2-5: Acts I- IV

2. ACT I: THE RIDDLE WHOSE SOLUTION IS A PRINCESS

The story starts with a riddle set by a princess's father; if the suitor can solve it, he gets the girl; otherwise, he is killed. This is all reminiscent of Oedipus, who also faced a riddle, one posed by the Sphinx; the prize was a Queen and a kingdom, or else death. Like the Sphinx, this riddle-maker has sent many a suitor to his death. Oedipus, of course, got the girl and the kingdom, but what he did not figure out in time was that his queen was really his mother.

In Pericles' riddle, the incest is of a different sort. As the narrator, Gower, tells us in his Prologue, the king his daughter “to incest did provoke” (I.pro.25). Moreover, the answer to the riddle is the fact of this incest, as the first scene makes clear. What is not obvious--since Pericles does not marry the girl--is what this opening scene has to do with the rest of the story, other than forcing the hero to start on a series of adventures.

The action starts with Pericles at the court of Antiochus, King of Antioch, seeking to marry the King's daughter. He says how on her face “is read none but curious pleasures,” (“curious” is Elizabethan for “exquisite”), and how he feels “inflamed desire” to “taste the fruit of yon celestial tree” (I.i.17,21). Despite various polite phrases, this speech is on a rather physical level, as opposed to one praising the lady's soul or spirit; and the tree, however celestial, tempts in words reminiscent of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. But the riddle he is given seems on an even lower level:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father,
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you. (I.i.65ff)

Pericles immediately guesses that the riddle is alluding to incest between the king and his daughter. And Pericles' answer (spoken as though to the king but actually to the audience, when he is alone):

Where now you're both a father and a son
By your untimely claspings with your child
(Which pleasures fit a husband, not a father)
And she an eater of her mother’s flesh
By the defiling of her parent's bed;
And both like serpents are, who though they feed
On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed. (I.i.128ff)

The “celestial tree” is really a serpent! Fortunately, Pericles is careful not to voice his solution out loud, except to the audience. The King charitably gives Pericles more time to solve the riddle, while at the same time realizing that Pericles has already solved it. Pericles decides that anyone who would knowingly commit incest would also not hesitate at murder; he wisely flees the city.

Incest in real life is hidden; the daughter herself may not have it in her awareness. It comes out indirectly, in sudden rages, perhaps. Let us look further at Pericles’ answer to the riddle. The King--whose Queen has died--is having sex with his own daughter. On a physical level, then, the father is in the role of husband. Pericles adds that the King is also “a son” to her. He does not say just how this is. Presumably it is by her nurturing of him, as a mother might for her child, both emotionally and in running his household. Perhaps also she provides the adoring and adorable image that a child first finds in its mother.

We might wonder what the riddle was supposed to suggest in the 3rd century, when the story likely originated. One possibility is that despite the carnal perspective at the beginning, the story is alluding to something on a spiritual level, perhaps a divine female figure from some mystery cult. Pericles, after all, felt a hint of divinity about her in describing her as a “celestial tree.” From mythology we know about the great Syrian goddess Cybele and her relations with her son Attis; the same was true for Venus and Adonis. The play later on brings in Diana, the ancient Graeco-Roman goddess of the moon, chastity, and childbirth. She was one of the virgin goddesses. Could her cult have been expanded in later times? Could she have become the all-nurturing mother who is also the spiritual bride and daughter? A famous image of Diana, used in the BBC video both at the beginning and the end of the play, is that of a multi-breasted woman. Any written records associated with such images are lost.

From Gnostic sources, however, we do have the remains of texts which sound similar in terms to the riddle. One is “The Thunder, Perfect Mind”:

I am the honored one and the scorned one,
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin...
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband,
and he is my offspring... (Barnstone 1984, 595)

This text comes from the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection dating from the 4th century, found in 1945 by an Egyptian farmer. It is in Coptic, the Egyptian language of antiquity, written in Greek phonetic script. Most likely it was translated from Greek. It is one of numerous writings in the collection termed “Gnostic” by the official Church of that time, from the Greek word for experiential knowledge, Gnosis. The Church felt obliged to persecute these Gnostics ruthlessly as heretics. Thus the texts had probably been hidden to prevent their utter destruction from human memory.

