8
Enter Pericles on shipboard
The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell, and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep.
Pericles 3.1.1–4
These lines mark a turning point. This much is noted by almost all recent commentators who linger on Pericles for long enough. These critics, bound up by the fine textual questions which concern the play’s dual authorship, broadly agree that the play is Shakespeare’s from Act 3 onwards, with the first two acts belonging to George Wilkins.1 Hence, when Pericles appears in this sea-storm, raging at the elements from the deck of his ship, the play suddenly feels very different. We are reading, or hearing, for the first time in the story the poetry of the writer who overshadows our language like no other. Here is the touchstone of literary and dramatic merit at work, we are told. Consequently, perhaps, in this storm we feel in safe hands.
But there is something of greater importance here. Shakespeare had collaborated before, and there are similar, debatable moments of his ‘entry’ in other plays. In this, his first scene in Pericles, he tries something new. He has written sea-storms before, but they have been narrated, as in Comedy of Errors, illustrated through exposition, as (we assume) in Twelfth Night, or given a simultaneous commentary, as in Othello. Here, Shakespeare takes a further step and brings the ship itself into the theatre (‘Enter Pericles on shipboard’). Lost in the search for Shakespearean indicators and similar Shakespearean scenes, then – lost, indeed, in the attempt to isolate the singular stamp of Shakespeare – is the important realisation that the storm of Pericles is inherently different, dramatically, from anything which the playwright has thus far attempted.
The immediacy and the intimacy of Shakespeare’s scene are, I will argue, indicative of fundamental differences in the approach of the two playwrights. For the play contains another shipwreck, the storm in Act 2, Scene 1 written by Wilkins. This gives us the opportunity to compare the storm of Shakespeare with that of a contemporary writing the same play. In exploring the different ways in which the two playwrights develop storms in the play, we can move beyond studies of attribution, and the details of each writer’s staging and phraseology. The storms, I will show, enclose both ideological and aesthetic stances. Wilkins takes an approach which allies the storm to heavenly judgement. I have already examined the ‘fire from heaven’ which kills Antiochus and his daughter, from a meteorological perspective.2 In this chapter, I want to draw it into a wider discussion of the storm’s signification in the play. I will examine the ways in which Shakespeare’s storm is weighted towards human experience rather than heavenly judgement. The fact that Shakespeare stages the sea-storm as it happens suggests that this focus on the lived experience of the storm is an important concern, emphasised in several ways. In Shakespeare’s storm there is no interventionist god; the prince, the seamen and the audience experience the storm together.
G. Wilson Knight maintained that ‘To analyse the tempests in Pericles would be to analyse the whole play’.3 More recently, the sea has been described as ‘the play’s second protagonist, facilitator of and actor in Pericles’s imperial story’.4 Each of these remarks points to a continuity in the play which may otherwise be thought lacking: in diction, aesthetic and a retrospectively judged quality, it is obviously in two sections, that of George Wilkins preceding that of Shakespeare. In tempest and sea, however, the play has its constants and both writers employ them discretely and distinctively. To the constants of sea and storm, I will introduce another, the Bible. This is for three basic reasons. Firstly, scripture informs and colours more in the play than has previously been addressed in the necessary detail. Secondly, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis notwithstanding, the Bible is one text which can be said with a relative degree of certainty to have been encountered by both playwrights.5 Thirdly, as I will argue, by reading the storms of each writer in the context of their Biblical allusions we can more precisely discern each writer’s approach. Although the relevant sections share a great deal in terms of trope and allusion, the way in which the two playwrights develop them is distinctive. The continual use of the storm enables Pericles to represent these shifting perspectives at once delicately and forcefully.
That vengeance should be associated with storm, thunder and lightning is a characteristically Old Testament notion. Most obviously, it is formulated in Exodus, as hail is the seventh of the ten plagues of Egypt: ‘for upon all the men, and the beastes, which are founde in the field, and not brought home, the haile shal fall upon them, and they shall dye ... Then Moses stretched out his rod toward heaven, and the Lord sent thundre and haile, and lightening upon the grounde: and the Lorde caused haile to raine upon the land of Egypt’.6 However, the further one explores the similarities between the heavenly retribution of the Biblical God and that of Pericles and, especially, Wilkins’s prose version of the story, Painful Adventures, the more it is apparent that the examples of Wilkins are extreme. In Exodus, the ten sequential plagues provide a platform for God to deliver his message – ‘that thou maiest know that there is none like me in all the earth’ – the successful transmission of which, is, after all, one of the overarching themes of the entire Old Testament.7 In Wilkins’s examples, there is no room for that message to be apprehended by the recipient, and this is made explicit, especially in comparison to John Gower, who relates the death of Antiochus ‘as men mai wite’ and little more.8 Wilkins’s description of Antiochus’s demise builds a narrative tension so that, rather than being offered forgiveness, he is struck ‘in the height and pride of all his glory’ (2.4.6). Perhaps this is a feature of the author’s representation of a pagan world, one, that is, that operates under the principle that pre-Christians need not be offered Christian redemption. Perhaps, for dramatic effect, Wilkins merely augmented the episode taken from his source.
