SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “‘The Shores of My Mortality’: Pericles' Greece of the Mind.” In Pericles: Critical Essays, edited by David Skeele, pp. 228-37. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

In the following essay, Hopkins considers the treatment of geographical locations in Pericles, concluding that the travels depicted in the play are symbolic of an exploration of the characters' identities.

In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the eponymous hero undertakes a convoluted series of travels which take him from Tyre to Antioch, back to Tyre, thence to Tarsus, next to Pentapolis, back to Tarsus again (en route for Tyre), to Mytilene, where he meets his long-lost daughter, who has been brought up in Tarsus, and finally to Ephesus, where he is reunited with his wife. These fantastic peregrinations may seem to align the play with some of the other narratives of travel that had proved so popular on the English stage, such...