Pericles The Oxford Shakespeare

Pericleswas one of the most popular plays of its time, and it has regained much of that popularity today. In a wide-ranging introduction, Roger Warren draws on his experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to explore the reasons for this enduring popularity. UnfortunatelyPericlessurvives only in a corrupt text, theQuartoof 1609, in which many passages are nonsensical and others appear to be missing altogether. Earlier editions have merely cleaned-up theQuarto, but this edition offers a conjectural reconstruction of what the original play might have been like. It draws upon George Wilkin'sThe Painful Adventures of Pericles(1608) to emend some of the errors and missing material. It does so in the belief that the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins. The entireQuartotext is reprinted in an appendix, together with the passages from Wilkin's narrative that have particularly contributed to the reconstruction, so that readers can see for themselves how the reconstruction has been made.