Whatever the author’s reason, it is worth pointing out that lightning is rarely fatal in the Bible. Naseeb Shaheen lists several different Biblical formulations of ‘fire from heaven’, of varying interest in relation to Pericles.9 The most detailed account of a fatal lightning strike in the Bible is in II Kings, as the prophet Elijah turns away the followers of the king of Samaria.10 If any Biblical instance of lightning had an influence on the diction of Helicanus in Pericles, it is this one: ‘If that I be a man of God, let fyre come downe from the heaven, and devoure thee and thy fyftie. So fyre came downe from the heaven and devoured him and his fiftie.’11 The phrase ‘fyre came downe from the heaven’ and its variations are repeated several times during the first chapter of II Kings, its victims described, according to various early modern translations, as devoured, ‘consumed’ or ‘burnt up’.12 Given that the Biblical phrase is so close to Pericles’s ‘A fire from heaven came’ and that each describes deadly lightning strikes, it is curious that the play’s commentators have not examined this episode, as they have that of II Maccabees. Both Wilkins and II Kings present the very kind of unequivocal relationship of lightning to judgement, wrath or indeed heavenly powers that we consistently find Shakespeare endeavouring to keep ambiguous. It would be churlish and simplistic to argue that all storm in the Bible is a result of God’s anger or demonstration of his power (especially, as we shall see, given the case of Jonah). But in II Kings, the case is very much of a defined line of good and evil, or at least, the Hebrew God and ‘Baal-zebub the God of Ekron’.13 In the story, it is the belief in Baal-zebub that acts to legitimise the deaths by lightning of the one hundred and two people so killed. Each death serves rapidly to convert the captain of the final fifty:
And the thirde captaine over fifty went up, and came, and fel on his knees before Elijah, and besoght him, and said unto him, O man of God, I pray thee, let my life and the life of these thy fifty servantes be precious in thy sight. Beholde, there came fyre downe from the heaven and devoured the two former captaines over fifty with their fifties: therefore let my life now be precious in thy sight.14
The power of God’s weather teaches various kinds of lessons through the Bible, this example being, perhaps, the most extreme after the Flood of Genesis. Only those who are willing to accede to the power of the God of Israel are judged in II Kings to be safe from a lightning strike. This severe line is paralleled by Wilkins: lightning and judgement correlate directly. Shakespeare, as we will see, avoids anything so certain.
As if to reinforce the link between storm and judgement, Helicanus follows his report of the lightning with a conclusive, unapologetic statement:
yet but justice; for,
Though this king were great, his greatness was no guard
To bar heaven’s shaft, but sin had his reward.
(2.4.13–15)
Helicanus’s final word on the matter, as well as remembering the fatal lightning, is a continuation of the play’s tendency to marginalise the daughter of Antiochus. Whenever mentioned, this character is constructed as an object. The very fact that she remains nameless is indicative of this, but she is also figured as a sexual prize by Gower from the outset: ‘many princes thither frame | To seek her as a bedfellow’ (1.0.32–3). As a prize, she is ideal for the romantic hero Pericles’s risky adventure: he ‘Think[s] death no hazard in this enterprise’ and warnings of the ‘danger of the task’ only serve to ‘embolden’ him (1.1.2–5). Very quickly then, and before the daughter has entered, a vivid association between danger and sexual objectivity is clearly established.
