Pericles, Prince of Tyre

A Comedy/Romance by William Shakespeare. It's one of his less-known and less-liked plays, and it's theorized that it was co-written or script-doctored by a less accomplished writer. It doesn't help that the surviving text is corrupt, possibly a pirate copy from memory; various scholarly attempts have been made to produce an improved version.

The story is framed by a narrator called Gower. He tells the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a virtuous adventurer who encounters many hardships on his road to happiness. Pericles gets in trouble for uncovering an incestuous relationship between a king and his daughter, and sails the world trying to avoid their assassination attempts. He meets and marries Thaisa, another princess, and sets sail to return home. A storm hits and Thaisa dies during childbirth; Pericles puts her body in a coffin and dumps it in the sea, which wards off the storm. Her body washes up on shore, and we learn Thaisa is not, in fact, dead; believing she survived a shipwreck and that her family is dead, she becomes a priestess in a temple of Diana.

Pericles fears his newborn daughter Marina will die before they get home, so he leaves her with the governor of Tarsus and his wife. Time passes, and Pericles decides to retrieve her. Marina has grown up beautiful, and the governor and his wife are angry because she is more beautiful than their own daughter. They plan to kill her, but she is captured by pirates and sold into prostitution. Marina is so virtuous that she not only remains a virgin, but also convinces her potential customers to leave and seek meaning in their lives. She eventually gets a respectable job in Mytilene, working for a lord as a musician/singer.

Pericles arrives in Tarsus, and the governor tells him his daughter is dead. Grief-stricken, he heads to sea, arriving in Mytilene. The lord tries to cheer him up by having Marina sing for him. Father and daughter are reunited. The goddess Diana appears to Pericles in a dream, saying he should go to her temple and tell his story there. He does, and Thaisa overhears; the whole family is finally reunited. Gower returns to the stage, saying that the villains have been punished, and the virtuous have been rewarded.

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Pericles, Prince of Tyre provides examples of:

• And Knowing Is Half the Battle
• Contrived Coincidence
• Easy Evangelism
• Engagement Challenge
• Friend to All Living Things:

Marina: I never kill'd a mouse, nor hurt a fly: I trod upon a worm against my will, But I wept for it.

• Green-Eyed Monster
• He Knows Too Much
• Idiot Ball
• Morton's Fork
• Only Mostly Dead
• Rags to Royalty
• So Beautiful It's a Curse
• Tears of Remorse
• Tender Tears
• Villainous Incest
• Virgin Tension