SOURCE: 'The Imagery of Pericles and What It Tells Us," in Ball State University Forum, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Summer, 1967, pp. 61-70.

In the essay below, Schiffhorst surveys the varied imagery of Pericles, offering it as evidence that the play was either entirely written or emended throughout by Shakespeare.

Critical attention to the imagery of Shakespeare's Pericles has been almost negligible, and commentators have often been content to dismiss the play as only in part Shakespeare's. Recent scholarship has indicated that the differences between the first two and the last three acts are due either to two separate reporters involved in the transmission of the text or to the likely possibility that Shakespeare, basing the play on the work of another dramatist, made a few alterations in the first two acts but completely rewrote the last three. Concludes Kenneth Muir: "There are no lines in the first two acts...