The passage just quoted refers to a divine feminine being; other texts in the same collection call her Sophia, Greek for wisdom. The passage occurs in a long series of paradoxical utterances, suggesting her possession of a multitude of antithetical attributes, and thus in herself a being indescribable in language. But what does our story have to do with such mystical heights? Even in their heyday, not many people would have read this text. It is only an indication of the kind of cult figure the story might have drawn on. Actually, there is in orthodox Christianity a feminine being who also fits the description in Antiochus’s riddle. But to say her name at this point would be to give away the surprise.

In Shakespeare's own works, the issue of father/daughter incest appears in the incestuous blending of daughters' goals with those of the father, most notably in Hamlet and King Lear. In the former, it is Ophelia's loyalty to her father over himself that makes Hamlet so furious with her. In the latter, the older daughters' extravagant show of devotion to their father, gratifying his narcissism, combined with their commitment to care for him in exchange for his estate, leads to their repudiation of him when they find him offensive. Thus the Fool reminds Lear, “thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers,” terms reminiscent of Pericles' riddle, explaining that “when thou gavest them the rod” he “puttest down thy own breeches” (King Lear, I.iv.187-190). The incestuous implications have been spelled out in the novel and film A Thousand Acres, where the older daughters have as children been victims of the father's sexual appetite. At the same time, in Lear. it is the youngest daughter's declaration of independence from her father that clears the way to her more lasting loyalty. One must assume that if Pericles had married Antiochus's daughter, she would have continued to love her father over him, just like Ophelia, even if she did not go back to his bed.

It might be objected against the story that it is unrealistic that a king advertise his incest with his own daughter by such a riddle. Incest is so universally disapproved that if the facts were known, the King's subjects would revolt. The more universal truth displayed in the scene, I think, is that a suitor has a right to be on guard when the affection between father and daughter is too close, because then he may end up being judged against the father by the daughter for the rest of his life.

In the second act of the present play, we will see how another king's daughter does act independently of her father, for her own goals, moreover, the father approves such independence; thereby she is both independent of him and also genuinely loyal. This is one resolution of the psychological father/daughter incest that Antiochus's relation to his daughter implies.

But I am getting ahead of our story. We left Pericles fleeing Antioch for his life. In the remainder of the scene, his fears are confirmed, as King Antiochus does indeed give an assassin instructions to murder Pericles, going to Tyre if necessary. Pericles, meanwhile, has decided to sail for points unknown, leaving his city in the hands of his faithful friend Helicanus. Pericles arrives in the vicinity of the city of Tarsus (St. Paul's home city), which he learns is starving from famine. Pericles offers his own supplies; and after some delay, because its ruler, King Cleon, feared that Pericles was using the food merely as a way to gain control, the city is saved. The main purpose of this scene seems to be to set up an obligation for the King and Queen of Tarsus, Cleon and Dionyza, to repay later. Thus ends Act I (as editors have divided up the play).

3. ACT II: ANOTHER TEST TO WIN FAIR LADY

Act II begins with a storm at sea--Fortune is a fickle lady--and Pericles finds himself the sole survivor, washed up on some unknown shore with nothing but the shreds of his clothes (echoing Twelfth Night and anticipating The Tempest). Two fishermen, reflecting on the storm as Pericles lies hidden behind a rock, have an interchange which humorously indicates the play's dark moral world:

3 Fisherman. ...Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
1 Fish. Why, as men do a’land; the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; ‘a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a’ th’ land, who never leave gaping till they swallow’d the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.
Per. [Aside.] A pretty moral. (II.i.26ff)

King Cleon's fear of Pericles, in the earlier scene, would seem to have stemmed from a similar perspective. The fishermen go on to wish that their own “good king Simonides” would “purge the land of these drones, that rob the bee of her honey.” It develops that Pericles has landed at Pentapolis, whose ruler they praise for his “peaceable reign and good government.” Pericles joins in and expresses his admiration of such a king. It further develops that Simonides has a “fair daughter,” whose birthday is the next day, and that there will be a tournament in her honor, at which knights from all over the world will be jousting in hopes of winning her love. If only Pericles had a suit of armor! Just then his own armor, somewhat rusty now, catches in a fisherman's net.

