Shakespeare seems deliberately to re-create the tone and atmosphere of the early medieval romances, too, on the very good and practical grounds that they could still have a startling effect upon their spectators. Longinus wrote of the Odyssey, “Homer shows that, as genius ebbs, it is the love of romance that characterises old age.”6 The Shakespearian romances may be an indication of advancing age but not of ebbing inspiration. His late plays are unique in the history of Elizabethan drama. With their combination of music, spectacle and vision, they fulfil all the conditions of older drama while at the same time providing a wholly contemporaneous interest in narrative and adventure. The medieval atmosphere of Pericles is in fact deliberately created with the appearance of the fourteenth-century poet John Gower as Chorus, at the beginning of every act. Gower’s Chorus lends the play the form of ritual, exactly the effect that was intended. Ritual is another element involved in the enchanted atmosphere of romance.
After Shakespeare’s death his fellow actors excluded Pericles from the Folio edition of his works in 1623. They seem to have taken the view that it was in part a collaboration and therefore did not fit an attribution to William Shakespeare. Most historians and textual scholars agree that much of the play was written by a second playwright, but there are also scenes and passages that are undoubtedly and authentically composed by Shakespeare. The identity of the second dramatist has been a matter of speculation, but one candidate emerges above all others. At some point in 1608 a playwright in his mid-thirties, George Wilkins, published a novelisation of the play entitled The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. The novel is so close to the play, and is so intimate with its structure, that it has generally been agreed that Wilkins himself collaborated with Shakespeare in the composition of the drama. Wilkins was writing his novel from memory, his “foul papers” being now in the possession of the King’s Men, and it is likely that the play proved so popular in the spring months of 1608 that Wilkins rushed into publication during the period when the playhouses were closed once more.
In the years between 1604 and 1608 Wilkins wrote other works of a popular nature, among them plays and prose narratives. The King’s Men had performed his The Miseries of Inforst Mariage in the year before, so the connection between him and Shakespeare was already there. Wilkins wrote the first sections of Pericles, and parts of the other acts, while Shakespeare wrote the rest. It should also be noted here, given the fact that Pericles has often been considered to be a “Catholic” play, that Wilkins himself adhered to the old faith.
It might be wondered why the older and much more famous dramatist would condescend to work with a tyro. But Shakespeare was a man of the theatre. He was competent and practical, no doubt ready to work with anyone for the good of the company. It is not at all likely that the collaborators sat down together with their principal sources, Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Laurence Twine’s The Patterne of Painefulle Aduentures, before sharing out the plot of Pericles. It is much more likely that Wilkins suggested the idea of the play and himself devised the plot. His earlier venture with the King’s Men had been relatively successful, and he was already trying his hand at prose romances. The company might have considered him to be a promising dramatist. After essaying a first version of Pericles, however, he may have discovered himself to be unequal to the task. He may have been in trouble with the authorities, or even briefly imprisoned. He may simply have run out of invention. So the work was handed to Shakespeare for completion. Shakespeare could on occasions act as a superior “play doctor” bringing together all the themes and strands of a plot. His imagination seems, in fact, to have been quickened by the last sections of Pericles, in which the restoration of Marina and the resolution of family loss are the important motifs. He added significantly to these scenes, and tended to leave the earlier stage business as it was. Since the play was extraordinarily popular, he made the right decision.
The prospect of Wilkins being arrested or imprisoned is no biographical fantasy. George Wilkins was a tavern-keeper and brothel-owner whose establishment was on the corner of Turnmill Street and Cow Cross Street. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the site is still that of a flourishing public house. Wilkins had a reputation for violence and was regularly cited in the proceedings of Middlesex sessions court, particularly for assaults against the young female prostitutes whom he employed. He was accused, for example, of “kikkinge a woman on the Belly which was then greate with childe.”7 One of the guarantors of Wilkins on this occasion was Henry Gosson, of St. Lawrence Pountney; it was Gosson who issued the play of Pericles in quarto form. It seems probable that Wilkins obtained the play for him from the King’s Men. Since he had written much of it, he may have had some claim to proprietorship. It might be added that, at a later date, Wilkins was convicted of being a thief and of harbouring criminals in his inn.
Shakespeare may also have been acquainted with Wilkins’s father, a poet and well-known Londoner, who had died of the plague five years before. But it is also likely that Shakespeare encountered Wilkins through the agency of the Mountjoys; when the daughter of the house married one of the apprentices, Stephen Belott, the young couple became tenants of Wilkins at his inn on the corner of Turnmill Street. Belott himself had been well acquainted with Wilkins, and had eaten meals at his establishment. It was the most notorious of all London quarters, filled with brothels and cheap taverns, but it was also one of the most interesting. This was the world in which Shakespeare encountered his collaborator. It is not unusual to find Shakespeare in what might be called “low” company — he has been discovered before with the landladies of Southwark in an affray — and it is not even occasion for surprise. Even when wealthy and successful, he fitted himself to any kind of society.
PART IX Blackfriars
Ben Jonson’s Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611): designs by Inigo Jones. The style and staging of plays changed with the move to “indoors” theatres such as Blackfriars.
CHAPTER 82. As in a Theatre the Eies of Men
Since the doors of the playhouses were shut for eighteen months, from the summer of 1608, it may seem a strange time for the King’s Men to be engaged in a very expensive theatrical speculation. Nevertheless at the beginning of August 1608, just when the theatres had closed down, Shakespeare and six of his colleagues leased the Blackfriars Theatre for a period of twenty-one years. The Children of the Chapel Royal had been disbanded, after a particularly contentious production that had scandalised the French Ambassador, and so their venue was available for hire.
Each “sharer” among the King’s Men paid a seventh part of the annual rent of £40 to Cuthbert Burbage. There was also the cost of necessary repairs. Very little had been done during the last years of the childrens’ occupancy, and the playhouse “ran far into decay for want of reparations.”1 It may have seemed a tempting prospect, but the King’s Men must also have had great faith in the long-term financial health of the London drama. It may be that they were also trying to circumvent the ban on public playing at a time of plague by using a “private” playhouse; there is a note of a reward from the king in January 1609 “for their private practise in the time of infeccon.”2 This suggests that they did perform plays, under the cover that they were rehearsing for the court dramas of the Christmas season.