SOURCE: "Language and Role in Pericles," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn, 1986, pp. 550-66.

In this essay, Dickey analyzes the characters of Pericles and Gower and the peculiarities of their dramatic and metadramatic relationships.

Criticism of Pericles traditionally has been attracted either to its textual difficulties or to its position as apprentice romance. Partially deprived of Shakespeare's authorship, disowned by the First Folio, its quarto bad, the bastard Pericles has provoked numerous speculations about its parentage of collaboration, adaptation, or revision. Otherwise, the play is valued chiefly for its transitional place in the canon, where Shakespeare turns from tragedy to romance.¹ Thus Pericles appears as an abbreviated King Lear, ending with reunion and reconciliation but without death, or as a trial run through the still evolving romance paradigm, the "rhythm of pain, endurance, and joy."² Either way, of course, attention is deflected from the play itself, as...