come by ship to Michaeline, he prescribes Marina as the perfect antidote.
She questioned less with her sweet harmony and other chosen attractions.
Would a lawyer and make a battery through his deafened parts, which now Midway's stopped.
She is all happy as the fairest of all, and her fellow mates.
Now, upon the leafy shelter that abuts against the island side.
Description here is a slightly awkward one. There are potentially sexual undertones to attraction,
a law and deafened parts which echo a disturbingly really with light democracies encounter with Marena,
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
rather than as she actually is trying grimly to hang on to her hymen in a dockside brothel.
Unknown, though, to listen smokers, the play players here returning parallelise to the scene of its original of his original
trauma is returning him to that father daughter incest from which he has been running,
but which has turned out to be inside himself rather than exterior Marina's hasty marriage to lie.
Civicus is one of the ways the play desperately tries to resist this inevitable encounter between father and daughter.
It's constantly trying to start again, to rewrite, to move on,
to have its last three acts cut free from the first two to leave behind that TDE
Chancellor George Wilkins and his terrible incest legacy over this play to escape.
What was established right at the beginning? The production apparently is in Regent's Park in London in summer 2011,
did just that cutting axe one and two to produce a production widely advertised as suitable for ages six and above.
The play, I think is not itself so easily divisible nor so comfortably insulated.
Antiochus and his daughter, we learn, are consumed by a thunderbolt. A fire from heaven came and shrivelled up those bodies, even to loathing.
But the meeting of Pericles and Marina shares, disquietingly, in their incestuous rhetoric.
Just as this is plausible that the same actor would have played Antiochus,
his daughter and Marina, now that begats him, that did the beget, parallelise exclaims.
Now, that begat him. That did the begat as he and Marina recognise each other,
but also recalling unconsciously the language of incestuous coupling that neither he nor the play can quite shake off.
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.
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.
You have heard of monstrous lust that the dew unjust reward empirically is his queen and daughter seen.
Although assailed with fortune, fierce and keen virtue preserve from fell destruction's blast laid on by heaven and crowned with joy at last.
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,
confessed Diamantis. In doing so, it suggests a version of the play as a kind of morality tale.
A production at the Globe in London in 2005 had Corin Redgrave play the old
parallelise as an onstage chorus watching his younger self played with Robert Lucke,
say, going through his adventures. The music of the spheres in the reunion scene, Music of the Spheres,
is an otherworldly sort of harmonic system which signals the cosmic order of the planets.
And also, apparently, his dream vision of Diana suggests that something like a divine benediction has fallen onto the play.
parallelise is suffering and his peregrination come to stand for the human journey towards grace.
And this more spiritual interpretation of the play may echo one striking aspect of the play's early performance history.
We know that parallelise, along with King Lear,
was performed by a group of represent Catholic actors in the North Riding of Yorkshire in sixty nine to 10.
Perhaps the Marion echoes of faces resurrection sequence parallel to the revivification,
as we've heard of her in The Winter's Tale, were part of its appeal in this context.
Catholic connotations in the play, in particular,
the combination of music and sent out fades as the rediscovery and their echoes of Marian iconography are well worth exploring.
On the other hand, the providential power which organises the play does not seem to be explicitly Christian.
The pre-Christian setting of the plot perhaps alleviates the need to tie it into religious forms of orthodoxy.
We might think here also about the play's anxieties about maternity in this Marijan context.
The banishment of the female body at the point of childbirth,
as in The Winter's Tale and less obviously in comedy of errors and the absence of mothers elsewhere
in the canon has been linked by some scholars with social anxieties about female sexuality.
These anxieties have their institutional framing in the religious ceremony of churching, where,
after a period of segregation following childbirth, the woman is reassumed into society following rituals of purification.
If Pericles is running away from the threat of incest, he is also connected.
Lee running away from the female, he's drawn towards it and repelled in equal measure,
just as the play conflates the archetypes of virgin and [INAUDIBLE] in its depiction of
Marina in the brothel and ultimately finds its presiding goddess in the chaste Diana.
So in today's lecture, I tried to approach the question, apparently its reputation and its place in the Shakespearean canon by
investigating the fact and the significance of its omission from the First Folio.
I've pointed out how popular apparently is was in the Jacobean period.
Much more so than any of Shakespeare's other late plays, which we now tend to value more,
and therefore our marginalisation of this play from our considerations of Shakespeare's canon,
a distinctly out of step with early modern appreciations.
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.
But I've tried mostly to turn this theme of collaboration onto the play itself
to think about attitudes to sexuality and the overshadowing presence of incest.
The thing at which parallelise is trying to escape from as a model for a kind of perverse creativity
across the play and also to think about its own self-conscious and unusual depiction of Gower.
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,
and to make that a question with interpretive rather than strictly factual implications.
My next lecture is going to be, in fact, at the time of recording this, it already has been King John.