Marina’s School: Education and Vulnerability in Pericles

Abstract

ABSTRACT On the shores of both Pericles and modern injustice, this essay focuses particularly on the play’s account of education and the difference it makes. Reading Pericles’s escape from shipwreck alongside the COVID university allows us to see both the play’s interest in our differential vulnerability and the university’s function in maintaining that difference. In the second half, I turn to Marina. By reading moments of editorial intervention in the text of the play, I propose that the play’s investment in whiteness as property activates the settler-colonial history of my own university, at a time in which legislative efforts continually seek to obscure that history.