Thus by a series of happy coincidences Pericles is on his way to a second contest whose prize is a fair princess. I do not think we need be disturbed by the improbabilities; the play does not by such accidents lose its ability to convey a universal message: Even in a dog-eat-dog world, a young man gets more than one opportunity to win fair maiden. There are always more fish in the sea, to return to the earlier metaphor. Moreover, the improbabilities give a sense that this land of Pentapolis is not quite of this world. Like Odysseus on the wondrous islands he finds himself after his ship is lost, Pericles has entered a mythic land, this time one that fulfills all the courtly ideals of the medieval romances.

This tournament at Pentapolis is quite an improvement over the earlier riddle-guessing at Antioch. For one thing, the losing knights are not killed. For another, the princess is not bound to marry the winner; he just gets more of her attention. Moreover, the wooing is conducted on a high cultural level, with Latin mottoes, polite conversation, music, and dance; there is no place for that “inflamed desire” we saw earlier.

Of course, Pericles in his rusty armor wins the day. In asides to the audience the princess reveals her attraction to the mysterious stranger. Pericles, oddly, thinks not of her but of her father--Simonides reminds him of his own deceased father, whose glory was as the sun, against which his he shines “like a glowworm in the night,” he feels so inadequate by comparison. Pericles is the boy to the man Simonides; in short, he feels at home here. Yet with Simonides, the ideal king, he could grow to fill his father's shoes. Part of taking on the adult role, of course, is getting a wife.

The next day Simonides, holding a letter, tells the waiting knights--all but Pericles, who seems to have slept in--that his daughter Thaisa has decided to devote herself to the goddess Diana for the next twelve months, i.e. remain a virgin. So the knights bid adieu. The King peruses the letter, as Pericles enters. The letter, from Thaisa, shows that Simonides' story about her dedication to Diana was merely a polite ruse. His reaction reveals much about both of them:

Simonides. ...She tells me here she'll wed the stranger knight,
Or never more view day nor light.
'Tis well, mistress, your choice agrees with mine.
I like that well. Nay, how absolute she's in't,
Not minding whether I dislike or no!
Well, I do commend her choice,
And will no longer have it be delay'd...(II.v.16ff)

Although father and daughter have similar tastes, independent self-assertion is part of that value system. In what follows, the King tests both his daughter and Pericles against that value. First, the King asserts, and Pericles angrily denies, that he has tried to “bewitch the yielding spirit of my tender child” to make her love him. Pericles says to ask Thaisa whether he ever used “any syllable that made love to you.” Thaisa is not one to wait for her suitor, much less her father, to make the first move; she replies that she would not have minded if he had spoken of love to her. The danger in such forwardness is not so much that he will be offended (her worry previously) but that the man will take advantage of the opportunity without much of his heart in loving the girl. Pericles, we have seen, not only has not tried to seduce her, but was first touched more by her father than by her. Yet like father like daughter--they have an easy compatibility.

The King, hiding his true feelings until his daughter's declaration, heartily applauds both Pericles' and Thaisa's responses. Here Shakespeare takes a point of view like much of modern American psychotherapy (following Freud's lead), which has as its goal freeing the “ties that bind” adults in childlike dependency on other people. On the other hand, such independence is here (as for Freud) won mostly by internalizing the father's values: in this case, not to look at outward displays or signs of status (for Pericles is hiding his), but the “inner man,” as one of the King's speeches puts it. Although psychotherapy tends to stop at just this point, for Shakespeare, things have just begun to get interesting; we are at Act III, where scholars say that Shakespeare's personal touch is now very much in evidence.

4. ACT III: A BEGINNING AND AN ENDING AT SEA

Pericles and Thaisa marry and live happily together for a year at Simonides' court. Meanwhile in Tyre, the ruling clique is restless; they want a king. Moreover, King Antiochus and his daughter are both dead, struck by Jupiter's lightning, so Pericles has no reason to stay away. If he is not back in 12 months, they want Helicanus, Pericles' deputy, as king. Ever loyal, Helicanus orders a search for Pericles. At almost the end of the 12 months, they find him at Pentapolis; he must return immediately if he is to remain king. So he sets off, accompanied by Thaisa even though she is expecting their child. As Fortune would have it, a terrible storm comes up at sea, full of high winds, thunder, lightning, and even an earthquake, we learn later (III.ii.14). Right in the middle, Thaisa gives birth.

This kind of setting, with--as Pericles says--all five elements colluding (fire, air, water, earth, and heaven), suggests a magical auspiciousness, as though all the fairy godmothers were giving the baby gifts. Thaisa, sadly, dies in childbirth. The sailors protest superstitiously that they will all perish unless the dead body is removed from the ship. So the grieving Pericles seals her in a chest and throws her overboard, with a message to whoever finds her to give her a proper burial. Now he fears that the newborn will not survive long at sea. Learning that the ship is near Tarsus, he takes the baby girl there to be cared for by the King and Queen whom he had earlier saved from famine.

In this play full of reverses, it is not to be assumed that Thaisa will remain dead long. The next scene is at the house of one Lord Cerimon, who appears to be an ancient physician. Men bring in a casket that has washed ashore, and he goes to work. Through music, massage, and medicine, Cerimon manages to raise Thaisa from death (or trance, as he more modestly says).

In Scene 3, Pericles puts the baby, named Marina, in the care of King Cleon and Queen Dionyza, to be educated there; and in Scene 4 Thaisa becomes a devotee of Diana at Ephesus. For the next 14 years, Thaisa is at Ephesus, Marina is at Tarsus, and Pericles is at Tyre, none apparently in communication with the others.

Some aspects of these events might strike us as odd. First, one would have thought Pericles would have taken some steps to recover Thaisa's body, if only to make inquiries. Second, before dedicating herself to Diana, would not Thaisa first have tried to find out whether her husband was alive or dead? Likewise, having apparently lost his wife, how could Pericles let strangers raise his daughter? Perhaps even odder, we do not lose interest; the play still works! The reason, I think, is that the story is a parable, and the psychological truth lies on that level.

These characters, I think, are not to be seen as real people. They are shells onto which we may project a perfectly typical way of conducting domestic life. When two people marry, unless it is very special, the excitement wanes after the first year or two or six. So the husband gets involved in his career, which we have seen is Pericles' true passion anyway. The wife manages the household, and perhaps a career. They may as well be separated by an ocean, or death. There may also be some grief over the loss over their former relationship, manifesting as a vague depression. In noble families of Shakespeare's time, children were raised by nannies and sent to boarding school. They grew up scarcely noticed by their parents, except for carefully rehearsed performances at holidays. Nowadays, the wife, or sometimes even both parents, may raise the children, but often, with both parents working, they are immersed in their own lives and hardly even relate to each other.

5. ACT IV: MARINA

Marina, like a typical English aristocratic child, grows up under others' care, excelling in all that she is taught. But this child has been performing a little too well, outshining even the daughter of her protectors. Queen Dionyza finds this situation too humiliating, and resolves to have Marina killed. We pick up the story there, with the Queen talking first to the murderer and then to Marina, to induce her to go for a walk with him.

Just as the assassin raises his knife, we see, pirates intervene and kidnap her. Again, we are not to wonder about this amazing coincidence. The outside world often does intervene adventitiously in a teenager's life at some point, to prevent psychological death--sometimes even physical death--as a result of some overbearing authority or other, such as a tyrant of a father or a witch of a mother. Usually the course of action interrupted is one that youngsters are told is for their own good, by people without understanding who they are and who are mostly absorbed in themselves. Likewise, the “rescuer” is often not somebody very reputable, even somebody rather unscrupulous. In our own day, we may think of drug dealers who then, when the girl needs money, double as pimps. The pirates, who sell Marina to a brothel in the port city of Mytilene, are not so different.

