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    Pericles
    Pericles
    Pericles
    Audiobook11 minutes

    Pericles

    Written by William Shakespeare and Edith Nesbit

    Narrated by Josh Verbae

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    About this audiobook

    Pericles, the young Prince of Tyre in Phoenicia. modern day Lebanon, hears the riddle, and instantly understands its meaning: Antiochus is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his daughter. If he reveals this truth, he will be killed, but if he answers incorrectly, he will also be killed.

    This edition of Pericles is an adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous drama, narrated in plain modern English, capturing the very essence and key elements of the original Shakespeare's work. This work was adapted by Edith Nesbit.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInteractive Media
    Release dateMar 3, 2018
    ISBN9781787244535
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist in the English language. Shakespeare is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon.”  

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    Reviews for Pericles

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    • 4/5
      Pericles, called Prince and King interchangeably, goes to win the hand of a princess and finds that the king is unwilling to let his daughter go because they are in an incestuous relationship. He plays a game with each courting prince, asking them a riddle that ends in the young man's death. Pericles catches on pretty quickly and escapes across the waters, but the king sends a man to follow and kill Pericles to keep him from exposing the king's secret.Pericles goes on to survive shipwrecks and lost love. His daughter experiences kidnapping and slavery. Yet, because this has a happy ending, it may be included as a comedy.Scholars generally agree that Shakespeare probably wrote exactly half of this play.
    • 2/5
      Not one of Bill's best plays, and often dismissed as being largely by other people, nonetheless, the play is included in the canon. Pericles, noble and virtuous, discovers his king Antiochus has an incestuous relationship with his own daughter. The king being aware of this, Pericles must flee home to tyre. However, after outliving Antiochus Pericles desires to return to court, but his family is shattered by a shipwreck. Years later they are at last reunited. This play has no connection with Hellenistic history other than the names of some of the principals. the play is usually dated to 1606 or thereabouts.
    • 3/5
      It's a retelling of an older story, as so often with Shakespeare, but he distills it down, then adds his own particular twist to the action. Pericles arrives at Antioch to pay court to the King's daughter, and is faced with a riddle that he has to solve in order to win the daughter. The answer is perilous and so he prevaricates, then runs away, pursued by a Lord of Antioch engaged to track him down & kill him (he doesn't try much beyond Act 1). Pericles leaves Tyre, to avoid pursuit, and arrives at Tarsus, bringing grain to the starving populace. From there he again sets sail and this time is shipwrecked. A group of fishermen save him and also drag ashore his armour form the sea. They tell him of a tournament being held by the local king and Pericles resolves to enter. He does and wins the daughter of the King, Thaisa. They set sail again (sensing a theme here? Maybe the theatre had bought a job lot of blue material) and encounter a storm. Thaisa gives birth and seems to die. The sailors insist that the corpse be thrown overboard. From here on in it is a divergence before act 5 serves to tie the whole unlikely thing back together. Thaisa isn't dead, drifts ashore, is found, revivied and, fearing Pericles dead, serves as a priestess to a temple to Diana. (fast forward 14 odd years) Marina (the daughter) is left with Creon and his wife, only she outshines their daughter and so the resolves to send a man to kill her. He's foiled by a bunch of kidnapping pirates. Marina gets sold to a brothel owner, then manages to charm or cajole her way into keeping her virginity against all the odds. Creon & wife claim Marina is dead when Pericles visits (unclear quite what hes been up to all this time, Kinging in Tyre, we presume) he sets sail (again) in grief. He arrives in Ephesus, mute in his grief, and is met by the local governor, who has previously been charmed by Marina (we'll gloss over the fact he was in a brothel and planning on deflowering a virgin. like you do). Marina is bought to Pericles and by telling their stories, they realise who the other is. After a dream sequence, where Diana appears to Pericles and tells him to go to the temple at Ephesus, Thaisa is also brought back into the fold. There are plenty of characters and plenty of them are identikit. The ones that stand out are the common people, whose scenes have the feeling of the everyday, rather than the lords and ladies that populate the rest of the piece. The fishermen, the brothel keeper & his wife all feel like they are recognisable to the London of the time. They feel like a comic interlude to bring the tone back down to earth, they provide it with an earthiness. This is a good listen.
    • 2/5
      God, I hope there's some redemption in the few remaining works I have yet to experience. Because this one? It's simply awful for the most part.

      Reading this one, one is led to believe that every daughter of a rich man must be attained by some stupid competition, and that every sea voyage ends up with you washed up on shore alone and almost dead, or plucked from the sea, almost dead.

      Aside from that, there's some incest and prostitution and kidnapping and rape to keep you occupied.

      It's just freaking awful.

      With less than 20% left to go, I almost just stopped it and walked away, but I figured, why not finish it off? I'm glad I did, because only the ending managed to bring this up from no stars to two.

      And I must say, while all the incidental music in the Arkangel productions is uniformly terrible, in this one, it was insufferably grating. I refuse to believe anyone on the production team ever listened to this and thought, "damn, this sounds great!

