We come now to the denouement. While Marina gives lessons to noble girls, Pericles and his men wander about the Mediterranean coast, from port to port listlessly. They arrive at Mytilene for its annual feast of Neptune. Seeing the flag of Tyre, the governor pays the visitors a call.
In this scene, one of the most moving in Shakespeare, Pericles overcomes his depression through a gradual recognition that a girl sent to cheer him with her singing is in fact his daughter Marina. He arouses his interest when the girl, miffed by seeing her attempts to help rebuffed, says that she, too, has her sorrow, for she is separated from her noble parentage by the accidents of fortune. Like Norea in the Gnostic myth, Marina lets her interlocutor know that her birth is not what it seems. Pericles asks questions and realizes by her answers who she is. The whole play has been building toward this moment, which gains special significance by the particular words he uses. Pericles finally speaks, first to his trusted friend and then to the daughter he is sure he sees before him:
Pericles. O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir!These lines both indicate the birth of new life in Pericles’ depressed frame and also refer us back to the original riddle: Marina is daughter and mother both. There is a sense in which she is even his wife, for he said earlier:
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;
Thou that was born at sea, buried at Tarsus,
And found at sea again! O Helicanus!
Down on thy knees! thank the holy gods as loud
As thunder threatens us: this is Marina. (V.i.190-197)
Pericles. ...My dearest wifePericles does more than merely compare her to his wife. It is speech, verbal intercourse between the two of them, that produces the new Pericles. He is the child of the relationship. Besides answering the riddle, Pericles' words fit the Gnostic verse to Sophia that I quoted earlier, terming her wife, mother, and daughter.
Was like this maid, and such a one
My daughter might have been: my queen's square brows,
Her stature to an inch, as wand-like straight,
As silver-voic’d, her eyes as jewel-like
And cas’d as richly; in pace another Juno;
Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.... (V.i.106-113)
Moreover, Marinas responses to Pericles are reminiscent of the Gnostic female spiritual principle's teachings to Adam and Eve. Just as the snake’s words, when responded to by Adam and Eve, lead to the Knowledge, Gnosis, of ignorance and their regaining through the apple of the spirit Adam had lost, thanks to the Authorities, so Marina’s words bring Pericles to the knowledge he needs to regain his spirit, after the separation and ignorance caused by the envious Queen.
To Shakespeare's audience, the words “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” would have had religious overtones, referring to the central paradox of Christianity, that of God the Father also being the God the Son. In that Mary, like all of us, is part of the Father's creation, she is in that sense His daughter. She is also God's daughter in a more specific sense; the Marian cult of the Middle Ages had held that Mary, to be a pure vessel suitable for Christ, must have been born by Immaculate Conception--in other words, she, like Christ, had no human father. The resulting paradox would have been well known in Elizabethan England. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Second Nun's Tale Prologue has a prayer to the Virgin Mary which begins, “Thow Mayde and Moodor, doghter of thy Sone...” Chaucer was echoing here the prayer to Mary in the final canto of Dante's Divine Comedy, which Chaucer had translated; the words in Italian for “daughter of your son” are “figlia del tuo figlio,” the nouns' similarity accentuating the paradox. Many hymns to Mary in the Latin Middle Ages spoke of her in similar terms; for example, James Torrens (1993, 255) tells us the words of O Gloriosum Virginum: “He who created you lies quiet/Nursing at your breast.” From this standpoint, we might revisit the idea of Marina as a Virgin Mary figure, in a spiritual sense. For although Mary would not physically be imagined in a brothel, her image would have been, for prayer and supplication; thus she could be thought of as spiritually present.
