The Therapeutic Wanderings of Pericles
Résumés
Cet article analyse l’agentivité de la pièce de Shakespeare et Wilkins, Pericles, qui façonne l’histoire de sa réception à travers les siècles. Il montre d’abord comment la pièce se distingue par la place qu’elle accorde à la médecine dans un canon shakespearien qui s’y montre particulièrement sensible en général. L’étude porte ensuite sur un éventail de mises en scène de la pièce à visée thérapeutique, à commencer par sa présence dans le répertoire d’une troupe catholique du Yorkshire, les Cholmeley’s Men, spécialisés dans les pièces d’errances et de retrouvailles ; puis par son appropriation par le Shakespeare Ladies Club au XVIIIe siècle ; jusqu’au XXIe siècle où elle acquiert le statut de pièce sur et pour les réfugiés, notamment dans la mise en scène de Cardboard Citizens en 2003. L’article accorde une attention particulière au travail de Flute Theatre en direction de publics autistes afin d’évaluer le parti pris réaliste mais constructif qui exploite le potentiel affectif de la pièce dans cette mise en scène.
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The research for this paper was partly supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education Singapore) AcRF Tier 2 research grant Print to Digital Continued: Expanded Research into adapting Shakespeare for VR, AR and AI.
Texte intégral
- 1 On Flute Theatre, see https://flutetheatre.co.uk/
- 2 All references to the text of Pericles are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, second edi (...)
1I presented the first version of this article at an online symposium about Shakespeare and healing organized by the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre at Zaporizhzhia in autumn 2021, when none of us had any idea how much healing that country would soon need, and I hereby dedicate this online version to its organizers, Nataliya Torkut and Maya Harbuzyuk. Since the last third of this piece discusses three versions of Pericles by a company called Flute Theatre, I should declare an interest at the outset, namely that I am a trustee of Flute, and indeed that I have been involved with their founding artistic director Kelly Hunter’s work for excluded audiences for twenty years.1 At the time of writing, summer 2023, the company were just back from Serbia, where they had staged a series of performances of Pericles for mixed audiences including Ukrainian refugees. They had adopted as a motto one phrase from the play which might also serve as an epigraph for this paper: “nothing we’ll omit / That bears recovery’s name.” (21.42-43).2
2I begin from some questions which are frequently asked of Flute Theatre and other exponents of what is sometimes called “applied Shakespeare”. Are the plays of Shakespeare actually and innately good for you? Or is that notion purely a back-formation, one arbitrary side-effect of the longstanding appropriation of Shakespeare by national educational systems? Shakespeare’s place on officially prescribed curricula over the last century and a half has made a fluency in reading and enjoying the plays into one badge of full citizenship, and this has in turn enabled certain recent practitioners to offer the plays, or at least activities nominally based on them, to a range of hitherto neglected constituencies, as therapeutic short-cuts to social integration. But is that what Shakespearean drama really wants, or is it just an agenda into whose service the plays have been conscripted from without? Either way, when it comes to understanding what Shakespeare’s plays do want, is that solely a matter of reconstructing their first historical contexts, or can the plays’ subsequent lives in the world across time be just as revealing?
3I want to ask these questions of Pericles in particular, looking at this play’s reception history in its own time and in ours in a bid to gauge the play’s own agency in shaping that reception history. The paper is arbitrarily divided into two sections, labelled “Then” and “Now”, but since our accounts of the past can only be assembled in the present, and since it is very difficult to decide how long ago the present actually began, I hope that this will not suggest any particular reverence for those terms as categories. I will be looking closely at Flute Theatre’s dealings with this play, but I will also be glancing at one still under-studied instance of its early reception, its presence in the vagrant repertory of Sir Richard Cholmeley’s Men in 1610. Vagrancy, I will suggest, has been one keynote of this play’s life throughout. Excluded from the Folio despite its early theatrical popularity, and tainted for modern scholars by its status as a collaboration with the playwright and brothel-keeper George Wilkins, Pericles has been exiled from the centre of Bardolatry, wandering through theatrical history like a Shakespearean lost child. But like Marina, that long-lost reviver of her long-lost father, Pericles has behaved with remarkable consistency, drawn again and again to contexts of displacement and of healing.
A. Then
- 3 On Hall, and on the suggestion that he lies behind the figure of Cerimon, see Greg Wells, John Hall (...)
