Music and Storytelling in Pericles

Pericles is a drama of grief, loss, despair, ultimately a drama of joy, recovery and hope. At critical junctures in the play, music and story-telling play a redemptive role.

Pericles uses music as a metaphor for love, licit and illicit, in the first scene of the play. When he discovers the terrible secret of Antiochus’s incest with his daughter, Pericles tells the daughter:

You are a fair viol, and your sense the strings;

Who, finger’d to make man his lawful music,

Would draw heaven down, and all the gods, to hearken:

But being play’d upon before your time,

Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime (1.1).

In lawful love, a man plays the viol of the woman to unite heaven and earth as well as the man and woman. Incest is a dissonance, a hellish cacophony, since the instrument has been played in an untimely way.

The stages of recovery are marked by music. Pericles wins Thaisa’s love and hand not only by jousting mightily, but by dancing and playing music better than any of other suitors. Her father Simonides tells Thaisa:

I am beholding to you

For your sweet music this last night: I do

Protest my ears were never better fed

With such delightful pleasing harmony (2.5).

When Pericles believes that Thaisa has died in childbirth while at sea, he throws her body overboard in a coffin, which washes ashore at Ephesus. There a magician-chemist Cerimon applies herbs and potions and music to revive her and bring her back to life (3.2). When Pericles’s daughter, Marina, comes on board his ship and attempts to revive him from his comatose depression, she begins by singing, and when Pericles finally recognizes his long-lost daughter, whom he had thought dead, he hears a music that no one else can hear, music he ultimately identifies as the music of the spheres (5.1). Father and daughter are reunited in proper love, and their love does not create the hellish music of Antiochus’s incest. When father and daughter are united in love, heaven itself harmonizes on their restored harmony.

Marina’s singing doesn’t bring Pericles back to life, though. Rather, her story-telling does. Or, rather, their mutual story-telling. She tells Pericles that she has a tale of grief that matches his, were the two put into a balance. That by itself is enough to awaken Pericles in a small way: That another can tell a story of woe brings him back into human life, back into society, united with Marina in a common sorrow. As she continues her story, though, it becomes clear that her story is not only as sad as Pericles’s story; it dawns on him that she is telling the same story, his story, which is also her story. His is a story of a wife and daughter lost; hers is of a mother and father lost. And as the story-tellers gradually recognize that they are telling the same story, the story is suddenly translated from tragedy to comedy. Two sad stories, harmonized and intertwined, produce a narrative of happiness. Add a story of loss to a story of loss, and it becomes a story of loss regained.