Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Williams, Deanne.
- Title
- Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in "Pericles."
- Published
- Williams, Deanne. "Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in 'Pericles'." University of Toronto Quarterly 71.2 (Spring 2002): 595-622.
- Review
- In Part II of her article, Williams discusses the choric "Gower" as father figure in the play, especially the literary "fader" he was assumed to be in Early Modern England (610). As this "Gower" introduces the action to follow, he humbly admits to his prolixity: 'Pardon old Gower, this longs the text'." By calling his speech a "text," however, Williams claims that the choric "Gower" is also claiming the superiority of moralizing words over mere dramatic spectacle, as playwright Ben Jonson also argued (600, 609). Throughout his speeches, choric "Gower" personifies the authority of Gower the "moral" poet recognized as such by Caxton and others in early modern England. However, in Williams' view Shakespeare understood the modest literary persona of the poet Gower as "a sophisticated narrative strategy that he developed to ameliorate the effects of his shocking and scandalous subject matter," including incest, discussed in the "Confessio Amantis" as inherent in human sexuality from the days of Adam and Eve (610). Like his archetype the poet, Shakespeare's "Gower" proposes to control the depiction of immoral actions with a running moral commentary: "I do beseech you/To learn of me, who stands in the gaps, to teach you" (first Chorus 7-8, p. 611). Ben Jonson famously admired Gower (612) and disparaged "Pericles," which Williams attributes to its dramatic spectacle placed "alongside, rather than in tension with, verbal testimony" (613). For all his preaching, however, choric "Gower" shows himself unable to "separate moral discourse from transgressive sexuality," any more than Pericles can "separate himself from the pervasive presence of incestuous desire . . . " Only "in the daughter" can "these contradictions [be] resolved" (614). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2002
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion