"Ancient [and Modern] Gower": Presenting Shakespeare's "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Dymkowski, Christine.
- Title
- "Ancient [and Modern] Gower": Presenting Shakespeare's "Pericles."
- Published
- In The Narrator, the Expositor, and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre, ed. Philip Butterworth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 235-64.
- Review
- As do most assessments of Gower-as-Chorus in Shakespeare and George Wilkins' "Pericles," Dymkowski's essay focuses--justifiably--on the range of functions of the choric character in the drama rather than on Gower the man or his tale of Apollonius as a source of the play. She is largely concerned with the metatheatrical functions of the character in various modern productions of the play, with most extensive attention paid to two productions (1958 and 1989) in which the character was played by a black actor in an otherwise white cast. Exploring how "contemporary productions negotiate the challenge of making the character work for a modern audience" (248)--whose members are largely ignorant of Gower and his poetry--Dymkowski assesses how the Chorus generally helps to make the "audience aware they are watching a play" and "consciously engage with the nature of theatre itself" (246), before going on to assess individual productions. Prefatory to this line of argument and exposition, she usefully rehearses "what Gower might have meant to the play's original audience" (237), offering a clear, if conventional, review (pp. 237-41) of Jacobean familiarity with Gower and his works, claiming that the original audience of "Pericles," "even without direct knowledge of Gower's work, could be presumed to identify him as an important literary figure, as an ethical and wise man, as a patriot, and as a storyteller" (239). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2007
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion