I'm lecturing on Pericles today and if you're a regular of this series and you're worried that you can't hear any rustling or coughing or occasional laughter from the audience of Oxford students, that's because I'm re-recording this lecture, not live, but specifically to be podcast because of a problem with the quality of the live

recording. So today I'm lecturing on Pericles, which is a problematic play dating from around

1607. It's always been on the edges of the Shakespearean canon, and that's in part because, as I'm

going to focus my attention on today,

it was not printed as part of the collective plays in the first folio of 1623.

We'll come on to why that might be, and more importantly, what its implications have been for readings of the play in a moment.

But I want to start, as usual, with a summary of the plot.

Pericles is an episodic romance play, so it's romance in the medieval sense of journeying or questing,

in the sense of a combination of human and supernatural events,

which often take place over a long period of time.

So if you know any medieval romances, like those of Mallory, for example,

or the modern stories like The Lord of the Rings, which are heavily influenced by them,

you'll have a sense

what's meant the plays narrated by a chorus figure the poet john gower and he introduces

our first scene in antioch in antioch the king is in an incestuous relationship with his daughter

pericles has travelled to antioch to woo her,

and like all her potential suitors, he has to answer a riddle. Realising that he is doomed to death,

if he reveals the answer, incest he will be executed, or if he fails to, he will also be executed.

Pericles flees, and he is pursued by

an assassin from the king's court and the escape from this assassin perpetuates, propels his journey

through the rest of the plane. Arriving next in the port of Tarsus, Pericles encounters a famine and distributes corn to relieve the city.

Its rulers, Cleon and Dionysa swear allegiance to Pericles in gratitude for what he has done.

...