SOURCE: Womack, Peter. “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29, no. 1 (winter 1999): 169-87.

In the following essay, Womack asserts that Pericles shares similarities with earlier dramas that venerated saints, most notably the play Mary Magdalen. The critic discusses the two plays in the context of the changing critical, political, and religious sentiment in England during the 1500s and 1600s, which denigrated improbable and miraculous stories because of their connections to Catholicism.

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It was long ago discovered, by the industry which neglects no conceivable Shakespearean origin, that the main action of Pericles oddly resembles the King of Marcylle episode in the fifteenth-century East Anglian play Mary Magdalen.¹ In both, a monarch is shown on a ship at sea with his wife, who dies in childbirth in the midst of a storm. The sailors, believing that it is fatally unlucky to have a...