      Because it doesn't. It's sandpaper for the ears.
    • 5/5
      One of the best plays I've read by Shakespeare. Truly notable. A great read!
    • 4/5
      In only a few minutes we’re in the midst of incest and attempted murder. There’s soap opera level drama from the start. There’s a storm at sea, shipwreck, a lost infant, lost wife, prostitutes, pirates, and so much more. Pericles escapes a dangerous situation, on the run for his life. He ends up in a new kingdom and falls in love with a princess there. In a plot straight out of The Tempest, Shakespeare has the princess’ father pretends to be against the pairing to encourage the two to fall even faster in love. There is a narrator who helps the reader navigate the many location and time changes in each act. Pericles’ lost wife plot is reminiscent of Winter’s Tale.This is one of Shakespeare’s “romance” plays. Though the ending might be happy, the story is full of tragedy. Redemption doesn’t come until the characters are heartbroken by loss. The play is interesting, but it does feel like a pieced together effort that combines some of his better work. It was the very last of his plays that I read and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment that I've finally read ALL of his plays! “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.”“Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.”
    • 3/5
      Okay. For starters, thanks to Marjorie Garber and her interesting piece on the play in her “Shakespeare After All,” I enjoyed this more than I otherwise would have. She talks about how the play, a “dramatic romance,” needs to be seen not as a failed effort at the sort of play where the protagonist develops and shows psychological depth through monologues and all, but as a play where the character development and other “deep” aspects are illustrated through mythic and fairy tale motifs. …...”Some modern audiences – like some early modern ones – have found these plays deficient in realism, but, as we will see, what they actually do is shift the “real” to a different plane, one more aligned to dream, fantasy, and psychology, while retaining, at the same time, a topical relationship to historical event in Shakespeare's day.”This really did help. When events in the play got particularly... goofy or illogical, I had something to think about other than, “Well, this is pretty dumb.” (Instead, I could think, “Well, this is dumb in a mythically symbolic” sort of way.”). Anyway. So, her essay was great, and starting with her appreciation and a nice overview, I was prepared to be pleased by what the play has to offer. And I did find stuff to like. Some lovely lines and scenes, especially towards the end, and the situation with the brothel, where Marina converts all the guys who come in to virtue and the brothel owners are increasingly outraged, was funny. Until Lysimachus. The local governor comes in to the brothel looking for a virgin to deflower. So, ick. But... he sees the error of his ways, and I imagined I'd seen the last of that scumbucket. But NO. Rather than retreating to his palace or wherever he lives, he continues along with Marina, and is welcomed by Pericles as a wonderful future son-in-law. So, the fall out from being identified as a particularly loathsome sort of sexual predator is that he is welcomed into a royal family??? Not that this made me think of today's news or anything, but this Completely made me think of current events, with Roy Moore running in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, with a solidly documented record of having, in his 30's, dated young teenaged girls, and with the defense of supportive Evangelical pastors being that “only by dating young teenagers could he find girls who were really pure” (a paraphrase of the argument of Pastor Flip Benham). It's a truly twisted logic that argues that grown men chasing after young girls is a sign of high moral values. Gah. This illustration of the play's timelessness did Not increase my enjoyment.Still, this isn't one I expect to ever return to, but I'm glad to have read it once. I listened to the ensemble recording from Librivox while reading, and, despite some truly jarring mispronunciations and silly accents, their recording features some excellent performances and did help me enjoy the play. Three stars.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what to think about this play. It had been listed as one of Shakespeare's comedies but it didn't strike me as humorous. In fact, despite the happy ending with Pericles and his family reunited, I found much of the subject matter upsetting.

      The play starts with the young prince of Tyre, Pericles, searching for a bride. He visits a neighboring kingdom but unfortunately the beautiful daughter of the king is in an incestuous relationship with her father. Pericles flees upon discovering that secret but the king sends an assassin after him. After this disturbing opening, Pericles undergoes various adventures, mostly standard fare.

      Later in the play is another worrisome section, when Marina (daughter of Pericles) is captured by pirates and sold into prostitution..

      I guess it was considered a comedy because it didn't end with a bunch of dead bodies!
    • 2/5
      So, I'm no dramaturge or anything, but I kind of suspect this is actually not even a good play.In the introduction I find that only a relatively small part of it was written by Shakespeare and the rest was written by some neighborhood pimp who apparently also dabbled in playwriting on the side? The plot is just a bunch of random shit that happens. Totally pointless mini-arcs are introduced and then discarded to be resolved off-stage or not at all. The closest thing we have to an antagonist appears in only two scenes.One thing I found interesting (though not actually good) are the scenes in which a company of pimps attempt to coerce Pericles's daughter into taking up the profession. Knowing what I do about the author makes me uncertain about how they were really intended to come off and I suspect they were meant with a sense of sarcasm or irony that would have been obvious in contemporary performance but isn't really captured on the page.
    • 2/5
      I've read from that this play is another Shakespearian collaboration. I couldn't separate the Bard from the Hack to my satisfaction, as I could for Timon of Athens, because it was all written on the same level of pleasant mediocrity. I was mildly interested in the use of the author of the source material as a character who introduces each act. I was a little repulsed by the sex, which involved incest between father and daughter and a young girl on the verge of being broken in as a prostitute.
    • 2/5
      "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" was easily my least favorite play by William Shakespeare so far. I didn't know until after reading it that many critics speculate the play was mostly written by a collaborator and not Shakespeare himself. I'm not surprised.... some of the writing was really cringe-worthy... it really lacks the masterful prose of the bard's more famous works.Plot wise, the play is pretty interesting and moves fairly quickly. King Pericles flees his country after finding out an unfortunate secret of a neighboring king, loses his wife, then loses his daughter. If the writing itself had been better, this would have been pretty entertaining.
    • 4/5
      I don't know enough about Shakespeare to know which of his plays are comedies or tragedies and that made the reading of this play very suspenseful for me. I truly enjoyed and was wrapped up in Pericles; the conflict which happened to him pained me. It's possible that my emotions are just extra sensitive right now, but I thought this a fine read.