The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works
Page 340
What woman’s that?
DIANA
I am, my lord, a wretched Florentine,
Derived from the ancient Capilet.
My suit, as I do understand, you know,
And therefore know how far I may be pitied.
WIDOW (to the King)
I am her mother, sir, whose age and honour
Both suffer under this complaint we bring,
And both shall cease without your remedy.
KING
Come hither, Count. Do you know these women?
BERTRAM
My lord, I neither can nor will deny
But that I know them. Do they charge me further?
DIANA
Why do you look so strange upon your wife?
BERTRAM (to the King)
She’s none of mine, my lord.
DIANA If you shall marry
You give away this hand, and that is mine;
You give away heaven’s vows, and those are mine;
You give away myself, which is known mine,
For I by vow am so embodied yours
That she which marries you must marry me,
Either both or none.
LAFEU (to Bertram) Your reputation comes too short for my daughter, you are no husband for her.
BERTRAM (to the King)
My lord, this is a fond and desp’rate creature
Whom sometime I have laughed with. Let your
highness
Lay a more noble thought upon mine honour
Than for to think that I would sink it here.
KING
Sir, for my thoughts, you have them ill to friend
Till your deeds gain them. Fairer prove your honour
Than in my thought it lies.
DIANA
Good my lord,
Ask him upon his oath if he does think
He had not my virginity.
KING What sayst thou to her?
BERTRAM She’s impudent, my lord,
And was a common gamester to the camp.
DIANA (to the King)
He does me wrong, my lord. If I were so
He might have bought me at a common price.
Do not believe him. O behold this ring,
Whose high respect and rich validity
Did lack a parallel; yet for all that
He gave it to a commoner o’th’ camp,
If I be one.
COUNTESS
He blushes and ’tis hit.
Of six preceding ancestors, that gem;
Conferred by testament to th’ sequent issue
Hath it been owed and worn. This is his wife.
That ring’s a thousand proofs.
KING (to Diana)
Methought you said
You saw one here in court could witness it.
DIANA
I did, my lord, but loath am to produce
So bad an instrument. His name’s Paroles.
LAFEU
I saw the man today, if man he be.
KING
Find him and bring him hither. Exit one
BERTRAM
What of him?
He’s quoted for a most perfidious slave
With all the spots o’th’ world taxed and debauched,
Whose nature sickens but to speak a truth.
Am I or that or this for what he’ll utter,
That will speak anything?
KING
She hath that ring of yours.
BERTRAM
I think she has. Certain it is I liked her
And boarded her i‘th’ wanton way of youth.
She knew her distance and did angle for me,
Madding my eagerness with her restraint,
As all impediments in fancy’s course
Are motives of more fancy; and in fine
Her inf’nite cunning with her modern grace
Subdued me to her rate. She got the ring,
And I had that which my inferior might
At market price have bought.
DIANA
I must be patient.
You that have turned off a first so noble wife
May justly diet me. I pray you yet—
Since you lack virtue I will lose a husband—
Send for your ring, I will return it home,
And give me mine again.
BERTRAM I have it not.
KING (to Diana) What ring was yours, I pray you?
DIANA
Sir, much like the same upon your finger.
KING
Know you this ring? This ring was his of late.
DIANA
And this was it I gave him being abed.
KING
The story then goes false you threw it him
Out of a casement?
DIANA
I have spoke the truth.
Enter Paroles
BERTRAM (to the King)
My lord, I do confess the ring was hers.
KING
You boggle shrewdly; every feather starts you.—
Is this the man you speak of?
DIANA
Ay, my lord.
KING (to Paroles)
Tell me, sirrah—but tell me true, I charge you,
Not fearing the displeasure of your master,
Which on your just proceeding I’ll keep off—
By him and by this woman here what know you?
PAROLES So please your majesty, my master hath been an honourable gentleman. Tricks he hath had in him which gentlemen have.
KING
Come, come, to th’ purpose. Did he love this woman?
PAROLES Faith, sir, he did love her, but how?
KING How, I pray you?
PAROLES He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a woman.
KING How is that?
PAROLES He loved her, sir, and loved her not.
KING As thou art a knave and no knave. What an equivocal companion is this!
PAROLES I am a poor man, and at your majesty’s command.
LAFEU (to the King) He’s a good drum, my lord, but a naughty orator.
DIANA (to Paroles) Do you know he promised me marriage?
PAROLES Faith, I know more than I’ll speak.
KING But wilt thou not speak all thou know’st?
