62 pages • 2-hour read
Pericles
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Act VChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Act V, Chorus Summary
Thus, Gower says, Marina escapes the brothel, making an honest living by tutoring the children of nobility and teaching embroidery and music. Marina’s embroidered landscapes are so beautiful people often mistake them for nature itself. The only downside to her work is that she has to give her earnings to the awful Bawd.
Leaving Marina for a while, Gower now visits her father, Pericles. As fortune would have it, Pericles’s ship is approaching Mytilene, which is busy celebrating the annual festival of Neptune, the god of the seas. Lysimachus, the governor, sets out in a boat to meet the grand ship approaching his shores. Gower asks the audience to sit and watch intently, as they are bound to like what happens next.
Act V, Scene 1 Summary
Helicanus helps Lysimachus onto the deck of the Tyrian ship. Lysimachus introduces himself. Helicanus tells Lysimachus that the ship belongs to King Pericles. For the last three months, the king has not met anyone and eaten but the bare minimum required to survive. Grieving for his dead wife and daughter, Pericles is despondent. Lysimachus requests to meet Pericles. Helicanus pulls a curtain to reveal Pericles, but warns Lysimachus that Pericles may not pay him any heed.
When Pericles does not respond to the greetings of Lysimachus, one of the gentlemen accompanying the governor suggests that Pericles be introduced to a virtuous girl in their city (Marina). The words of the girl are powerful enough to change hearts and may revive Pericles. Lysimachus sends one of his men in his boat to fetch Marina. When Marina arrives, Lysimachus tells Helicanus that if he knew she were of noble birth, he would marry the beautiful lady in a heartbeat. Marina, appraised of the situation, promises to Helicanus that she will try her best to make Pericles speak. The men leave Marina alone with Pericles.
Marina sings to Pericles, but to no avail. She goes closer to him, calling him loudly. An agitated Pericles hits Marina to keep her away, but she goes on speaking. Marina can tell Pericles and she have a shared fortune, in that both have seen real grief. Destiny has robbed her of her parents and lineage, forcing her into servitude.
The mention of shared fortune and lost parents catches Pericles’s attention. He asks Marina to look at him as she talks, since she reminds him of someone. As Marina tells him that she was not born in any country (having been born at sea), Pericles notes in an aside that Marina looks exactly like his late wife, Thaisa, having the same square eyebrows, silvery voice, and bright blue eyes. He fears he will start weeping if he continues to look at Marina.
Pericles grows even more overwhelmed when he learns Marina’s name, fearing the gods are playing a cruel joke on him. However, as he and Marina continue to talk, Pericles deduces that she is indeed his own daughter, a suspicion that is confirmed when Marina reveals her mother’s name as Thaisa. An overjoyed Pericles tells Marina he is her father and embraces her. He bids his lords to kneel to Marina, their princess.
Raving in happiness, Pericles hears divine music and falls asleep. The goddess Diana appears in Pericles’s dream and asks him to go to her temple in Ephesus, where priestesses worship her. Pericles wakes up and promises to do the goddess’s bidding. He asks Lysimachus to help him travel to Ephesus. Lysimachus agrees gladly and tells Pericles he has a request of him. Pericles has guessed Lysimachus’s wish is to court Marina and grants it.
Act V, Scene 2 Summary
Gower says the sand in the clock of their play has almost run out. He requests a last favor from the audience, which is to visualize the festivities and pageantry Lysimachus threw in Mytilene to greet Pericles. Lysimachus is engaged to Marina, but the two will not wed until Pericles makes a visit to the temple of Diana. The ships get ready, the sails puff up with wind, and off go Pericles and his group to Ephesus.
Act V, Scene 3 Summary
Pericles approaches the temple of Diana in Ephesus and hails the goddess. He declares that he is the king of Tyre who fled his country and married Thaisa of Pentapolis. Thaisa died during childbirth at sea, leaving behind a daughter, Marina. Pericles entrusted Marina to the care of Cleon and Dionyza of Tarsus, but when she was 14, Dionyza sought to murder her. Luckily, Marina, a virgin like Diana, survived. Pericles is now reunited with his daughter and seeks Diana’s blessings.
A priestess faints when she hears Pericles’s voice. Cerimon reveals that this is none other than Thaisa, Pericles’s wife. He relays the tale of how he found and revived the lady. Thaisa awakes from her faint and she and Pericles embrace. Marina kneels before her mother.
Marveling at his good fortune, Pericles praises Diana’s perfect divine plan. He will sacrifice to the goddess that night. Meanwhile, Thaisa tells Pericles that her father, the king of Pentapolis, has passed away. Pericles says Marina and Lysimachus will rule in Tyre, while he and Thaisa will live in Pentapolis as king and queen.
Act V, Epilogue Summary
Gower tells the audience the many moral lessons of his tale. Antiochus and his daughter were punished for their sin, while Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina were rewarded for maintaining their faithfulness and virtue amidst great travails. Helicanus is an example of loyalty, and Cerimon of wisdom used virtuously. Cleon and Dionyza were also punished for their sins: When the people of Tarsus learned what they had done to the daughter of their beloved Pericles, they burnt them to death in their palace.
As the play ends, Gower blesses the audience, thanking them for their patience in attending to his story.
Act V Analysis
Comprising the climax, falling action, and resolution of the play’s narrative arc, the last act also contains elements of both comedy and romance. It is comedic in the sense that it restores both the torn-apart family at its center and the social and political order: At the end of the play, both Pentapolis and Tyre are ruled by just kings and married, virtuous pairs, reinforcing The Importance of Chastity and Political Virtue. The play qualifies as a romance because it involves the end of a quest and the recovery of a loss, as in the case of other Shakespearean fables such as Cymbeline, in which the title character is reunited with the sons he believed dead.
In this final act, Pericles gradually realizes that Marina is the daughter he believed lost, with both father and daughter rewarded for their virtues via their happy reunion. The narrative builds the dramatic tension of the realization, with Pericles’s emotions rising in response to the details revealed by Marina. Pericles’s “recognition” of Marina represents his rebirth into a new, fresh life, allowing both the family and the kingdom to become fully restored. Tellingly, Pericles tells Marina, “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget” (V.1.238), or that she gives life to the very father who gave her life. Just as the sea restores what it took, Marina—her name steeped in nautical metaphor—floods Pericles’s heart with hope.
Gower’s mention of Antiochus and his daughter in the Epilogue is significant, since it once again invokes the importance of chastity and political virtue. Unlike the corrupted father-daughter pairing of Antiochus and the princess, Pericles and Marina share a quasi-spiritual connection that upholds sexual propriety and, by extension, social and political stability. Central to this connection is the recovery of Thaisa. With the mother in the picture, the ideal family structure is restored and the importance of chastity once again invoked. Thaisa’s dedicated service as a priestess to the virgin goddess Diana mirrors Marina’s successful vow to Diana to remain sexually inexperienced during her time in the brothel, presenting both mother and daughter as committed to sexual propriety and, thus, worthy of becoming the queens of Tyre and Pentapolis.
Pericles’s dream-vision is another example of the play’s use of medieval conventions. A staple in early medieval English verse, the dream-vision involves an encounter with the divine and the revelation of a truth. Though the dream-vision usually occurs in a Christian context, here the pagan goddess Diana appears before Pericles. Diana’s appearance shows the play’s reliance on deux et machina, magic, and the supernatural to resolve major plot points, while also invoking The Tensions Between Fortune and Free Will. Just as Thaisa miraculously survived the burial at sea and turned up on Cerimon’s doorstep, here Pericles is returned to Thaisa’s threshold through Diana’s instructions to go to Ephesus. While the reliance on coincidences is considered one of the play’s more flawed aspects, it fits in the traditional romance genre, where the lines between natural and supernatural are often blurred.
The happy resolution also collapses the boundaries between fate and free will. While fate tore apart Pericles’s family, the divine plan was always its restoration; however, the restoration would not have been possible without free will and the virtuous exercise of agency by the characters. For instance, it was Thaisa’s choice to become a priestess, Marina’s choice to fight her way out of the brothel, and Pericles’s decision to keep sailing despite setbacks. Thus, free will and divine providence are intertwined in a subtle, intractable web. The play’s end restores not just the family but also the larger structure of the polity, suggesting that fate will ultimately reward the just.
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