4Shakespeare was himself remarkably and pervasively soft on healers, even before his eldest child Susannah married Dr John Hall in 1607.3 Nowhere in the canon do we meet the cynical, mercenary, jargon-spouting poisoners of their patients we encounter when doctors arrive on stage in the works of, say, Ben Jonson or Molière. The one possible quack in the Complete Plays is Doctor Pinch in The Comedy of Errors, but he is an exorcist, purporting to be a doctor of divinity rather than of medicine, and by comparison the Shakespearean cleric who dabbles in genuine bodily physic, Friar Lawrence, at least means well. The Doctor in The Two Noble Kinsmen, admittedly, seems less dispassionate about the role-playing sex therapy he recommends the Wooer to adopt with the Jailer’s Daughter than the British Psychological Society might nowadays wish, but then those scenes were written by Fletcher. Elsewhere Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor may be comically self-important, but the Host is very keen to preserve him alive from the comical duel into which he is manipulated against Parson Evans, and in general the professional physicians in Shakespeare proper are all pillars of Hippocratic integrity: the late Gerard de Narbon in All’s Well That Ends Well (who was clearly a paragon, however mixed his daughter’s motives may be for applying his fistula cure to the King of France); the English and Scottish doctors in Macbeth; the doctor who helps Cordelia revive King Lear; and the conscientious and even anti-vivisectionist Doctor Cornelius in Cymbeline.
5This supportive attitude towards medics is compounded in Pericles, not only by the presence of Shakespeare’s most impressive healer, Cerimon, who restores Thaisa from apparent death, but by the other laudable feats of recovery which shape the play. Pericles cures Tarsus of famine (scene 4), and is then himself recovered from starvation and exposure by the fishermen at Pentapolis in the next scene (scene 5). At the play’s climax Pericles is again restored to active life, this time by the agency of his daughter (scene 21). In fact Pericles’ revival by Marina only recapitulates his earlier revival by Thaisa when, despite his victory in the tournament through which he was supposedly trying to win her hand, he lapses into a state of solipsistic melancholy about his dead father during the subsequent feast and seems to have abandoned this quest completely: he is restored here through music and dance, prefiguring the recognition scene, which gives him Marina via a song and gives him the instructional dream which sends him to find Thaisa via the music of the spheres (7.36-46). Pericles himself recovers Thaisa in his turn at the very end of the play when she expires again on recognizing him and again has to be revived, this time by her husband, and others (after that immortal line, “What means the nun? She dies. Help, gentlemen”, 22.35). It is no wonder that Cheek by Jowl’s French-language production of the play (Sceaux, 2018) set it in a hospital.
6In the play’s own professed understanding, all these instances of recovery and regeneration possess a cumulative force able to produce comparable effects in the real world, as though its offstage audiences will be able to recover their full wholeness too through participation in its fictions. Pericles actively advertises itself not as a play which merely dramatizes therapy but as itself a therapeutic work. The first thing we are told by Gower the narrator is that he has revived himself from death not only to please us but also to administer a proven remedy:
To sing a song that old was sung
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man’s infirmities
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
It hath been sung at festivals
On ember-eves and holy-ales,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives. (1.1-8)
- 4 [George Wilkins], The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre: Being the true History of the (...)
7This must have been a particularly effective opening gambit when Pericles was first performed at the Globe, playing to an audience familiar with the effigy of Gower in the nearby parish church of St Saviour’s (also known as St Mary Overies, now Southwark Cathedral) on which the costume worn by the actor playing him was presumably based (illustrated on the title page of Wilkins’ tie-in prose version The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre).4 But it seems to have worked beyond the capital too, since within a year of this play’s publication we have evidence of its being revived elsewhere.
- 5 See Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave (...)
- 6 On Foster the York bookseller, see Siobhan Keenan, “Interval show lands pair in jail”, BBC online a (...)
8According to Siobhan Keenan’s estimate, more than half of Elizabethan and Jacobean actors never performed in London, instead busying themselves elsewhere at guildhalls, inns, manors (as depicted in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew), and, in the case of Bristol and York for certain periods, purpose-built playhouses.5 Many of these provincial companies did not commission or own their own plays but worked from printed playbooks, so it is just as well that there was also a national network of book distribution. We only know of the existence of a quarto printing of Shakespeare’s still-missing Love’s Labours Won, for instance, thanks to a scrap of paper reporting it to have been among the plays stocked by a bookseller in Exeter. York, too, was an important centre for the book trade, and its bookstalls (including that of John Foster, known to have sold contemporary works including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and a range of unspecified playbooks) seem to have supplied the needs of the first company other than Shakespeare’s known to have performed Pericles, Sir Richard Cholmeley’s Men.6
- 7 London, PRO, Star Chamber 8 12/11, mb.2; quoted in S. Keenan, ibid., p. 72.