Yet Shakespeare's emphasis, I submit, is more akin to the Gnostic myth than that of orthodox Christianity, even with the additions that embellish Mary's rank. For the orthodox Catholic, Mary is a flesh and blood woman whom God picked as the vessel in which to incarnate himself. The miracle is God's, not Mary's. The same would be true of her Ascension. For Shakespeare, however, Marina is the miracle worker, not her father. Nor is Pericles a good model for God--God would never have been so ignorant or debilitated as Pericles. It is Marina who incarnates the Deity, in a secularized Gnosticism; she is the redeemer-figure, not the other way around, just as she is to the wayward souls who come to the brothel. And although missing her parents, she has not plunged into deep depression like Pericles. The brothel does parallel his depression; Marina, however, is the way out of brothel and depression alike. Moreover, the audience is identifying with him in the scene with Marina, feeling his all too human pain and joy. Marina, in contrast, is too controlled and unexpressive of her own emotion for us to identify with; she is distanced from us, like a god, or a psychotherapist. She has taken on the role of healer here, even though she is being healed as well.
In Gnosticism, in contrast to orthodox Christianity, either Christ or Sophia can be the redeemer-figure, depending on the myth and the context. Each is a deity--or figure of the unconscious--incarnated on earth. This androgyny of God also carries over to the imagery associated with various rituals, e.g. the communion wafer, which is both the body of Christ and the nurturance of the earth-- the grain, sacred in ancient times to the Goddess. In Jungian psychology the divine corresponds to aspects of the archetypal, or transpersonal, unconscious.
Marina as a divine female Sophia-figure corresponds to the anima (Latin for soul) in the unconscious of a man, which may be projected onto a flesh and blood woman or fleshed out in imagination, incarnated as a painting or a story, for example. For the individual whose “creation” she is, she is first a part of himself cut off from himself (like Eve from Adam), and later a bearer of new life. Such a figure is, as his creation, daughter; as the agent of his rebirth, she is mother; and as one whose spirit interacts with that of the individual to bring about the new life, she is wife.
In the play, likewise, Marina is for Pericles primarily a figure in his unconscious, for otherwise how could he grieve so much for someone he has not even known? She is not even conspicuous by her absence as long as his consciousness is otherwise engaged; and when he feels the need for his young, spontaneous, sensuous side to reawaken, he projects it upon a specific human being, now noticed as absent, causing a consciousness of soul-loss. When he finds her, however, his projecting finds fulfillment and is the means toward a new beginning. His ignorance has led to knowledge, Gnosis, achieved through dialogue, verbal intercourse, with the part of himself that he has lost.
7. THAISA AND MARINA AS THE UPPER AND LOWER SOPHIA
Bloom (1998) has alluded briefly to the idea of Marina's being an image of the Gnostic Sophia. But for a developed exposition we must turn to the British poet Ted Hughes (1992), who compares the play's development to the Gnostic myth of Sophia’s fall and redemption, a myth that appears in many texts and many variations. The primordial spiritual pair, Depth and Silence, masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine Mystery, emanate a series of male/female pairs of divine beings or Aeons. Sophia, or Wisdom, is the youngest of these Aeons. She separates from her partner so as to seek union with the Divine Mystery, but since Sophia could not have survived the energy of the divine radiance, she is prevented from doing so; that part of her which represents her desire is cast into the darkness. She is thus split in two, one part remaining above, rejoined with her consort, and the other below.
According to Hughes, Sophia's suffering is due to her trying to know the Divine by intellect alone, the separated consciousness, which is an act of “hubris,” conceited pride (1992, 351). For Hughes, the same is true in Shakespeare's myth, which he first stated in his poem Venus and Adonis and which continues through his plays. In Shakespeare's poem, Adonis haughtily rejects Venus's overtures of love as really invitations to “lust's abuse” and “increase,” i.e. physical propagation, for which “every stranger” will do; but love is something higher, and it “to heaven is fled” (all quoted in Hughes, 1992 65). Hughes calls this attitude “prudish Puritan idealism,” to which Sophia’s yearning for the highest Divinity, rejecting her partner, is comparable. Venus’s revenge, in the myth, is to have Adonis thrown down to hell, killed by a boar, just as Sophia, the youngest daughter of the Divine Mystery, is cast by its will into the darkness.
