The New Yorker: Shakespeare’s “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” is, according to Ben Jonson, “a mouldy tale,” and, until recently, it was seldom staged. In an informal poll of dedicated New York theatre-goers, last week, only one person had seen it. But the play has enjoyed a number of productions in the past two years, and recently a “Pericles” opened in Brooklyn, at the Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Center, under the direction of Sir Trevor Nunn. Nunn, who is best known in the U.S. for the Broadway musicals “Cats,” “Les Misérables,” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” is the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon.
2 comments:
I’ve seen a production of Pericles, and I thought it was really good. It didn’t feel different than other Shakespeare plays to me. A shipwreck, a family being separated, discovering previously unknown identities, and a love story all seem like pretty standard Shakespeare elements to me. And as for potential plot holes, I don’t remember anything that was as seemingly random as the pirates in Hamlet. I saw Pericles as part of a school trip, so before the play we were discussing the history of it, and if I remember correctly, I was told it was one of Shakespeare’s most well-loved plays when he was alive, but (as this article discusses) it is now rarely performed. After seeing it, I wondered why. I haven’t looked closely at the script, so maybe the text isn’t as good as it seemed, but based on the performance I saw, it is a perfectly good play.
Apparently like most other people, I have never seen Pericles. But now I really wish I had. However, something that I found so interesting is that one of the justifications for why Shakespeare could never have ever written this play is that parts of it are “so bad.” Why do we put Shakespeare up on a pedestal where he can do absolutely no wrong? Many of his comedies have incredibly similar plots, he has plays where he is pandering to the sexism and xenophobia of the age he was writing in, in other words Shakespeare is not prefect by any stretch of the imagination. While it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he had collaborated with someone else to write a play it also wouldn’t surprise me if he had just written a bad play on his own. What is interesting to me about this is why certain cultural figures are above fault in our eyes, it is like how we rarely talk about the fact that George Washington owned slaves, our great historical figures were still human, subject to the prejudices and practices of their time, and maybe occasionally writing a less than stellar play.
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