SOURCE: Dean, Paul. “Pericles' Pilgrimage.” Essays in Criticism 50, no. 2 (April 2000): 125-44.

In the following essay, Dean contends that Pericles is a pilgrimage tale, and outlines several literary works that may have influenced Shakespeare's creation of the drama, including two from the Bible: the tale of Jonah and the Acts of the Apostles.

Had it been printed in the First Folio, Pericles (1608) might well have appeared among the comedies, with The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, rather than among the tragedies, with Cymbeline, which was perhaps placed there out of a feeling that it was more akin to the Roman plays or to King Lear. There was, as we know, no formal category of romance drama in Shakespeare's time.¹ Nor did he invent the kind of play whose absurdities and improbabilities were already being derided by Sidney in the 1580s² and which, as Leo Salingar has shown in detail...