The Sea and Dramatic Structure in Shakespeare's Pericles

Abstract

Under the influence of Greek romances and the New Comedies of Plautus and Terence, Shakespeare's late plays or romances are set in the sea. In these Mediterranean plays, the sea is the setting for shipwrecks and sufferings of separation, but it is also the place for a rebirth and resurrection, and a family reunion. In the sea, sorrow changes into joy, death into resurrection, and separation into reunion. This sea of changes represents loss of an identity from Shakespeare's early comedies onwards to his major tragedies and Roman plays, as a drop of water confounding itself in the water. However, in his romances the sea travelers experience their loss of identity after their initial experience of a sin, and succeed in regaining their lost identity by finding out their lost family members. The tripartite phases of identity crisis, identity dissolution and the final identity re-solution of the main characters correspond to the three parts of plot development in Shakespeare's last plays: protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe. Shakespeare inherits the traditional plot structure of the New Comedy and creatively varies it in his last romance plays. In Pericles, the titular hero experiences an Edenic fall in his marriage proposal and riddle test. Seeing into the incest of Antiochus with his daughter, he contaminates himself with the sin of thwarted sexual desire and is haunted by his vision of distorted feminine sexuality. This crisis in his identity comprises the protasis or the problem of the play. Afraid of murder and war, he puts himself to the sea of wandering and shipwrecks. Pericles's repeated sea voyage dissolves his identity as the prince of Tyre and lowers himself to a kind of a wet beggar. The dissolution of Pericles's identity on the sea in the middle part of the play is dramatized by his comatose state and his speechlessness, a drastic change from the famous Athenian orator. The stormy turbulence of the sea reflects the passions of his mind and a patient conformity to the cosmic order. The experience of sea suffering and the deadly dissolution of his identity corresponds to the epitasis or the complicated knotting of the plot. In his final meeting with his daughter and his wife, both supposed to be dead and lost, Pericles enjoys the experience of resurrection and regains his identity as father and husband. This family reunion brings his tragic problem to a resolution or a catastrophe. The sea in this experimental epic play is the setting for changes of events and identity. Shakespeare's sea is more than a mere setting in his romances, and does play both thematic and structural functions.