Pericles was the last play I read in January, and I was not enthusiastic. It starts out with our hero sussing out the truth about a father-daughter incestuous couple, which made me sigh heavily because Room is still thrusting itself into my brain at inopportune moments. I didn't want to read about any more sex slavery, thanks.
Their relationship turns out to be a very small part of the play, which is good, but my anticipation of better things to come was dampened (dampened is an understatement here -- dampened like a tsunami might dampen something) by the writing in the first two acts. Pericles is one of Shakespeare's collaborative projects. His co-author is unknown but I think his name might have been Poetaster The Hack, or PT for short. The first act prompted this exasperated tweet, and the second wasn't any better.
Two good things came out of the Hack-Bard collaboration for me, though. The first was a keener appreciation for what Shakespeare does: he makes blank verse look easy. Sure, Shakespeare wrote plenty of lines that don't scan and lines that are hard to parse, but our friend PT produced a limping affront to scansion and syntax. It's like Yoda meets Bill Peet. (Bill Peet in his rhyming stage -- goodness, I dislike those books.)
The second thing was a fun surprise for me: I think my ear for Shakespeare's voice is developing. I skimmed the introduction and took away the idea that Shakespeare didn't jump in until Act IV. Imagine my astonishment, then, to find myself actually...enjoying Act III. There were bits I wanted to underline. There were turns of phrase I admired. It sounded more like the Bard than the hack, but it was still too early for that, wasn't it?
I flipped back to the introduction and discovered that I'd misremembered: Act III is exactly where Shakespeare comes in. Kind of nifty, huh?
Even though he was light-years ahead of PT, Shakespeare was pretty much phoning it in for Pericles. Hidden identities, last-minute reunions, big happy ending, blah blah blah. He'd done the same thing at least a half-dozen times by then. There are also scenes in which I imagine PT grabbing the quill and saying, "No, it's my turn now" -- the writing is uneven. I will remember it happily, though, as the play in which I saw Shakespeare's craft more clearly, and in which I hit a target I wasn't sure I'd make: 1 month, 6 plays.
My updated intro post for the Crazy Shakespeare Project is here, if you're curious about how it's going. For February I am going to post about Richard III, and read The Winter's Tale, The Lover's Complaint, and about half of the sonnets. Getting there!
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