Mental Tempests, Seas of Trouble: The Perturbations of Shakespeare’s Pericles

Abstract

This essay considers how two early modern commonplaces, the “sea of troubles” and the “tempest of the mind,” helped to sustain the period’s exploration of human subjectivity--of the experience of suffering, in particular. While the former trope depicts the human subject as tossed by tumultuous waves, the latter takes the subject to be the source of tempest and tumult. The polyvalent maritime storm, through which selfhood is imagined as both water-tossed and water-like, asks whether it is possible to be a pragmatic agent while remaining at the mercy of emotion. The question is investigated at length in Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” a drama about a father who suffers at sea and a daughter who belongs mysteriously to it. The conceptual metaphors binding mind and water are borne out at length by the play’s central characters, both of whom comprehend themselves and their adversities in relation to the sea: Pericles’s self-allegorizing emerges as a counterpoint to unmanageable inward passions, and Marina combats the sordid realities of a shoreline underworld by fashioning a mythology of sea-birth. Shakespeare stages the fluidity with which human beings own and disown their perturbations—a fluidity apparently inscribed in the most intuitive oceanic commonplaces of the English Renaissance.