ABSTRACT
Pericles has always been a play which is equally enthralling and perplexing. Some perplexity certainly comes from its status as a poorly transmitted collaboration. However, in this reading I explore the thesis that the play makes dramaturgical sense, partly because of its original perplexity. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare had treated the Apollonius story with nuanced irony, and in all likelihood, he was presented with an incomplete play on the same subject in 1607. Once again, he gave the melodramatic story an ironic tone, experimenting freely on his source. Shakespeare shows as much free-ranging, collaborative playfulness as the Rose playwrights who wrote the Huntingdon plays, but he also shows some of the pathos of tragedy. This zestful complexity of tone is heavily dependent on its contemporary dramatic context, as well as the resources of a theater to complicate representation. l This may explain why modem readers find it hard to understand why Pericles was so popular in the seventeenth century.2 The problem is that we are modem and that we are readers.
