SOURCE: "Heritage in Pericles," in Shakespeare's Late Plays, edited by Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod, Ohio University Press, 1974, pp. 89-113.

In the essay below, Welsh cites four "heritages" operating in Pericles: the archaic tale itself, the importance of riddles, the seven capital sins, and the appearance of the "flourishing emblem. "

It's an old tale, told age after age in language after language. It was probably first told to eastern Greeks by a romance written no later than the third century A.D. The Greek romance has been lost, but a Latin proseversion made sometime between the third and the sixth centuries A.D. carried the tale throughout Europe, and many manuscripts of this popular version still survive. The Latin version entered Godfrey of Viterbo's twelfth-century Pantheon and the fourteenth-century collection of tales Gesta Romanorum. The tale was told in most of the vernacular languages of Europe...