Sources.

Author/Editor
Guy-Bray, Stephen.

Title
Sources.

Published
Guy-Bray, Stephen. "Sources." In Henry S. Turner, ed. Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 133-63.

Review
Guy-Bray examines three plays--Marlowe's "Dido, Queen of Carthage," Jonson's "Poetaster," and Shakespeare/Wilkins' "Pericles"--finding in them a "strong if usually implicit tension between the earlier and newer versions" (133). "This tension was greater," he goes on to say, "in the case of plays based on well-known texts or events, and greater still if playwrights chose to make this tension part of the subject of their plays--to confront, more or less explicitly, the question of the secondary status of their own texts, and, by extension, the secondary status of theatre itself as a form that was new in an English context and of lower status than poetry" (133). This thesis guides Guy-Bray's analysis of "Pericles," which focuses on the character Gower, whose "Confessio Amantis" would have been only one of the sources of the play (he claims without offering evidence) known to the audience--the others being Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon" and the "Gesta Romanorum" (146). Gower the character, he notes, could be identified not as the author of the source per se, but as a "presenter," one who "embodies the author function" (146). By this means, Shakespeare/Wilkins "may be seeking to give 'Pericles' a higher status than if the source were a folktale or a relatively recent English prose work" (146--but see also n. 19 on that page, in which it is suggested that the name Apollonius was changed to Pericles in order to invoke Pyrocles from Sidney's "Arcadia"). Pointing out that by underlining the visual--the watched drama with its potential to show rather than "merely" narrate--Shakespeare/Wilkins register some credit for their new form (148); yet, as the necessity of Gower's narration is made clear in the otherwise-unintelligible dumb-show, "Gower reminds us that we can still rely on him to tell the truth of the visual representation" (149). Thus, "'Pericles' suggests that however different a play may be from its source, the source is still necessary" (149). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]

Date
2013

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis