carcely less potent than Prospero's; in the grieving Pericles, who,
like remorse-stricken Leontes, recovers first his daughter, then his
wife, we see the first sketches of the most interesting elements in the
dramatic romances which are to follow. Throughout all this Shakespeare
is manifest; and even in those scenes which depict Marina's misery in
Mytilene and subsequent rescue, there is little more than the revolting
nature of the scenes to bid us reject them as spurious, while Marina's
speeches in them are certainly true to the Shakespearean conception of
her character.

+Authorship and Date+.--The play was entered to Edward Blount in the
Stationers' Register, May 20, 1608. It was probably written but little
before. Quartos appeared in 1609, 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. It was
not included among Shakespeare's works until the Third Folio (1664).
The publishers of the First Folio may have left it out on the ground
that it was spurious, or because of some difficulty in securing the
printing rights. The former of these hypotheses is generally favored,
since, as we have said, a study of the play reveals the apparent work
of another author, particularly in Acts I and II, and the earlier
speech of Gower, the Chorus in the play. In 1608 a novel was {200}
published, called "The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately
presented by the worthy and ancient poet John Gower." The author was
George Wilkins, a playwright of some ability. He is generally accepted
as Shakespeare's collaborator. The claims of William Rowley for a
share in the scenes of low life have little foundation.

Source.--Shakespeare used Gower's _Confessio Amantis_, and the version
in Laurence Twine's _Pattern of Painful Adventures_, 1606. The tale is
also in the _Gesta Romanorum_.

+Cymbeline+.--"A father cruel, and a step-dame false,
A foolish suitor to a wedded lady,
That hath her husband banish'd."

Thus Imogen, the heroine of the play, and the daughter of Cymbeline,
king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the
story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her
fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the
stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her
brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous
Italian Iachimo, her husband's fri