"The world to me is but a ceaseless storm": Pericles, The Porpoise, and the Resistance of Exile
- "The world to me is but a ceaseless storm":Pericles, The Porpoise, and the Resistance of Exile
The adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into fiction has a long history. Early on it was considered a useful way to introduce the stories of the plays to children, as in Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, and more recently, Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories. However, contemporary authors have seen an opportunity to adapt and expand the stories of and within the plays in more sophisticated and mature ways. The most high-profile examples of this trend come from the Hogarth Press's series of "retellings" begun in 2016, which features adaptations by such giants of contemporary fiction as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Jo Nesbø, and Jeanette Winterson.
There is a clear advantage to having a familiar story to work with, and Hogarth authors were given the freedom to choose the play on which to base their work. The authors involved, it is fair to say, represent a range of talent and genre as well as literary heft. The plays chosen also largely represent Shakespeare's major works. However, the novel on which I focus in this essay, Mark Haddon's The Porpoise (2019), takes a slightly different tack by adapting one of Shakespeare's lesser known, collaboratively (and thus unevenly) written late romances, Pericles.
Pericles' Nomadic Fortunes
As Adam Smyth writes in the London Review of Books, the early reception of Pericles was rapturous. By 1609, Smyth reports, it had been performed "divers and sundry times," being a go-to performance for any occasion [End Page 87] needing something popular and rousing.1 It was the only late play to be printed while Shakespeare was still alive and, as Smyth continues, appears to have become a "by-word for audience appeal."
The play's popularity tailed off dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily due to its distasteful portrayals of incest and prostitution. These were not considered to be reflective of the moral education which Shakespeare was supposed to provide. The ambiguities of the play did not endear it to the didacticism of the literary establishment at the time. Although provisionally a happy ending, the lack of "punishment" meted out to King Antiochus for his incestuous relationship with his daughter was problematic—we only learn that both have died at the end of the play, and their deaths are presented as incidental rather than the proper conclusion to a crime-and-punishment narrative. Marina's kidnapping and stay in the brothel scenes also raised concerns, being largely performed as comedic rather than dangerous, thus not cleaving to the conventional wisdom surrounding women's virtue and its loss.
Pericles did receive a brief post-World War II revival, possibly due to the protagonist's experience of suffering and rebirth as well as the transient nature of its settings. Yet the play has only truly returned from its artistic and critical exile in recent years. It could be said to be "having a moment"—its narrative and thematic combination of incestuous secrets, action scenes, isolation, hospitality, and the responsibility we have towards each other as strangers, migrants, and refugees all seem to resonate with contemporary cultural and political concerns. The loosely drawn, episodic nature of the play also reflects the fractured nature of our present selves and societies. As Patrick O'Malley states, "Pericles insists on the gaps, the resistance to the imperative of choosing the One."2 Although O'Malley is primarily focused on a queer reading of the play, he rightly points to the resistance of choosing one identity or consciousness over another as one likely reason for its current vogue.
In a discussion of a recent prison production, Niels Herold notes that the play, somewhat counterintuitively, suits such an environment well. Comparing the spare resources of prison theatre programs with the "empty stage" of the early modern theatre, he argues that the play is especially appropriate for the prison context despite the initial reticence of the prisoners themselves faced with its odd design.3 Herold explains that the "restless voyaging" and the "episodic continuum of scenes" in the [End Page 88] play's formal structure...
