ABSTRACT
Pericles, first of Shakespeare’s four romance narratives of vicissitude, loss and restoration, is usually regarded as the most tentative, fumbling or inchoate of the four, or not entirely Shakespeare’s at all. Critics have been made unhappy not only by a text probably transcribed in part from memory, but also by the Gower narrator’s laboured tetrameters, the jerky tempo of frame narration and dramatized episode, the curiously “phlegmatic” or “passive” character of the protagonist, and the outlandish events. Pericles is tragicomedycomme il faut according to Renaissance theory, which demanded both extreme peril and happy solution; and Pericles’ saga of preposterous and totally fortuitous misfortunes can be moralized without difficulty into a vision of longsufferingness, princely excellence and the wondrous ways of a mysterious Providence.
