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The play of *Pericles, Prince of Tyre*, dramatizes a tale of great antiquity and world-wide popularity. The fiction deals with the adventurous travels of an apocryphal hero, called Apollonius of Tyre, who in the play is re-christened Pericles. The vein is frankly pagan. The story was doubtless first related in a Greek novel of the first or second century A.D. The incidents of a father's incestuous love for his daughter, of adventures arising from storms at sea, of captures by pirates, of the abandonment for dead of living persons, are very common features of Greek novels of the period. But the Greek text has not survived. It is in a Latin translation that the story enjoyed its vogue through the Middle Ages. More than a hundred mediaeval manuscripts of the Latin version are extant, of which one at least dates from the ninth century.¹ The Latin version was printed about 1470 for the first time, but the volume has no indication of place or date of production.²
Meanwhile the Latin tale was rendered into almost all the vernacular languages of Europe—not only into Italian,
¹ There are eleven in the British Museum.
² A vast amount of energy has been devoted in Germany to a study of the story of Apollonius of Tyre in the Latin version, and of its developments and analogues in modern languages. A useful summary of results, with a good account of the vast German literature on the subject, will be found in Mr. Albert H. Smyth’s *Shakespeare’s Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre: a study in comparative literature*, Philadelphia, 1898. A valuable paper by N. Delius on the play *‘Ueber Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre’*, in *Fabrioch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft*, 1868 (iii), pp. 175–204, should be read with papers by Mr. F. G. Fleay (in his *Shakespeare Manual*, 1878, pp. 209–23), and by Mr. Robert Boyle on *‘Wilkins’ share in the play called Pericles’*, 1882.
The novel of Apollonius of Tyre.
Its European vogue.
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