"Pericles" and Polygenres.
- Author/Editor
- Mentz, Steve.
- Title
- "Pericles" and Polygenres.
- Published
- Mentz, Steve. "'Pericles' and Polygenres." In Goran Stanivukovic, ed. Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017). Pp. 238-56.
- Review
- The "Gower" of this article is the character Gower in Shakespeare's "Pericles." The poet Gower receives a passing mention. As an early modern romance, Shakespeare's "Pericles" is a "hodgepodge . . . polygeneric . . . unsystemic," and that is the point! "In this system, hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks" (238). Mentz defines his purpose as "craft[ing] a language to describe the variety and instability of early modern romance fictions" (238), using "Pericles" as his case study. In this context, multiple authorship (including with Gower) is a feature, not a bug: "Connecting this variety to Shakespeare's relationship with co-author George Wilkins and also with the play's internal narrator John Gower creates a version of romance authorship that attenuates and pluralizes itself" (239). Mentz proceeds to review three schools of current critical theory that help to explain the "plurality" that is "Pericles": Latour's actor-network theory of systems that are "centreless" (241); Glissant's post-colonial theory of text as a "relation," not a hierarchy (242); and Caroline Levine's view of genre as "flexible," while it is also "meaningful" (242). He proceeds to review the plot of "Pericles" as a dizzying succession of transitions from era to era and genre to genre, including classical tragedy, Bible story, Machiavellian theory, medieval chivalrous romance, and Jacobean city comedy where the good prevail (245-53)--starting with the name 'Pericles,' shared by the Athenian statesman, but also the hero of Sidney's romance the "New Arcadia" (245). Through all this purposeful chaos, narrator John Gower "provides a through-line of narrative stability," a tribute to Gower the poet, given his command of the many narrative genres that comprise "Confessio Amantis" (251). His foil is Marina, who in her "rhetorical and dramatic variety," personifies the glorious disjunctions of the romance genre (251). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis