Pericles

Marina is the daughter of Pericles and Thaisa. Her name means “of the sea,” invoking her birth during a storm at sea. Exceedingly beautiful and skilled at sewing and music, Marina has pale hair, blue eyes, straight eyebrows, and a sweet voice. Pericles describes her as “in pace another Juno” (V.1.132). 

Apart from the ocean, Marina is also associated with her patron goddess, Diana, with the virgin goddess reflecting Marina’s devotion to upholding her society’s values of sexual propriety, thereby invoking The Importance of Chastity and Political Virtue. While chance tests Pericles through storms, Marina’s very birth occurs during a tempest, with her mother, believed to be dead, buried at sea. Thus, the narrative places Marina in even greater peril than Pericles from the very onset. While Pericles never faced Thaliard, the man sent to kill him, Marina is nearly struck by her would-be assassin Leonine. The elements may have tested Pericles, but Marina is additionally threatened physically by human beings, since pirates kidnap her and sell her to a brothel.

Setting up extremely high stakes for Marina’s trials, the narrative proceeds to reveal her even more elevated courage and virtue. Unlike Pericles, who is more passive at the beginning of the play, Marina takes charge of her life from the very moment of danger, refusing to let others decide her fate. She declares, “If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep / Untied I still my virgin knot will keep” (IV.2.147-48). As these lines show, Marina is ready to defend to the death her “virgin knot”—a symbol here of her sexual chastity and autonomy. The view that escaping forced sex work is just a matter of asserting one’s “virtue” is, of course, archaic and riddled with victim-blaming assumptions. However, within the play’s values, Marina’s chastity carries a near-magical charge, changing the hearts of even the most hardened traffickers. Through her assertion of virtue and “preaching,” she extricates herself from a hazardous situation and makes a living by tutoring the children of noblemen.

As her ability to effect transformation suggests, Marina is associated with miracles and magic. She embodies the archetype of the divine maiden, associated with purity, innocence, and the natural world. For her chastity, the play rewards her with a reunion with her parents, a loving marriage to Lysimachus, and the rule of Tyre as queen.

Thaisa is the daughter of King Simonides of Pentapolis, wife of Pericles, and the mother of Marina. Pericles describes her “[a]s a fair day in summer, wondrous fair” (II.5.38). Cerimon the healer compares her eyes to jewels hidden behind “fringes of bright gold” (III.2.122), suggesting she has pale hair and blue eyes, like her daughter Marina. 

Thaisa embodies the archetype of the good wife and mother, since her choice of a groom coincides with her father’s will. She has sex only after wedlock and conceives Marina. Thus, her sexuality exists within a lawful context in the play’s value system. Thaisa is therefore a “good woman,” in stark contrast to Antiochus’s daughter and other transgressive characters like Bawd. Thaisa is clever and far-sighted, since she chooses Pericles for marriage despite his rusty armor and lack of antecedents. She holds her own before her father Simonides, suggesting that she would rather stay unwed than marry anyone else. Thaisa is therefore a strong-willed character.

This willfulness is further established after Thaisa wakes up in a strange land after her separation from her husband and child. She immediately decides to take on a nun’s garb to protect her chastity and to ward off suggestions of impropriety. Her actions show a keen awareness of the social mores of her time, as well as her goodness, since she wishes to remain faithful to Pericles. Much like Pericles, Thaisa does not remarry despite believing her spouse is dead. Her constancy is rewarded at the end of the play through a joyous reunion with her nuclear family and the rule of Pentapolis.

The governor of Tarsus, husband of Dionyza, and the father of Philoten, Cleon is an important minor character in the play. Cleon is well-meaning but weak-willed and deceptive, his flaws leading to grave crimes and punishments. 

Since personal flaws in the play mirror failures in governance, Cleon is a poor leader to his people. Before the arrival of Pericles, Tarsus starves under Cleon’s rule, the barrenness of the land signifying the sterility of Cleon’s stewardship. One of Cleon’s defining features is his exalted manner of speaking, filled with extreme promises and curses. When he discovers Pericles has brought corn for his famine-struck country, he exclaims that those who fail to thank Pericles for his generosity, “Be it our wives, our children, or ourselves / The curse of heaven and men succeed their evils” (I.4.107-08). The statement is filled with unintentional irony, since it is Cleon and his wife themselves who will prove most ungrateful to Pericles. The juxtaposition of Cleon’s promises and intentions with his disparate actions illustrates the play’s key theme of Appearance Versus Reality.

