The Life of George Wilkins

Summary

Very little has hitherto been known about the minor dramatist and pamphleteer, George Wilkins. From all the available evidence, it seems likely that he wrote the first two acts of Pericles Prince of Tyre, and that Shakespeare wrote the last three, apart from the Gower choruses. Several of his works survive, but he is not mentioned by his contemporaries, and hardly any facts about him have come to light. This is the more to be regretted because Pericles is an important experiment. It was the turning-point which led to the other late Romance plays. It is interesting that Shakespeare should have derived half his play, and possibly the original conception, from a minor dramatist like Wilkins. In these circumstances, any information about Wilkins is of particular value.

It is therefore extremely fortunate that a great quantity of such information has been preserved among the records of the seventeenth-century Middlesex Sessions in the Greater London Record Office (Middlesex Section). Professor Mark Eccles seems to be the first and only scholar ever to have pointed this out, in his Christopher Marlowe in London. He writes there that he intends to describe the records in full elsewhere, but, if he did so, it has eluded me and all other writers on Wilkins that I have come across. The Sessions records reveal much about Wilkins that is new, and positively confirm what had already been inferred from other evidence.