Of course, the danger in the scene is not restricted to Pericles; the Princess of Antioch has been subject to the proclivity of her father – the ‘evil should be done by none’, as Gower puts it (1.0.28) – and is condemned to the relationship. Sexual violation is, like the storm, a theme recurrent throughout Shakespeare’s romances: Cymbeline has Iachimo’s illicit undressing of Imogen, and Cloten’s attempted rape of the same (2.3.37–8; 3.5.138–9); the plot of The Winter’s Tale depends on imagined adultery; in The Tempest, Caliban is imprisoned for his attempted rape of Miranda (1.2.348– 52). It is in Pericles, however, that the idea of violation is most resonant and, indeed, most thoroughly connected with the violence of the storm. As his daughter enters, Antiochus describes her as ‘clothed like a bride | For the embracements even of Jove himself’ (1.1.8). Many commentators, remembering Jove’s affairs, have found distinct sexual overtones in Antiochus’s description of his daughter.15 Jove is, in addition to being associated with sexual domination, also a father figure in Roman mythology. As Gossett notes, ‘It is characteristic of Antiochus’s self-assurance that he compares himself to the king of gods’.16 Antiochus’s image is thereby loaded with various threats. But Jove is not only a father god and a sexual predator; he is also the god of lightning. The minatory sexual identity of Antiochus is therefore conflated with lightning here. As I have shown, the ‘fire from heaven’ that kills Antiochus is best understood as fulmen.17 Richard Huloet, in his Latin dictionary of 1572, offers a translation of ‘Lightning’ as both ‘Fulmen’ and ‘Fulgur’, going on to note that ‘Also Fulmen is ascribed to Jupiter’.18 Storm is a crucial danger in the play, and results in many deaths, and is inextricably linked to desire from the start. Here, the danger of Jove provides a wonderfully concise image with many resonances: in addition to the patriarchal character of the king of gods chiming with that of Antiochus, and each figure an intimidating lustful threat, the metaphor also presages the daughter’s ultimate death by thunderbolt.
The connection between desire, danger and the weather is expounded as Pericles declines to answer the riddle but persists with the connection between Antiochus and Jove:
For vice repeated is like the wandering wind.
Blows dust in others’ eyes, to spread itself;
And yet the end of all is bought thus dear:
The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear:
To stop the air would hurt them …
Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will;
And, if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?
(97–105)19
Here, we can find senses of storm, king and Jove in the response to the realisation of the violation that has taken place. The image of the wandering wind is resonant with the play’s themes of travel and Fortune as well as its weather patterns; the notion that it is commensurate with vice lends a meteorological aspect to the sexual violence.
Many critical responses to the play focus on its geography and its aesthetic reliance upon borders.20 Here, it is vice itself, personified as Jove, which transgresses those borders, and it is subject to, or imagined through the very force which physically separates and divides the characters. The codes of societal and sexual conduct are thereby represented as liminal, just as the port towns in which the play is set. Only once such a conjunction is established, does Pericles mention the true ‘wind’ of vice – breath. The shifting between the societal, the meteorological and the bodily ends in the image of the eyes seeing clear ‘to stop the air would hurt them’. Once more, the tone is meteorological – as in King Lear’s curse ‘Strike her young bones, | You taking airs, with lameness!’ (2.2.354–6) – the air itself as well as the repetition of vice is harmful. As societal, meteorological and bodily are conflated, so, again, are Antiochus and Jove in the final couplet of the speech. Following the elaborate metaphors outlined above, the phrase ‘in vice their law’s their will’ endows the king with a godlike power – in the reverberation of vice/storm – to match his authority. This is made concrete in the return to the specific god who embodies both storm and sexual transgression: ‘if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?’ In refusing to name Antiochus’s act of incest, then, Pericles’s speech figures him as an irreverent thunderer who operates on a level closed to questioning.21 The transparent riddle in this way may be seen as a godlike declaration of invulnerability, one that reverberates in the demise of Antiochus and his daughter quoted above. It is remarkable that, in the parts of the play which are ascribed to him, Shakespeare makes no mention of Jove. This may be coincidental, but it is surely undeniable that the force and insistence with which Wilkins uses the name, and the effectiveness with which Antiochus is finished, do complete a powerful image which concludes the beginning of the play.
I have been arguing that Wilkins’s approach to the storm is one invested in metaphor, as well as heavenly judgement. The figure of Jove ties together themes of the first two acts, and Wilkins’s aesthetic inheres in the allusion and suggestiveness of his images. This same aesthetic is also to be found in the play’s first storm proper, at the start of Act 2. The scene is often compared unfavourably to that at the beginning of Act 3 as a means of highlighting the collaborative process. Roger Warren describes Wilkins’s storm speech as ‘functional enough, as long as there is nothing better to compare it with’.22 But comparisons appear hard to resist. Gossett notes ‘the indubitably greater power of the [later] speech’, whilst Raphael Lyne claims that the ‘language [of the first storm] is sterile in comparison with the relentless fertility of the other’.23 Because commentators and editors regard the collaborative aspects of the play as one of its most intriguing features, though, analysis of how this speech fits in to the work of the storm in the play is lacking. Here is the speech in full:
Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you,
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.
Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks,
Washed me from shore to shore, and left me breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death.
Let it suffice the greatness of your powers
To have bereft a prince of all his fortunes,
And, having thrown him from your watery grave,
Here to have death in peace is all he’ll crave.
(2.1.1–11)
Pericles’s speech is clearly occupied by thoughts of his own demise: ‘must yield’ and ‘ensuing death’ being indications that ‘to have death in peace is all he’ll crave’. A death, that is, unlike that of his compatriots who have perished at sea.24 Ruth Nevo regards this as ‘a total submission, a capitulation’ and points out the lack of ‘any reference to the trauma of the wreck itself’.25 One answer to this is that the lack of reference to the wreck is an acknowledgement of its traumatic nature. In any case, Pericles’s language is that of the sole survivor, whether he mentions the crew or not. As I will show in the final chapter, this generic language is played upon in The Tempest. But in terms of the meteorology of the play, and of locating Wilkins’s approach, the crucial portion of the speech is the rhyming couplet in the centre, not the end. We have already seen examples of breath constructed as wind and as vice; we might begin now to appreciate the way in which the word echoes across the first two acts, the section of the play belonging to Wilkins. Here breath is apparently synonymous with life: Pericles ruminates on the irony that he is only alive enough to contemplate death.26 The breath, which had been dangerous in its propensity to spread vice, is now ostensibly at the limits of speech. Including the two examples noted, there are seven incidents of breath in the play, and it is always pertinent to the surrounding sense. Indeed, its signification has a story arc all of its own:
For death remembered should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error. (1.1.46–7)
The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear (1.1.100)
Let your breath cool yourself, telling your haste. (1.1.160)
Our woes into the air; our eyes do weep,
Till tongues fetch breath that may proclaim them louder (1.4.14–15)
I’ll then discourse our woes, felt several years,
And wanting breath to speak help me with tears. (1.4.18–9)
left me breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death. (2.1.6–7)
But if the prince do live, let us salute him,
Or know what ground’s made happy by his breath. (2.4.27–8)
To begin with, then, breath is, proverbially, life.27 The indistinctness of the metaphor, however, complicates the proverb somewhat. Simultaneously, ‘death remembered’ is a prompt to consider one’s mortality; is obscuring, like breath on a mirror; and is itself a validation of life, again like breath on a mirror.28 Breath is the basis of this dispersion of meaning. Next, we have the construction of breath/wind/spreader of vice as discussed above. The following instance – ‘Let your breath cool yourself’ – is an example of that construction made literal, as Antiochus implores the Messenger both to be refreshed by his own conversation and to ensure that Antiochus ‘sees clear’. The subsequent two examples, with Cleon lamenting the demise of Tarsus, figure breath as failing – a necessary, but absent means to communicate ‘woes’. Thus breath does not spread vice or danger, as before, but is tantalisingly absent at the time of need to signal emergency. By the time we reach the example in the storm, the word has assumed a panoply of meanings and associations. The final instance, spoken about Pericles, envisions breath as indicative of a semi-materialistic afterlife, as though the wandering wind which had carried the prince could be buried with him.
The commonplace of tears as rainy/tempestuous here finds its counterpart in the breath as wind.29 It is much more common to find such a correlation with sighing as in Coriolanus: ‘I have been blown out of your gates with sighs’ (5.2.73–4) or Titus: ‘Then must my sea be moved with her sighs’ (3.1.228) or Antony and Cleopatra: ‘we cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report’ (1.2.152–4). Wilkins’s section of Pericles, however, is less precise in preferring breath, and consequently constructs a lasting parallel which finds the wind more closely connected to bodily existence – the very substantive elements of life, rather than emotional expression. When Pericles employs the word in the storm, he is entangling himself in a nuanced system of signifiers which implicates him in the cause as well as the effect of the shipwreck: his is the life of which he speaks and the wind which blows it. The editorial emendation, ‘left me breath’ – as opposed to ‘left my breath’ – has the attractive quality of briefly rendering Pericles as breath and nothing more. The Quarto phrase imagines a breath which can think – hence the emendation – and this, given the range of meanings to which the word is put, is perhaps not out of the question: either way, the point remains the same, with Pericles as breath. As Gossett notes, breath is not used beyond the second act and is therefore only in the section of the play ascribed to George Wilkins.30 Curiously, Wilkins only uses breath once in Painful Adventures. Another play of Wilkins’s, though, The Miseries of Inforst Mariage (1607) contains a phrase which would not be out of place in Pericles: ‘As neere to misery had bin our breath, | As where the thundring pellet strikes is death’.31 For Wilkins, it seems, the cause and effect of breath is never too far from meteorological consequence. Indeed, it might be said that the self-imposed silence which Pericles enters in the second half of the play is a direct response to each kind of breath which had hitherto been imagined: he avoids speech and is wholly committed to ‘the wandering wind’. I shall return to this idea, and its resonance in the Shakespearean section of the play, below.