Hughes applies this perspective to Pericles. There, he says, the comparable act of hubris is Pericles' spurning of Antiochus' daughter, as someone steeped in lust rather than love. Here I must part company with Hughes. Pericles does not run away from Antiochus and his daughter because she is too associated with physical sex. It is his discovery of the incest with her father that gives him pause.. Moreover, Antiochus would have had him killed had he stayed, and never intended him to take his daughter. In this context, her sensuality is a trap. But it is not sensuality as such, as we see in Pericles’ next romantic endeavor. Thaisa is obviously interested in procreation and the physical act of love. This is shown by her reply at her father's accusation that Pericles has been making improper advances to her. “Who takes offence at that would make me glad” (III.v.72). And the father is pleased by her reply. There is also the blessing that her father gives them, that after the wedding: “Then with what haste you can, get you to bed” (93). This is simply part of the general mood of the occasion. The difference is that this second relationship is one based at least on mutual respect as opposed to manipulation, domination, and destruction. In fact, Adonis's fear of Venus in Shakespeare's earlier poem has a similar source: she is the conqueror, and one skilled in her form of conquest, and he feels himself too young for her, his ego too undeveloped alongside her strength. As he tells her, “Before I know myself, seek not to know me” (Venus and Adonis, line 525). In the Sophia myth, likewise, it is precisely to prevent Sophia’s destruction through union with the more powerful father that her desire must be thrown into the darkness.
Yet I do think there is one aspect of Sophia’s action that does parallel Pericles' similar action and which might be considered hubris. Pericles' fault is not disdain for the physical, but rather that in marrying Thaisa and begetting a child he is not really relating to her except as she mirrors her father. He is looking upward, toward his higher possibilities, not alongside him to the individual who is sharing his life. And when he boards ship with his pregnant wife, he is thinking of his kingship, which includes having an heir, but not the present circumstances of his wife and her condition. It is in this way, yearning for higher things and being unrelated to one's partner in the present, that Pericles follows the myth of Sophia. As the myth implies, it may sometimes even be a necessary fault, in one whose ego feels undeveloped. The only way an ego develops is by making choices on its own. The result is that the hero, Sophia, Pericles, or Adonis, becomes separated physically from his or her relational emotions. Each becomes unrelated, and this affects the partner as well as we see Thaisa embarking on a self-contained life dedicated to Diana, goddess of virginity and herself an ancient symbol of feminine self-containment.
Hughes correlates Thaisa with Sophia above and Marina with Sophia below: The doubling of Pericles’ love-objects correlates neatly with the doubling of the feminine goddess in the Gnostic myth. Indeed, Thaisa leads a life devoted entirely to divine objects of love; to that extent she is a citizen of the eternal world. Meanwhile, Pericles leads his life in Tyre unrelated to either his spiritual soul, i.e. Thaisa, or the aspect of his soul that has been cast into an evil world, i.e. Marina. The result is that his lower soul, his blood-soul, we might call it, is in the hands of the demiurge's demons, in the hell of this world. One cannot walk away from relationship without consequences.
In the Sophia myth, this lower world comes to be from Sophia’s fear, grief, yearning, ignorance, and consternation. A similar process happens in our play. The sailors’ fear, Pericles' grief, his ignorance of the emotional world, and his yearning for his own kingdom all lead to Marina's predicament. Hughes rightly identifies the creatures of the demonic world. First come the sailors' superstitions about women, which fit in with Pericles’ own unconscious need by demanding Pericles' separation from his wife and child. Next are the envious Queen and her weak husband, in whose hands Pericles places the infant Marina There follows the Queen’s assassin and finally the denizens of the brothel. Such is Marina's world, quite similar to that of the lower Sophia who remains below with suffering humanity.
Hughes notes that the Gnostic demiurge, or creator God, is sometimes called “the Lion-faced.” He observes that Marina's would-be assassin is named Leonine, and in other late plays similar names are given to rulers who seek to destroy the divine feminine: In Cymbeline, the name is Posthumus Leonatus; in the Winter’s Tale, it is Leontes. We need not assume that Shakespeare knew the relevant Gnostic texts; the Lion in Renaissance astrology-based imagery was a common image of pride and savage willfulness, which nonetheless also appears as the image of the sun, kingship, and divinity (e.g. the Biblical “Lion of Judah”).
