Imagining Shakespeare's Pericles

About the Book

Pericles is widely understood to be the first of Shakespeare’s late romances, but it is also widely considered a problematic text with multiple authors. Its first two acts are frequently assigned to a man named George Wilkins. These conjectures about authorship, however, fail to take adequate account of Gower, the medieval poet who acts as chorus throughout and stages the old story of Apollonius of Tyre, here renamed Pericles. If Gower was not Shakespeare’s choice, then Wilkins (or whomever else is proposed as co-author) brilliantly anticipated many of the central themes of the late romances, an unlikely possibility. If Gower was Shakespeare’s idea, then the play must be re-examined in the light of Gower’s role as “co-author” and its bearing on the stagecraft and verse of Pericles. One way to do this is by narration, retracing what may have been Shakespeare’s creative process in conceiving and then writing the play. Told as a story, this argument for Shakespeare’s sole authorship can remain conjectural (and entertaining) at the same time that it puts forward serious scholarly arguments. This book, then, tells the story in twenty-one short chapters, which are followed by an Afterword that clarifies David Young’s scholarly position.

About the Author

Until his retirement in 2003, David Young was Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College, where he continues to work as editor of Oberlin College Press. The author of three critical studies of Shakespeare (Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’; The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays; and The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy), as well as two anthologies of Shakespeare criticism, he has sometimes enhanced his knowledge by acting in theatrical productions (e.g. All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor). He is also a well-known contemporary poet, with eleven volumes to his credit, most recently Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems (Knopf, 2010), and he has translated poetry widely from many languages, including German (Rilke, Eich, Celan), Italian (Petrarch, Montale), Czech (Miroslav Holub), and Chinese (the T’ang Dynasty Poets).