PAROLES Yes, so please your majesty. I did go between them, as I said; but more than that, he loved her, for indeed he was mad for her and talked of Satan and of limbo and of Furies and I know not what. Yet I was in that credit with them at that time that I knew of their going to bed and of other motions, as promising her marriage and things which would derive me ill will to speak of. Therefore I will not speak what I know.
KING Thou hast spoken all already, unless thou canst say they are married. But thou art too fine in thy evidence, therefore stand aside.—
This ring you say was yours.
DIANA
Ay, my good lord.
KING
Where did you buy it? Or who gave it you?
DIANA
It was not given me, nor I did not buy it.
KING
Who lent it you?
DIANA
It was not lent me neither.
KING
Where did you find it then?
DIANA
I found it not.
KING
If it were yours by none of all these ways,
How could you give it him?
DIANA
I never gave it him.
LAFEU (to the King) This woman’s an easy glove, my lord, she goes off and on at pleasure.
KING (to Diana)
This ring was mine. I gave it his first wife.
DIANA
It might be yours or hers for aught I know.
KING (to attendants)
Take her away, I do not like her now.
To prison with her. And away with him.—
Unless thou tell’st me where thou hadst this ring
Thou die
st within this hour.
DIANA
I’ll never tell you.
KING (to attendants)
Take her away.
DIANA
I’ll put in bail, my liege.
KING
I think thee now some common customer.
DIANA
By Jove, if ever I knew man ’twas you.
KING
Wherefore hast thou accused him all this while?
DIANA
Because he’s guilty, and he is not guilty.
He knows I am no maid, and he’ll swear to’t;
I’ll swear I am a maid, and he knows not.
Great King, I am no strumpet; by my life,
I am either maid or else this old man’s wife.
KING (to attendants)
She does abuse our ears. To prison with her.
DIANA
Good mother, fetch my bail.
Exit Widow
Stay, royal sir.
The jeweller that owes the ring is sent for,
And he shall surety me. But for this lord,
Who hath abused me as he knows himself,
Though yet he never harmed me, here I quit him.
He knows himself my bed he hath defiled,
And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be she feels her young one kick.
So there’s my riddle; one that’s dead is quick.
And now behold the meaning.
Enter Helen and the Widow
KING
Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is’t real that I see?
HELEN
No, my good lord,
’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,
The name and not the thing.
BERTRAM
Both, both. O, pardon!
HELEN
O, my good lord, when I was like this maid
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring.
And, look you, here’s your letter. This it says:
‘When from my finger you can get this ring,
And are by me with child,’ et cetera. This is done.
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?
BERTRAM (to the King)
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
I’ll love her dearly, ever ever dearly.
HELEN
If it appear not plain and prove untrue,
Deadly divorce step between me and you.—
O my dear mother, do I see you living?
LAFEU
Mine eyes smell onions, I shall weep anon.
(To Paroles) Good Tom Drum, lend me a handkerchief.
So, I thank thee. Wait on me home, I’ll make sport
with thee. Let thy curtsies alone, they are scurvy ones.
KING (to Helen)
Let us from point to point this story know
To make the even truth in pleasure flow.
(To Diana) If thou be‘st yet a fresh uncroppèd flower,
Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower.
For I can guess that by thy honest aid
Thou kept’st a wife herself, thyself a maid.
Of that and all the progress more and less
Resolvèdly more leisure shall express.
All yet seems well; and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
Flourish of trumpets
Epilogue
The King’s a beggar now the play is done.
All is well ended if this suit be won:
That you express content, which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts:
Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.
Exeunt
PERICLES
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND GEORGE WILKINS A RECONSTRUCTED TEXT
ON 20 May 1608 Pericles was entered on the Stationers’ Register to Edward Blount; but he did not publish it. Probably the players allowed him to license it in the hope of preventing its publication by anyone else, for it was one of the most popular plays of the period. Its success was exploited, also in 1608, by the publication of a novel, by George Wilkins, ‘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’. The play itself appeared in print in the following year, with an ascription to Shakespeare, but in a manifestly corrupt text that gives every sign of having been put together from memory. This quarto was several times reprinted, but the play was not included in the 1623 Folio (perhaps because Heminges and Condell knew that Shakespeare was responsible for only part of it).
