“ W I S H E S FA LL O U T AS T H E Y ’ R E W I L L ’ D ” : A R T I S T , A U D I E N C E , A N D P E R I C L E S ’ S G O W E R RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES Mount Allison University M o s t critical readings of Pericles, insofar as they consider the role of Gower at all, exhibit a too-ready willingness to assume that extra-dramatic address, particularly in the form of a presenter, was a device essentially destructive of illusion,1 and that Shakespeare, in his use of Gower as chorus to Pericles, was therefore encouraging in the audience the kind of objective detachment appropriate to tragicomedy. In the early Elizabethan period, however, when choric figures had been common, there had been a need for a bridge between actor and audience simply because the aims and scope of the dramas were unfamiliar to their audiences, and explanations were neces sary. Far from being a distancing device, then, the choric figure would serve as a link between the audience and the play, often providing a general moral interpretation of which the play being presented was an exemplum. By the turn of the century, of course, and with the rise of the private theatres, prologues, epilogues, and choruses took on quite a different roie. The very familiarity of plays and players to audiences encouraged the discussion of technical devices and dramatic purposes in choruses, prologues, epilogues, and inductions that treated the audience as critics, students, or initiates (or, in the case of Jonson, scolded them that they were not so). In Pericles, then, Shakespeare was turning to a device that had first been used as a bridge between the audience and the stage to provide moral commentary, and was later used as a means of involving the audience in technical matters, but was by i6o8(?) out of date,2 obtrusive, and destructive of dramatic illusion. In spite of recent critical emphasis on the devices of detachment in Shake speare’s romances, however, it is possible that in Pericles as in the other ro mances there is elicited a quality of “delight” 3 that this criticism ignores; that this delight is associated with the audience’s belief in the moral framework of the work; and that to neglect, in emphasizing the devices of detachment, the equally important process of engagement, is to fail to consider that aspect of the play which sets it apart, together with the other romances, from other plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. English Studies in Canada, ix, i , March 1983 The creation of Gower is a case in point. I hope to show by looking closely at the Gower choruses in their context that although the passages may serve to distance the audience from simple involvement with character and action, they also serve Shakespeare’s attempt to lift our anticipation and belief to a level of communion with the process of the creative imagination that I have chosen to call “imaginative engagement.” In spite of the chorus in Shakespeare’s own Henry V and similar figures in Bamabe Barnes’s The Divell’s Charter (1607?), Day, Rowley and Wil kins’ The Travailes of Three English Brothers (1607?), and Anthony Munday ’s Robin Hood plays (1598?), the figure of Gower is unique in Renais sance drama.4 In every other case in which a choric figure similar to Gower is used, its function is a distancing one, soliciting our judgement rather than our imaginative assistance. It is perhaps significant that Gower’s only reference in Pericles to the audience’s judgement occurs in the first chorus,5 and that after the chorus to Act n there are no instructions merely to “see” or “ think” that are not augmented or qualified by an exhortation to “ imagine,” “believe,” or con tribute.6 Even in the introduction to a dumb show we are asked to help, not merely watch: Be attent, And time that is so briefly spent With your fine fancies quaintly eche: What’s dumb in show I’ll plain with speech, (m. ch. 11-14) At...