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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.
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