Hughes does not speculate on whether Shakespeare actually knew about the Gnostics. He certainly does not need to have done so. Yet the basic ideas were readily available in his time, in the unsympathetic summaries by the “Church Father” Irenaeus, published in Latin by Erasmus, whose writings Shakespeare often drew upon. For example, Irenaeus wrote, paraphrasing the myth of Sophia as presented by the Gnostic teacher Ptolemaeus:
Through Limit Sophia was purified and consolidated and restored to union with her partner. For when Desire had been separated from her, along with the passion which had come upon her, she herself remained with the Pleroma, but her Desire, with the passion, was separated and crucified by Limit. (Barnstone 1981, 612.)“Limit” in the myth is a kind of gatekeeper who prevents even gods from pursuing illegitimate ambitions, in this case Thaisa's goal of finding another caring father in the preoccupied Pericles. In the myth, Limit would correspond to the tempest and Thaisa's apparent death, which separates her from her daughter just as the tempest separates the Desire of Sophia from the Sophia who is returned to the Pleroma, or spiritual world. Tempests mythologically are the work of the sea-god; often is portrayed as the son or consort of the Great Goddess, who does her bidding. In the play, Thaisa’s partner will eventually meet her there, by prompting of the Goddess herself, who must have been behind the tempest as well. In Irenaeus' paraphrase, the partner has the allegorical name of Will, this would seem an apt description of Pericles himself until his return to Tarsus.
Irenaeus’s paraphrase also includes the creation of the lower world out of Sophia’s passions:
From perplexity and anguish, as from a very ignoble source, came the corporeal elements of the universe—earth related to the stability of consternation, water related to the motion of fear, air related to the congelation of grief. Fire is immanent in all of them as death and decay, just as ignorance is hidden in the three passions. (Barnstone 1984, 618)For Marina, this world of terror and death is the brothel, where Hughes (1992) says she finds her liberator, corresponding to Jesus in the Sophia myth. The redeemer-figure, he says, is Lysimachus, who helps Marina in her chosen profession and then unites her with her father. In so doing, after his change in attitude toward her, he has recovered his own soul, Hughes points out. The redeemer is first redeemed. Irenaeus does not tell this part of the Sophia story, but it is clearly indicated in the “Hymn of the Pearl,” a Gnostic parable which Hughes cites (where the hero's redeemer is a message-bearing eagle, coming from above). I would add only that in both the play and Gnostic myth, the Goddess-figure is as active and redeeming as the masculine figure who comes from above. Moreover, it is Pericles himself who completes Marina's redemption, by restoring her position in the community as a member of royalty. This is the most decisive of her redemptions, which of course is the first step of Pericles' redemption as well. It is a credit to Shakespeare's instincts that he makes the story one of mutual redemption, and on a series of levels, of which the most decisive is Marina with her father, which is Pericles' rebirth as well as the raising of Marina higher in the play's hierarchical world, until she herself becomes Queen. I will talk about these levels again at the end of this essay.
8. ACT V, SCENES 2-3: THE NEW LIFE
The play now returns to its original focus, Pericles, and in what happens next reinforces the notion of Pericles' rebirth and transformation. His natural tendency, based on everything in his conscious life up to then, would have been to go to Tarsus and take revenge upon his daughter's would-be murderers. But something intervenes. First, he hears music, the “music of the spheres,” as he calls it. This was the sound supposedly generated by the planetary spheres in their orbits around the earth. It was of an ethereal nature, only audible when the hearer was in a certain cosmic state. A correspondence was supposed to exist between the orbits of the seven planets (counting the sun and the moon but not the earth) and the seven notes of the musical scale. I think I have read that Kepler, Shakespeare's near contemporary, thought he was investigating this correspondence when he discovered the laws of planetary motion. (Kepler would have dropped the moon and added the earth as a planet; the sun then corresponds to the first note of the scale.)
Then Pericles goes to sleep and has a profound dream. The Goddess herself, Diana, appears to him and directs him to go to Ephesus, where her most famous temple was. It is a place also associated with the last days of the Virgin Mary. It is also the abode of that famous sculpture of Diana as many-breasted mother. Gnostically we could imagine the Goddess as the spirit that was with Marina, and still is with Thaisa, passing to him and manifesting itself in the dream.
