The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's "Pericles" and the Baroque.
- Author/Editor
- Vincent, Robert Hudson.
- Title
- The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's "Pericles" and the Baroque.
- Published
- Vincent, Robert Hudson. "The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's Pericles and the Baroque." The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 20: Special Section, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," ed. Tom Bishop et al. New York: Routledge, 2024: 32-49.
- Review
- Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" is central to Vincent's analysis of baroque "excess" in Shakespeare's "Pericles." (FYI: To understand Vincent's argument on "baroco," a syllogism, you will need to consult his article "Baroco: The Logic of English Baroque Poetics," MLQ 80.3 [Sept. 2019]: 233-59, and any academic background you may have in formal logic, as the author never provides an example of a baroco syllogism.) Vincent begins by noting the recent deficiency of studies on Shakespeare and the early modern artistic movement known as the "baroque." He locates the origin of the term in the "Scholastic syllogism called Baroco" (33) that was decried by early moderns, e.g. Montaigne, as linked to "excessive complexity and artificiality." Likewise, early modern authors disparaged the typical plot of a medieval romance as absurdly convoluted, piling "adventures upon adventures" (34). Nonetheless, paradoxically, these "baroque" effects were attractive to seventeenth-century poets, including Shakespeare, who based his "Pericles" on (in Vincent's view) Gower's notably "excess[ive]" (36) "Tale of Apollonius" in the "Confessio Amantis," Book VIII. While lacking in organic symmetry and unity, "baroque" literary works were unified by theme (37), a unity supplied by Shakespeare's choric Gower, as he navigates the audience through examples of sinful excess in love, to the equally extreme, but morally pure love ultimately achieved by Pericles and his wife and daughter (40). The paradigm for Shakespeare's "allegory of excess," per Vincent, is found in Gower's epigraph to the "Tale of Apollonius": "Omnibus est communis amor, set et immoderatos/Qui facit excessus, non reputatur amans." The alternative to such "immoderate excesses" in love is the rightly directed, "moderate excess" exemplified by Apollonius, Pericles, and Southwell's "Mary Magdalene" (38-40). Other baroque effects anticipated in "Apollonius," and recurring in "Pericles," are the hero's melancholy (related to Christian patience), and an over-the-top, miraculous conclusion to the story (41-44). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2024
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis