SOURCE: "The Perils of Pericles," in The Undiscover'd Country: New Essays on Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, edited by B. J. Sokol, Free Association Books, 1993, pp. 150-78.

In the following essay First published in 1987, Nevo presents a psychological overview of Pericles, focusing on the work's chaotic symbolism and dream-like aspects.

A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot be laid to rest until the mystery is solved and the spell broken.

Sigmund Freud, 'Little Hans'

Pericles, first of Shakespeare's four romance narratives of vicissitude, loss and restoration, is usually regarded as the most tentative, fumbling or inchoate of the four, or not entirely Shakespeare's at all. Critics have been made unhappy not only by a text probably transcribed in part from memory, but also by the Gower narrator's laboured tetrameters, the jerky tempo of frame narration and dramatized episode, the curiously 'phlegmatic' or...