- 8 S. Keenan, Travelling Players, op. cit., p. 72-873. Scholarship about this company has been thin bu (...)
9Although their patron lived near Whitby (at Roxby), traces of this company’s work survive from a number of widely-dispersed locations, scattered across a decade or so. Their operations were seasonal: for much of the year they had other jobs (their actor-manager Christopher Simpson mainly worked as a self-employed shoemaker), but they would reassemble before the extended Christmas holiday season and travel from one venue to another around some pretty remote areas of North Yorkshire. (Significantly, this area had been one of the heartlands of the country’s largest uprising against the Reformation, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and it is still known for its remarkable concentration of ruined abbeys and monasteries: Whitby, Fountains, Rievaulx, Guisborough, Bylands). Unusually for such a company, we not only have records of payments for the performances of unspecified plays, but occasional glimpses of their actual work, which survive as side-effects of their troubles with religious authority. In 1609 Cholmeley’s puritanical neighbour Sir John Hoby went so far as to obtain a warrant for the players’ arrest, but, he complained, Cholmeley did not only “suffer but…did giue leave and licence vnto the sayd players to play divers stage playes […] Conteyninge in them much poperie”.7 Details not just of the religious tendency of their work but of their specific repertory survive thanks to the similar difficulties which arose from their residency at Sir John Yorke’s house at Gowthwaite in Nidderdale over Candlemas (February 2nd) 1610, after which another complaint was lodged by another puritan neighbour, Sir Stephen Procter. The interrogation of Sir John and his openly Catholic wife Lady Juliana by the Court of Star Chamber the following year records that one of the company’s plays was a now lost drama called The Miracles of St Christopher, and scandalously the performance had included an interlude depicting a debate between a Catholic priest and a Protestant vicar, in which the Catholic won, and the Protestant was carried off to hell.8
10What is so striking about the testimony the actors provided under interrogation, reported at the Yorkes’ Star Chamber trial the following year, is that their entire repertoire that winter, as they sought out what were presumably other groups of recusants longing for a restoration of the true Church and a healing of the schism, seems to have revolved around painful journeys and restorative reunions. Insisting that they had the utmost respect for the government’s censorship regime, Simpson and his colleagues at first tried to claim that they only used scripts which must already have been approved by the Master of the Revels because they had already been printed (something which was probably only true when they performed outside the households of known co-religionists). The examples of lawfully published plays which they adduced from their 1610 repertoire look like the fruits of a shopping trip to York the previous year: King Lear (which admittedly, as D. H. Arrell argues, could have been the old anonymous Leir play, but which given the date of Shakespeare’s quarto is more likely to have been his); Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and another Wilkins collaboration, this time with John Day and William Rowley, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (referred to in their testimony as The Three Sherleys). The latter is based on the recent, real-life adventures of Robert, Anthony and Thomas Shirley during their respective journeys around Europe and the Middle East, and it dramatizes episodes which are, incidentally, also depicted in relief carvings on their rebuilt family home Ettington Park, at Alderminster, just south of Stratford.
11As a piece of journalistic drama-documentary The Travels of the Three English Brothers might seem an incongruous play to find in the company of Lear and Pericles, but it has many resonances with them, not only an interest in enforced wandering but a desire for family togetherness so strong that at the end of the last act its scriptwriters allow that desire to override their factual materials. Even though at the time when Day, Rowley and Wilkins were writing their play the Shirleys had not enjoyed any real-life reunion, and never would, The Travels of the Three English Brothers closes with a poignant piece of wishful thinking, in which the audience is invited to participate. As the Gower-like chorus Fame explains,
- 9 [John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins], The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, Sir Tho (...)
Thus farre hath Fame with her proclayming trumpe,
Sounded the trauailes of our English brothers [.]
Vnhappy they (and haples in our Sceanes)
That in the period of so many yeares,
Th[e] destinies mutable commandresse
Hath neuer sufferd their regreeting eyes
To kisse each other at an enterview:
But would your apprehensions helpe poore art [,]
Into three parts deuiding this our stage [,]
They all at once shall take their leaues of you [.]
Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia [.]
Your fauours then [.] [T]o your obseruant eyes
Weele shewe their fortunes present quallities.