Cleon’s hypocrisy is the source of much dramatic irony and foreshadowing in the play, enhancing the tension of the plot. When Pericles entrusts Marina to his care, Cleon declares that if he neglects his duty to the infant, the gods will “revenge it upon me and mine / To the end of generation” (III.3.28-29). The ponderous words foreshadow Cleon’s betrayal of Pericles, and his subsequent punishment. Though Cleon is innocent of the plot to murder Marina, he is complicit in her disappearance because he lies to Pericles. For this deception, he, along with Dionyza, are burnt to death by their own people. Cleon’s end enforces the play’s moralistic structure, showing how providence rewards the good and punishes the evil.

Dionyza is the wife of Cleon and mother of Philoten. Embodying the trope of the evil stepmother, Dionyza falls in the camp of the “bad women” of the play. Like Bawd and Antiochus’s daughter, Dionyza rejects feminine virtues such as chastity, maternal love, or pity, and is portrayed as a threat to moral and structured society. While tasking Leonine to kill Marina, Dionyza notes that even women have cast off pity. This statement shows Dionyza has strayed from proscribed roles for women, and will thus be punished for her transgressions. 

Dionyza can also be regarded as the folklore and fairy-tale evil stepmother, who punishes her ward for her beauty. Illustrating the theme of Appearance Versus Reality, Dionyza is described as beautiful, which masks her evil schemes. Cleon compares her to a creature which has an angel’s face but the talons of a predator. The allusion is to a harpy, though in Greek mythology, harpies are not always beautiful in appearance. For her part in Marina’s travails, Dionyza is burnt to death by her own people in her palace.

One of the play’s antagonists, Antiochus is the tyrannical ruler of Antioch. Embodying the theme of appearance versus reality, Antiochus’s fame and wealth hide a hideous secret: He has an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Antiochus’s mannerisms, words, and even his palace are variations of this deception, as his words hide his intentions, and his beautiful palace is home to the corpses of suitors he has slain. The deep deception of Antioch is evident in the fact that he has his daughter brought out dressed as a bride before every potential groom, knowing well that the wedding will never take place. Following the play’s schemata of bad personal choices reflected in governance, Antiochus is a tyrant, who rules by fear, rather than love or respect.

The worst aspect of Antiochus is his sexual abuse of his daughter, through which he sullies the chaste father-daughter bond. Although the play presents the relationship as consensual, in the real world, Antiochus would be a rapist for grooming his daughter into sex from an early age. Therefore, he represents the worst aspects of human nature. Pericles compares Antiochus and his daughter to serpents “who though they feed / On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed” (I.1.139-40). In the Bible, the serpent is the basest of all creatures because he leads to the downfall of Adam and Eve. By comparing Antiochus to a serpent, Pericles shows that he is a character beyond redemption. Antiochus is punished for his sins by being struck to death by lightning, with his flesh left to rot in his chariot.

Described by the play’s narrator, Gower, as “buxom, blithe, and full of face” (1.Chor.23), Antiochus’s nameless daughter is an ambiguous figure. As Gower’s description indicates, she is beautiful, but also heavily sexualized, since “buxom” refers to a curvy, large-breasted figure. No other woman in the play is so described. Further, she is given only two lines in the play, which reduces her agency even more. It can be inferred that the nature of her transgression—incest with her father—is so extreme that she herself becomes the unspeakable riddle that describes her. 

A foil to Marina, the perfect daughter, Antiochus’s daughter represents the danger of uncontrolled and unlawful sexuality. While the play treats her as an equal party to her father’s crimes—she is burnt to death with him in his chariot—in a more realistic scenario, she is a survivor of incestuous rape.

The choric narrator of the play, Gower’s character is inspired by the real-life historical figure. John Gower was the 14th-century author of Confessio Amantis, from which Pericles is inspired. The inclusion of the fictionalized Gower in the play is an experimental narrative choice, since it inserts a metafictional layer between the play and the audience. The audience watch not just the players, but rather, the players through Gower’s eyes, with Gower frequently drawing attention to the fact that what is being shown is fiction. Further, Gower provides a moral framework for the audience to judge the characters, which adds an anachronistic medieval flavor to the Jacobean drama being staged.

Since Gower performs a specific narrative function in the play, he is a relatively static character, the equivalent of the chorus in ancient Greek drama or the messenger or angel of medieval morality plays.