So far, I have shown that in Wilkins’s section of the play we find a network of allusions centred on the storm. Jove acts as a figure for illicit sexual activity as well as lightning. Lightning, moreover, purges that sexual activity. Similarly, the image of breath for Wilkins is replete with associations: it is life, wind, vice and death at various points. Wilkins’s employment of the storm inheres in these complex protean metaphors. Through them, a punitive, moralising aesthetic emerges.
As I have noted, the point at which Shakespeare is now usually conceded to assume the major creative role in the play is the storm of Act 3, Scene 1. Here, editors find ‘Shakespearean indicators’ in the opening speech, and comment on the complexity of the verse. 32 Gossett recalls the opening of King Lear’s Act 3, Scene 2, drawing attention to similarities and differences. Occasionally, the storm of 3.1 is taken as some sort of manifestation of authorial advent, as by Raphael Lyne:
[T]here may be a special moment of traumatic arrival in Pericles as Shakespeare takes over the play, using an excessively pivotal speech as a coded way of announcing his presence; so at least it may seem to readers and audiences of romances who know that storms come at critical junctures, as in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.33
The readers and audiences to whom Lyne is referring are necessarily thinking retrospectively, at least with regard to the plays he mentions, which postdate Pericles. Such readers would also need conveniently to forget the earlier storm in the play. If there is a ‘traumatic arrival’ here, it is surely the result of the immediacy of the storm. The Senecan technique of relating various violent situations and atrocities rather than acting them is abandoned, again drawing comparisons with King Lear, which brings such actions on to the stage (not only in the storm scenes, of course, but in the loss of Gloucester’s eyes). The audience have already seen the surviving Pericles ashore and wishing for death. Here, they join him in the storm, desperate for life – his own, Thaisa’s and the unborn Marina:
The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell, and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep. O, still
Thy deafening dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble sulphurous flashes! O, how, Lychorida!
How does my queen? – Thou stormest venomously;
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman’s whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard. Lychorida! – Lucina, O,
Divinest patroness and midwife gentle
To those that cry by night, convey thy deity
Aboard our dancing boat; make swift the pangs
Of my queen’s travails!
(3.1.1–14)
The tenor of Pericles’s speech depends on the fact that, unlike those characters in, say, King Lear and Julius Caesar who exhibit fear and defiance, he is in considerable danger of death. Of course, the death that looms largest is not his own, but Thaisa’s, and the subtleties of Pericles’s soliloquy make use of the juxtaposed dangers of tempest and childbirth. As we have seen, Wilkins managed to conflate the sexual identity of Antiochus’s daughter with ideas of the threat of Jove in terms of rape and, ultimately, storm. Here, Shakespeare introduces the notion that the dangers of storm and labour are metaphorically resonant. It is this very juxtaposition which adds to the complexity of the verse, a characteristic which is important in the critical case for Shakespeare’s composing hand.34 ‘How does my queen? – Thou stormest venomously’ is a clear example of how the competing forces of Pericles’s fears jostle for space in the formulaic boundaries of iambic pentameter. Neither concern can develop fully because of the urgency of the other. Clearer still is the implicit connection drawn between storm and childbirth by the invocation of a deity for each. Thus ‘god of this great vast’ and ‘thou that hast | Upon the winds command’ are called upon, referring, presumably, to Aeolus, Neptune or Tempestates, just as Lucina, goddess of childbirth is summoned. As Wilkins called on Jove to conflate storm and sexual violence, then, so Shakespeare alludes to pagan gods of sea, storm and childbirth. But for all the reference to gods, each writer prioritises the human experience of the storm. Antiochus is struck with Jove’s lightning bolt, and Pericles’s cries are representations of his inability to take control. For it is no accident here that Pericles’s invocations are rendered as impotent through diction such as ‘deafening’ and ‘whisper … | Unheard’. Nor is it coincidental that the ‘nimble sulphurous flashes’ of lightning compare unfavourably to Thaisa’s ‘pangs’ which Pericles wishes Lucina could ‘make swift’. Each god in Pericles’s speech is wished as ‘gentle’ or ‘gently’. The wish seems forlorn as the initial long assonant sounds of ‘vast’, ‘hast’ and ‘brass’ give way to the guttural insistence of the three desperate ‘O’s. Meanwhile, the relentless alliteration (‘god/great’, ‘heaven/hell/hast’, ‘deafening/dreadful’, ‘whistle/whisper’, ‘Lychorida/Lucina’, ‘cry convey’) seems to punctuate – or puncture – those cries. If breath for Wilkins is an idea replete with metaphorical possibilities, then for Shakespeare here it is the actor’s voice, subject to, and interrupted by, the movement of the storm just as his words create it.