Enter three seuerall waies the three Brothers, Robert with the state of Persia as before, Sir Anthonie, with the king of Spaine and others where hee receiues the order of Saint Iago, and other Offices, Sir Thomes in England with his Father and others. Fame giues to each a prospectiue glasse, they seeme to see one another, and offer to embrace, at which Fame parts them and so: Exeunt.9
12So Cholmeley’s Men, as they trudged around the North York Moors during one of the worst winters of the Little Ice Age, were staging the dispersal and reassembly of Pericles’ family around the eastern Mediterranean; Lear’s wanderings towards Dover and his subsequent healing reconciliation with Cordelia; and this imaginary interrupted proleptic Zoom call between the separated Shirley brothers – with all three of these more secular shows under the protection of that miracle-working patron saint of wayfarers, St Christopher. (Before you dismiss a belief in miracles as itself a piece of wishful thinking, do bear in mind that these touring Catholic loyalists, caught red-handed in Nidderdale not so long after the Gunpowder Plot, seem to have got off with only a caution, even if Sir John Yorke and Lady Juliana were fined £1,000 and spent three years in a debtors’ prison).
- 10 The point is made by Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare: a cultural history, from the Restorati (...)
13I’ll be returning to the question of the efficacy or otherwise of wishful thinking, but for the moment I want to note just two more pre-twenty-first century instances of Pericles being read and indeed acted for a restorative. One, I admit, counts as an instance of extra-theatrical effects solely via a pun. The play, having outlived the playhouse in which it had its premiere, was still sufficiently popular in the late 1650s for the young Thomas Betterton to make his name playing this exiled king who eventually returns to reclaim his throne, the minute that rumours that the exiled King Charles II would soon return to reclaim his throne made the resumption of theatrical activity in London possible.10 So to that extent it was a revival of Pericles, a play about the revival of Pericles, and hence a restoration drama, which inaugurated Restoration drama. More substantially, though, when Pericles returned to the London stage in 1738 in the form of George Lillo’s three-act version Marina, the genuine real-life moral restoration of the play’s audiences was very much to the fore.
- 11 On the Ladies’ Club, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, adaptation, (...)
14The printed text of this adaptation is dedicated to the writer and patroness Frances Seymour, countess of Hertford, and in performance an epilogue dedicated the play to the whole group of elite female theatregoers to which Seymour belonged, the Shakespeare Ladies Club. For three seasons the Club had been lobbying theatre managements to perform more wholesome native Shakespeare in place of foreign dramatic imports such as opera and the harlequinade, and their leader the Countess of Shaftesbury was already raising funds towards the commissioning and installation of a statue of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey. (As we now know, she would also buy the model for that statue and have it installed in 1742 in the world’s first Temple of Shakespeare, in the grounds of her country house in Dorset, together with glass bookcases containing copies of Shakespeare’s works, from which the Club could read aloud as they sat at the statue’s feet).11 Lillo’s epilogue represents the Shakespeare Ladies Club as a sanctified collective Marina, a “sacred band” who have campaigned to rouse a dormant, Pericles-like Britain to a renewed sense of true Elizabethan manliness through the singing of the miraculously reviving songs that are the Shakespeare canon:
- 12 George Lillo, Marina, “Epilogue”, in The Plays of George Lillo, ed. Trudy Drucker, 2 vols, New York (...)
When worse than barbarism had sunk your taste,
When nothing pleased but what laid virtue waste,
A sacred band, determined, wise, and good,
They jointly rose to stop th’exotick flood,
And strove to wake, by Shakespeare’s nervous lays,
The manly genius of Eliza’s days.12
15The mechanism by which the performance of Pericles in particular is to further this reclamation is specified in Lillo’s prologue, and it depends on the audience allowing itself a full emotional engagement with the recognition scene. If we can only participate imaginatively in the suspenseful distress of Pericles and then in its represented relief, Lillo promises, agreeing to play its affective fort-da game in our hearts, we will experience not only an apparently perverse delight in finding ourselves in tears, but intellectual elevation:
- 13 Lillo, Marina, “Prologue”, in Plays, ii, p. 61.
If, when in pain for the event, surprize
And sympathetic joy should fill your eyes;
Do not repine that so you crown an art
Which gives such sweet emotions to the heart:
Whose pleasures, so exalted in their kind,
Do, as they charm the sense, improve the mind.13
16This is a very eighteenth-century way of describing how reunion scenes like those in Lear, Pericles and The Travels of the Three English Brothers are understood to exert a therapeutic force, but it seems unlikely that its account of the necessary sympathy between onstage action and offstage emotional response – a response which Lillo would not be the last to try to co-opt for extra-theatrical ends – would have seemed alien to Cholmeley’s Men more than a century earlier.
