What happens in Pericles, Prince of Tyre

The medieval poet Gower steps out of the past to tell this old story, and he begins at Antioch. Pericles, the young Prince of Tyre, has come to win the King’s daughter by solving a riddle, knowing that every suitor who fails is executed. He solves it, and the answer is terrible: the riddle conceals that Antiochus is sleeping with his own daughter. Pericles realizes this knowledge marks him for death and flees home to Tyre. Antiochus sends an assassin, Thaliard, after him. To draw danger away from his city, Pericles leaves the realm to his steward Helicanus and sails off again.

He lands first at famine-struck Tarsus, where he relieves the starving city with shiploads of grain and earns the gratitude of its governor, Cleon, and his wife Dionyza. From there a storm wrecks him on the coast of Pentapolis. Three poor fishermen pull him from the sea and fish up his late father’s rusty armor. Wearing it, Pericles enters a tournament held by King Simonides for the hand of his daughter Thaisa. He wins, Thaisa chooses him over richer knights, and the two marry happily. Word then reaches Pericles that Antiochus and his daughter are dead, struck down for their sin, and that Tyre needs its king. He sets sail with Thaisa, now pregnant.

Another storm strikes. Thaisa goes into labor and, after giving birth to a daughter, appears to die. The superstitious sailors insist her body be thrown overboard to calm the sea. Pericles seals her in a chest with jewels and a letter and lets it go. He names the baby Marina, born at sea, and turns the ship toward Tarsus, leaving the infant in Cleon and Dionyza’s care while he sails home to rule. The chest washes ashore at Ephesus, where a learned lord named Cerimon opens it, revives Thaisa with his skill, and shelters her. Believing her husband lost forever, she becomes a priestess in the temple of Diana.

Marina grows into a gifted and beautiful young woman, so much so that Dionyza grows jealous on behalf of her own plainer daughter. She hires a man named Leonine to murder Marina by the shore. Before he can strike, pirates seize Marina and carry her off to sell. Leonine reports her dead, and Cleon and Dionyza raise a false monument with a lying epitaph. The pirates sell Marina to a brothel in Mytilene, but her virtue defeats them all. Even the governor Lysimachus, arriving as a customer, is so moved by her words about her own nobility that he gives her gold and leaves. She talks her way into honest work as a teacher instead.

Pericles, told that Marina is dead, sinks into a silent grief so deep he will not speak for months. His wandering ship happens to put in at Mytilene. Lysimachus, hoping her gifts might reach the broken king, sends Marina aboard. She speaks to him of her own suffering and royal birth, and slowly, against all hope, Pericles recognizes the daughter he believed dead. The goddess Diana appears to him in a vision and orders him to her temple at Ephesus.

There the family is made whole. Pericles confesses his losses before Diana’s altar, and the priestess listening recognizes his voice and face. Thaisa is alive; Cerimon explains how he saved her from the sea. Husband and wife embrace, Marina kneels to the mother she never knew, and a family scattered across years and oceans stands together again. Marina is promised in marriage to Lysimachus, and Pericles will rule at last in peace.