Pericles himself is subjected to the elements more than most Shakespearean characters. Wilkins’s storms compare to those of II Maccabees and II Kings, and we can continue such comparison with Shakespeare’s scenes. As others have pointed out, the storm at the beginning of Act 3 recalls the account, in the book of Luke, of Jesus calming the sea at Galilee: ‘And he arose, and rebuked the winde, and the waves of water: and they ceased, and it was calme’.35 The crucial component of those New Testament verses in relation to Pericles is the use of the word ‘rebuked’, which is apparently echoed by Pericles: ‘The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges’ (3.1.1). Given that Jesus calms the seas and Pericles merely yells at them, such linguistic parallels are important if we are to maintain the significance of the allusion. ‘Rebuke’, however, is elsewhere used in the Bible in relation to controlling the elements, as Malone pointed out glossing the same line, quoting from Psalms: ‘the waters wolde stand above the mountaines. But at thy rebuke they flee: at the voice of thy thunder thei haste away’.36 The marginal note of the Geneva Bible offers the interpretation ‘If by thy power thou didest not bridle the rage of the waters, it were not possible, but the whole worlde shulde be destroied’. Rebuke, then, is readily understood in elemental terms. Even though the Psalm describes the Creation, not a storm, it does not follow that Luke’s instance of rebuke used in the storm should be acknowledged as an influence on Pericles. For, as we have seen with Wilkins’s storms, the Biblical reference is not so direct and simple. Pericles’s Act 3, Scene 1, in addition to, perhaps more than the passage from Luke, bears a similarity to the book of Jonah.37 This similarity is found not simply in terms of its narrative – the storm is constructed as dependent upon a passenger of a ship – but also in the way that the weather is imagined. Rather than figuring the storm as a manifestation of God’s anger or vengefulness, the passage allows for greater complexity:
Then said thei unto him, What shal we do unto thee, that the sea maie be calme unto us? (for the sea wroght and was troublous) And he said unto them, Take me, and cast me into the sea: so shal the sea be calme unto you: for I knowe that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.38
Pericles’s main parallel with the story of Jonah is clear enough: a passenger is thrown into the sea in order to calm it. In the play, of course, it is Thaisa, whether presumed or actually dead, who is cast into the water: ‘Sir, your queen must overboard. The sea works high, the wind is loud and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead’ (47–9). An important difference between the two texts is that the sailors of Pericles are determined to carry out the action, certain that they are correct in determining the cause of the storm, whereas in Jonah, the crew draw lots to establish why the tempest has arisen. Once Jonah has drawn the lot, the sailors are still unwilling to carry out his prophetic advice, but attempt to approach the shore: ‘Nevertheles, the men rowed to bring it to the land, but thei colde not: for the sea wroght, and was troublous against them’.39 This is in contrast with Pericles’s meek response to the Master’s demand: ‘That’s your superstition’ (50). Despite these differences, the threat to the ship in Jonah is great, just as in Pericles, and in each case the storm is attributed to supernatural causes, and subdued by the casting of a passenger overboard.