In putting together The Painful Adventures, Wilkins drew on an earlier version of the tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, by Laurence Twine, written in the mid-1570s and reprinted in 1607. Twine’s book is also a source of the play, which draws too on the story of Apollonius of Tyre as told by John Gower in his Confessio Amantis, and, to a lesser extent, on Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Wilkins not only incorporated verbatim passages from Twine’s book, he also drew heavily on Pericles itself. Since the play text is so corrupt, it is quite likely that Wilkins reports parts of it both more accurately and more fully than the quarto. And he may have had special qualifications for doing so. He was a dramatist whose popular play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage had been performed by Shakespeare’s company. Pericles has usually been regarded as either a collaborative play or one in which Shakespeare revised a pre-existing script. Our edition is based on the hypothesis (not new) that Wilkins was its joint author. Our attempt to reconstruct the play draws more heavily than is usual on Wilkins’s novel, especially in the first nine scenes (which he probably wrote); in general, because of its obvious corruption, the original text is more freely emended than usual. So that readers may experience the play as originally printed, an unemended reprint of the 1609 quarto is given in our original-spelling edition. The deficiencies of the text are in part compensated for by the survival of an unusual amount of relevant visual material, reproduced overleaf.
The complex textual background of Pericles should not be allowed to draw attention away from the merits of this dramatic romance, which we hope will be more apparent as the result of our treatment of the text. If the original play had survived, it might well have been as highly valued as The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest; as it is, it contains some hauntingly beautiful episodes, above all that in Scene 21 in which Marina, Pericles’ long-lost daughter, draws him out of the comatose state to which his sufferings have reduced him.
14. From the title-page of The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), by George Wilkins; artist unknown. Since Gower is not a character in Wilkins’s novel, the choice of woodcut undoubtedly reflects both the play’s popularity and Gower’s own impact in early performances, and it is as likely to reflect the visual detail of performance as any early title-page. The sprig of laurel (or posy) in Gower’s left hand is symbolic of his poetic status.
15. From Greene’s Vision (1592), sig. CIr―CIv; probably by Robert Greene. The description here fits reasonably well the Painful Adventures title-page, though the woodcut does not contain the ‘bag of red’, ‘napkin’, or tight-fitting ‘breech’.
16. Severed heads displayed on the gate of London Bridge, from an etching by Claes Jan Visscher (1616). In the play’s sources, and Painful Adventures, the heads of previous suitors (Sc. 1) are placed on the ’gate’ of Antioch. In performance they could have been thrust out on poles from the upper stage; but the timing and method of their display is not clear.
17. From The Heroical Devices of M. Claudius Paradin, translated by P.S. (1591), sig. V3. This is the source for the impresa of the Third Knight, in Sc. 6.
18. From The Heroical Devices of M. Claudius Paradin, translated by P.S. (1591), sig. Z3. This is the source for th
e impresa of the Fourth Knight, in Sc. 6.
19. An Inigo Jones sketch of Diana, probably for Ben Jonson’s masque Time Vindicated (1623). The goddess of chastity appeared as a character in court entertainments, masques, and plays, and her representation was governed by iconographic convention. As goddess of hunting, she was most often identified by her ‘silver bow’ (21.234). In Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age (1611), stage directions refer to ‘Diana’s bow’ (sig. EIv) and her ‘buskins’ (sig. E3v); her ‘nymphs’ explicitly, and by inference she, have ‘garlands on their heads, and javelins in their hands ... bows and quivers’ (sig. D3v). The bow, quiver, and javelin, all visible in Jones’s sketch, were commonplace in emblematic representations. As a huntress, Diana could naturally be envisaged in a chariot: in Aurelian Townshend’s masque Albion’s Triumph (1631), she descends ‘in her chariot’ (pp. 2, 12); in Time Vindicated, ‘Diana descends’ (1. 446). Such descents for deities were used in the public theatres, too, usually in a chair or chariot (21.224.2).
20. A miniature of Diana by Isaac Oliver (1615): the dress is yellow, the scarf a gauzy pink-white, the cloak over her right shoulder blue; the leaf-shaped brooch topped by the crescent moon, gold. In Samuel Daniel’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), ‘Diana, in a green mantle embroidered with silver half moons, and a crescent of pearl on her head, presents a bow and quiver’ (sig. A5). The ‘crescent of pearl’—an ornamental crescent moon, also detectable in Jones’s sketch—can be seen in many emblematic representations of the goddess.
21. For the pastoral Florimène (1635), Inigo Jones designed two scenic views of ’The Temple of Diana’ (see 1. 22.17.1). Though such scenes were not used in the public theatres in Shakespeare’s time, the columns supporting the overhanging roof of the public stage (see General Introduction, pp. xxvii-xxix) could have created a scenic effect roughly similar to Jones’s recessed classical temple. Statues were also available as props in the public theatre; in Pericles, as in The Winter’s Tale, the statue could have been impersonated by an actor on a pedestal. Whether or not a statue was visible, the temple could be identified by an altar (as in The Two Noble Kinsmen).
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
John GOWER, the Presenter
ANTIOCHUS, King of Antioch
His DAUGHTER