riddle teaches him that the
Princess is living incestuously with her father. He flies from
Antioch to Tyre, and there takes ship to avoid the King's
vengeance. Coming to Tarsus he relieves a famine by gifts of corn.

Act II. He is wrecked near Pentapolis, recovers his armour, goes
jousting at the King's court, wins the King's daughter Thaisa, and
marries her.

Act III. While bound for Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to a daughter,
dies, and is thrown overboard. The body drifts ashore at Ephesus,
and is restored to life by a physician. Thaisa, thinking Pericles
dead, becomes a votaress at Diana's temple. Pericles leaves Marina,
the newly born babe, in the care of the King and Queen of Tarsus.
He then returns to Tyre.

Act IV. The years pass. Marina grows up to such beauty and charm
that she passes the Queen of Tarsus' own daughter. The Queen,
deeply jealous for her own child, hires a murderer to kill Marina.
Pirates surprise him in the act and carry off Marina to a brothel
in Mitylene, from which she escapes. She becomes a singer and
musician.

Act V. Pericles, wandering, by sea, to Mitylene, in great
melancholy for the loss of wife and child, hears Marina sing. He
learns that she is his daughter. The goddess Diana bids him go to
her temple at Ephesus. He goes, and finds Thaisa. The play ends
happily with the reuniting of the family.

The acts are opened by rhyming prologues designed to be spoken by John
Gower. The prologues to each of the three first acts are followed by
Dumb Shows, an invention of the theatre to explain those things not
easily to be shown in action. The prologues, the invention of the dumb
shows, and the first two acts, are not by Shakespeare. They are like the
poetical work of George Wilkins, who published a prose romance of _The
Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre_ in the year 1608,
probably after the play had been produced.

The construction of the last three acts makes it likely that the play
(in its original state) was by the constructor of the first two acts. It
is not known how it came to pass that Shakespeare took the play in hand.
From the comparative feebleness of his work upon it, it may be judged
that it was not a labour of love. The impression given is that nothing
in the piece is wrought with more than the mechanical power of the great
mind, that Shakespeare was no