Pericles

"Two Noble Kinsman is not in the First Folio either. Because it distills a lot of the elements of the late plays: romances like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline . It’s a very retro play, it’s looking backwards. Its form is nostalgic, its language is pretty nostalgic. It seems like a very odd little piece of almost medievalism. Also, I think that the reunion between Pericles and Marina at the end of the play is probably, when I’ve seen it in the theatre, the most moving moment in Shakespeare that I have experienced. There are lots of problems with it. It’s not realistic except emotionally. It’s got emotional realism in this unbelievable, fairytale structure. Absolutely. It begins with incest and can’t ever quite get away from it. Pericles meets Marina at the end because somebody says, “there’s this very chaste woman who works in a brothel and can cheer anyone up, go and see her,” and it’s his own daughter. Contemporaries loved it. There’s a line in Ben Jonson, where he talks about plays that are too popular, and therefore can’t be very serious. He talks about a “mouldy old tale like Pericles.” It gets reprinted. It’s not in the Folio, either because it’s not completely Shakespearean or because they didn’t think it was very good, which is what we tended to believe. But it may be that it’s not in the Folio because it was too commercially alive a product for them to get the rights to reprint. There are lots of references to Pericles in the period which suggests it’s a really popular play. There’s a really tantalising piece of performance history where we know a group of Catholic travelling actors in North Yorkshire around 1609/1610, were arrested for performing Pericles and King Lear for Catholic households. It was popular, though I think it became old-fashioned quite quickly. It’s nostalgic and knows that it’s outdated, but quite quickly it just came to look outdated without that irony. I think it struggled to find a place. Again, the First Folio is important, it’s struggled to find a place in the canon since then. It may be that only recently it has got some performance history and is starting to recover the ways in which it can be powerful. There have been some really interesting projects where refugee groups have done Pericles . It is a play about being homeless and being in movement. These people moving about on the sea, separated from family. It may, horribly, turn out to be one of the more topical Shakespeare plays."