Read Pericles - In Person

Read Pericles with us!

Hello all! The parts will be posted on Sunday.

Pericles is an odd duck. Just imagine that you were writing for a player company that you’ve been in for a long time and then you had a significant financial stake with. Still, the theatre is changing around you and these lighthearted romps are just not what the public wants. They want true crime they want gritty and so Pericles is partially written by the pimp that lived just a few blocks away from where William Shakespeare have been lodging for years.

This pimp conveniently was in court a lot for things related to prostitution and so we know a fair amount about him.

Shakespeare had resorted to making use of him before, when the nice young couple Shakespeare had engineered to get together were kicked out of the house. So they moved in to stay in the bawdy house operated and run by Mr. George Wilkins. George wrote the

At the time Shakespeare was renting a room in Silver Street in the house of an immigrant French family that made spectacular hairdressers along with wigs and all sorts of other things too. In the house, which also doubled as a workshop and a retail storefront apprentices lived along with the family. The landlord/master headattire producer Mr. Mountjoy and his wife had one daughter Mary. Mary had a thing for one of her father’s apprentices, Mr. Stephen Bell.
Mary’s Mother Marie Montroy was much younger than her husband and somehow managed to talk Shakespeare into getting involved in this quaint love story. Shakespeare was the person who performed the hand fasting between the two lovebirds. At the time the hand vesting was the legally most important part of a marriage ceremony with the church aspect being an afterthought. As a result Shakespeare was forced to testify in court years later, when the same apprentice sued his father-in-law last/Shakespeare’s landlord for not paying the dowry.

I highly recommend the “The Lodger Shakespeare” by Charles Nicholls for more of this weird saga.

An excerpt:

“Indeed it is almost certain Wilkins wrote most of the opening two acts of Pericles.

Written in c. 1607-8, Pericles was notably absent from the great collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the ‘First Folio’ of 1623, probably because of Wilkins’s extensive contribution; it was first included in the Third Folio of 1664…Though his literary career was brief and minor, Wilkins is a writer of considerable bite, as best seen in his play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage , loosely based on a real-life murder case, and performed by Shakespeare’s company in c. 1606.”

Logistics
Recommended text is Folger's, but we make it work no matter which version you have!
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/

This is an in-person reading.

On the day, we will read through the first half of the play, take a break, read the second half of the play, short break, then have a short discussion.

We look forward to reading with you!