Pericles, Prince of Tyre

My first reaction after seeing this play was that there were some heartwarming and also hilarious bits but that the play overall is one of the weirdest plays I've seen from Shakespeare. But the overall shape of the play comes from the classic "Apollonius of Tyre" and as with his other embellishments on existing material, the Bard managed to impart his qualities of humanity and humor onto a very odd play.

The hero, Pericles, starts the play by solving the riddle of a king and nearly loses his life as a result. The riddle of King Antiochus is supposed to be a challenge where a champion can win his daughter but lose his life upon failing. But solving the riddle reveals his incestuous relationship with his daughter and the king decides to kill Pericles for solving the riddle. Since he will kill anyone who either solves or fails to solve it, it's not clear whether the point is providing the king and his daughter a bit of sport.

Antiuchus sends his henchman Thaliart to kill Pericles, following him to Tyre when he flees for his life. Realizing the assassins are likely to follow him there, Pericles boards a ship and flees (rather than simply having Thaliart arrested or executed for coming to kill him in his own kingdom). Pericles' ship bestows food on a starving city of Tarsus and later sinks. He survives and wins the heart of Thaisa, who unfortunately appears to die on another ship during a storm, after giving him a daughter. Her body is dropped from the ship in a sealed box which conveniently protects her from drowning and she is revived by a kindly doctor. Pericles leaves his daughter Marina and her nurse with the people of Tarsus but, unfortunately, the queen tries to have the daughter killed when she grows up. Instead, she is kidnapped by pirates and sold into captivity in a brothel.
 

The character of Boult, a servant in the brothel, is played by Trevor Peacock, an actor who has played some terrific roles in the BBC Shakespeare series, including Lord Talbot (terror of the French) and Jack Cade (whose companion suggests "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers") in the first two Henry VI plays.

In the brothel, the plot really takes some comedic turns, with some seriously outrageous lines. Just as Marina appears, the brothel has had bad luck keeping suitably, er, staffed. At one point, Boult describes prospective customers anticipating sex with a virgin:

    'Faith, they listened to me as they would have
    hearkened to their father's testament. There was a
    Spaniard's mouth so watered, that he went to bed to
    her very description.

And another:

    I warrant you, mistress, thunder shall not so awake
    the beds of eels as my giving out her beauty stir up
    the lewdly-inclined. I'll bring home some to-night.

However, Marina's virtue is so strong that she converts prospective customers from lust to chastity, increasing the brothel's existing cash flow problems. Her virtue is so strong that Boult cannot even follow through with his plans to rape Marina and instead helps her find employment as a sort of healer. Meanwhile, her father revisits Tarsus and, believing Marina dead, sinks into despondency and mourning. But in the end, chance encounters reunite Pericles, Marina and Thaisa.

Pericles the play itself is narrated by a figure named Gower without any explanation of who Gower is. As it turns out, he is a 14th century poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. The screen shot below is of Gower on board a ship near the end of this play. I thought it conveyed a quiet, thoughtful sense of what viewing this play was like for me, as this was the last Shakespeare that I had never seen (blog post about THAT to follow).