rm
and misfortune from one shore to another. The five acts which tell his
adventures are like five islands, widely separated, and washed by great
surges of good and ill luck. The significance of his daughter's name,
Marina, is intensified for us when we realize that in this play the sea
is not only her birthplace, but is the {198} symbol throughout of
Fortune and Romance. From the polluted coast of Antioch, where
Pericles reads the vile King his riddle and escapes, past Tarsus, where
he assists Creon, the governor of a helpless city, to Pentapolis,
where, shipwrecked and a stranger, he wins the tournament and the hand
of the Princess Thaisa, the waves of chance carry the Prince. They
overwhelm him in the great storm which robs him of his wife, and gives
him his little Marina; but they bear the unconscious Thaisa safely to
land, and in after years their wild riders, the pirates, save Marina
from death at the hands of Creon, and bring her to Mitylene. Here,
upon his storm-bound ship, the mourning Pericles recovers his daughter;
and at Ephesus, near by, the waves give back his wife, through the kind
influence of Diana, their goddess. We are never far from the sound of
the shore, and the lines of the play we best recall are those that tell
of "humming water" and "the rapture of the sea."

_Pericles_ in its original scheme was a play of adventure rather than a
dramatic romance. The first two acts, in which Shakespeare could have
had no hand, are disjointed and ineffective. To help out the stage
action, Shakespeare's collaborator introduced John Gower, the mediaeval
poet, as a "Prologue," to the acts. He was supplemented, when his
affectedly antique diction failed him, by dumb show, the last straw
clutched at by the desperate playwright. But at the beginning of Act
III the master's music swells out with no uncertain note, and we are
lifted into the upper regions of true dramatic poetry as Pericles
speaks to the storm at sea:--

{199}

"Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having call'd them from the deep! ...
The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard."

In the shipwreck which follows, some phrases of which anticipate the
similar scene in _The Tempest_; in the character of Marina, girlish and
fair as Perdita; in the grave physician Cerimon, whose arts are
s