Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in ‘Pericles’

Summary

Since 1958 when Shakespeare Survey last focused on the final plays, structuralism as an important intellectual movement has both deepened and expanded our critical perspectives. Because of an apparently corrupt text and problematic authorship for its first three acts, Pericles, among the late plays, has attracted the least critical attention. Yet a structural approach especially suits this work, particularly since it may be applied independently of textual issues. Accordingly, in the last two decades the play has inspired a number of structural studies centering on the meaning of its rambling form. We now recognize that the implausibly ordered episodes produce an analogical coherence distinct from the causality of Aristotelian plotting. Recurrent and inverted outlines of action emerge as transformations of the same deep structure, which conveys a message about its own timeless rhythm of separation, loss, and recovery.