As a result of the dream, Pericles drops his plan for revenge temporarily and obeys Diana. They go to Ephesus, where Thaisa, of course, recognizes Pericles; she faints “dead away,” as the saying goes. She had assumed he had died in the storm. This is a crucial moment:
Thaisa. Voice and favour!A faint is a metaphorical kind of death, admittedly a brief one; hence the regaining of consciousness may constitute a rebirth; such is Thaisa's faint, a rebirth and transformation. Pericles is the agent of that death, from which Cerimon must once again revive her, but Pericles’ presence is also what transforms her, the rebirth. He is for her an inner figure--her animus, in Jungian terminology. Like Marina for Pericles, his reality had lain dormant in her unconscious until, as in the fairy tales (e.g. “Sleeping Beauty” or “Snow White”) her prince came to wake her up. Then, from recognizing him, she is led to recognize a feminine divine beyond the animus, personified in Marina.
You are, you are--O royal Pericles! [Faints]
Pericles. What means the nun? She dies, help, gentlemen! (V.iii.13-15)
In this way Pericles discovers his wife not only not dead, but figuratively reborn, just as he himself has been. Psychologically, this could be a husband's reunion with his wife, now reborn out of her solitary preoccupation with career or children, and after his preoccupation with the young female--whether in an affair, an attachment to the daughter, in art, or in therapy. If there has already been a divorce, or real death, there may be the marriage or attachment--in life, art, or therapy--to a new woman his own age--or a man, if he is so inclined. On a spiritual level, there would be attention to the Jungian Self--the hidden organizing principle or principles of the totality of the personality, unconscious and conscious alike--which can also be found without, in religion, art, etc. Some of the most urgent concerns of the old ego, such as revenge, drop away or are taken up by others (in the play, the people of Tarsus rise up and put their king and queen to death themselves).
The main transformative power in all this is Marina, Pericles’ anima-figure. She, as an inner figure come to life, is the one who allows for the connection to be made between the ego in this world and the divine world of dreams and myth. In Pericles’ case, the divine world appears to his ego as the music of the spheres and the dream, in which Diana leads him to his further fulfillment, his connection with the lost Thaisa, herself half in the spiritual world. The play follows what Jungian psychology says is the role of the anima: to be the agent of rebirth in a new connection to the Self, the inner equivalent of the sacred world. As such the anima appears in dreams and in artistic creations. If a man asks questions of such an imaginal object of his desire, he will discover that she is his own inner life; thereby she will restore him to life.
In myth and fairy tales, the girl leads the hero to the Wise Old Man. In Dante, correspondingly, the Virgin Mary leads Dante to the vision of God. The Wise Old Man here is Cerimon, whom Pericles meets at Ephesus, and as a result becomes whole. He himself, with Thaisa, can now return to their world of nobility and virtue as rulers of Pentapolis, the world of the enlightened demiurge. Meanwhile Marina goes to her father’s land, to rule in wholeness with Lysimachus as King and Queen of Tyre. In Jungian psychology, the anima leads toward the “ego-Self axis,” where Self is the perspective of the whole, i.e. an androgynous God. Similarly, in fairy tales, the girl marries the prince and “lives happily every after.” In Gnosticism the return to harmony is likewise signaled by the joining or rejoining of male and female pairs, the upper Sophia with Will and the lower Sophia with the Savior. Unusually in Western Culture, the good god behind the scenes has been imagined in feminine terms, as the Goddess Diana. Since all the other characters have arranged themselves in male/female pairs, perhaps we may assume that even the fiercely independent moon-goddess has her masculine counterpart. In alchemy, the moon-goddess’s consort was depicted as her brother, the sun-god Apollo.
