Search Results

The first commentator to suggest that Pericles was not wholly Shakespeare's creation was Nicholas Rowe. The degree of Shakespeare's involvement in Pericles was the subject of a vigorous debate between George Steevens and Edmond Malone in 1780. Modern study of the authorship of Pericles began in 1868. Delius argued for Wilkins's authorship of Pericles I and 2 on the basis of the 'continuous stylistic, metrical, and dramatic relationship' between the two acts and Wilkins's Miseries of Enforced Marriage, published in 1607. For many years, there was general agreement that the last three acts of Pericles were by Shakespeare. A somewhat unexpected insight into the double authorship of Pericles was provided by Charles A. Langworthy.

This chapter attempts to identify the author of Pericles, Acts 1 and 2. George Wilkins, Thomas Heywood, John Day, William Rowley, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton have all been proposed as candidates of co-authorship, but Wilkins is the only one of these for whose association with Pericles, Acts 1-2, evidence of any worth has been brought forward. Wilkins is known to have been the author of just one unaided play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, published two years before Pericles, in 1607. Attribution studies are most persuasive when a variety of approaches all converge on the same conclusion. The chapter details findings which cover versification, rhymes, high-frequency words, stylistic quirks, linguistic forms, uses of the relative pronoun, and verbal parallels. Statistics are complemented by stylistic analysis along conventional literary-critical lines.

This chapter summarizes the argument that Wilkins is co-author of Shakespeare in Pericles. On two points there has long been consensus: the absence of Pericles from the First Folio of 1623 raises some doubt of Shakespeare's sole authorship, and while the bulk of Acts 3-5 is recognizably in his mature style, most of Acts 1-2 is not. Theories put forward to account for the oddity of the first two acts are (a) that they are remnants of a very early Shakespeare script; (b) that Shakespeare deliberately wrote them, at the same time as Acts 3-5, in a style consonant with the medieval mode of his choric narrator, Gower; (c) that, as that 1609 quarto presents them, they are a reporter's fumbling paraphrase of a greatly superior original, which may have been wholly Shakespeare's; and (d) that they are the work of another dramatist.

This chapter demonstrates that co-authorship can be seen just as clearly in the treatment of character and motive as in language. In considering Shakespeare's co-authorship of the five plays presented, namely Titus Andronicus with George Peele, Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton, Pericles with George Wilkins, and King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher, it concentrates on their language, and the many ways in which his style can be differentiated from that of his collaborators. Specifically discussed are the plot and character in these co-authored plays.

This chapter presents a literary-critical approach to style in Pericles. The plausibility of the theory that George Wilkins wrote Pericles, Acts 1-2, can be demonstrated by illustration and analysis along traditional literary-critical lines. The affinities between the verse of Pericles, Acts 1-2, and that of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage can be discerned by an attentive reader without the help of figures. Shakespeare's poetic style is marked by its concentration, energy, particularity, and concreteness. In his verse words simply do more than in the verse of other playwrights. The writer of Pericles, 1-2, in contrast, tends towards a wordiness that seems half way between the pointless and the cryptic. The imagery may hint at interesting ideas, but there is a curious arbitrariness about it. This is found in the verse of Wilkin's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. Wilkin's way with antithesis is very different from Shakespeare's.

This chapter discusses not only the first known examples of film shot in the polar region, but also elucidates the role polar expedition films played as cinema was becoming of broad attraction globally. Analysing footage from archives around the world, Diesen contextualises how mass media and technological developments for capturing and relaying to the world feats of exploration, often in the service of nationalism or personal gain, have come to shape the perception of the Arctic region to this day. Case studies in this chapter includes: documentation and media coverage of the Baldwin-Ziegler, Nobile, and Amundsen-Ellsworth Expeditions, including films by Anthony Fiala, Walter Wellman, George Hubert Wilkins, Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev, and Oskar Omdal and Paul Berge. Diesen also considers the propagandistic value of these films for various nation states and their mass media appeal for news companies.

The poet John Gower takes the stage in Pericles. This chapter examines the presence of syncretistic religiosity that results from the benevolent and motivating presence of this Catholic figure as the presiding spirit of a Jacobean play. It specifically attends to the materiality of the Reformation as exemplified by the tomb of Gower, a historical artifact that was located in the ancient church building of St. Mary Overie’s, just a short walk from the Globe Theater where Pericles was performed. This chapter considers how the enduring power of such church fabrics indicates the persistence of traditional ways of dealing with grief and loss. Pericles considers this issue in a nuanced manner that neither privileges the old faith, nor actively promotes the doctrines of the reformed church. Pericles suggests how, at the turn of the seventeenth century, individuals could find spiritual comfort through creative syntheses of traditional and reformed religious practices.

Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen do not appear in the First Folio, but they have long been seen as part of Shakespeare’s final dramatic urge. This chapter sees these two plays, in effect, as commentaries and responses to the Shakespearean traditions of lyric performance and the possibilities of music to restore civic and civil harmony in the face of threat. In particular, the chapter sees Pericles as an attempt to lyricize King Lear, It sees The Two Noble Kinsmen as an attempt to find in earlier English poetic traditions (Chaucer’s source material, the figure of Gower as choral commentator) a claim for a vernacular poetic, and aesthetic, authority. Finally, the Epilogue proposes that the romance narrative trope of loss and recognition becomes a model for our own, modern critical response to these late plays: that we search for an authentic Shakespeare much as a romance figure will search for a lost child or love. In this move, the rhetoric of romance links together the curatorial language of the First Folio’s prefaces and introductory poetry with the affirming language of the modern editor.