Moldy "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Schreyer, Kurt A.
- Title
- Moldy "Pericles."
- Published
- Schreyer, Kurt A. "Moldy Pericles." Exemplaria 29 (2017): 210-33.
- Review
- "Examining the choric figure of John Gower in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins's 'Pericles,' this essay recuperates the funereal accoutrements often associated with dead poets in order to demonstrate their significance to late medieval and early modern notions of authorship" (212), Schreyer tells us near the beginning of his essay. He goes on to imagine an early modern production of "Pericles" in which John Gower as Chorus rises from a stage-tomb decorated to look like the poet's tomb in St. Saviour's church, reaching for the copy of "Confessio Amantis" (the source of the play) while delivering his opening monologue. Backgrounds to this imagined dramatization include the observation that "In the sixteenth century, Gower's social status was . . . questioned and debated, and was only resolved through recourse to his tomb monument" (213), followed by supporting references to John Leland, John Bale, and John Stow, evidence that "[m]edieval tomb effigies thus underpin early modern--and indeed modern--notions of authorship and biography in very material ways." By way of Ben Jonson's dismissive citation of "Pericles" as a "mouldy tale" (quoted by Schreyer) and exploration of the denotations of "mold," Schreyer asserts that the "significance of mold therefore lies both in its materiality and in the temporal obstinacy that arises from it: as both decayed remains and fecund soil, a locus of death and birth, mold leavens the authority of the past with the promise of the future" (214)--in this context, the authority of literary tradition in the production of new art. Much of the rest of the essay broadens the application of this nexus of tomb, mold-as-decay-and-as-fecundity, and the pastness and productivity of literature, including discussion, not only of "Pericles," but also of speaking images in Ovid's "Tristia" and on "Benedetto da Maiano's 1490 monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral" (218); the portrait of Chaucer atop his son's tomb in Thomas Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer's "Works" and the title pages of these editions; Shakespeare's Sonnets 55 and 74; John Weever's "Ancient Funerall Monuments" of 1631; and the title page and frontispiece of the 1679 edition of the works of Edmund Spenser and Spenser's comments on Chaucer and his tomb in "Faerie Queene" 4.2.32–33. Wide-ranging and firmly anchored in studies of the significance of monuments, tombs, and their associations with literature in the classical revival of English humanism, Schreyer's essay stretches to include the rust of armorial bearings as a kind of mold, "the metallic form of corrosion and decay--that is to say, mold" (226), when discussing the armor of Pericles' father. Echoes between "wombs" and "tombs" in "Pericles" enable him to discover in the play's theme of incest a parallel concern with "authorial incest--the recycling of literary material from author to author" (229), leading to his closing claim: "this essay ends where many studies of "Pericles" begin: with the question of its shared authorship. Whether or not Shakespeare collaborated with George Wilkins on the text, the play finds its author--its authority--in the tomb of John Gower" (230). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Biography of Gower