This world of disease, death, and forced degradation could hardly be portrayed more vividly. For example, the Bawd, the madam in this establishment, complains about their need for fresh whores:

Bawd. We were never so much out of creatures. We have but poor three, and they can do no more than they can do. And they with continual action are as good as rotten. (IV.ii.6ff)

And a few lines further on, from the husband and the hired man:

Pander. Thou say’st true, there's two unwholesome, a’ conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.
Boult. Aye, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast meat for worms. But I’ll go search the market. (IV.ii.19ff)

Here “poop,” according to the notes to the Penguin edition, is a low term for the female genitalia; as a verb, it means to infect by such means: such is the brothel's reality. The similar deflation occurs when the brothel keepers discuss Marina's potential customers. The sequence reminds one of the tournament at Pentapolis, when knights from various countries came to vie for Thaisa's favor. This time, there is a knight from Spain and one from France. Of the first, Boult says that his “mouth watered, and he went to bed with her very description”; he will be coming “with his best ruff on” (IV.ii.95f). The other is one “that cowers i’ the hams” and “brought his disease hither” (IV.ii.100, 105f), ready to deliver. Now we see what those fine knights, all grace and culture at court, are in a different setting. It is the underside of polite society, a dark world of uncaring lust and greed, drawn in broad black humor.

Oddly, perhaps, it is in similar language that the world is described by the Gnostic scriptures from Nag Hammadi, in their dark rendition of Genesis. Adam and Eve, in one account, were created because “the authorities of the Darkness”--fallen angels, or, in Hellenistic myth, the negative sides of the seven noble planetary gods--became enamored of the Goddess, here called "incorruptibility," after seeing her reflected image; they hoped to possess her by creating a being in her image (Robinson 1988, 163). First they make out of the mud an androgynous being (like the goddess-figure described in the text quoted earlier) whom they call Adam; but what they make (unlike the goddess) has no spirit, because of their own lack of divine spirit. As a result, “They could not make him arise because of their powerlessness” (163). The Bible's apparent sublimity has become a comedy of incompetence. Then “the spirit”--meaning the Goddess—“saw the soul-endowed man upon the ground. And the spirit came forth from the Adamantine Land; it descended and came to dwell within him, and that man became a living soul” (163). The authorities realize that what they want, the Spirit, still eludes them. So they open Adam up and take out “the spirit-endowed woman.” Adam speaks, honoring her. The text continues:

Then the Authorities came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation, and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, “Come, let us sow our seed in her,” and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches, she became a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully. (Robinson 1988, 164)

The "Authorities" are the selfish lust, greed, envy and other vicious passions for the sake of which people dominate others and which dominate them in turn. They are personified in the Gnostic myth by “the authorities of the darkness,” whose chief is the one who says “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me” (162)--a thinly veiled reference to Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. In the play they correspond to the evil king and queen and the people who run the brothel. Whether Marina will retain her integrity and her spirit, or give up her spirit for the sake of her life, like the feminine spirit's "shadowy reflection" in the passage just cited, remains to be seen.

The action returns to Tarsus, where Marina was to have been killed. The wicked queen now has the supposed assassin killed, to keep Marina's fate a secret. The King reluctantly goes along with her plan to pretend that Marina has died of natural causes; they give her a fancy funeral with much weeping. Then when Pericles finally does come, he is shocked to find not her but only a tombstone marking her supposed grave. Grieving deeply, he lets his hair grow and loses interest in everything.

Pericles' sudden and prolonged outpouring of grief and depression is, after what has already happened, another odd development. His grief at his wife's death was remarkably short, and now he wears sackcloth and shuns the world, over the death of someone he never even knew! The point is that he is at a time in his life when it makes sense to feel something for a young woman. He has accomplished enough in his career, and in any case he is bored with it. His wife could have fit the bill, but he was not ready then. Now she is dead to him and anyway does not need him. His unconscious “feminine side,” which Jung called the anima, is now a demand in a man for a close relationship and life in the sensuous moment, which had gotten activated for a time at his marriage, at college, or at some other time when he was not obsessed with his career, and then pushed aside. Developmentally this feminine figure is still young, at a time when his image of himself is rather old and something to be defended against. Some men get a young girlfriend; others turn to a ready-made connection, their daughters, and let us hope it is not sexual. That is where Pericles is; that is why he comes to Tarsus now rather than earlier. What he needs is not there; he is abandoned again, and this time he did not want to be abandoned. That which was to give his life meaning is gone, just as when he was a child and again as an adult. In grieving Marina he is really grieving himself and his feminine losses all through life, which his masculine preoccupations had allowed him to keep at bay until now. And since its nature remains unconscious, the “mourning” gets stuck as “melancholia,” in Freud's words.

The action shifts to Mytilene, back in the brothel. Marina, it develops, is not so easily exploited as the brothel keepers had hoped. First let me quote a few lines from an earlier scene of Marina in the brothel, where she declares her resistance to the brothel keepers:

Marina. If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.
Diana, aid my purpose!
Bawd. What have we to do with Diana? Pray you will you go with us? (IV.ii.145ff)

They discover soon enough what the goddess of chastity has to do with them:

Bawd. Fie, fie upon her! She’s able to freeze the god Priapus and undo a whole generation. We must either get her ravished or be rid of her. When she should do for clients her fitment and do me the kindness of her profession, she has me her quirks, her reasons, her master reason, her prayers, her knees, that she would make a puritan of the devil if she should cheap a kiss of her. (IV.vi.3ff)

Priapus is the god of male generative powers. Marina is somehow able to appeal to her prospective clients' better nature and get them to lose interest in fornication. One day the young Governor of the island, Lysimachus, pays a visit in disguise, although the brothel keepers recognize him. Marina says in effect that if he is governor, he should act with the honor expected of his office:

Marina. I hear say you're of honorable parts and are the governor of this place.
Lysimachus. Why, hath your principal made known to you who I am?
Marina. Who is my principal?
Lysimachus. Why, your herb-woman: she that sells seeds and roots of shame and iniquity. O, you have heard something of my power, and so stand aloof for more serious wooing. But I protest to thee, pretty one, my authority shall not see thee, or else look friendly on thee. Come, bring me to some private place. Come, come.
Marina. If you were born to honor, show it now;
If put upon you, make the judgment good
That thought you worthy of it.
Lysimachus. How now? How now? Say more. Be sage. (IV.vi.76ff)

Marina takes advantage of the opening, calling the brothel a “sty” selling diseases, where she has been placed by “ungentle fortune”; she would rather be “the meanest bird/That flies in the purer air” than stay in this “unhallowed place.” Lysimachus is moved: “I did not think thou couldst have spoke so well,/ Ne’er dreamt thou couldst” (99f).

After that, scholars have noted two very different versions of Lysimachus’s response. One comes from a 1608 prose version of the play by George Wilkins, Shakespeare’s likely collaborator in writing the play. Even though it is prose, much of it reads like blank verse, which leads some, e.g. Edwards (1976), to think these lines come from a lost original script of the play:

Lysimachus. Now surely this is virtue’s image, or rather virtue’s self, sent down from heaven a while to reign on earth to teach us what we should be. I hither came with thoughts intemperate, foul, and deformed, the which your pains so well have laved that they are now white. For my part, who hither came but to have paid the price, a piece of gold for your virginity, now give you twenty to relieve your honesty. (Edwards 1976, 23)

In the standard version of the play, from 1609, Lysimachus is less humble; he pretends not to have come for her virginity at all: “Had I brought hither a corrupted mind,/ Thy speech had altered it” (IV.6.101f ), but “I came with no ill intent; for to me/ The very doors and windows savour vilely” (107f). His honorable persona clashes so much with his desire that desire must take a back seat! He praises her as “a piece of virtue” (109) and doubts not “thy training hath been noble” (110). He lavishes money on her, promises that “If thou/ Dost hear from me, it shall be to thy good,” and curses anyone who would take her “goodness”—although he does not repeat this curse in the hearing of those who run the brothel. Considering that Marina later marries Lysimachus, the prose version (in blank verse) makes more dramatic sense: Marina would hardly marry such a hypocrite. It would be even worse if we took Lysimachus as being truthful, for then he would appear a cruel prankster, out to demean the woman’s reputation as the reluctant whore if he could. (It would be like a college fraternity prank I once heard about. A brother was assigned the task of secretly recording a woman “pleading for her virtue” against his attempts to seduce her. He was then to play the tape for the amusement of the assembled brothers.)

