Gower 4
Gower leaves Pericles in Tyre and his wife in Ephesus, concentrating on Marina: talented, graceful, the object of wonder. And also the object of jealousy, for Philoten, Dionyza's own daughter, plays second fiddle to "absolute Marina". Proud mother that she is, she decides like a fairytale stepmother to do away with Marina. Gower places the action on the eve of the as yet "unborn event". Lychorida has died, and the distraught Marina is met by Dionyza and "Leonine, a murtherer".
Act 4.1
Marina is mourning Lychorida with flowers. Like Perdita in The Winter's Tale (4.4), her allusion to classical myth associates her with its heroines: she calls the earth from where (or whom) she takes her flowers "Tellus" (Perdita wishes she had "Proserpine's" flowers). But in her grief she also feels that not only her birth but also her whole life has been "a lasting storm" (18-9), reminding us of her particular origin. No child of the earth she really does "rob" the earth's flowers (13), unlike Perdita who is a child of the country, "a peerless piece of earth" (Imogen in Cymbeline is "a piece of tender air"). Leonine listens to her very vivid picture of the storm in which she was born; by virtue of the boundless compassion common to all the young heroines of the romances she makes the story as vivid as if she had been old enough to remember it for herself, not rely upon a tale Lychorida must have told her (as is described in Confessio Amantis). Leonine is not, however, moved enough by Marina's story or her terrified protests to disobey his vow. They are walking on the edge of the shore, alone, and as he is about to kill her, the sea intervenes and produces some pirates who whisk her away. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Philomel is rescued from rape by Tereus by being turned at the last minute into the nightingale, the story providing an explanation of the origin of nightingales. Here the sea rescues Marina, because the sea is her origin - as her epitaph claims, she is the "Thetis' birth-child" (4.4.41). Leonine decides, as is usual in the play, that being at sea is as good as being dead, (especially if pirates are involved) and decides to tell Dionyza that he has killed Marina. True to his vow, however, he vows that "If she remain / Whom they have ravish'd must by me be slain" (101-2).
Act 4.2
Things have not come to that, yet. Marina is bought in Mytilene by Pandar, who has been scouring the markets with Bawd and Boult in search of some young blood to invigorate their flagging business - as the Bawd unwholesomely phrases it they are "out of creatures", the ones they have are "with continual action are even as good as rotten" (5-9). To judge from the keen response shown when Boult starts the bidding for her virginity Marina looks (and sounds) like just what they need: "a Spaniard's mouth water'd and he went to bed with her very description" (97-9, compare Iachimo in Cymbeline 1.4). The heroines of the romances are famous for their vitality, but there is a darker side that is perhaps most pronounced in Pericles, the sense that youth and chastity are objects to be consumed, used and then tossed away like the proverbial glove, or a play. It is perhaps not a coincidence that, as is common to the heroines of Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale, the word piece is used to refer to Marina - "when nature fram'd this piece, she meant thee a good turn", says the Bawd to Boult (137). Marina, determined not to take a turn, calls on Diana to prevent "these blushes of hers" being "quench'd by some present practice" (123-4).
Act 4.3
Back in Tharsus Dionyza has told her husband what happened to Marina, and he is deeply upset - "such a piece of slaughter" (2) he exclaims, and what about Pericles? Dionyza is scornful, calling him childish, and he replies "Were I chief lord of all this spacious world, / I'd give it to undo the deed" (5-6), not knowing he will be echoed by a child, Miranda after she witnesses the sinking ship at the start of The Tempest: "Had I been a god of power, I would / Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere / It should the good ship so have swallowed" (The Tempest 1.2.10-3). In the romances, the play's events provide such impossible power to the shocked and compassionate audience. But Cleon gives in to his Lady Macbeth and her heart of flint. A monument and epitaphs are already almost complete; money has been spent. Cleon calls her a harpy; she dismisses this as the stuff of superstition.
Act 4.4
Gower stands in front of Marina's monument. We learn that Pericles is coming for his daughter, see him in dumb show hearing the news, lamenting, putting on sackcloth and departing "in a mighty passion", followed out by the hypocrites of Tharsus, whose "borrow'd passion" disgusts Gower. He tells us that Pericles has sworn not to cut his hair or wash his face and has put himself at the sea's mercy, he reads Marina's epitaph, leaving Pericles to his grief, and us in Mytilene. Gower's technique of presenting the events on the stage is now sophisticated and self-aware:
"Thus time we waste and long leagues make short;
Sail seas in cockles, have and wish but for't;
Making, to take our imagination,
From bourn to bourn, region to region." (1-4)
The experience of the play is likened to imagination's travelling across a sea in a puny vessel, as is Pericles. Gower has already made the comparison at the beginning of Act 3.