B. Now
17Let us pretend for the sake of argument that the present began at the turn of the twenty-first century, when some fellow-contributors to this issue were still at school; a time by which classical theatre had dwindled into a minority and heavily-subsidized artform, reliant on funding bodies ever more interested in levels of participation across different demographics and in measurable social benefits. In this climate Pericles – an easy play to follow, sufficiently uncanonical to be untainted by association with schoolrooms, and adequately unquoted to be cut and rewritten with impunity – might be, and might have to be, every bit as useful as Gower had always promised. It might at very least look topical. The early 2000s, in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, saw a whole batch of revivals of Pericles which tried in different ways to connect the onstage fortunes of the Prince of Tyre to the offstage misfortunes of refugees.
- 14 A videorecording of this production, with full details and surtitles in four languages, is availabl (...)
- 15 See Conor Hanratty, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Yukio Ninagawa, London, Arden, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. (...)
- 16 A videorecording of this production, with full details and surtitles in four languages, is availabl (...)
18In Yukio Ninagawa’s production, for instance, which visited the National Theatre in London in 2003, Pericles became a play-within-a-wordless-play, acted by a whole tribe of refugees, some visibly maimed, who shambled exhausted through the auditorium onto a desolate stage to the sound of distant gunfire.14 During a merciful lull in the shelling, however, they arrived at a standpipe centre stage, and began to fill plastic containers with water: under the direction of their storyteller and a traditional musician they were then able to encourage and recollect themselves by retelling once more the story of Pericles, producing costumes and props for the purpose reverently preserved in their baggage as if sacred. At the end of the last scene, with Thaisa and Pericles finally restored to one another, the whole company set stoically off across the empty expanse of the stage towards their next uncertain meal and resting place. This mise-en-scene provided an extremely poignant frame for Shakespeare’s play, rendered more so in London by the company’s status as themselves temporary exiles.15 (It has been emulated since, notably by the desert setting of the Yohangza company’s production of Pericles nearly twenty years later, itself haunted by the separations produced by the division of Korea).16 But it was a frame which arguably remained merely decorative; and in the same year, 2003, determined to produce something more instrumentalist, Cardboard Citizens, “Britain’s first theatre company for the homeless”, went further.
19As their founding artistic director Adrian Jackson later explained in an essay in The Guardian,
- 17 The Guardian, June 24 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/jun/24/cardboard-citizens-mincem (...)
I made a small-scale version of [Pericles] to tour for a couple of weeks in refugee centres around London. I had a hunch that the play – a sequence of exile, journey, shipwreck, separation and reunion – might resonate with [that] audience. The eponymous hero experiences a painful series of events, including the birth at sea of his daughter (Marina) and loss of his wife (Thaisa), inviting extraordinary sympathy. Our plan was for audiences to watch our cut-down, hour-long version and tell us their own stories afterwards. We incorporated some of these tales in a full-scale production six months later.17
- 18 More recently, this problem has been simply and powerfully side-stepped by the Bangladeshi theatre- (...)
- 19 On both Ninagawa’s and Jackson’s productions, see Michael Dobson, “Shakespeare performances in Engl (...)
20The tales Jackson elicited from his initial, refugee audiences included that of someone who had actually fled from Tyre, and, incredibly, that of a girl who really was born at sea and really was therefore called Marina. The integration of these real-life sufferings into the subsequent full-scale production, though, turned out to be a thoroughly uneasy business: was this show supposed to be making entertainment for refugees, or out of refugees? and if it was supposed to be helping someone, who was it helping, and how, by its problematic intermingling of real and fictitious objects of pathos? Staged as an immersive, promenade experience in an adapted warehouse near the Old Kent Road, the show tried to turn its non-refugee audience into refugees just for the occasion, with simulated Home Office officials forcing us into queues for the supposed processing of our applications for political asylum, and lecturing us at one early stage in the evening about our need to adopt British values and to acquire a suitable reverence for the monarchy and for Shakespeare. (As if the experience were not already depressing enough, we were even told that there would be a compulsory examination about Shakespeare later). But this had the counter-productive effect of casting the surviving passages from Pericles which followed, alternating in successive detention-camp-like spaces with live and videorecorded testimony from refugees, solely as hostile tools of the state apparatus.18 A liberal, humanitarian application of state-subsidized Shakespeare seemed to be telling us that all state-subsidized uses of Shakespeare were innately xenophobic, repressive and authoritarian.19
- 20 The director Justin Audibert invited me to two rehearsals of this production as a consultant, where (...)
