(Foreground) A.Bernard Cummings as Cerimon and Roxanna Hope as Thaisa. (Rear) Jessica Avellone, Kasey Lockwood, and Kenneth Lee in PERICLES. Photo © Gerry Goodstein.

--Pericles Act I, Chorus

There is virtually nothing that can be said about the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre that is indisputable except that it tells a powerfully beautiful story that is laced with magic and wonder, and guided by faith.

Pericles is the only play widely held to have been written by Shakespeare that was not included in the First Folio, the first complete collection of his plays that was published by his friends and colleagues in 1623, six years after his death. The Folio's introduction claims that prior to its publication, readers "were abus'd with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters*". We can only speculate as to why the play was excluded from this collection. Perhaps Shakespeare was not the sole author, nor the author at all. More likely is that the editors of the First Folio had no text available to them that was sufficiently reliable and complete to allow them to publish the play "cur'd, and perfect of (its) limbs" as they promised.

Nothing in the intervening 379 years has come along to change that, and every attempt to study, edit or stage the play since then begins with a Quarto text (from 1609) that is probably "maimed and deformed," and certainly difficult and frustrating. Our attempt here strives not for definitive scholarship, which has eluded men far more learned than we for centuries. With humility, we seek rather "to glad your ear and please your eyes" as stated by our narrator. In this attempt, we willingly employ every trick in the book, and a few that you won't find there as well.

-- Jonathan Bank, Dramaturg

"The purchase is to make men glorious."

--Pericles, Act I, Chorus

"A man on whom perfections wait."

--Pericles, Act I, sc. 1

"The hero is a man of self-achieved submission."

--Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

William Shakespeare wrote Pericles in 1608, nine years before his death and just prior to writing his wonderful works Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale and The Tempest. It is interesting to see the elements of all three in their early form in Pericles. And while some of the characters in Pericles may not have the depth and richness that exist in his other plays, the show takes Pericles and the audience on an unpredictable, entertaining and harrowing journey of love, loss and restoration. It is a hero's journey.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, has recently and unexpectedly lost his father and king, leaving him heir to the throne and faced with the awesome responsibility of governing his country at a young age. He wisely ascertains that before he can manage a country he must manage and know himself - he must grow, become a man. This sets into motion his quest to the center of himself. Full of hardship that equals Job's, he willingly accepts the contests placed in his path, and emerges, as we all must, from pain, full, whole and enriched.

--Gabriel Barre, Director

"Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long survival - a continuous 'recurrence of birth' to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death."

--Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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