Gower and Shakespeare in "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Hoeniger, F. David.
- Title
- Gower and Shakespeare in "Pericles."
- Published
- Hoeniger, F. David. "Gower and Shakespeare in 'Pericles'." Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 461-79.
- Review
- Hoeniger argues for appreciation of Shakespeare's "Pericles" as an experiment in placing drama in tension with story-telling, one that succeeds better on the stage than on the page, and one that casts the Chorus, John Gower, as a moralistic, episodic story-teller whose style functions as a foil to Shakespeare's own dramaturgy. In passing, Hoeniger mentions that Shakespeare used Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" from "Confessio Amantis" as a source, citing it once, and asserting the "singular subservience" of Shakespeare's play to the "order of Gower's narrative and his characters" (465). Hoeniger does not engage the intertextual relations of the two works at any length, but concentrates on the "quaint, archaizing, moralizing lines" (463) of the Chorus and on the episodic nature of the story "unsuited to dramatic adaptation" (478) in order to argue that "Pericles" is startlingly innovative and very effective on stage because the Chorus' style is counterpointed by Shakespeare's. Acknowledging traditional concerns with collaboration, revision, and/or First-Quarto memorial reconstruction in "Pericles" studies, Hoeniger attributes at least some of the well-known unevenness of the play to the "impression" that the Chorus "controls the presentation of the whole play" (464) while this impression, Hoeniger maintains, actually serves Shakespeare's dramatic effectiveness through contrast. Hoeniger's argument recurrently depends upon impressions, those of Shakespeare's audience who, for example, "must have been bemused by the naïve simplicity of Gower's outlook and art" (474), and his own, as when rhymes "turn . . . conventional morals into tags that Gower would wish us to remember, tags that strike us as naive in their simplicity and patness, as do his own" (469). Hoeniger turns to Chaucer when seeking precedent for Shakespeare's depiction of "grossly inferior" (478) art in his play, citing "The Tale of Sir Thopas" for comparison and describing Chaucer's burlesque of tail-rhyme romance. The comparison, unfortunately, reinforces an impression Hoeniger himself creates (although not stating it directly): that Shakespeare may have thought similarly little of Gower's own art--an impression countered in, for example, Richard Hillman's "Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare" (eJGN 38.1) and Bart van Es's "Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages" (eJGN 38.2). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 1982
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion