Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Pericles, called Prince and King interchangeably, goes to win the hand of a princess and finds that the king is unwilling to let his daughter go because they are in an incestuous relationship. He plays a game with each courting prince, asking them a riddle that ends in the young man's death. Pericles catches on pretty quickly and escapes across the waters, but the king sends a man to follow and kill Pericles to keep him from exposing the king's secret.
Pericles goes on to survive shipwrecks and lost love. His daughter experiences kidnapping and slavery. Yet, because this has a happy ending, it may be included as a comedy.
Scholars generally agree that Shakespeare probably wrote exactly half of this play. ( )

Not one of Bill's best plays, and often dismissed as being largely by other people, nonetheless, the play is included in the canon. Pericles, noble and virtuous, discovers his king Antiochus has an incestuous relationship with his own daughter. The king being aware of this, Pericles must flee home to tyre. However, after outliving Antiochus Pericles desires to return to court, but his family is shattered by a shipwreck. Years later they are at last reunited. This play has no connection with Hellenistic history other than the names of some of the principals. the play is usually dated to 1606 or thereabouts. ( )

It's a retelling of an older story, as so often with Shakespeare, but he distills it down, then adds his own particular twist to the action. Pericles arrives at Antioch to pay court to the King's daughter, and is faced with a riddle that he has to solve in order to win the daughter. The answer is perilous and so he prevaricates, then runs away, pursued by a Lord of Antioch engaged to track him down & kill him (he doesn't try much beyond Act 1). Pericles leaves Tyre, to avoid pursuit, and arrives at Tarsus, bringing grain to the starving populace. From there he again sets sail and this time is shipwrecked. A group of fishermen save him and also drag ashore his armour form the sea. They tell him of a tournament being held by the local king and Pericles resolves to enter. He does and wins the daughter of the King, Thaisa.
They set sail again (sensing a theme here? Maybe the theatre had bought a job lot of blue material) and encounter a storm. Thaisa gives birth and seems to die. The sailors insist that the corpse be thrown overboard. From here on in it is a divergence before act 5 serves to tie the whole unlikely thing back together.
Thaisa isn't dead, drifts ashore, is found, revivied and, fearing Pericles dead, serves as a priestess to a temple to Diana.
(fast forward 14 odd years) Marina (the daughter) is left with Creon and his wife, only she outshines their daughter and so the resolves to send a man to kill her. He's foiled by a bunch of kidnapping pirates. Marina gets sold to a brothel owner, then manages to charm or cajole her way into keeping her virginity against all the odds. Creon & wife claim Marina is dead when Pericles visits (unclear quite what hes been up to all this time, Kinging in Tyre, we presume) he sets sail (again) in grief.
He arrives in Ephesus, mute in his grief, and is met by the local governor, who has previously been charmed by Marina (we'll gloss over the fact he was in a brothel and planning on deflowering a virgin. like you do). Marina is bought to Pericles and by telling their stories, they realise who the other is. After a dream sequence, where Diana appears to Pericles and tells him to go to the temple at Ephesus, Thaisa is also brought back into the fold.
There are plenty of characters and plenty of them are identikit. The ones that stand out are the common people, whose scenes have the feeling of the everyday, rather than the lords and ladies that populate the rest of the piece. The fishermen, the brothel keeper & his wife all feel like they are recognisable to the London of the time. They feel like a comic interlude to bring the tone back down to earth, they provide it with an earthiness.
This is a good listen. ( )

Plot: madcap. Writing: largely bad (thanks... Wilkins?) Read-aloud quality: superb. ( )

God, I hope there's some redemption in the few remaining works I have yet to experience. Because this one? It's simply awful for the most part.

Reading this one, one is led to believe that every daughter of a rich man must be attained by some stupid competition, and that every sea voyage ends up with you washed up on shore alone and almost dead, or plucked from the sea, almost dead.

Aside from that, there's some incest and prostitution and kidnapping and rape to keep you occupied.

It's just freaking awful.

With less than 20% left to go, I almost just stopped it and walked away, but I figured, why not finish it off? I'm glad I did, because only the ending managed to bring this up from no stars to two.

And I must say, while all the incidental music in the Arkangel productions is uniformly terrible, in this one, it was insufferably grating. I refuse to believe anyone on the production team ever listened to this and thought, "damn, this sounds great!

Because it doesn't. It's sandpaper for the ears. ( )