Pericles in each half of the play rails at the elements, and the stars or gods responsible for them. For Wilkins, those elements are decisive. We see Pericles after the shipwreck; we learn of the swift death of Antiochus and his daughter. For Shakespeare, the storm is not as certain. We witness the lived experience of Pericles on the ship, and the gods to whom he alludes do not manifest themselves. Rather, Shakespeare’s emphasis is on the narrative of human agency within the storm. There is a parallel distinction in the Bible verses. Whereas in II Kings and Exodus the action and diction of the storms tend to emphasise God’s message and power, and in Luke, Jesus’s ability to calm the elements, the depiction of the sea-storm in Jonah is weighted towards the human experience. Although the tempest is decidedly the work of God,40 the bulk of the chapter deals with the coping strategies of the crew and Jonah. The fear of the sailors is emphasised repeatedly: ‘the mariners were afraied, and cryed everie man unto his god’, ‘Then were the men exceedingly afraid’, ‘Then the men feared the Lord excedingly’.41 Similarly, the calm resolution of Jonah is shown to contrast with that fear.42 Gone is the narrator of II Kings and Exodus who depicted the voice and motives of God alongside the storm; instead that voice and those motives are expounded by the figures in the storm, who are necessarily emotional. Just as the strong judgemental tones of Gower and Helicanus seem to echo the Biblical accounts given, so the Shakespearean section of the text resonates with the methodology of Jonah. Shakespeare here, characteristically, is reluctant to direct blame or offer judgement and instead portrays a scene which owes its nuance to the experiential dialogue of its many characters. This is evident, for example, in the language of the mariners:
MASTER Slack the bowlines there! – Thou wilt not, wilt thou? Blow and split thyself.
SAILOR But sea-room, an the brine and cloudy billow kiss the moon, I care not.
(43–6)
The immediacy of such lines is not apparent in the play’s first sea-storm; although Wilkins has Pericles entering ‘wet’, the many voices of Shakespeare’s storm are reduced to that of Pericles and the spectating fishermen. Furthermore the imperative and present tenses of Shakespeare’s lines are not to be found in those of Wilkins, removing the audience from the propinquity of the storm. The frenetic activity of mariners in Act 3, Scene 1 is also found in Jonah: they ‘cast the wares that were in the ship, into the sea to lighten it of them’.43 As in the play, the emotions of the sailors in the biblical text are depicted through the structure of their speech, for example in the frustrated guise of the rhetorical question: ‘Then were the men exceedingly afrayde, and said unto him, Why hast thou done this?’44 Both Wilkins’s and Shakespeare’s approaches to the storm operate on a metaphorical level, then, but Shakespeare’s is also characterised by its practicality, both in the fact that it is played out on stage and in the language of the characters who do so.
There are phrases in both Shakespeare’s section of the play and that of Wilkins which allude more explicitly to the Book of Jonah. In Act 3, Scene 1, addressing the body of Thaisa, Pericles laments: ‘the belching whale | And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse’ (3.1.62–3). As Gossett has pointed out, the fact that Jonah is described as though dead strengthens the connection between the two texts: ‘Being now swallowed up of death … he was in the fishes belly as in a grave or place of darkness’.45 The Biblical story had also been touched upon after the play’s first shipwreck:
I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: ’a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful … he should have swallowed me too, and when I had been in his belly I would have kept such a jangling of the bells that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church and parish up again. (2.1.29–42)
The story of Jonah here is explicit enough, although the Geneva Bible mentions the creature as a fish, not a whale. What makes this passage more noteworthy is not only that it anticipates the reappearance of themes from the Book of Jonah later on, but also that it follows the Fisherman’s allusion to the porpoise as a predictor of storms. The sight of dolphins or porpoises playing near land is mentioned as a precursor of tempests in several ancient meteorological texts and the phenomenon had found its way into proverbial English.46 The significant point here is that this discussion leads into a scenario in which the world is under threat from the whale (here, simply the biggest fish) and that a Deluge-like scenario is played out in metaphor. The storm precedes the fish just as the fish foretell the storm. This, of course, is very much the case for Jonah, whose complex irony inheres in his situation of finding safety from the tempest inside the creature whose appearance would predict the tempest, as much as it inheres in finding a dry room in the sea. The storm precedes the fish. That the Fishermen’s discussion overlays the simple structures of the Deluge and the story of Jonah with an intricate argument on the greed of humankind is illustrative of the play’s insistence on appropriating Biblical text. This being Wilkins’s work, it should not be surprising, even in this moment of light relief, to find a binary ethic with simplistic answers: ring the religious bell to curtail – even reverse – the greedy destruction. As Richard Halpern writes, Wilkins here ‘seems to invoke this typological framework in the fishermen’s image of salvation through the ringing of the church bells and through the fishermen themselves, from whose profession Jesus recruited his disciples’.47 What Halpern does not take into account is that, in contrast, when Shakespeare uses the story, it is to contextualise the death of the innocent Thaisa. The requisition of the strands of the Jonah story for starkly differing ends is a neat illustration of the approach of the two playwrights. Just as in Jonah, Shakespeare emphasises the human experience of storm, the strategies of bargaining and the development of fear, acceptance and resolution, rather than the indelicate message from the heavens found elsewhere in the Bible, and elsewhere in Pericles.