21This Cardboard Citizens version of 2003 was a co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company, who have continued to turn to Pericles when looking for contact with audiences and indeed performers beyond their usual mailing lists. In 2012, during their Open Stages project, they mounted the play at the Courtyard with a large amateur cast, but with the professional Sope Dirisu, who went on to play Coriolanus for the company in 2017, in the title role.20 Kelly Hunter’s career in applied Shakespeare also began under the aegis of the RSC, when as one of their actresses in the early 1990s she took part in some RSC performances for prisoners, which she found much more exciting than those which the company more usually gives for A-level students and their parents, tourists, and the retired. But her company Flute are much clearer than are either the RSC or Cardboard Citizens about who the beneficiaries of their performances are supposed to be. Rather than being made in the name of people elsewhere who might incidentally benefit from having theatre audiences reminded of their existence, or being made to provide memorable experiences for part-time casts from target social groups, Flute’s productions, whatever their range of possible side-effects, are entirely for the people in the audience.
- 21 Kelly Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat. Drama games for children with autism, London, Routledge, 201 (...)
- 22 See Sonya Freeman Loftis, “Autistic Culture, Shakespeare Therapy and the Hunter Heartbeat Method”, (...)
22What has become Flute’s core work, for audiences on the autistic spectrum and their families, started with a show based on The Tempest, which first played in 2014 in a space at the second Other Place studio theatre in Stratford, prior to the building of the third. This production – if that is the right word – was designed for the participation of fifteen autistic individuals at a time, and both its methods and its effects were studied by neuroscientists at Ohio State University. It has set a lasting pattern for this aspect of Flute Theatre’s work. The narrative outline of a play by Shakespeare is distilled into a sequence of deceptively simple imitative, role-playing drama games, each one of which is first played and then led by a small group of actors, who first welcome the audience into the space and into the group using the company’s trademark “Heartbeat Hello”. (The importance of the rhythmic, embodied nature of Shakespeare’s language throughout all her work is explored in Hunter’s book Shakespeare’s Heartbeat, 2014).21 The actors then guide each audience member-participant in such a way that each gets a turn at each successive role. Their family and/or teachers, reassuringly present in a wider circle surrounding the circle of participants, look on, often visibly moved, as closed-in immobility may turn to at first distracted, constrained, hesitant imitation, and thence into actual play, and then, just sometimes, play which includes a delighted consciousness of being watched, marking a transition all the way from stasis into behaviour and thence into performance. Although Flute have occasionally been accused of claiming to “cure” autism,22 they don’t, however astonished the Ohio neuroscientists were by the changes in behaviour and brain activity they were able to document: but what they do claim is that the levels of focussed attention their actors necessarily lavish on these potentially unresponsive, potentially over-volatile audiences definitely gives them – and their families – a rich interactive pleasure.
23By 2019 the company had offered two shows like this, based on The Tempest and on A Midsummer Night’s Dream respectively, and given the brevity of their scripts and the simplicity of most of the vocabulary (Hunter is a great admirer of Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare, and the words “eyes”, “heart”, “mind” and “love” are always prominent in her work), they had been able to offer them in several different languages and, through the work of allies abroad, in several different countries. (When it comes to travels abroad, Flute are by now up there with the Shirley brothers: Spain, Catalonia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, the US, Peru, India…). Using many of the same actors, the company had also developed what was at first a separate strand of work, small-ensemble, highly musical two-hour versions of Shakespeare plays which toured to European festivals and elsewhere. Hamlet was first seen at the Gdansk festival in 2015, initially with Mark Quartley as Hamlet and Greg Hicks as Claudius, and Twelfth Night premiered at Craiova in 2018, with Paula Rodriguez as Viola. But when Hunter turned to Pericles she realized she had found a script ideal for all Flute’s purposes, and she has so far produced three successive versions of the play.
- 23 I am grateful to Kelly Hunter for sharing a copy of this unpublished script.
- 24 See Emma Harper and Hans Rall, “‘That whoso ask’d her for his wife, / His riddle told not, lost his (...)
24The first was a characteristic Flute in-person show for autistic audiences, first seen in late 2019. The script, little more than 1500 words long, sings, acts and narrates its way between games (silently) labelled: “King and Pericles”; “Fisherman and Pericles”; “Pericles and Thaisa”; “Tango - Pericles and Thaisa”; “Storm, Thaisa and Pericles”; “Cerimon: tipping”; “Marina and Assassin”; “Marina and Lysimachus – trance”; “Pirates and Marina (1 and 2)”; “Marina and Pericles”; “Fingertips and Names” (in which the participants, like Marina, speak their names); “Pericles and Thaisa reunion”; and “Cerimon spins the children”, after which it is Cerimon the healer who presides as the company say farewell.23 The episodic structure of the play turned out to fit it extremely well to what in different, digital contexts is called “gamification” – an aspect of Pericles foregrounded in a different, digital register by Hans Rall’s interactive, online animated version (still in progress at the time of writing, 2023).24 When the Covid lockdown came in spring 2020, the company, with a great deal of ingenuity, adapted this set of games so that they could engage one spectator-participant and family at a time via Zoom, and with considerable support in the form of grants they had given something like four hundred performances by the time the restrictions were lifted, often giving four in succession on a single day. (Beyond the prospective-glass effect by which Zoom enables its users to participate in imaginary reunions, one facility which it provides is the opportunity to take screenshots, so that participants in Flute’s online shows are helped to remember their experiences by getting to keep images of themselves co-performing).
25It was only after these adaptations, having already identified the dramatic and emotional fundamentals of the play, that Hunter started working on an “adult” version, which was first seen at the Craiova festival in Romania in May 2022. A company of six onstage actor-musicians played a two-hour version of the Shakespeare-Wilkins text, in a production especially alert to its cues for music and movement. Echoes of the Pericles-Thaisa tango and of Cerimon’s spinning game, for instance, were present in the banquet scene at Pentapolis – in which Thaisa revived the isolated and depressed Pericles by insisting, with all the force of a practised Flute member, that he join her in an increasingly physical dance; and then this was beautifully and painfully recalled later, in the scene of her own revival from death, when Cerimon physically danced her back into life. (This was a wonderful sequence, like an inversion of Macmillan’s famous pas-de-deux in the tomb between Romeo and the apparently dead Juliet; and the joy of Thaisa’s recovery was then mitigated in an instant by her traumatic part-memory of childbirth). After the last reunion, the moment the adult, festival audience had finished weeping and applauding, the company were already re-setting the stage and moving the furniture, and within half an hour of finishing this very demanding performance, the same company were then giving an even more demanding performance, of the drama games version – this time in Romanian, for an audience largely composed of survivors from the notorious “orphanages” to which the Ceaucescu regime used to consign those children deemed inadequately useful to society. A day later they were off southwards towards Sofia by road, across the Danube and across the Balkans, to give both versions again for audiences of refugee children and their parents, this time with the drama-games version in Ukrainian.
Conclusion
26“Nothing we’ll omit / That bears recovery’s name”. If it does nothing else, Pericles at least names recovery, and it provides images of what it might mean: the drawing of people from states of despair and introversion and disorientation back into communities, back into familial love, back into the dance. But part of this play’s very distinctive affect depends on our knowing all along how thoroughly its narrative does not correspond with the offstage reality in which we otherwise live. Just as Jacobeans knew as they watched the Shirley brothers enjoying their fleeting imagined reunion via prospective glass that this could never happen in real life, we are painfully aware even as we watch and applaud that what happens to Marina is not what happens to young women abducted and trafficked into the sex trade; just as what happens to Pericles on the beach at Pentapolis is not what is happening to refugees today on the shores of the Mediterranean or of Kent. Equally, by generating and by representing intense sympathy around stories of displacement, loss and isolation, Pericles resonates profoundly with what Flute Theatre in particular have always tried to do: but their current performances in Sofia will not solve the refugee crisis, or banish autism, or end the war, or revive the dead. If Pericles does work as a restorative – as it seems always to aspire to do, in all its wanderings across historical periods and contexts – it does so by sympathetic magic; by offering its fragile fictitious better world as an ideal; by enabling its audiences (and their families) to hone and to cherish their wishful thinking. Whether the rest of the Shakespeare canon is good for you or not, wishful thinking probably is: at least, it has to be better than the alternatives. I certainly can’t claim myself to have been healed or morally reclaimed by attending the world premiere of Flute’s Pericles, but I might mention that late in the evening after those two performances in quick succession in May 2022, during which Cerimon had set Thaisa spinning back to life and had then set orphans spinning into playfulness, the company and I went to the Piaţa William Shakespeare in the middle of Craiova. There we bribed an open-air bar to stay open well after the legal closing time, and we persuaded one of the waiters to turn up his CD player; and we all danced. The available music, as I recall, was by Eminem, so this was hardly the music of the spheres. But it will do to be going on with.
Notes
1 On Flute Theatre, see https://flutetheatre.co.uk/
2 All references to the text of Pericles are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, second edition, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, editors Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
3 On Hall, and on the suggestion that he lies behind the figure of Cerimon, see Greg Wells, John Hall, Master of Physicke: A Casebook from Shakespeare's Stratford, Manchester: Manchester University Press, with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2020.
4 [George Wilkins], The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre: Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower, London, Nathaniel Butter, 1608.
5 See Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
6 On Foster the York bookseller, see Siobhan Keenan, “Interval show lands pair in jail”, BBC online article, 2016: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/23GpzTDcsKjKdBB1c10ps1L/interval-show-lands-pair-in-jail, consulted March 2022.
7 London, PRO, Star Chamber 8 12/11, mb.2; quoted in S. Keenan, ibid., p. 72.
8 S. Keenan, Travelling Players, op. cit., p. 72-873. Scholarship about this company has been thin but persistent since the 1940s but its implications have rarely been assimilated in mainstream Shakespearean scholarship. See Charles J. Sisson, “Shakespearean quartos as prompt copies, with some account of Cholmeley’s Players and a new Shakespeare allusion”, Review of English Studies, 18 number 70, April 1942, p. 129-143; G. W. Boddy, “Players of interludes in North Yorkshire in the early seventeenth century,” North Yorkshire County Records Office Publications journal 3, issue 7, 1976, p. 95-130; S. Keenan, Travelling Players, op. cit., p. 66, 71, 72-73, 75, 86, and “Interval show…”; D. H. Arrell, “‘King Leir’ at Gowthwaite Hall”, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, volume 25, 2012, p. 83-93.
9 [John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins], The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony, Mr Robert Shirley. As it is now play’d by her Maiesties servants, London, John Wright, 1607, p. 23-24.
10 The point is made by Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare: a cultural history, from the Restoration to the present, London, Hogarth Press, 1990, p. 21-24. See also David Roberts, Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 71.
11 On the Ladies’ Club, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, adaptation, and authorship, 1660-1769, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 146-161; on Susannah Ashley-Cooper’s private shrine see Genevieve Kirk, “‘And his works in a glass case’: the Bard in the garden and the legacy of the Shakespeare Ladies Club”, Shakespeare Survey, 74, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, p. 298-316.
12 George Lillo, Marina, “Epilogue”, in The Plays of George Lillo, ed. Trudy Drucker, 2 vols, New York, Garland, 1979, ii, p. 127.
13 Lillo, Marina, “Prologue”, in Plays, ii, p. 61.
14 A videorecording of this production, with full details and surtitles in four languages, is available on the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive website : http://a-s-i-a-web.org/index.php
15 See Conor Hanratty, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Yukio Ninagawa, London, Arden, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 130-133; Alexa Huang, “Yukio Ninagawa” in Peter Holland (ed.), Great Shakespeareans: Brook, Hall, Ninagawa, Lepage, London, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 79-112, here p. 98, 100, 104.
16 A videorecording of this production, with full details and surtitles in four languages, is available on the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive website, http://a-s-i-a-web.org/index.php
17 The Guardian, June 24 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/jun/24/cardboard-citizens-mincemeat, consulted March 2022.
18 More recently, this problem has been simply and powerfully side-stepped by the Bangladeshi theatre-maker Shahman Shahriar, who simply used aspects of Pericles as the basis for his own play about a refugee from the Bangladeshi war of independence, Shattered Faces of Piyar Ali. This is a piece which takes some of its key cues from Pericles’ stalled recollections of his father: Piyar Ali is both devastated and trapped by his hopeless grief over his dead parents until he learns that he also has a sister, and in the play’s final movement he is able to embark on a new quest for reunion with her.
19 On both Ninagawa’s and Jackson’s productions, see Michael Dobson, “Shakespeare performances in England, 2003”, Shakespeare Survey, 57, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.258-89, here p. 269-74.
20 The director Justin Audibert invited me to two rehearsals of this production as a consultant, where I think the only useful thing I quite unknowingly did was convince Audibert, a professional director of verse drama, that the name of Pericles’ wife contains three syllables rather than two.
21 Kelly Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat. Drama games for children with autism, London, Routledge, 2014.
22 See Sonya Freeman Loftis, “Autistic Culture, Shakespeare Therapy and the Hunter Heartbeat Method”, Shakespeare Survey, 72, 2019, p. 256-267.
23 I am grateful to Kelly Hunter for sharing a copy of this unpublished script.
24 See Emma Harper and Hans Rall, “‘That whoso ask’d her for his wife, / His riddle told not, lost his life:’ Puzzles and Riddles in an Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Pericles for Gamified Animated Virtual Reality”, unpublished conference paper, Asian Shakespeare Association (online), November 2022.
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Michael Dobson, « The Therapeutic Wanderings of Pericles », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 46 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 mars 2025, consulté le 13 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/20261 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13jur
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