ABSTRACT
Shakespeare here seems to presume the normal Aristotelian contrast of passivity or potentality and act, and either to invert it or, if Patience is at once receptive and active, to transcend it. Two or three years before he wrote Pericles, Shakespeare had given in The History of King Lear another recognition scene, that between Lear and Cordelia, and explored this kind of morality at the end of the play in relation to actual death. Shakespeare sometimes seems to adopt this more austere position, as in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and may have preferred it for some time. It is fairy tale that, at first sight, seems to have attracted Shakespeare some sixteen or so years later, probably in 1608, when he dramatized the whole story of Apollonius in Pericles Prince of Tyre. There is in the old Leir a recognition scene of much less passion than Shakespeare's.