As with Wilkins, Shakespeare’s storm is not confined to a single scene in the play. I have already looked in detail at the brief conversation between Marina and Leonine and the ways in which a self-sustaining understanding of the wind is formed.48 This scene (4.1) also reflects the same approach to the storm I have been proposing. Marina’s evoking of the direction of the wind at the time of her birth accords with the shift of tense as she moves from soliloquy to conversation and into narration. ‘When I was born the wind was in the north’, establishes a sense of impossible recollection and a testament to the power of the story: the curious minutiae of the scene bear the characteristic of received understanding, as there is no possibility of Marina remembering the night, let alone the detail. As the supplier of this knowledge, Marina’s nurse Lychorida, is invoked, the tense alters: ‘My father, as nurse says, did never fear’ (51). Again, this bears the touch both of the impossible and its relation to storytelling – Lychorida is recently deceased, but her story is still current, still voiced. Indeed, it is a story Marina immediately begins to retell, or more accurately, since it is still being told, to maintain. The events are told in the past tense and this is continued for several lines, until Marina moves from conversation into fully developed narration. ‘When I was born. | Never was waves nor wind more violent’ (57–8) is her response to Leonine’s question, but as her story becomes more detailed, she returns to the present tense:
And from the ladder tackle washes off
A canvas climber. ‘Ha’ says one, ‘wolt out?’
And with a dropping industry they skip
From stem to stern. The boatswain whistles, and
The master calls and trebles their confusion.
(60–3)
The shift into the present tense again ensures that minute details of the scene are again made vivid, again experienced. The reported dialogue of the seamen, their frantic activity and the disorder of the storm are all conveyed. Furthermore, Marina has knowledge of mariners’ terms and nautical colloquialisms. Partly, this may be attributed to the feeling, formulated by many, that Pericles is ‘a play controlled by the sustained awareness of the sea’, or that the sea ‘has the part of a principal character’.49 The proximity of the scene to the sea is also relevant, and is emphasised by Dionyza (25). More significant than these factors, however, is the way in which Marina seems to inhabit her story: it is clear from a comparison of this speech and the scene it recollects that Marina’s details have not appeared on stage earlier.50 Apparently having learned the story from Lychorida, Marina is supplementing the staged version of the storm as though it were still onstage. The tense and the detail are both complicit in reifying Marina’s earlier pronouncement, ‘This world to me is as a lasting storm’ (18). If the sea is a principal character of the play, the storm is that character’s personality: just as the characters continue to use the diction of the sea, so they consistently identify with its oragious character and ensure that the waves are never still. Wilkins symbolises; Shakespeare dramatises the human capacity to symbolise.
In Pericles, therefore, we may see Shakespeare’s storms in a direct comparison with those of his collaborator. We have seen the ways in which the same source is used differently by each writer, with regard to the Bible. Bardolatry and canonicism may prescribe to the modern reader the idea of which of the play’s sections is more valuable, but in Pericles’s storms the separate approaches allow each example to function differently without becoming repetitive. For just as it is no coincidence that we find two distinct voices in the play, it is no surprise that they seem to evince two discrete world views: the judgemental diction and absolutes of Gower, Helicanus and the Pericles of the first two acts are juxtaposed with the moral exoneration of Lysimachus and Bolt; Wilkins’s providential lightning is replaced by the ethical intricacy of Shakespeare’s storm; the omniscient narration of Gower and Helicanus gives way to a generically sustained narrative ignorance and silence. Rather than form a hierarchy with regard to the two sections of the play, we might, more helpfully, conclude that the continual use of the storm enables Pericles to represent these shifting perspectives at once delicately and forcefully.
Whilst it is a fragmented play in many respects, the treatment of storm imparts a certain continuity. The audience are introduced to the storm ex post facto: it has delivered Pericles to Pentapolis; it has killed Antiochus and his daughter. In the first acts of the play, the storm is compartmentalised and ripe for unopposed moralisation. From the third act on, however, the audience encounter the storm in medias res and are necessarily implicated. We apprehend, but also imagine it; witness it but also create it (as implored to by Gower). Pericles stages the received sea-storms of Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and Othello and then progresses beyond them. Marina’s image of the world as a ‘lasting storm’ is more than a metaphor: it is the play’s performance aesthetic.