SOURCE: Abraham, Lyndy. “Weddings, Funerals, and Incest: Alchemical Emblems and Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98, no. 4 (October 1999): 523-49.

In the following excerpt, Abraham argues that Pericles embodies emblems of alchemy in the treatment of its two romance themes: the difficult quest and loss and restoration.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is presented primarily by means of narrative and spectacle rather than through drama. Many of the play's enacted episodes, as well as the dumbshows interpolated in Gower's narrative chorus, take the form of three-dimensional emblems and tableaux. The emblematic nature of the play has been well documented: Maurice Hunt has explored the structure of Pericles in the light of the emblematic imagination, Claire Preston has demonstrated the play's emblematic mode of glossing and moralising its stage pictures and the phenomenon of nature, and Alan Young has traced the sources of the knights...