SOURCE: Hanna, Sara. “Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles.” Upstart Crow 11 (1991): 92-116.

In the following excerpt, Hanna traces Pericles's spiritual evolution in terms of his increasing awareness of good and evil and his eventual understanding of what may be gained by patience and perseverance. She finds in the play a coherent system of emblems and spectacles developed from Christian and biblical sources that mark the hero's progress from darkness to light.

Vision is an especially complex subject in Pericles, very closely bound up with the play's medieval dimension. To some extent the very heroism of Pericles can be defined through the progress of his vision. Pericles appears as a chivalric hero, a young knight on a quest. While he is much more than an allegorical figure, we may see him in the medieval and Spenserian tradition as a knight of patience who must learn the virtue in question...