| ||
Rhyming in Pericles: More
Evidence of
Dual Authorship
by
MacD. P. Jackson
Pericles was first published in a quarto of 1609, which attributed the play to William Shakespeare and claimed that it had been "divers and sundry times acted by his Majesty's Servants at the Globe." Scholars agree that the quarto, on which modern editions must be based, provides an imperfect text, though there has been disagreement about the extent and nature of the corruption. The majority view is that it is a "bad quarto," printed from an unauthorized manuscript, which may have been concocted largely from memory. But the quarto's textual imperfections are not so drastic as to obscure a stylistic disparity between the play's first two and last three acts. The second part of Pericles is unmistakably Shakespearian; the first part is not.[1]
Several theories have been advanced to account for this state of affairs. It has been suggested that the circumstances of the text's transmission may have produced the disjunction in style, two different "reporters" having reconstructed the two parts of the play.[2] Another hypothesis is that acts 1 and 2 of Pericles are vestiges of an early Shakespearian play that the mature dramatist thoroughly revised over acts 3-5, or that Shakespeare wrote acts 1 and 2 at the beginning of his career and failed to finish the play until around 1606-1607.[3] Other commentators have supposed that Shakespeare wrote the whole of Pericles within a single period but that he deliberately made the first two acts odd for some special artistic purpose.[4] The choruses,
No other play generally accepted as wholly Shakespeare's was excluded from the First Folio of 1623. So the failure of Pericles to appear in that volume tells strongly in favour of the theory of divided authorship.[6] The leading candidate for the role of non-Shakespearian contributor to Pericles has long been the minor dramatist George Wilkins, whose one independent play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, was published two years before Pericles, with a title page claiming that it had been acted by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men; over the last twenty years or so some quite substantial evidence has accumulated in support of Wilkins's authorship of Pericles 1-2.[7] The purpose of this paper is to add some more.
Among the most valuable contributions to the case for Wilkins's participation in Pericles is David J. Lake's investigation of the play's rhymes. There are 145 rhymes within acts 1-2 of Pericles and 128 within acts 3-5. Lake offers a mass of data demonstrating that certain features of the rhymes in Pericles 1-2 associate this portion of the play much more closely with the known verse of Wilkins than with the acknowledged verse of Shakespeare
My procedure was first to compile a list of all the rhymes in Pericles and in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage.[11] The texts were scanned carefully from beginning to end and rhyme words were keyed into a computer in alphabetically arranged pairs: breath|death, ill|will, life|wife, and so on. Those from Miseries were tagged with an extra final symbol so that they could be identified as coming from that source play, not from Pericles. The order in which a rhyme's components appeared within the text—ill followed by will, or will followed by ill—was regarded as irrelevant. This holds for every phase of the investigation reported in this paper. The majority of rhymes were in couplets. When three consecutive lines rhymed (as in "away . . . stay . . . day"), three rhyme pairs were recorded: away|day, away|stay, and day|stay. Similarly a sequence of four lines rhyming on a single sound would produce six rhyme pairs. Thus "die . . . testify . . . eye . . . justify" yields die|eye, die|justify, die|testify, eye|justify, eye|testify, justify|testify. There were very few cases in which there could be doubt over whether a rhyme was intentional or accidental. Imperfect rhymes were included when they occurred within a rhymed context or in places, such as gnomic lines or ends of speeches, where rhyme might be expected. The Micro-OCP concordance programme was then used to generate an alphabetical list of all the rhyme pairs and to tally the number of occurrences of each in Pericles and in Miseries. As rhymes from both plays were printed in the one list, with the total of ill|will, for example, in Pericles being followed by the total of ill|will
It is immediately obvious that although the total number of rhymes in Pericles 1-2 is not much larger than the total number of rhymes in Pericles 3-5, it is within acts 1-2 that the great majority of rhyme links with Miseries fall. Twenty-six of the Pericles line references are to the first two acts, only six to the last three. Also noticeable is that the two rhymes that occur most frequently in Miseries—and they are easily the most frequent not only in the list of shared rhymes but in Miseries as a whole—are also the only two shared rhymes that occur as often as three times in Pericles. But in order to determine the significance of the links with Miseries we need data concerning rhymes in all Shakespeare's works.
