Pericles

“To sing a song that old was sung,

From ashes ancient Gower is come;

Assuming man’s infirmities,

To glad your ear, and please your eyes.”

As the opening lines of the Prologue show, Gower’s addresses are in the form of rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter, a departure from the Shakespearean norm of iambic-pentameter blank verse. The iambic tetrameter line contains four stressed syllables, as can be seen in the scansion of Lines 1-2, where stressed syllables are highlighted: “To sing a song that old was sung / From ashes ancient Gower is come.”

Gower’s speech is intentionally archaic—the iambic tetrameter was common in medieval English verse—to stress the artifice that he is indeed the historic poet of the 14th century. Gower further draws attention to this artifice by comparing himself to a ghost who has returned from dust to relay an old story.

“ANTIOCHUS. Prince Pericles,—

PERICLES. That would be son to great Antiochus.”

This bleakly tragicomic exchange between Antiochus and Pericles establishes Pericles’s youth and innocence, as he is still unaware of the problem of Appearance Versus Reality. Unaware of the deception of Antiochus and infatuated by the beauty of his daughter, Pericles hurriedly proclaims himself the son-in-law of the king, interrupting Antiochus mid-sentence. Pericles’s eagerness to be Antiochus’s son also indicates his search for a fatherly figure following the death of his own parent.