Shakespeare, Fantasist

Marjorie Garber’s amusing summary (Shakespeare After All) of Shakespeare’s Pericles captures the flavor of the play: “a man who woos a wicked, incestuous princess, solves a riddle, and flees her land—and who just happens to be shipwrecked on the shore of another land, where there is another princess choosing a husband; a man who has no armor to fight in the princess’s tournament until there washes up onshore the very suit of armor, now rusted, once given him by his father; a man who is involved in a shipwreck and a storm at sea, and who therefore loses his new wife and parks his infant daughter with a supposedly friendly neighboring king and queen; a man who then neglects to visit his beloved daughter for a period of fourteen years, in the course of which the supposedly friendly king and queen attempt to murder her, and she is stolen away by pirates, sold to a brothel-keeper, and begins to convert the brothel’s clientele to chastity. Consider that this same man is finally reunited with both daughter and wife under the most improbable circumstances, including a doctor with miraculous powers and a personal visit, with instructions, from the goddess Diana.”

To that catalogue of improbabilities, we may add the improbably repetitions of the play: “the actions that make up the play are all repeated. Loss of a parent, loss of a child, shipwreck, privation, suffering, rebirth, and reconciliation: each of the three main characters – Pericles, Thaisa [his wife], and Marina [his daughter] – undergoes a version of these events, all to be knit together at the close.” And add to that the multiple exotic locations – “Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, and Ephesus.” There is no unity of place here, nor unity of time, as the play stretches over a decade and a half of action.

Unlike other critics, Garber doesn’t see these as flaws. She points to common themes between the tragedies and the romances, and insists that romance has to be judged on its own terms: “Romance is the pattern that underlies both psychology and myth: the quest hero, who stands at its center, who undertakes an adventure to prove himself, and to find his own secret name. . . . The sign of his success in human terms will be marriage; in political terms, kingship or rule; and in both, fertility: for the family, the birth of a child or children, the provision of an heir; for the land, the coming of spring and harvest after a long period of drought, waste, or winter. Thus romance will often cross over into the terrain of comedy (love, sex, and marriage) as well as history (succession, rule, and plenty).”

Shakespeare is a fantasist in this play as in others, but a fantasist who retains is interest in the human world and in human motivations and psychology: “In myths the freeing of the land and the self is often visualized as the slaying of a dragon. In Shakespeare the ‘dragons’ tend to be monstrous human beings, naturalized dragons who prevent maturity and fertility: in Pericles, the wicked, incestuous Antiochus and the cruel queen Dionyza, both struck by lightning, and the bawds and their customers in the Mytilene brothel, converted to virtue by Marina.” She draws interesting parallels between Shakespeare and Freud, arguing that the analogy works not because Shakespeare is Freudian but because Freud is a Shakespearean, learning from the Bard who is a “realist” fantasist, a humanizer of myths.