The necessary information is available in Helge Kökeritz's Shakespeare's Pronunciation (1953), which ends with an index to all the rhymes in Shakespeare's collected works, including The Two Noble Kinsmen and the largely spurious miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim. From Kökeritz's index it is clear that three of the rhyme pairs common to Miseries and Pericles occur nowhere else in the Shakespeare canon. These are consist|resist, him|sin, and impudence|offence. Fears|years is paralleled only by fear|half year in I Henry IV, 4.1.136, tears/years only by Venus and Adonis, 1091, both|oath only by The Rape of Lucrece, 569, and awe|law only by Richard III, 5.3.312; and the index records only two further instances of bed|wed, bring|sing, and do|you. Even examples of ill|will and life|wife are far from numerous: outside Pericles there are eleven of each.
However, a just assessment of the presence in Pericles 1-2 of so many rhymes that are also found in Miseries requires comparisons between Miseries and all Shakespeare's works. I therefore consulted Kökeritz's comprehensive inventory for citations of each individual rhyme in my alphabetical list of rhymes in Miseries so as to obtain counts of the links with the various Shakespearian plays and poems. "Links" were counted not merely in terms of the presence of a rhyme in both Miseries and the Shakespearian work but in terms of the number of occurrences of the rhyme in each work. Thus, to illustrate from the data in Table 1, since all|call appears once in Pericles and
Kökeritz normally groups minor inflexional and derivative forms with their basic words, agree(d,-s,-ing) rhyming not only with be|me, etc., but also with bleed, sees, seeing, and abhor (thee) rhyming with more, for thee, and adore thee. Thus a single head word thrive(d,-th) includes rhymes with thrive, such as thrive|wive in Twelfth Night, and rhymes with thriveth and thrived, such as thrived|wived in Pericles. However, when a rhyme word is exceedingly common, as are die and eye, Kökeritz gives a separate head word to even the -s plural or verbal inflexion, dies and eyes. In such cases I differentiated between die|eye rhymes and dies|eyes rhymes. In practice, it matters little what rules-of-thumb one adopts. The word kiss, for example, is given the head kiss(ed,-es,-ing, you), but the inflexions and the feminine rhyme with you are irrelevant to kiss|this and to most of the other examples. In the large majority of cases, "links" implied exact equivalence of the rhyme words, and most of the few exceptions involved the simple -s ending. It was easy enough to preserve Kökeritz's separate categorization of such homophones as knight and night, somewhat more difficult to be sure of consistently maintaining his distinctions between such different words as the verb and the noun tear. Again, multiple rhymes were broken down into their components, so that triple rhyme yielded three rhyme pairs, a series of four rhyming lines (whether consecutive or part of a more complex pattern) yielded six rhyme pairs, a string of five rhyming lines yielded ten rhyme pairs, and so on. When a particular rhyme word appeared twice or thrice within such a sequence calculations were made as though it appeared only once. Thus "holly . . . folly . . . holly . . . jolly" was taken as creating three rhyme pairs, not six. Two attempts to extract the relevant information, made over a year apart, resulted in sets of figures that were identical for most works and so closely similar for others that errors or inconsistencies in the application of my criteria must have been few and of no practical consequence.
Once we have figures for the number of rhyme links between George Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and each one of Shakespeare's plays and poems, we still need to calculate how frequent these links are in proportion to the number of possible links, that is to the total number of rhymes in each Shakespearian work. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use ready-made tallies of Shakespeare's rhymed lines, such as those presented in the metrical tables appended to the second volume of E. K. Chambers's William Shakespeare (1930) or those given by Frederic William Ness in The Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare's Plays (1941). Ness's totals are often seriously at variance with Chambers's, which themselves result from Chambers's efforts
It was therefore necessary to produce new figures for the number of rhymes in each Shakespearian play and poem by working systematically through Kökeritz's one hundred page inventory, and marking each example of a rhyme on graph paper in which the various Shakespearian titles were allotted separate columns. This proved a tedious and tricky task. It takes a while to familiarize oneself with the organization of Kökeritz's index. References to all instances of above|love, for example, are given under the head word above; later, under the head word love, the rhyme above is listed, but the references are not repeated. However, references for multiple rhymes ("fight . . . sprite . . . night") and for especially unusual rhymes (am|Tom) are sometimes given under the later alphabetical head or heads as well. So it requires vigilance to avoid counting some instances of a rhyme twice. Kökeritz, who comments on the inaccuracy of Ness's statistics, seems to have been careful himself, and he is much more cautious about admitting rhymes as intentional, though he includes some doubtful examples, marking them with an asterisk. I included these few doubtful examples in my counts. But I excluded rhymes peculiar to bad quarto texts, ignoring all those that Kökeritz marks with a Q, except those from King Lear and the single example from Richard II.
As a check on the accuracy of my counts, I calculated directly the number of rhymes in the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. The Sonnets consist of 154 sonnets, each with seven rhymes, except that Sonnet 126 is a tail-piece with twelve lines and six rhymes and Sonnet 99 has an extra line connected with the opening quatrain and so yields nine rhymes. This gives 1079 rhymes. The total I compiled from Kökeritz's inventory was 1075. Kökeritz is responsible for at least part of this discrepancy. He has omitted the headword truth and so has no reference for the truth|youth rhyme in Sonnet 138, though he includes the rhyme (without reference) under the headword youth. A Lover's Complaint has 47 stanzas rhyming ababbcc, giving five rhymes in each and 235 overall. My total, compiled from Kökeritz's inventory, was 242. Venus and Adonis has 199 stanzas rhyming ababcc. This gives 597 rhymes, compared to my total of 603. The Rape of Lucrece has 265 stanzas, each with five rhymes. This gives 1325 rhymes altogether, compared to my total of 1338. Presumably my
An additional step in the investigation was to compile, with the help of Micro-OCP, an alphabetical list of all the rhymes in those sections of The Travels of the Three English Brothers which have been assigned to George Wilkins.[12] The play, another belonging to the King's Men, was printed in 1607 with a dedicatory preface to which were appended the names of John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, and there has been a fair measure of agreement among scholars upon which scenes were composed by Wilkins. The list of Travels rhymes was then compared with the list of Miseries rhymes, so that the number of links could be ascertained. Travels was thus treated like each of Shakespeare's works, in that the proportion of its rhymes that were shared with Miseries was calculated.
Table 2 presents for each Shakespearian work and for Wilkins's putative share of Travels (a) the total number of rhymes, (b) the number of rhyme links with The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, and (c) the number of rhyme links with Miseries expressed as a percentage of the total number of rhymes (that is, total-b divided by total-a and multiplied by 100). The plays are ordered according to the size of this percentage. Pericles 1-2 is treated separately from Pericles 3-5.
Pericles 1-2 heads the list with a percentage of rhyme links with Miseries that is almost double that of the highest authentic work by Shakespeare. This means that Pericles 1-2 is far more "Wilkinsian" in its rhymes—when "Wilkinsian" is defined in terms of the one play of George Wilkins's undoubted sole authorship—than any of the other plays or poems. This is a remarkable result considering the rather small number of rhymes in some of the plays, which would produce considerable chance variation in the percentages:
The results are very difficult to explain without resort to a theory of dual authorship. Pericles 3-5, in striking contrast to Pericles 1-2, falls about midway on the list, exhibiting roughly the same proportion of rhyme links with Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage as is exhibited by such other late romances as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. The notion that acts 1 and 2 of Pericles are early Shakespearian work receives no support from Table 2. There is no tendency for Shakespeare's earliest plays to display, in their use of rhyme, the same association with Miseries that is evident in Pericles 1-2. Nor does the theory that the style of Pericles 1-2 results from Shakespeare's conscious attempts at archaism provide a satisfactory explanation of the data. If attempts at archaism were responsible for the prevalence of rhyme links with Miseries, the links should be predominantly with the Gower choruses, which deliberately imitate Gower's medieval rhymes. But of the 58 rhyme links with Miseries in Pericles 1-2, 46 occur within the dialogue of Pericles 1-2 with its 100 rhymes, and only 12 within the Gower choruses to Pericles 1-2 with their 45 rhymes: the percentage of Miseries links with Gower choruses 1 and 2, namely 26.7, is higher than for any of the Shakespearian works, but the percentage of Miseries links with the dialogue of Pericles 1-2 rises as high as 46. In Pericles 3-5, in contrast, neither the Gower choruses nor the dialogue are significantly linked with Miseries in their use of rhyme. And of course the author of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage had no reason for aiming at archaism within that particular play, whose very success was due to its topical subject matter, the abuse of the powers of a guardian over his ward in the making of a marriage settlement.
