Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by

HENRY N. HUDSON,

in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

GINN & HEATH:

J. S. CUSHING, PRINTER, 16 HAWLEY STREET,
BOSTON.

IRST heard of through an entry in the Stationers' Register

FIRST

by Edward Blount, dated the 20th of May, 1608. The next year, a quarto edition of it was published, the title-page reading as follows: " The late and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre: with the true relation of the history, adventures, and fortunes of the said Prince; as also the no less strange and worthy accidents of the birth and life of his daughter Marina. As it hath been divers and sundry times acted by his Majesty's Servants at the Globe on the Bank-side. By William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson." The play was issued again in the same form in 1611; also in 1619, 1630, and 1635; but was not included in any collection of the Poet's dramas till the folio of 1664. In all these copies the text is shockingly corrupt and mangled throughout; each later issue being just like the earlier in this respect, only more

So.

"stolen

It is all but certain that the first issue of Pericles was and surreptitious"; and the state of the text naturally infers the copy to have been made up, at least in part, from short-hand reports taken at the theatre. Why the play was not included in the folio of 1623, as also how it came to be published by Gosson after being registered by Blount, are questions not likely to be settled. Blount was one of the publishers of the folio, and he may have transferred his right to Gosson, or the latter may have managed to get a copy in advance of the former. As the play was vastly popular on the stage, this would naturally render the company the more unwilling to have it printed, and at the same time sharpen the desire of publishers to get hold of it. And its exclusion from the folio may well have grown from the fact of its being a joint production of several authors. On this point, Collier writes as follows: 66 Ben Jonson, when printing the volume of his works, in 1616, excluded for this reason The Case is

Altered, and Eastward Ho! in the composition of which he had been engaged with others; and when the player-editors of the folio of 1623 were collecting their materials, they perhaps omitted Pericles because some living author might have an interest in it; and the fact that the publishers of the folio could not purchase the right of the bookseller, who had then the property in Pericles, may have been the real cause of its non-insertion."

66

As to the time of the writing, we have seen the title-page of 1609 describing Pericles as the late and much admired play." It is also spoken of as "a new play," in a poetical tract entitled Run Red-cap, printed in 1609. But the most decisive item of evidence in this behalf is a novel by George Wilkins published in 1608, with a title-page reading as follows: The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre; being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower." As the novel was thus avowedly founded on the play, the latter could hardly have been written later than 1607; and the great popularity of the drama was probably what induced Wilkins to set forth the matter in another form. The novel, as may be seen from several extracts here given in the notes, is of considerable value in helping to clear up some points in the text of the play. And the greater completeness of some of the speeches, as there given, is further argument that the text of the play has reached us in a mangled and imperfect

state.

The story on which Pericles was founded is very ancient, and is met with in various forms. It occurs in that old store-house of popular fiction the Gesta Romanorum, and its antiquity is shown by the existence of an Anglo-Saxon version. Latin manuscripts of it are said to be extant, dating as far back as the tenth century. The story was accessible to Shakespeare in at least two forms. One of these was a prose translation from the Gesta Romanorum by Laurence Twine, first printed in 1576, and again in 1607, with the following title: "The Pattern of Painful Adventures: Containing the most excellent, pleasant, and variable History of the strange accidents that befell unto Prince Apollonius, the Lady Lucina his wife, and Tharsia his daughter." The other of these forms was the version of old John Gower, who

rendered it into English verse, and made it a part of his Confessio Amantis, with the title " Appollinus, the Prince of Tyre." Gower, it scarce need be said, lived at the same time with Chaucer, and well deserves to be remembered and studied as one of the masters of English poetry in that age. His Confessio Amantis was first printed by Caxton in 1483. In Shakespeare's day it was very popular; but in later times the author has been well-nigh lost sight of in the outshining brightness of his great contemporary. In the story of Prince Appollinus, Gower avowedly took his incidents from a metrical version in the Pantheon, or Universal Chronicle, of Godfrey of Viterbo, which was made in the latter part of the twelfth century. The fact of the story being so well-known and so popular in Gower's poem was of course the reason why he was made to serve as Chorus in the play.

Touching the authorship of Pericles, there is room for a good deal of discussion. On the one hand, that Shakespeare did not write all, or even half, of the play, is abundantly certain; the style and manner of the most of it being utterly unlike his at any period. On the other hand, that portions of it were written by him, is not doubted. Even if there were no external evidence to the point, his mighty hand is too manifest in some parts to admit of any question on this score. And it is equally evident that wherever his hand is visible, the workmanship is clearly that of the master, not of the apprentice; the characteristics being the same as those of his other plays known to have been written between 1605 and 1610. But whether the whole were written by him and another person or other persons working together; or whether his part were written by way of altering and completing what had been done by others; or whether his part were written first, and then taken in hand by others, and interwoven with their own vastly inferior workmanship; - these are questions about which there have been, and will most likely continue to be, various opinions.

Of these three alternatives, Mr. F. G. Fleay takes the latter decidedly; and his judgment proceeds upon so close, so minute, and so exhaustive a study of the subject, that it may well challenge, if not carry, our full assent. I can but condense his pre

sentation of the matter, retaining, as nearly as practicable his own language.

With regard to the authorship of this play, we may take for granted that the first two Acts are not Shakespeare's; this having been so long admitted by all critics of note, that it is not worth the while to repeat the evidence in detail. In order, however, to extinguish any lingering doubt, he gives the metrical evidence. The play consists of verse scenes, prose scenes, and the Gower chorus. Taking only the verse scenes, we find so marked a difference between the first two Acts and the last three, as to render it astonishing that they should ever have been supposed the work of one author. Total number of lines in the first two Acts, 835; of rhyme lines, 195; of double endings, 72: total number of lines in the last three Acts, 827; of rhyme lines, 14; of double endings, 106. The differences in the other items are of themselves conclusive; but the difference in the number of rhymes is such that the most careless critic ought long since to have noticed it. With regard to this main question, then, there can be no doubt: the last three Acts alone can be Shakespeare's; the other part is by some one of a different school. But we have minor questions of some interest to settle. The first of these is, Who wrote the scenes in the brothel, the second, fifth, and sixth of Act iv.? Not Shakespeare, decidedly; for these are totally unlike Shakespeare's in feeling on such matters. He would not have indulged in the morbid anatomy of such loathsome characters: he would have covered the ulcerous sores with a film of humour, if it were a necessary part of his moral surgery to treat them at all: above all, he would not have married Marina to a man whose acquaintance she had first made in a public brothel, to which his motives of resort were not recommendatory, however involuntary her sojourn there may have been. A still stronger argument is the absence of any allusion in the after-scenes to these three.

But, if these scenes are not Shakespeare's, the clumsy Gower chorus is not his either; and this brings us to the only theory that explains all the difficulties of the play. The usual theory has been that Shakespeare finished a play begun by some one else; that is, that he deliberately chose a story of incest, which, hav