The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles
- Author/Editor
- Lynch, Stephen J.
- Title
- The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles
- Published
- Lynch, Stephen J.. "The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 361-378.
- Review
- Concerned less with Gower than with Shakespeare. The "Gower" that Shakespeare creates as choral figure and presenter in "Pericles" is tritely moral, reductive, mechanistic, and consistently inadequate to what richness remains to the plot in the play, and in one sense he is a vast misrepresentation both of Gower as author and Gower/Genius the narrator of "Apollonius of Tyre." However, he merely anticipates the stance of some of the characters, including Pericles, before the many enigmas in the play. He also stands in for Shakespeare himself, as the confession of authorial limitations of the playwright who did not fully control the texts of his plays and who could not control the effects of live performance, but also as a claim to "authorial mystification and elevation," the "authorial medium through which eternal truth speaks" (p. 376), despite his own limitations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1]
- Date
- 1993
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion