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PERICLES
entirely by him. This explanation absolves Shakespeare's responsibility for the choice of the intractable plot and for the piece's clumsy construction. The effect of his own work is impaired by such dominant features as those. The dramatic intensity, which colours the scenes in which Pericles recognizes his long-lost daughter and wife, is weakened by the duplication, which the plot requires, of the motive within very narrow limits of space. Shakespeare's interposition failed to relieve materially the strain of improbability which is inherent in the ancient story. The play as a whole fills a secondary rank in any catalogue raisonné of dramatic literature.
George Wilkins the chief author.
There seems good ground for assuming that the play of Pericles was originally penned by George Wilkins, and that it was over his draft that Shakespeare worked. Wilkins was a dramatist of humble attainments who had already produced, either alone or in collaboration with others, plays for the King's Company at the Globe Theatre, which included Shakespeare among its members and first produced Pericles. In 1607 Wilkins had published under his own name a piece called *The Miseries of Inforst Mariage*—a popular domestic tragi-comedy, of which the plot was treated anew in the following year in *A Yorkshire Tragedy*, one of the pieces fraudulently assigned by publishers to Shakespeare. Both *The Miseries* and *A Yorkshire Tragedy* were performed by Shakespeare's company of actors at the Globe. Although the characters and plot are very different from those of Pericles, there is sufficient resemblance between the rhetorical vehemence and syntactical incoherence of passages in the non-Shakespearean part of Pericles and in Wilkins' *Miseries* to render it possible that both came from the same pen.¹
¹ The suggestion that the prose portions of the brothel scenes were from the pen of a third coadjutor rests on more shadowy ground. Some critics
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