An indication that the rhyme links between Pericles 1-2 and Miseries are due to common authorship is afforded by the results for Wilkins's share of Travels, for which the percentage of links with Miseries is higher than for any of the Shakespeare works. It can hardly be coincidental that those sections of Pericles and Travels which have often been attributed to Wilkins are both more "Wilkinsian" in their rhymes than the sections of Pericles generally accepted as Shakespearian or than any other of Shakespeare's works.
In themselves the results are perhaps less decisive for Wilkins's authorship of Pericles 1-2 than for the dual authorship theory generally. Dramatists other than Wilkins may have had an unShakespearian liking for Wilkinsian rhymes. Shakespeare appears to have favoured variety in his rhymes, and the high proportion of links between Pericles 1-2 and Miseries may have arisen because the rhyming in both these pieces of dramatic writing tends towards the commonplace. There are, however, less predictable links, such as consist|resist, him|sin, and impudence|offence, and this new evidence has to be considered in connection with all the other internal evidence that has been offered in support of the case for Wilkins's authorship of Pericles 1-2.
David J. Lake showed that in its rates of use of certain categories of
Eric Sams has argued that Wilkins, an inveterate plagiarist, must have imitated Shakespeare,[14] and certainly Wilkins's prose narrative The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608) follows the plot of the extant Pericles play and often echoes its wording. But a theory that Wilkins in Miseries and Travels imitated the style of Pericles 1-2 does not even begin to explain why Wilkins should have modelled his verse on those particular acts of the play or why they should be so notably unlike any other section of the Shakespeare canon. In Pericles we have a play whose omission from the First Folio encourages the suspicion that it is not wholly Shakespearian, and a play, moreover, which divides stylistically into two parts. The natural conclusion is that the part which sounds like Shakespeare's is his, and that
Rhyme | Pericles Reference | Frequency: |
Pericles/Miseries | ||
above/love | 2.3.21 | 1/1 |
all/call | 5.1.246 | 1/2 |
awe/law | 1.P.35 | 1/1 |
bed/head | 2.3.97 | 1/1 |
bed/wed | 2.5.92 | 1/2 |
begin/sin | 1.P.30 | 1/1 |
be/me | 1.2.108 | 1/2 |
both/oath | 1.2.119 | 1/1 |
breath/death | 2.1.7 | 1/1 |
bring/sing | 1.P.13 | 1/1 |
buried/dead | 2.1.80 | 1/1 |
consist/resist | 1.4.84 | 1/1 |
debt/get | 4.P.33 | 1/1 |
die/eye | 1.P.39, 1.1.32 | 2/1 |
do/you | 1.1.50 | 1/1 |
fear/here | 1.4.79 | 1/1 |
fears/years | 1.2.84 | 1/1 |
go/woe | 3.P.42 | 1/1 |
him/sin | 1.2.39, 2.P.23 | 2/2 |
ill/will | 1.1.103, 2.1.140, 2.1.171 | 3/6 |
impudence/offence | 2.3.68 | 1/1 |
kiss/this | 1.2.77 | 1/4 |
life/wife | 1.P.37, 1.4.45, 5.1.245 | 3/6 |
swear/tear | 4.4.27 | 1/2 |
tears/years | 1.4.18 | 1/1 |
