"Read it for restoratives": "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness.

Author/Editor
Ndiaye, Noémie.

Title
"Read it for restoratives": "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness.

Published
Ndiaye, Noémie. "'Read it for restoratives': "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness." Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama 26 (2023): 11-27.

Review
The nominal question asked by Ndiaye springs from the character Gower's lines "Lords and ladies in their lives / Have read it for restoratives" ("Pericles" 1.0.7–8), the "it" being John Gower's own narrative of Apollonius in CA VIII. This "leads [her] to wonder: what 'restoratives' exactly does 'Pericles' have in store for us, when 'us' is (as it always was and will be) diverse, Black, and Brown?" (12). Appropriately, Ndiaye's focus is on the play (which, it is fair to say, she finds blindly racist), not on the poet who inspired it; hence Gower the poet figures only briefly, by way of establishing how colors--red, white, and black--appear in the "Confessio," and hence are transferred into the "Pericles" text. Ndiaye notes that when Apollonius "is stranded, naked and destitute, on the shores of Pentapolis, 'His colour, which whilom was whyt, / Was thanne of water fade and pale'" (CA VIII. 636-37; at p.13). Citing "critical whiteness studies" (13) scholarship, Ndiaye argues that "Gower depicts Apollonius as particularly white (with all the privileges attendant to whiteness in potentia) at the peak of dispossession, and whiteness might read here as a promise of compensation. While such a reading may not have been the one Gower had in mind, it may very well have informed Shakespeare and Wilkins's early modern reception of those lines" (13). She also identifies Gower's use of red and white to suggest emotional states (love, e.g.), quoting CA VIII. 845-50 and 1908-11, and black to flag negatives, e.g., Apollonius' depression in his ship's "derke" hold--though the attempt to extend the pejorative color language to mourning clothes and widows' weeds (14) is anachronistic, at the very least. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Ndiaye concludes that: "The question is not whether 'Pericles' has anything restorative in store for Black, Brown, and diverse twenty-first century audiences, but, rather, how scholarship that unearths all the toxic layers of plays like 'Pericles'-- such as early modern critical race and critical whiteness scholarship--might constitute a resource for theatre-makers who want to produce that play in an informed restorative manner" (23). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Confessio Amantis