Titlepage of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1611.

The play has two related sources: Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, which provides the story of Apollonius of Tyre, and Lawrence TwineÂ’s prose version of another Gower tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, (1576 & 1607). The Painful Adventures of Pericles by George Wilkins (1608) seems to be a "novelization" of this play which it mentions in the Argument of the story. Wilkins and Shakespeare were witnesses in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit (1612) and the former is a possible author of the play's first two acts, as it appears only late in the Third Folio.

The dominant role of ChaucerÂ’s friend Gower as the playÂ’s chorus identifies the story as a medieval romance set in an unhistorical version of classical Greece, not that of the original Pericles. The storyÂ’s Levantine setting anticipates the Acts of the Apostles, but the play explores what it is like to live in a pre-Christian world. Many of ShakespeareÂ’s plays are set in the Eastern Mediterranean where the extensive Venetian Empire was currently active (e.g. the Illyria of Twelfth Night and the Cyprus of Othello). Shakespeare seeks to exploit the exotic allure of the Middle East, climaxed in his Antony and Cleopatra. The play was initially very popular, then neglected, and now again enjoyed for its exoticism.

Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).