What was Shakespeare's own inspiration for this radical perspective on the role of the divine feminine? In part, he had the culture's literary models to go on, such as Dante. Going further, I think, were features in England, such as his own Virgin Queen. Behind Dante there had been the Marian cult of the late Middle Ages, which followed in the wake of the troubadours' Cult of Courtly Love, which in turn arose in the context of the Cathar upsurge in Languedoc (today's southern France) and northern Italy of the 11th to 13th centuries. The Cathars were the last remnants of the ancient Gnostics, as a continuous tradition passed down from generation to generation (Quispel 2000). As to Shakespeare’s specific knowledge of the ancient Gnostics, from Irenaeus or other sources, we can only speculate. More respectably, another influence on Shakespeare was undoubtedly the “Wisdom” literature of the Old Testament (Bloom 2004), including the so-called Apocrypha, which personified Wisdom, Sophia in the Greek version, as the spouse of God, who was with him at the beginning and dwells with humanity even when God himself is apparently absent.
A more distant influence might have been the Sufi mystics of the Middle Ages. The Moslem faith had its own cult of the divine feminine, expressed by the Sufi mystics. The Prophet himself reputedly gave the terms “mother of her father” to his daughter Fatima al-Zahra, Fatima the Radiant (Corbin 1997, 40-41). This phrase of course is reminiscent of Dante's description of the Virgin Mary and Pericles' of Marina. It continued to provide food for meditation among Muslim mystics; Hallaj, for example, was alleged to have pronounced, “My mother gave birth to her father; that is a marvel indeed” (169). Jallaludin Rumi in a poem described woman as “Creator,” and “not the being whom sensual desire takes as its object,” not “creature” (160). Another mystic, Ibn Ben ‘Arabi, envisioned the divine in terms of a wise young girl, rather like Shakespeare's picture of Marina. Corbin has discussed these mystics eloquently.
9. PERICLES AND ALCHEMY
One important context in which the Elizabethans understood spiritual transformation was that of alchemy. Elizabeth even had an alchemist on her payroll, the learned Dr. John Dee, Court Astrologer. I want to look briefly at one example in their literature, specifically the 1580’s translation, from Latin into English, of an alchemical poem written by George Ripley, alchemist to Edward IV in the years just before and after 1500. Called the Cantilena, the poem is about an old King who regenerates by returning to his mother's womb, dissolving there, and returning as a newborn. The child is compared to Christ, and his mother to the Virgin Mary. The poem can be seen as an allegory about Father, Son and Virgin. But it is also an alchemical allegory about the regeneration of the alchemist himself in an imaginal mother, projected upon the alchemists’ ovens and retorts, which burned substances black (corresponding to Pericles’ depression), dissolved them in solution (his tears and hers), and returned them, purified, to solid form. I give two verses, the first one spoken by the King:
Else I God's Kingdom cannot enter in;
And therefore, that I may be Borne agen,
I'’le Humbled be into my Mother's Breast.
Dissolve to my first matter, and there rest.
...
Then great with Child, nine months she languished
And Bath’d her with the Teares which she had shed
For his sweete sake, who from her should be Pluckt
Full gorg’d with Milke which now the Greene Lyon suckt.
(Quoted in Jung, 1970/1955, pp. 283, 311).
The color green, of course, symbolizes new life, just as black symbolizes death. In Ripley's poem, the image of the “Greene Lyon” leads to that of the “ruddy son,” where red is the red of the rising or reborn sun. Both mother and son ascend to heaven at the end of the poem.
I have already hinted at the application to Pericles. The queen in these verses would correspond to Marina, even though she is really the King's daughter. Then with Pericles as king, and Marina as queen, the process is Pericles’ dissolving into black prima materia when he thinks she is dead, and then being reborn from her womb as the “Greene Lyon” when he has found her. And in as much as his rebirth is the culmination of a process that began in Antioch and continued in Pentapolis, it could be said that those other kings’ daughters, of Antiochus and Simonides, have something of the queen or mother goddess about them as well. In the Gnostic/Alchemical distinction among body, soul, and spirit, each represents the goddess on a different level.
