SOURCE: Lewis, Anthony J. “‘I Feed on Mother's Flesh’: Incest and Eating in Pericles.” Essays in Literature 15, no. 2 (fall 1988): 147-63.

In the following essay, Lewis probes the metaphorical link between incest and the cannibalistic devouring of kin in the thematic contexts of Pericles.

The problems which have, historically, plagued critics of Pericles stem not so much from its doubtful origins—its exclusion from the First Folio and the attendant questions of authorship—as from the sense that the play is, finally, meaningless. For Ben Jonson Pericles was “a mouldy tale,”¹ all the more exasperating for its considerable popularity on the stage. But for more recent commentators the play is less an old familiar story than a mishmash, a repository filled with the stuff of romance but jumbled in a way that defies understanding. Though the play is occasionally read as a myth of death and re-birth, as a...