SOURCE: Mullaney, Steven. “‘All That Monarchs Do’: The Obscured Stages of Authority in Pericles.” In The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, pp. 135-51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Mullaney argues that Pericles represents a dramatic experiment in which Shakespeare attempted to dissociate the dramatic art form from its popular context and instead re-imagines it as a “purely aesthetic phenomenon, free from history and from historical determination.”

I

In 1605, the Queen's Revels Children performed Eastward Ho! at Blackfriars. The authors, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, were soon apprehended and imprisoned, and for a time it was rumored that Jonson would suffer the loss of his nose and ears for satire directed against the king and his Scottish knights. A year later John Day's The Isle of Gulls resulted in similar charges, and again “sundry were committed to Bridewell.”¹ When again...