The application of the Cantilena to Shakespeare is not new. Scholars have already applied Ripley’s poem profitably to two of Shakespeare's plays, King Lear (Nicholl 1980) and All’s Well That Ends Well (Haley 1993). I think that the poem applies equally well to Hamlet, with Gertrude as the Mother in the poem. In Hamlet, as in Ripley’s poem, the regenerating womb of Gertrude is not so virginal, in that it has already given birth to the hero once. There are variations on the rebirth theme, and more than one mother goddess--Venus as well as Diana, for example. In Pericles, Thaisa has something of the mother goddess about her, in as much as she is the mother of Marina. In Shakespeare more generally, the mother goddess, the feminine agent of rebirth, appears in numerous guises, usually young ones: Lear’s daughters, for example, or Helena and Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well, Portia in Merchant of Venice, even Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Regrettably it would take us too far afield to examine these examples here.
10. PERICLES AND THE ENGLISH MIRACLE PLAY MARY MAGDALENE
There is one final context I want to include which is useful for understanding the spiritual and Gnostic aspects of Pericles, namely, the English miracle play. Hoeniger (1963) has summarized the important points in his introduction to the Arden edition of the play. Miracle plays, popular both in England and on the continent, were dramatic spectacles illustrating the lives of the saints. Going loosely from episode to episode and based on legend rather than scripture, these plays acted out numerous supernatural occurrences demonstrating divine grace. One play in particular corresponds loosely with Pericles, Hoeniger points out, namely, the Digby play of Mary Magdalene. It begins by describing the Satanic rule of Emperor Tiberius, who corresponds roughly to the evil incestuous king Antiochus in Pericles. Mary Magdalene is shown as being seduced by these Satanic forces and as being redeemed by Jesus, who also raises her brother Lazarus from the dead. There is a loose parallel between these events and the redemption of Marina and her father. Then in the second part, Mary receives a vision in which Christ tells her to go by ship to Marcyll (Marseilles), to convert the Muslim king. She successfully follows the vision, and as a result of conversion the Muslim queen's desire to be with child is miraculously fulfilled. The couple undertakes a journey to the Holy Land, but the queen dies during childbirth in the midst of a violent storm. The sailors demand that both Queen and child be placed on a nearby rock--the similarity to Pericles is evident. The King is baptized by Peter in the Holy Land; then, as Hoeniger describes it, “On the return voyage he discovers his babe unharmed on the rock, and his wife suddenly returns to life as if from a trance. They return joyfully, and bless Mary Magdalene, who exhorts them to lead a steadfast Christian life” (1963 xc). This plot does not have the two generations and other details of Pericles deriving from the Greco-Roman tale, but the borrowing of features having to do with powers greater than humanity--the storm, the rebirths--is evident. And the change in deities from the Christian God to the Greco-Roman pantheon is typical of the Renaissance, Hoeniger points out.
Of special interest here is the character of Mary Magdalene, who has both the humanity and the spiritual power possessed by Marina in Pericles. The conversion of the king of Marseilles is reminiscent of Marina's conversion to virtue of Lysimachus in the brothel. The brothel of course suggests the pre-conversion life of Mary herself, as portrayed by orthodox Christianity. In Gnosticism, Mary Magdalene is an even more powerful spiritual figure than in orthodox Christianity. In the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, not only is she the person to whom Jesus appears first after his resurrection, but she is privy to teachings from Jesus that the other disciples are not. She is clearly one of the disciples, even an especially favored one, a fact that irritates Peter, as the Gospel of Mary relates.
The same irritation occurs even more strongly in the Gospel of Thomas. When Peter says, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus replies, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males” (Robinson 1988, 138). At that time, among both Jews and Gentiles, masculinity was considered inherently more spiritual than femininity, which was associated with the earth and matter. The Gospel of Thomas is choosing not to challenge that premise, but rather the assumption that therefore women cannot be as spiritual as men, by saying that women can make themselves male: “Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus concludes. Perhaps he is saying not simply that women can be as spiritual as men, but also that they can have other qualities typically associated with men: They can hold their own in a sinful world as well as men, and as forcefully, without succumbing to the archonic forces that work against one. The Gnostic writings say nothing of any former life for Mary as a prostitute; she is simply a strong woman as worthy of being a disciple as any man. In that capacity, reminiscent also of the Gnostic Norea, she is a worthy model for Shakespeare’s Marina..
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