"By you being pardon'd we commit no crime
To use one language in each several clime
Where our scene seems to live" (5-6)
The apology is not so much for using English where Greek should be spoken, but for breaking the unities, rules that the neo-classicists claimed to have found in Aristotle's Poetics that stipulated that the action of a play cover only one day (the unity of time) and happen in one place (the unity of place). The unities never became quite the issue that they were in France where Racine and Corneille used them to conduct a war of prefaces, each accusing the other of transgressing theatrical form whilst pre-empting criticisms of their own creations. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's romances, especially Pericles, are too prodigal of time and space not to have been criticised, and it is sometimes thought that The Tempest's preservation of the unities was a riposte to critics such as Jonson. This "mouldy old tale," however, has little dramatic unity, so it is apt that its hero should also be coming apart at the seams: "He bears / A tempest, which his mortal vessel tears, / And yet he rides it out" (29-31).
Being at sea is also bearing, giving birth (see commentary to 2.1 above): Gower's presentation of the play suggests it might also being a metaphor for the performance of a play, giving birth to imagination. Marina's epitaph attributes what is called her "foul death... slaughter" (so close to the truth) to the earth's reaction to the sea's swelling pride at Marina's birth, sending her to heaven. The sea in return "makes raging battery upon shores of flint" for the loss of her "birth-child" (34-43).
Act 4.5
Two gentlemen leave a brothel in Mytilene, having visited Marina, who has deflected their lust onto more godly (and comically improbable) objects: "No, no, Come, I am for no more bawdy houses. Shall'st go and hear the vestals sing?" - "I'll do anything now that is virtuous; but I am out of the road of rutting for ever" (5-8). Marina has changed them with her discourse: "But to have divinity preach'd there! Did you ever dream of such a thing?"
Act 4.6
The Bawd, Pandar and Boult are dismayed that Marina is "able to freeze the god Priapus" (3). Boult has decided to take her in hand when the governor of Mytilene, Lysimachus, enters. Boult presents Marina to his customer, who (somewhat prophetically) greets his pitch with the sardonic "Faith, she would serve after a long voyage at sea" (42). Boult takes Marina aside tells her who Lysimachus is - an honourable man and the governor - hoping that this will impress her enough to drop her "virginal fencing" and "use him kindly" (56). After warning Lysimachus that he might have to take some pains with Marina, he leaves them alone. Marina does not let Lysimachus' rather desultorily attempts at conversations nor his euphemisms pass, asking what a man like him is doing in a place like that. Misunderstanding, he reassures her that his authority will look kindly on her, and tries to move things along. When Marina appeals to his honour - "If you were born to honour, show it now" (96) - everything changes: "I did not think / Thou couldst have spoke so well; ne'er dreamt thou couldst. / Had I brought hither a corrupted mind / Thy speech had alter'd it" (101-3). The conditional "had" implies its negative, that he had not come to the brothel with a "corrupted mind", which he goes on to assert: "For me, be you thoughten / I came with no ill intent; For me / The very doors and windows savour viley" (108-110) and reward her with gold. Everything up to this point, however, suggests that he was a recognised and regular patron of the brothel. The point is important given that he is Marina's future husband, in a play where chastity is so important and Diana, the goddess of chastity herself, intervenes.
On his way out Lysimachus berates Boult with "Your house, / But for this virgin that doth prop it, / Would sink and overwhelm you" (119-20). The result is uproar: Boult is furious and determined to lose no more time or customers but "crack the glass of her virginity" (142), Pandar and the Bawd, hearing that "she has here spoken holy words to the Lord Lysimachus" (131-137) exclaim in pious, comic horror. Marina's situation is not comic, nor is the savage tirade she launches at Boult and his profession. He defends himself with "What would you have me do? Go to the wars, would you? Where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?" (169-171) but gives in when Marina claims she can earn as much by teaching as by prostitution and agrees to find her a place among honest women.
Marina's outburst is surprising because until now she has defended her chastity by preaching "divinity" rather than defiance; one imagines she is protected by what she inherently is, like Perdita of whom Polixenes says "nothing she does or seems / But smacks of something greater than herself / Too noble for this place" (The Winter's Tale 4.4.157-9). The presence of a romance heroine in a realistic brothel is a juxtaposition that sometimes challenges the idealism of the genre to which Marina belongs:
"Marina:
The gods defend me!
Bawd:
If it please the gods to defend you by men, then men must comfort you, men must feed you, men stir you up" (4.2.86-9).
However, this picture is too simple because, as Marina's attack on Boult shows, she can be as real as she is ideal.