Gower 5
Marina is now a teacher, described in admiring terms charming her noble pupils, while the "cursed bawd" gets her income. The winds send Pericles to Mytilene at the time of the feast of Neptune, god of the sea.
Act 5.1
Lying on a couch in a pavilion on his ship, Pericles presents a strange figure in sackcloth and unkempt hair. Helicanus greets Lysimachus on his barge and explains that Pericles is inconsolable and will not talk to anyone. Lysimachus thinks of Marina, who is duly brought forth, and sings to Pericles, but even her music seems to have no effect. She tries to get his attention. He pushes her away - in Gower's version she falls and cuts herself. Angrily, Marina claims she has "endur'd a grief / Might equal yours", that she is of royal blood (87-94). She is startled by her own outburst, but feels impelled: "something glows upon my cheek, / And whispers in mine ear", "Go not till he speak" (94-6). The challenge rouses Pericles, who turns to look at her and finds her vaguely familiar. "What countrywoman? / Here of these shores?" Like a riddle, she answers "No, nor of any shores / Yet I was mortally brought forth, and am / No other than I appear" (102-5). Pericles sees the face of his wife or of her statue. Her words make him hungry for more, and instead of pushing her away he prompts her to continue, recalling her claim from which she now tries to retreat. He promises to believe her: "thou look'st / Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace / For the crown'd Truth to dwell on" (120-2), adding that if she has endured even a fraction of his sorrows then "thou art a man and I / have suffered like a girl; yet thou dost look / Like Patience gazing on kings graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act" (136-9), as if Marina has a serenity and self-containment (so different to his own dishevelled distress) that not only makes it hard to believe that she has endured suffering but also that suffering would ever bear to afflict her.
She begins with her name. Immediately Pericles interrupts, and as she adds details he returns obsessively to the name: "To call thyself Marina... And call'd Marina?... And wherefore call'd Marina?" When she explains the name he thinks he is dreaming of his dead daughter, when she describes the attempt on her life he begins to weep. Marina interprets his tears as chagrin at an imposture, and only now does she announce "I am the daughter to King Pericles / If King Pericles be" (188-9). Pericles still hesitates, and turns to Lysimachus. Only when he is told that "She never would tell / Her parentage; being demanded that / She would sit still and weep" (186-9) does the truth finally hit him, like a huge tidal wave.
"Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me in their sweetness. O come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;" (191- 5)
Pericles is reborn through his daughter, a father-daughter relationship that is in direct contrast to that of Antiochus and his daughter, also described by a riddle - "He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child" (1.1.69-70). The chaos of his life gives way to music, "the music of the spheres", that lulls him to a sleep in which Diana visits him and commands him to do her a sacrifice at Ephesus.
Little attention is paid to Marina's reaction; when Pericles is overcome with wonder she still asks, "First, sir, I pray, what is your title?" (203). Her slightly bewildered "Is it no more to be your daughter than / To say my mother's name was Thaisa? / Thaisa was my mother, who did end / The minute I began" (208-9) are the last lines she speaks in the scene, which is then dedicated to Pericles' joy. She has only one more line in the rest of the play, when meeting her mother she kneels, saying "My heart leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom" (5.3.44-5).
It often happens in Shakespeare's plays that by means of various types of proof persons and states of affairs are recognised, or misrecognised (as in the case of Desdemona's handkerchief in Othello). The recognition that occurs in this scene depends on Marina, but she does not deliberately control it. Iago pieces out his (mis)information in order to get Othello to beg him to tell him what in another sense he does not want to hear, just as Othello himself had parcelled out his stories to Desdemona to keep her attention; Marina's reluctance and hesitations are genuine. Lysimachus' decisive lines "She never would tell / Her parentage; being demanded that / She would sit still and weep", combined with the image of
Patience, recall Twelfth Night :
"Viola:
Ay, but I know
Duke:
What dost thou know?
Viola:
Too well what love women to men may owe:
In faith they are as true as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it may be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship
Duke:
And what's her history?
Viola:
A blank, my lord, she never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm in th'bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more - but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.
Duke:
But died thy sister of her love, my boy
Viola: I am all the daughters of my father's house,
Ay, and all the brothers too... and yet I know not... " (2.4.103-121)
Viola's image is powerful because it is an image of suppressed emotion, especially poignant because it allows her to covertly express her love for Orsino and her inability, disguised as a boy, to express it directly, as well as her grief for her drowned brother. Viola's own indirect expression is transgressive, since the sister is invented to cover for a her too assertive "I know." For much of the play, Viola's cross- dressing creates a confusion that is also a window onto suppressed feeling, a vehicle for expression. Here she is defending the authenticity of women's love, claiming that a depth of feeling exists despite a lack of outward passion and "male" swearing, which so often proves false. The two scenes are linked by more than a verbal echo, there is also a metaphorical affinity between two images of a woman containing passion - in the sense of having passion and also restraining or dissuading it. Patience on a gravestone acknowledges mourning but silences it, rather like the snow that falls at the end of James Joyce's story "The Dead" in Dubliners. Until he learned of Marina's death, Pericles had been "patient" despite fortune's attempts to shake him (see Act 3.1), but the last blow was too much and, as Gower says, he fell into "a great passion," falls apart and is put back together, unwittingly, by Marina. The audience of course knows the identity of the protagonists and anticipates the result of the scene, but where in Twelfth Night the audience's superior knowledge creates a fine comic balance between irony and sympathy, here it creates a kind of amazement specific to romance.
Act 5.2
"Now our sands are almost run", says Gower, aware that after such a monumental recognition scene all that remains is a few strings to be tied, Marina's marriage to Lysimachus, Pericles' trip to Ephesus.
Act 5.3
Pericles proclaims himself and his story in front of the altar. Hearing his name the astonished Thaisa calls to him then faints with emotion, but Pericles does not recognise her: "What means this nun? she dies, help, gentlemen!" (15). Cerimon tells him she is his wife, Pericles is incredulous - "I threw her overboard with these very arms" (19). Cerimon continues the story and and they are on the point of going to inspect the proof, the jewels Cerimon found with the coffin when Thaisa wakes up. Thaisa is now a nun, and cannot throw her arms around just any man, but even before she sees the conclusive ring her father gave Pericles, on his finger, she thinks that her very chastity will be the litmus test of her true husband: "If he be none of mine, my sanctity / Will to my sense bend no licentious ear / But curb it, spite of seeing" (5.3.29- 31).
Pericles is overwhelmed: "This, this: no more. You gods, your present kindness / Makes my past miseries sports. You shall do well / That on the touching of her lips I may / Melt and no more be seen," and he embraces Thaisa - "O come, be buried / A second time within these arms" (40-4). Marina kneels before her mother, briefly forming a family tableau before Helicanus and Cerimon are introduced.
All that remains is for them to look at the objects found with Thaisa, for Pericles to cut his beard, and for Marina's marriage to be arranged in Pentapolis, where Simonedes has died. Pericles intends to live there and let his daughter and son-in-law rule Tyre. In the meantime, as at the end of The Winter's Tale, the characters have a lot to tell each other, offstage. The play ends on Pericles' invitation, "Lord Cerimon, we do our longing stay / To hear the rest untold: sir, lead's the way."
Epilogue
Gower's epilogue presents Antiochus' fate as the reward of "monstrous lust" and Pericles' as the virtue protected against fortune. Helicanus is a figure of truth, faith and loyalty, Cerimon of learned charity.
Cleon and Dionyza's fate is to be burned in their palace by an incensed mob, furious at the attempt to murder Marina.