ABSTRACT
These imaginative strands are all Shakespearean favourites; but their use is new. They are newly actualized: what was formerly imagery becomes dramatic fact. The old image of storm gives us "enter Pericles, wet"; that of barkin-storm becomes a stage-setting, with Pericles "on shipboard"; the old association love=jewel is built into a personal sense of Thaisa's and Marina's jewel-like worth; the love-image of jewel-thrown-into-the-sea (see The Shakespearean Tempest, pp. 64-9; 222-3) becomes Thaisa in her jewelstored coffin (like Portia's picture in the casket) thrown overboard. Shakespeare's continual reference to pagan deities works up to the "feast of Neptune" and actual appearance of Diana. Finally, music, for so long a dramatic accompaniment to scenes of love and reunion becomes an active force in Cerimon's magic and explicitly mystical in Pericles' "music of the spheres" (5.1.231). A similar process develops the Friars of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado about Nothing, both plot-manipulators within their dramas with a tendency to arrange false appearances of death, into the miracle-working Cerimon taking on the plot-manipulation of life itself and restoring the dead. Pericles is the result of no sudden vision: it is Shakespeare's total poetry on the brink of self-knowledge.
