The genesis and authorship of Pericles

Pericles, a popular play based on the old legend of Apollonius of Tyre and produced in London sometime between 1605-08, has long been the subject of scholarly conjecture. Although all contemporary sources attribute the play wholly to William Shakespeare, most scholars believe the play to be a revision by Shakespeare of a play written by another author. Basing their arguments on internal evidence of changes in literary style between Acts I-II and Acts III-V and on the fact that Pericles was excluded from both the First and Second Folios, scholars have attempted to name either George Wilkins, Thomas Heywood, or John Day as co-author of the play. The first evaluative section of this study (Chapter II) is devoted to a comparative analysis between Pericles and the known sources of the play. The resultant conclusion is that Pericles is based primarily upon Book VIII of John Gower's Confessio Amantis with additional detail from Laurence Twine's The Patterne of Painefull Adventures and the Latin Historia Apollonii Regis Tyrii. More importantly, this section reveals that the story was adapted for the stage and structured by only one author, a craftsman of considerable dramatic skill. Evidence examined in Chapter III demonstrates that the first printed quarto of 1609 (Q1), upon which all other copies are based, is corrupt, for it abounds in mislineations lost phrases, and jumbled verse. While this corruption accounts for many of the stylistic inconsistencies between Acts I-II and Acts III-V, differences in style which indicate two levels of workmanship continue to exist. ..