SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. “Pericles.” In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, pp. 603-13. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

In the following essay, Bloom presents an overview of Pericles, concentrating on the last three acts.

Shakespeare was occupied with Pericles in the winter of 1607-8, though scholars are not able to define the precise nature of that occupation. The first two acts of the play are dreadfully expressed, and cannot have been Shakespeare's, no matter how garbled in transmission. We have only a very bad quarto, but the inadequacy of so much of the text is probably not the reason why Pericles was excluded from the First Folio. Ben Jonson had a hand in editing the First Folio, and he had denounced Pericles as “a mouldy tale.” Presumably Jonson and Shakespeare's colleagues also knew that one George Wilkins was the primary author of the first two acts of the play...