thrives/wives | 5.2.10 | 1/1 |
Title | Rhymes | Links | Percentage |
Pericles 1-2 | 145 | 58 | 40.0 |
Travels of . . . English Brothers | 232 | 62 | 26.7 |
Measure for Measure | 46 | 11 | 23.9 |
Romeo and Juliet | 254 | 55 | 21.7 |
All's Well That Ends Well | 144 | 31 | 21.5 |
The Comedy of Errors | 210 | 45 | 21.4 |
2 Henry VI | 61 | 12 | 19.7 |
Twelfth Night | 83 | 16 | 19.3 |
Julius Caesar | 21 | 4 | 19.0 |
I Henry VI | 176 | 28 | 16.0 |
Othello | 57 | 9 | 15.8 |
Henry V | 53 | 8 | 15.1 |
Richard II | 283 | 41 | 14.5 |
Timon of Athens | 80 | 11 | 13.8 |
The Two Gentlemen of Verona | 74 | 10 | 13.5 |
Sonnets | 1079 | 140 | 13.0 |
Much Ado About Nothing | 39 | 5 | 12.8 |
Troilus and Cressida | 109 | 13 | 11.9 |
The Winter's Tale | 53 | 6 | 11.3 |
The Rape of Lucrece | 1325 | 139 | 10.5 |
Macbeth | 144 | 15 | 10.4 |
Pericles 3-5 | 128 | 13 | 10.2 |
As You Like It | 143 | 14 | 9.8 |
Titus Andronicus | 73 | 7 | 9.6 |
Hamlet | 117 | 11 | 9.4 |
Love's Labour's Lost | 624 | 57 | 9.1 |
The Passionate Pilgrim | 181 | 16 | 8.8 |
Cymbeline | 102 | 9 | 8.8 |
2 Henry IV | 46 | 4 | 8.7 |
The Merchant of Venice | 162 | 14 | 8.6 |
Richard III | 94 | 8 | 8.5 |
King John | 85 | 7 | 8.2 |
Venus and Adonis | 597 | 49 | 8.2 |
A Midsummer Night's Dream | 567 | 39 | 7.4 |
The Tempest | 98 | 7 | 7.1 |
3 Henry VI | 86 | 6 | 7.0 |
The Two Noble Kinsmen | 89 | 5 | 5.6 |
A Lover's Complaint | 235 | 13 | 5.5 |
King Lear | 130 | 7 | 5.4 |
Coriolanus | 19 | 1 | 5.3 |
The Phoenix and Turtle | 39 | 2 | 5.1 |
The Merry Wives of Windsor | 65 | 3 | 4.6 |
I Henry IV | 31 | 1 | 3.2 |
The Taming of the Shrew | 97 | 3 | 3.1 |
Henry VIII | 43 | 1 | 2.3 |
Antony and Cleopatra | 28 | 0 | 0.0 |
Notes
This paper was presented at a seminar, chaired by me, on "Defining Shakespeare: Works of Disputed Authorship", at the World Shakespeare Congress, Tokyo, August 1991. A useful guide to scholarship on Pericles is provided by Nancy C. Michael, Pericles: An Annotated Bibliography (1987). There is a concise evaluation of the evidence relating to the 1609 quarto in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987), pp. 130-131 and 556-560.
Philip Edwards, "An Approach to the Problem of Pericles," Shakespeare Survey, 5 (1952), 25-49. Edwards reargued the case, in modified form, in his Penguin edition of Pericles (1976), 7-8, 31-41, 193-199. Gary Taylor offers a rebuttal in "The Transmission of Pericles," PBSA, 80 (1986), 193-217.
This has been the view upheld by James O. Wood in a series of articles, notably "The Running Image in Pericles," Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 240-252. He has been joined by an impassioned advocate in Eric Sams, "The Painful Misadventures of Pericles Acts I and II," Notes and Queries, 236 (1991), 67-70.
F. David Hoeniger expounds this idea in "Gower and Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 461-479. Karen Csengeri supports single authorship in "William Shakespeare, Sole Author of Pericles," English Studies, 71 (1990), 230-243.
