Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Pericles is a romance, written with George Wilkins, that follows a prince through shipwrecks, loss and wandering across the Mediterranean until he is reunited with the wife and daughter he believed dead.

Main characters

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• Thaisa, his wife
• Marina, their daughter
• John Gower, the medieval poet, as narrator
• Antiochus, King of Antioch
• Cleon and Dionyza, rulers of Tarsus
• Lysimachus, Governor of Mytilene
• Cerimon, a physician of Ephesus

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Pericles discovers the incestuous secret of King Antiochus and has to flee for his life. Shipwrecked at Pentapolis, he wins a tournament and marries the princess Thaisa. On a stormy voyage home she apparently dies giving birth to their daughter Marina and is buried at sea in a chest, which washes ashore at Ephesus where the physician Cerimon revives her. She becomes a priestess of Diana.

Pericles leaves Marina with Cleon and Dionyza in Tarsus. Years later, jealous that Marina outshines her own daughter, Dionyza orders her murder; pirates carry her off and sell her to a brothel in Mytilene, where her virtue converts every customer. Pericles, told his daughter is dead, falls silent with grief. At Mytilene, Marina is brought to cheer him, and father and daughter slowly recognise each other. A vision of Diana sends Pericles to Ephesus, where he finds Thaisa.

Themes

• Loss and restoration
• Endurance and patience
• Virtue under threat
• Fortune and the sea

Famous lines

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.

Pericles, Act 1 Scene 1

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

John Gower's Confessio Amantis (1390s), which tells the ancient story of Apollonius of Tyre, and Laurence Twine's prose version The Pattern of Painful Adventures.

On stage and screen

It was hugely popular and was printed several times, but it was left out of the First Folio, possibly because of its co-authorship or the poor quality of the surviving text. It was added to the Third Folio in 1664. Most scholars think Wilkins wrote the first two acts and Shakespeare the rest.

See where Pericles, Prince of Tyre sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.