Now, for the parallel, I wish to return to the text quoted earlier, the Gnostic reinterpretation of Genesis. Having separated from her “shadowy reflection resembling herself” the female spiritual principle, which had become a tree, enters a snake on the tree. The snake, really the Goddess in disguise, persuades her shadowy reflection, the “carnal Eve,” to eat the fruit of that tree, and thereby gain knowledge. She and Adam both do so; what they learn is that they are “naked of the Spiritual Element,” and they cover themselves in fig leaves; knowledge of one's ignorance, of course, is for Gnostics the beginning of wisdom. At such Gnosis, knowledge, the Chief of the Authorities, the arrogant one--an epithet for Jehovah--scolds them for their disobedience. They leave the garden heavy with guilt, taken in by the ruler's browbeating, and the Authorities “defile” Eve for their pleasure. The fruits of such evil, such as Cain and Abel, are further disasters. But then Eve has a daughter, named Norea. I quote the text:

And again Eve became pregnant, and she bore Norea. And she said, "He has begotten on me a virgin as an assistance for many generations of mankind." She is the virgin whom the forces did not defile.
Then mankind began to multiply and improve....
The rulers went to meet her intending to lead her astray. Their supreme chief said to her, “Your mother Eve came to us.”
But Norea turned to them and said to them, “It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. And you did not know my mother; instead it was your female counterpart that you knew. For I am not your descendant; rather it is from the world above that I am come.” (Robinson 1988, 166)

This last speech could have been said by Marina, another “virgin whom the Forces did not defile,” whose spirit also opposes and confounds the dark world around her. Marina has an aura that is both human and beyond the human. In the Wilkins prose version, Lysimachus notices this in a sentence that strangely echoes the description of Norea in our Gnostic text: “Now surely this is virtue's image, rather virtue's self come down from Heaven a while to reign on earth to teach us what we should be.” In a nice touch, the BBC television version includes this significant sentence. The word “reign” suggests royalty, a kind of Queen in Heaven come to exercise her power on earth.

In the world of the play, Marina's association is with the goddess Diana, to whom she has prayed all her life and with whom her mother has many associations also. There were also the five elements at Marina's birth, suggestive of divine birth. Could the spirit of Diana have incarnated in Marina? The problem is that it is out of keeping with Diana's myth for her to appear in a brothel. She is too powerful to let that happen. Another possibility is that it is an oblique reference to the Virgin Mary, who in the Middle Ages was considered the Bride of Christ and hence a kind of royalty of heaven. This is certainly possible, given Shakespeare’s Catholic upbringing. And it is oblique enough to pass the censors. But Catholicism did not go so far as to put Mary physically in a brothel, subject to rape. The image of being thrown into a brothel does, however, apply to the Gnostics’ Norea; the authorities seduced Eve and are now after her. And Norea says what Marina would have said if she thought it would have helped: that she is not what she seems, she is actually, unknown to them all, from stock nobler than her jailers. The play expresses Gnostic myth in secular images.

After Marina's visit from Lysimachus, Boult and the Bawd are even more furious with her than they were before. “She sent him away cold as a snowball, saying his prayers too,” Boult complains (IV.vi.138ff). The Bawd berates her on her arrogance for thinking she can avoid going “the way of all women.” The implication is that there is no difference between prostitution and marriage. We can imagine what the argument would be. Each is a game of selling oneself for profit. Most women in those days had no choice whether or who to marry, that was done by their father, who often decided on the basis of what profits him most. And after marriage, if she wishes not to have sex, the Church tells her it is her duty, part of the “sacrament of marriage.” The bawd doesn't say this, but it is well-nigh implied.

Alone with Boult, Marina again demonstrates her ability to find her opponent's vulnerability. Boult is the opposite of Lysimachus: he is low-man on this very low totem pole. “Thou holdest a place/ For which the pained'st fiend of hell/ Would not in reputation change” (IV.vi.160ff). She reminds him of the abuse he puts up with from customers. “What would you have me do?” he asks, “Go to the wars? 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?” (168ff). Marina says that even emptying latrines or helping a hangman would be more honorable. Then she offers him the proposition she's been building up to: she can make more money for the brothel teaching noble girls singing and weaving than she ever could the usual way. Boult can use her that way, and increase his own position as well. To sweeten the pot, she gives him the gold she got from Lysimachus. Boult loves the idea.