This was Hoeniger's position when editing the Arden Pericles (1963), and it has been taken by almost all editors of the play.
The quarto's attribution of Pericles to Shakespeare alone is less significant. Both A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) and The London Prodigal (1605) were first published in quartos assigning them to Shakespeare and the King's Men. Yet even scholars who suspect that Shakespeare may have had "something to do" with one or both these plays are unwilling to suppose that he was the sole author of them both.
The case for Wilkins is summarized in Hoeniger's Arden edition, pp. lix-lxii, and in the Oxford Textual Companion, as in note 1 above. Among recent contributions are D. J. Lake, "Rhymes in Pericles," Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 139-143; "Wilkins and Pericles— Vocabulary", Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 288-291; "The Pericles Candidates—Heywood, Rowley, Wilkins," Notes and Queries, 215 (1970), 135-141; M. W. A. Smith, "The Authorship of Pericles: New Evidence for Wilkins," Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2 (1987), 221-230; "The Authorship of Acts I and II of Pericles: A New Approach Using First Words of Speeches," Computers and the Humanities, 22 (1988), 23-41; "A Procedure to Determine Authorship using Pairs of Consecutive Words: More Evidence for Wilkins's Participation in Pericles," Computers and the Humanities, 23 (1989), 113-129; "A Note on the Authorship of Pericles," Computers and the Humanities, 24 (1990), 295-300; MacD. P. Jackson, "Pericles, Acts I and II: New Evidence for George Wilkins," Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 192-196; "George Wilkins and the First Two Acts of Pericles: New Evidence from Function Words," Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6 (1991), 155-163.
In his Arden edition of Pericles, pp. lvii-lxiii, 171-180, Hoeniger summarizes the cases that have been made for Heywood and Rowley and presents his own evidence for Day as Wilkins's collaborator.
John Jowett makes good use of the evidence of rhymes to distinguish between Chettle and Munday in "Henry Chettle and the Original Text of Sir Thomas More," Shakespeare and "Sir Thomas More": Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (1989), 131-149.
The source text for Pericles was the Arden edition, for Miseries the Malone Society Reprint, ed. Glenn H. Blayney (1964 for 1963). But my line references for Shakespeare's rhymes are taken from Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (1953).
The text used was that in The Works of John Day, ed. A. H. Bullen (1881; reprinted London: Holland Press, 1963). The table on p. xix of Robin Jeffs's introduction to the reprint shows considerable agreement among scholars over which portions of the play were written by Wilkins. Like Lake, I accept the following sections as his: pp. 319-320, 328-341 ("Enter the great Turke . . ." to "Exeunt"), 348-360 ("Enter Chorus" to "Exit"), 378-389 (to "Exit"), 391-405 (from "Exit Iaylor . . ."); the lack of scene divisions in Bullen's edition and the different pagination of the reprint cause some confusion over allocations; the passage from "Enter Messenger" to "Exeunt" on p. 328 may be by Wilkins.
This last statement is substantiated in my "Pericles, Acts I and II: New Evidence for George Wilkins," Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 196, notes 12-14. References for all the articles described in this paragraph are given in note 7 of the present article; see note 9 for Sykes.
To attribute Pericles 1-2 to Wilkins is not necessarily to claim that he wrote everything in this portion of the play. There are passages for which Shakespeare may well have been responsible. The first sixteen lines of the first Gower chorus are a fine introduction to the play's essential concerns, as Howard Felperin stressed in "Shakespeare's Miracle Play," Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 363-374. And yet Gower's initial couplet contains a nasal rhyme (sung|come) typical of Wilkins. The speech with which Pericles opens 2.1 begins with four strong blank verse lines not unworthy of Shakespeare, collapses into bathos with the next three lines, which include a rhymed couplet, picks up with two good blank verse lines that might have followed on directly from the first four, and ends with an undistinguished but unobjectionable couplet. However, Wilkins's Miseries and share in Travels show that he was quite capable of producing effective verse, though intermittently. Whatever the extent and nature of Wilkins's participation in the play, its overall design, though unusual, seems Shakespearian.
| ||