SOURCE: Cutts, John P. “Pericles' ‘Downright Violence.’” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1969): 275-93.

In the following essay, Cutts argues that the outer disharmony Pericles encounters reflects the inner disharmony of his own character.

F. D. Hoeniger, in the introduction to his edition¹ of Pericles, asserts that G. Wilson Knight² is wrong in his argument that Pericles is somehow infected by the evil of Antiochus' daughter whom he tried to woo, and that Kenneth Muir's³ suggestion that Thaisa upon suddenly marrying Pericles broke a vow to Diana is equally misleading, and that to seek for a moral cause of Pericles' troubles is to assume the role of Job's comforters. On the contrary I think that to take Hoeniger's own position that Pericles is the plaything of Fortune and the gods, that he is “an impeccably good man, man without defect,” is to make of Pericles an unnecessary Job. From the totality of...