Coasting in the Mediterranean: The Journeyings of "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Holland, Peter.
- Title
- Coasting in the Mediterranean: The Journeyings of "Pericles."
- Published
- Angles on the English-Speaking World 5 (2005): 11-29.
- Review
- Peter Holland is well-known for his interests in Shakespeare and drama in performance, and both are reflected here. This essay is largely concerned with "Pericles" as a play--a drama--made of narrative source-materials, mentioning in swift passing Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" among these materials. Holland gives little particular attention to specifics of Gower's and other narrative versions, focusing instead on emphases rendered in the transition (or "journeying") between literary forms, arguing that "Pericles" itself "is a journey across the mapping of narrative represented by the Apollonian story . . . [in] all its manifestations" (25). The story was widely known to the audience of "Pericles," but its presentation as drama was new and unknown, Holland tells us, perhaps even a little "dangerous," aligning the artistic experiment with action of the play, and suggesting that the non-traditional name "Pericles" is a version of Latin "periculum." Early modern navigational techniques, geographical dislocations in the play, repetitive structuring, and "Gower's choruses" are recurrent concerns in this essay, with the choruses "acting as dramatic stitching to make the drama a web of lines radiating across the map of the Apollonius narrative like the lines on the early charts that link harbours and headlands" (26). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2005
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Influence and Later Allusion